And, like the Arab world after the Mongol invasions, the Jews of Poland never recovered from the Cossack massacres.
Numbed from the butchery, they entered an era of desperation and sought a way out of the long black night through their Holy Books.
The cult of the cabala snowballed. The cabala, a study of mystic meanings of the Holy Books, was taught by cabalistic rabbis who preached the Zohar and the Book of Creation. Through cryptic numerology and mystics they sought to overcome the suffering of daily life by finding hidden meanings in the Bible.
Along with the cabalists came a parade of false messiahs. Self-declared messiahs proclaimed themselves the anointed leader to take the Jews back to the Holy Land. A desperate, anguished people disposed of reason and flocked behind them.
King of the frauds was Sabbatai Zvi, a Turkish Jew, who through distortions of the cabala “proved” himself the Messiah. Throughout the world of dispersed Jewry the elders and the rabbis from Amsterdam to Salonika, from Kiev to Paris, argued the validity of Sabbatai Zvi’s claims. It was the Polish Jewry who arose, drowning logic with the maddened hope that he could lead them to escape.
A crushing delusion. Sabbatai Zvi was converted to Islam and became a Mohammedan to escape the wrath of the Turkish sultan.
Jacob Frank, a Bohemian rabbi, relit the fires after Sabbatai’s death in Albania, but the Frankist sect carried out sex orgies and debasements of the Holy Laws. In the end, Jacob Frank was converted to Catholicism.
And all of the false messiahs fell, and the Jews of Poland sank deeper into a muck of despondency. From the depths of their despair emerged the Hassidim. Israel Baal Shem Tov erupted with yet another new cult which captured the imagination of the enslaved Jews in their ghetto dungeons. The Hassidim detached themselves from the world of daily tribulation and reality through frenzied prayer that transcended the pain about them. Wild! Leaping! Screaming! Moaning! The joy of prayer!
“Poppa! I don’t want to be a tailor or a chicken seller!” Andrei cried. “I don’t want to be a Hassid! I want to be like other people in Warsaw.”
Israel Androfski’s face saddened. He stroked his son’s curly bush of hair. “My boy will not be a chicken seller. You will be a great Talmudic scholar.”
“No, Poppa, no. I don’t want to go to cheder any more!”
His father raised his hand in anger, but the slap never came, for Israel Androfski was too gentle a man. He looked at the burning in his son’s eyes with puzzlement.
“I want to be a soldier—a soldier like Berek Joselowicz,” Andrei whispered.
Poland, partitioned, at constant war with Germany and Russia, ceased to exist as a state time and again in her long and bloody history. At the end of the 1700s she was again in the throes of one of her numerous rebellions, this time against the Russian Tsar on the east and the King of Prussia on the west. Desperate for manpower, the Poles allowed Berek Joselowicz, a Jew of Vilna, and Josef Aronwicz to organize a Jewish brigade, a radical departure from past principle. Five hundred of them took the field in the defense of Warsaw. Twenty of them survived. With the precedent set, the Jews answered the call to arms in Poland’s rebellions against Russia in 1830 and 1863, but as Russia gobbled Poland and the state disappeared from the face of the earth, a huge land ghetto was formed called the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Beyond the Pale, no Jew could travel or live.
And through the 1800s the web of economic strangulation, boycott, excessive taxation, and bestial pogroms continued. Murder of Jews was supported by the Tsar and overlooked by the Russian Orthodox Church. The Jews were driven into a position of mass destitution.
A few fumbling calls for reforms were heard, but the voices were far softer than the gangs of roving Jew killers.
And a new generation in the Pale emerged unsatisfied to continue Jewish existence as it had been through the black centuries. The new generation could not find peace in the cabala or the wild prayer of the Hassidim, nor would they follow false messiahs. To them, the old ideas had failed, and during the mid-1800s dynamic new ideas swept the ghettos of the Pale. Young Jews formed self-defense committees to protect the ghetto against the pogroms as they began to emulate the soldier Berek Joselowicz!
Then came the Lovers of Zion, the first practical move to organize colonies in the Holy Land.
The thousand religious groups, led by their rabbis, fought the new radicals who departed from traditional Jewish living, but the brush fires ran wild and each new pogrom made the desire for freedom more intense. Writers, dreamers, angry young men threw off the shackles of the past.
Theodor Herzl molded the hundred different ideas of a thousand years into a simple paper called “The Jewish State,” setting forth the credo that the Jews would never reach a status of equality until the re-establishment of their ancient homeland was achieved.
Herzl was hailed as a new messiah by some, was scorned as a new Sabbatai Zvi by others, but the father of modern Zionism had planted the seed of the new tree of hope for the Jews of the Pale.
As anti-Jewish riots spread over Europe at the end of the century, the urgency of Zionism heightened.
It was into this world of pogrom and flaming new ideas that Israel Androfski was born at the close of the century. World War I brought freedom to redeclare the state to Poland behind the legions of Pilsudski. Israel Androfski and most of Poland’s Jews listened to the words and ideals of Pilsudski and believed that after nineteen hundred years their emancipation had come. The Socialists and idealists rallied all of Poland behind him.
... And then Marshal Pilsudski abandoned the Jews and peasants and the workers of Poland to attain dictatorship with the age-old powers of the feudal gentry, the colonel’s clique, and the Church behind him. ...
To the Jews, another shattering disillusion as riots and unfair taxation and trade restrictions heightened against them.
“Andrei! What is! You carrying rocks in your pockets and fighting goyim in Krasinski Gardens?”
“Poppa, they started it. They attacked me when we began our deliveries.”
“I told you to run from the goyim.”
“I will not run.”
“God help me! God help me for a son like this. You listen to me. You will go to synagogue and pray and you will be a good Jew!”
They accepted Andrei outside the Jewish area because he could pit his strength against them and win. But behind his back he knew he was always “the Jew.” Always the Jew, no matter what he attained. Always the wall between them. Never able to be accepted ... what he craved the most eluded him.
“I have decided to join the Zionists, Poppa.”
“Those radicals! My son, my son. You have not been to synagogue for six months. You are now twenty years of age and you have not found out yet that the price of being a Jew calls for patience and prayer and acceptance of your position.”
“I’ll never accept it. Oh, Poppa, I cannot find what I want in the Talmud. I must look for myself. ...”
“Andrei,” Alexander Brandel said. “You must accept the commission in the Ulany. Do you realize what it means to all of us to have one of our boys, a Zionist, a Ulany officer? It has never happened. And pray God you’ll make the Polish soccer team for the Olympics in Berlin. Andrei ... do it for us.”
“If they would only accept me ... as ... not some sort of a freak!”
“I know, Andrei, how hard it is to carry this battle for us, but your back is strong and we need you.”
“We are like a bird a long way from home, circling aimlessly ... looking for a place to light and build a nest. But as soon as we cry we are driven from the tree and we must circle again. ...”
Israel Androfski lay on his deathbed and rasped to his bereaved boy, “And have you won your great battle for acceptance? Andrei ... return to a good Jewish life before it is too late. ...”