,
Solomon Luria, Mordecai Jaffe, and Meir Katz, to put their feet on the
neck of tyranny. Without special permission no one could buy or sell, or
move from one place to another, or learn a trade or practice a
profession. Rabbinism became synonymous with rigorism, the coercion of
untold customs became unbearable, and the spirit of Judaism was lost in
a heap of innumerable rites. The Jew's every act had to be sanctioned by
religion. He knew of the outward world only from the heavy taxes he paid
in order to be allowed to exist, and from the bloody riots with which
his people was frequently visited.

What could result from such a state of affairs but poverty, material and
spiritual, with all the suffering it engenders? Those at the head of the
kehillot, being responsible solely to the Government, often had to
deliver the full tale of bricks like the Jewish overseers in Egypt,
though no straw was given to them. On one occasion Rabbi Mikel of Shkud
was arrested because the kahal could not pay the thousand gulden it
owed. In 1767, the whole kahal of Vilna went to Warsaw to protest
against intolerable taxation. Such protests were usually of little
avail. On the other hand, a few powerful families throve at the expense
of their oppressed coreligionists. This aroused a spirit of animosity
and a clamor for the abolition of the kahal institution. Jewish autonomy
was more and more encroached upon. Rabbinates were bought and sold, and
the aid of the Government was invoked in religious controversies. A
question regarding the preferable form of prayer was submitted to the
decision of Paul I. In 1777, Prince Radziwill decided who should
officiate as rabbi in so important a centre of Judaism as Vilna,[7] and
in 1804 the Government issued a "regulation" depriving the kahal of its
judicial functions altogether.

What was even more disastrous was the spiritual poverty of the masses.
Seldom have the awful warnings of the great lawgiver been fulfilled so
literally as during the eighteenth century:

And upon them that remain of you, I will send a faintness into
their hearts in the land of their enemies; and the sound of a
shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee as fleeing
from a sword; and they shall fall, when none pursueth. And they
shall fall one upon another, as it were before a sword, when
none pursueth: and ye shall have no power to stand before your
enemies (Lev. 26: 36-37).

But the Lord s