Yet all their efforts improved the
demoralized condition of the country but little. As always in national
crises, the individual was sacrificed to the community, and deprived of
the few rights remaining to him. The kehillot became brutally
oppressive. There were no longer men of the stamp of Abraham Rapoport,
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.
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