KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
in this region and all of Poland. They worked as doctors, lawyers, moneylenders, accountants, commodity brokers, manufactur- ers, brewers, and craftspeople, and held leases and mortgages on mills, inns, and other properties. All this brought occasional rum- bles of anti-Semitism from non-Jewish businesspeople who were their competitors. A fourteenth-century middle-class Pole com- plained: “In our country, the leaseholder is a Jew, the doctor is a Jew, the merchant is Jewish, and so is the miller, the secretary and the most faithful servant, since they’ve gained the upper hand in everything.” 3 Farther down the social scale, anti-Semitism took on the dark- er coloring of superstitious fear: “In peasant lore, Jews were be- lieved to have supernatural powers and dark, peculiar customs. According to one folk belief, all Jews were born blind and need- ed blood to become sighted.’’ 4 There was less anti-Semitism in Poland than elsewhere in Europe, however, and Poland’s liberal religious toleration laws continued to make it a place of refuge for Protestants and Jews fleeing religious persecution in nations to the west. Jews seem to have lived in the village of Hovkov, near the Slusch River and, later, Ludvipol, until it was overrun by Genghis Khan’s Tatars in 1241. 5 The Tatars struck again in the 1640s and carried many residents of Volhynia into slavery before they were finally defeated. The complicated series of battles sparked by the Tatar invasion culminated in a bloody showdown between the Poles and the Ukrainians, who were irritated by Poland’s hegemony over Vol- hynia but were no match for the Polish hetmani (regional military commanders). Some Tatars settled permanently and peacefully in Poland; from the fifteenth century there were dozens of mosques in the vicinity of Lutsk. Records at the Beth Hatefutsoth Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv mention a seventeenth-century Jewish cemetery near a fortress in Hovkov, about three and a half miles from Ludvipol; the fortress was destroyed during a war in the eighteenth century. After the war, the Jews of Hovkov may have resettled on the other side
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