ABSTRACT
By the start of the modern period, Jews were established throughout Europe, North Africa, and certain Asian countries. Despite the lessening of anti-Jewish feeling in many places, the large communities of Eastern Europe were to suffer many changes
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their security was interrupted in 1648. In that year Bogdan Chmielnicki (1593-1657) was elected the leader of the Cossacks and he led a revolution against the Polish aristocracy. The Jews, some of whom were stewards of the great estates, were very much identified with the interests of the upper classes and took the brunt of the onslaught. It was a massacre. Probably as many as a quarter of the Jewish population of Poland was
murdered during the course of the upheaval and many others were sold in the slave markets of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul). Poland ceased to be a secure refuge.
