Note (return) — Chapter I

The reverence for Slavonic learning was strikingly illustrated during the years following the Cossack massacres, when many Russo-Polish rabbis fled for safety to foreign lands. Frankfort, Fürth, Prague, and Vienna successively elected the fugitive Shabbataï Horowitz of Ostrog as their religious guide. David Taz of Vladimir became rabbi of Steinitz in Moravia; Ephraim Hakohen was called to Trebitsch in Moravia and to Ofen in Hungary; David of Lyda, to Mayence and Amsterdam, and Naphtali Kohen, to Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1704, and later to Breslau. No less personages than Isaac Aboab and Saul Morteira welcomed the merchant-Talmudist Moses Rivkes of Vilna when he sought refuge in Amsterdam, and they entrusted to him the task of editing the Shulhan 'Aruk, his marginal notes to which, the Beër ha-Golah, have ever since been printed with the text. In addition to rabbis, Lithuania and other provinces furnished teachers for the young, melammedim, who exerted considerable influence upon the people among whom they lived. Their opinions, we are told, were highly valued in the choice of rabbis.25