a group of Jewish intellectuals who were eager to assimilate with the Poles and were imbued with Polish patriotism.  When, in 1859, the Warsaw Gazette published an anti-Semitic article in which the Jews were branded as foreigners, the Polish-Jewish patriots, including the banker Kronenberg, a convert, were stung to the quick, and they came forward with violent protests.  This led to passionate debates in the Polish press, generally unfriendly to the Jews.  The radical Polish organs, published abroad by political exiles, took occasion to denounce bitterly the anti-Semitic trend of Polish society.  The veteran historian Lelevel, who had not yet forgotten Poland’s historic injustice of 1831, [1] issued a pamphlet in Brussels, calling upon the Poles to live in harmony with the race with which it had existed side by side for eight hundred years.

[Footnote 1:  See above, p. 105.]

Lelevel’s kindly words would scarcely have brought the anti-Semites to reason, had not the Poles at that moment embarked upon an enterprise for the success of which they sorely needed the sympathy and co-operation of their Jewish neighbors.  The revolutionary movement which engulfed Russian Poland in 1860-1863 required the utmost exertion of effort on the part of the entire population, in which the half-million Jews played no small part.  All of a sudden Polish society opened its arms to those whom it had but recently branded as foreigners, and out of the ranks of Warsaw Jewry came a hearty response, expressing itself not only in patriotic manifestations but also in sacrifices and achievements for the sake of the common fatherland.

At the head of the Warsaw community during this stormy period stood a man who combined Polish patriotism with rabbinic orthodoxy.  Formerly rabbi in Cracow, Berush [1] Meisels had as far back as 1848 been sent as deputy to the parliament at Kremsier, [2] and stood in the forefront of the Polish patriots of Galicia.  In 1856 he accepted the post of rabbi in Warsaw.  When the revolutionary movement had broken out, Meisels endeavored to instruct his flock in the spirit of Polish patriotism.  Revered by the Jewish masses for his piety, and by the intellectuals for his political trend of mind, this spiritual leader of Polish Jewry played in the revolutionary Polish movement a role equal in importance to that of the leading ecclesiastics of Poland.  The harmonious co-operation of the orthodox Chief Rabbi Meisels, the reform preacher Marcus Jastrow, [3] and the lay representatives of the community lent unity and organization to the part played by the Jews in preparing the rebellion.

[Footnote 1:  A variant of the name Baer.]

[Footnote 2:  A town in Moravia, where, after the rising of 1848, the Austrian parliament met provisionally till March, 1849.]

[Footnote 3:  After the suppression of the Polish insurrection, Jastrow went to the United States, and became a leading rabbi in Philadelphia.  He died in 1903.]