364 A History of Judaism
the United States, was dedicated in 1763, nearly a century after the
arrival of Barbados Jews in the town in 1677.^3
In eastern Europe, the Jewish population of Poland and Lithuania
had grown since the thirteenth century under a system of state protec-
tion partly through the authority given by the state to local Jewish
councils, which encouraged migration east from Germany and settle-
ment in villages in the Ukraine. Already in 1264 a charter known as the
Statute of Kalisz had granted Jews in Poland extensive legal rights,
including jurisdiction by Jewish courts over Jewish affairs. As a result,
the Jewish population expanded greatly from the last quarter of the
sixteenth century under the patronage of the Polish– Lithuanian nobil-
ity, so that by the early seventeenth century Poland and Lithuania had
become the main centres of Ashkenazi culture. This dominance was
diminished, but not ended, by the destruction of hundreds of Jewish
communities in the Cossack and peasant uprisings against Polish rule in
the Ukraine led in 1648– 9 by Bogdan Chmielnicki.
The Chmielnicki massacres evoked a mass of liturgical poems and
laments and an exodus of Jewish refugees back west towards the Neth-
erlands, where an Ashkenazi population of very different social and
economic background and cultural outlook, with Yiddish as their pri-
mary Jewish language, thus settled alongside the Sephardi community
from Portugal and Spain. The refugees from what is now Ukraine who
ended up in small states in Germany brought a distinctive intensity of
religious life to the communities in which they settled. Ordinary Jews
enjoyed a complex relationship with the court Jews who provided com-
mercial and financial services to autocratic princes throughout the Holy
Roman Empire and adjoining states such as Poland and Denmark.
Many such Hofjuden did much to help their communities from the
court environment in which they operated. For instance, Samuel Oppen-
heimer, purveyor of military supplies to the army of the Austrian
emperor in the late seventeenth century, was a remarkable benefactor of
numerous synagogues and academies and wielded immense influence
within the Jewish community despite his own lack of learning.^4
The different trends within Jewish life met during this period in par-
ticularly spectacular fashion in Italy, where Jews had flourished in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries through small- scale money lending to
finance the general expansion of the local economy, generally maintain-
ing their civil position despite occasional hostility from Franciscan friars
and others. When Jews were exiled from Spain in March 1492, both
Sicily and Sardinia were under the rule of Aragon, and in 1503 the