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, Fuerth, Prague, and Vienna successively elected the fugitive Shabbatai 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 Beer 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]

It must not be supposed that supremacy in the Talmud was secured at the cost of secular knowledge, or what was then regarded as such.  Their familiarity with other branches of study was not inferior to that of the Jews in better-known lands.  Not a few of the prominent men united piety with philosophy, and thorough knowledge of the Talmud with mastery of one or more of the sciences of the time.  Data on this phase of the subject might have been much more abundant, had not the storm of persecution suddenly swept over the communities, destroying them and their records.  What we still possess indicates what may have been lost.  The Ukraine was famous for its scholars.  Among them was Jehiel Michael of Nemirov, reputed to have been “versed in all the sciences of the world."[26] Several of them were poets and grammarians.  Poems of a liturgical character are still extant in which they bemoan their plight or assert their faith hopefully.  Such were the poems of Ephraim of Khelm, Joseph of Kobrin, Solomon of Zamoscz, and Shabbatai Kohen.  The last, eminent as a Talmudist, the author of commentaries on the Shulhan ’Aruk approved by the leading rabbis of his generation, is also known as a very trustworthy historian.  His Megillah ’Afah, written in classic Hebrew, is a valuable source of information on the critical period in which he lived.  He won the esteem of the Polish nobility by his secular attainments.  To judge from his correspondence, he must have been on intimate terms with Vidrich of Leipsic.[27] Of the grammarians, Jacob Zaslaver wrote on the Massorah, and Shabbatai Sofer was the author of annotations and treatises.[28] Our taste in poetry and grammar is no longer the same, but the polemic and apologetic writings of those days, called forth by the discussions between Rabbanites and Karaites and by the constant attacks of Christianity,