What could result from such a state of affairs but poverty, material and spiritual, with all the suffering it engenders?  Those at the head of the kehillot, being responsible solely to the Government, often had to deliver the full tale of bricks like the Jewish overseers in Egypt, though no straw was given to them.  On one occasion Rabbi Mikel of Shkud was arrested because the kahal could not pay the thousand gulden it owed.  In 1767, the whole kahal of Vilna went to Warsaw to protest against intolerable taxation.  Such protests were usually of little avail.  On the other hand, a few powerful families throve at the expense of their oppressed coreligionists.  This aroused a spirit of animosity and a clamor for the abolition of the kahal institution.  Jewish autonomy was more and more encroached upon.  Rabbinates were bought and sold, and the aid of the Government was invoked in religious controversies.  A question regarding the preferable form of prayer was submitted to the decision of Paul I. In 1777, Prince Radziwill decided who should officiate as rabbi in so important a centre of Judaism as Vilna,[7] and in 1804 the Government issued a “regulation” depriving the kahal of its judicial functions altogether.

What was even more disastrous was the spiritual poverty of the masses.  Seldom have the awful warnings of the great lawgiver been fulfilled so literally as during the eighteenth century: 

And upon them that remain of you, I will send a faintness into their hearts in the land of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall, when none pursueth.  And they shall fall one upon another, as it were before a sword, when none pursueth:  and ye shall have no power to stand before your enemies (Lev. 26:  36-37).

But the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind.  And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and thou shalt have none assurance of thy life (Deut. 29:  65-66).

Having learned from sad experience that there was no crime their foes were incapable of perpetrating, they gave credence to every rumor as to an established fact.  A report that boys and girls were to be prohibited from marrying before a certain age resulted in behalot (panics), during which children of the tenderest ages were united as husband and wife (1754, 1764, 1793).  Mysticism became rampant.  “Messiah” after “Messiah” “revealed” himself as the one promised to redeem Israel from all his troubles.  Love of God began to be tinged with fear of the devil, and incantations to take the place of religious belief.  The Zohar and works full of superstition, such as the Kab ha-Yashar, Midrash Talpiyot, and Nishmat Hayyim, the first studied by men, the others by both sexes, but mostly by women, prepared their minds for all sorts