Now, these colonies were under the control of several noble Polish families which sold the lease of the imposts to their Jewish bailiffs. The latter were intended to act the part for which the training of a thousand years had so well qualified them--the part of the sponge. Thanks to this arrangement, Jewish communities rapidly sprang up and spread in the Ukraine and Little Russia, and to them was entrusted the odious privilege of collecting and even of inventing taxes. How galling these burdens were may be gathered from the following example: The Cossacks were bound to pay a duty on every new-born infant and on every wedding. As a safeguard against evasion, the Jewish tax-farmers kept the keys of the churches, and on each wedding or baptism the clergyman was obliged to apply to them for admittance into his own church. Nor were these tax-farmers scrupulous or lenient in the exercise of their privileges. Slaves to everybody else, they were eager to play the despots over those whom fate had placed under themselves. In their lust for profit and power, they readily helped the nobles in plundering and the Jesuits in tormenting the Cossacks. Hence the position of the Jews in the Ukraine and Little Russia became one of extreme danger, and the resentment which their conduct excited soon translated itself into acts of vengeance. And vengeance, when it fell on Jews, did not restrict itself to the individuals who had deserved it. “All Israelites are surety one for the other” was the Rabbinic motto of solidarity. The Cossacks were now to give a new meaning to this maxim. Where single units had offended, whole communities were punished. During a brief revolt of the Cossacks, in 1638, two hundred Jews were slain and several synagogues destroyed. The Jews, not warned by this omen, continued to provoke severer punishment with a recklessness which was partly derived from the belief in the near advent of the Messiah. The year 1648 had been fixed by the mystics as the era of triumph and universal sovereignty for Israel.[124] The expected date came, but it brought with it, not redemption, but retribution. In that year there broke out an insurrection led by a Cossack who, having been cheated out of his wife and property by a Jew, had no cause to love the race. Chmielnicki, in declaring to his compatriots that “they had been delivered by the Poles into bondage to the cursed breed of the Jews,” was voicing their wrongs with a conviction deepened by personal suffering.