Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 9, 2025
Beyond the steppes which encompass the whole southern seacoast of Russia, from the Sea of Azof to the Danube, there spreads far inland a fertile region, embracing the whole or part of the Governments of Podolia, Poltava, Kharkof, Kief, Voronei, Don Cossacks, etc., including the districts of what was once known as the "Ukraine," which was for many years debatable land between Poland, Turkey, and Russia, and on which roamed the mongrel bands of the Cossacks, an uncouth population recruited among the many tramps and vagabonds from the northern provinces, mixed with all the races of men with whom they came into contact, settling here and there in new, loose, and almost lawless communities, organized as military colonies, and perpetually shifting their allegiance from one to the other of these three Powers, till the policy and good fortune of Peter the Great and Catherine II. extended the sway of Russia over the whole territory.
In this manner I saw Podolia and Volkynia, which were rebaptized a few years later by the names of Galicia and Lodomeria, for they are now part of the Austrian Empire. It is said, however, that they are more prosperous than they ever were before. At Warsaw I found Madame Geoffrin the object of universal admiration; and everybody was remarking with what simplicity she was dressed.
The end of his journey was Kamimetz, in Podolia, where he gave himself out as a Frenchman, who had come to give private lessons in foreign languages, and received the usual permit from the authorities without exciting any suspicion. He was soon introduced into the best society; and the better to shield his connections, he chose the houses of Russian employés.
These scoundrels made life intolerable, and there were occasions when the people took the law into their own hands and secretly dispatched the most objectionable among them. A case of this kind came to light in the government of Podolia in 1836. In the town Novaya Ushitza two mosers, named Oxman and Schwartz, who had terrorized the Jews of the whole province, were found dead.
This woman who had taken Samuel Brohl from out of the land of Egypt, and had showered attentions upon him, was a Russian princess. She owned an estate of Podolia, and chance would have it that one day, in passing, she stopped at the tavern where young Samuel was growing up in the shadow of the tabernacle. He was then sixteen. In spite of his squalid rags, she was struck by his figure.
Let Lithuania, Samogitia, Witepsk, Polotsk, Mohilow, Wolhynia, Ukraine, and Podolia be animated by the same spirit I have seen in great Poland, and Providence will crown with success the holiness of your cause; it will recompense this devotion to your native country which has made you such an object of interest, and has obtained for you the right to my esteem and protection, on which you may rely under all circumstances."
The famous mystic Hayyim Samuel Jacob Falk, one of the many Baal-Shems who flourished in Podolia at the beginning of the eighteenth century, settled in London before 1750, and became the subject of many wonder stories. Sussman Shesnovzi, apparently a countryman of his, describes him, in a letter to Jacob Emden, as "standing alone in his generation by reason of his knowledge of holy mysteries."
In accordance with the customary pogrom ritual, the human fiends were left undisturbed for two days, and only on the third day were troops summoned from a near-by city to put a stop to the atrocities. On the same day the governor of Podolia arrived to make an investigation.
The barbarism displayed in the metropolis of the south-west communicated itself with the force of an infectious disease to the whole region. During the following days, from April to May, some fifty villages and a number of townlets in the government of Kiev and the adjacent governments of Volhynia and Podolia were swept by the pogrom epidemic.
Towards the end of the eighties the plan of promoting Jewish emigration from Russia, which had been abandoned with the retirement of Count Ignatyev, was again looked upon favorably by the leading Government circles. The sentiments of the Tzar were expressed in a marginal note which he attached to the report of the governor of Podolia for the year 1888.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking