Paradisus Judaeorum
Polish epigram / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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"Paradisus Judaeorum" is a Latin phrase which became one of four members of a 19th-century Polish-language proverb[2] that described the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795) as "heaven for the nobility, purgatory for townspeople, hell for peasants, paradise for Jews."[3][lower-alpha 1] The proverb's earliest attestation is an anonymous 1606 Latin pasquinade that begins, "Regnum Polonorum est" ("The Kingdom of Poland is"). Stanisław Kot surmised that its author may have been a Catholic townsman, perhaps a cleric, who criticized what he regarded as defects of the realm;[5] the pasquinade excoriates virtually every group and class of society.[6][7][8]
The phrase "Paradisus Iudaeorum" appears as the epigram to a POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews gallery that ends in a "Corridor of Fire symbolis[ing] the Khmelnytsky Uprising" (1648-1657). Mikołaj Gliński notes that Jews consider the latter uprising to have been "the biggest national catastrophe since the destruction of Solomon's Temple."[9]
Some commentators have read the phrase, "Paradisus Iudaeorum", as an observation on the favorable situation of Jews in the Kingdom of Poland and the subsequent Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a polity that was notable for giving Jews special privileges from the Statute of Kalisz of 1264, while Jews faced persecution and murder in Western Europe.[10][11] Other commentators have read the phrase as antisemitic – as suggesting that the Jews of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth were overprivileged.[lower-alpha 2] Most present-day usage relates to the first interpretation.[2]