By doing this, the Polish government did further isolate the already ghettoized Jews of the shtetl (small marketing villages in Poland that were primarily Jewish)[Eliach 741]. However, the Polish government did also establish a system allowing Jews to ultimately govern themselves and determine their own fate. And although members of the Kahals were in entirely different castes with that of the ones that they "governed", the Polish government making the first step to allow Jews to self-government was a historic development in European Jewish History [Zamoyski, 214].
While the Polish government made serious attempts to continuously protect the Jewish people, citizens and militant groups thought and acted otherwise. From 1648 - 1654, "the greatest Jewish suffering since the Crusades [Porath, 33]" occurred which have been coined the Ukrainian uprisings. This term, however, may be misleading because the geographical makeup of all that were affected by this ongoing tragedy were throughout Central and Eastern Europe. This period, in Hebrew, is known as the Tach v"Tacht (the phrase represents all eight of the years, but is actually an acronym for the two worst years, the beginning years of the uprisings, 1648-49). Cossack anti-Semite Bogdan Chmelnicki, or Chmelniski, led his fellow Cossacks (these uprisings were also called the Chmelnicki massacres) who were also Ukrainian peasants, throughout Europe to slaughter Jews. Historians say that anywhere from 100,000 to 125,000 Jews were slain: twenty to twenty-five percent of the Jewish population of Europe at that time. A Jewish economic recession followed, and only fully recovered with the abolition of the Kahals" tax allotment privileges in 1764 [http://www.webinfonet.net/heritage/history.html, 10/29/01]. .
Common Jews felt disconnected with Judaism, unable to spiritually connect very similarly to the self-deemed rejects of many Protestant factions.