being pushed from these in course of time by the growing flood of Christian population, they chose the suburb of Kazimierz for their habitation, and founded an almost purely Jewish community. There they still have their old synagogues (illustration 53), their interesting cemeteries with characteristic tombstones of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their own particular societies, hospitals, and Hebrew schools; they speak
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53. INTERIOR OF THE JEWISH SYNAGOGUE AT KAZIMIERZ.
(Fifteenth Century.)
among themselves a peculiar jargon, being a mixture of other languages, especially German and Polish; they keep their own literature and the national costume. All these peculiarities give its distinctive, Oriental character to this, perhaps unique, relic of medieval town life: a Ghetto in a modern European city.
After the reign of Sigismund August (the last of the Jagellons), during which the Reformation had gained a transitory ascendency,
