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Comment by blip54321 | Hacker News Reader

Let's break this down piece-by-piece.

(1) The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had elected kings and a parliament. It was a republic to the same degree as Rome or some of the more democratic Greek city-states. The only people who could vote were nobles, but nobles were about 10% of the population. That's about on-par with with Athens or the Roman Empire. Even in the US, only white landowners could vote when it was first founded. That's not too dissimilar from the Polish nobility.

(2) Jews emigrated to the Commonwealth from all over Europe for better treatment. Good treatment? No. Better treatment? Without a doubt.

The Commonwealth wasn't a modern enlightened democracy, but this was 1600, not 1900. It did incredibly well for 1600.

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The problem, ultimately, is that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was dominated by Poland, and said Polish nobility was not interested in treating religious minorities equally, as GDL did. Republic or not doesn't matter here - republics can quite easily become tyrannies of the majority. There's a reason why there were so many uprisings on the territory that is Ukraine today, back when it was a part of the Commonwealth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossack_uprisings

It changed with time, but the Polish nobility wasn't the ones persecuting religious minorities for the most part.

For one thing nobles took a lot of Jewish immigrants, used them as middle management (which frustrated the church, who in turn sent angry peasant mobs against Jews, which meant Jews had to work with nobility for their protection).

Also a lot of nobles weren't Catholic, especially in 1500s protestantism was very popular (about 1/3rd of nobles and majority of magnates were protestant). Only in times of Zygmunt 3 Waza who was super Catholic and introduced some discrimination it changed significantly.

In fact nobility forced kings to sign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Confederation which banned religious persecution.

Majority of nobles from eastern parts of PLC were orthodox at first (later they polonized and switched to Catholicism mostly), and there were some Jewish and Muslim nobles (but it was very rare). They still had all the rights including voting for kings, wars and taxes.

> There's a reason why there were so many uprisings on the territory that is Ukraine today, back when it was a part of the Commonwealth

Mostly economic, but yes, there has been some religious persecution there. Especially after the attempts to create orthodox-style pope-sanctioned religion in Ukraine.

The Orthodox nobility had the same rights at first. But, as you say yourself, almost all of them have switched to Catholicism over time. And the reason for that was that it was the only way to preserve both the rights and the social standing in the long term.

As for nobles not carrying out religious persecution, I don't even know what to say. Local magnates were the main drivers of the religious persecution of Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians. And sure, that persecution was often economic in nature, but it was also very clearly carried out along religious lines.

I'll grant you that religious intolerance in Poland was primarily between Catholics and Orthodox, rather than Catholics and Protestants as elsewhere in Europe. But that's to be expected from a country where most subjects are either Catholic or Orthodox, no?

EDIT: I suppose our perspectives are so different because we're focusing on different time periods. My take on this is that early Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth inherited many of the political arrangements of GDL, and tolerance was one of them. But as the center of political power shifted over to Poland over time, they were weakened.

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