In the 15th century, King Kasimir of Poland invited Ashkenazi Jews to settle there hoping to harness their purported penchant for money making. Happy to leave the inhospitable environment of Western Europe, the Jews accepted and made a pun of the name of their new host country, "Poh lin," which in Hebrew means "here we will sleep." Though it took several centuries before this initial first impression proved to be a catastrophic error, Jewish life and Torah scholarship flourished in Poland and became the foundation of Eastern European Jewry.