I'd prefer if we could refactor this code to not need so much code in static initializers, especially to not have two of blocks of static code.
If there ever is an exception in this code, that's going to result in hard to diagnose error messages.. for example that might happen if the user is attempting to use a wrongly matching version of Lucene jars.

The existing validation assertions make sense but we should either validate it using a unit test, or using standard assert or even an exception but it shouldn't happen at class initialization.