Cossack riots


The Cossack riots were pogroms carried out against the Jews of modern Ukraine during the 1648 uprising of the Cossacks and serfs led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Massacre of the Jews of Poland, Belarus, and today's Ukraine occurred throughout the rebellion, which lasted for many years and during the Russo-Polish War and the small northern war with the Swedish Empire that ignited them. Nevertheless, the sudden destruction of many communities from the beginning of April–May 1648, until the cessation of the Cossacks' progress in November of that year, is the named source. According to the historian Adam Teller: "In the Jewish collective memory, the events in the summer and autumn of 1648 define the uprising in general, and therefore the riots were known as the 1848s." Thousands were slaughtered or died of starvation and epidemics, and many others fled, sold into slavery, or converted. The number of Jews killed by the Cossack rebels in 1648 was estimated at a few thousand to 20,000 at most. It is estimated that all the parties - the Cossacks, the Russians, the Swedes, their allies and the Poles themselves who massacred them on suspicion of collaborating with the invaders - killed between 40,000 and 50,000 Jews in total.

Background

In 1569, with the establishment of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, large land tracts were transferred from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to the rule of the Kingdom of Poland. The aristocracy, which enjoyed independence and even chose the king, controlled the area that had been ruled until then by the Tatars from the Crimea. In the territories western to the Dnieper River, tens of thousands of people from the rest of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth came to settle down. The great Magnates, which most of them were descendants of the local aristocracy, established vast agricultural estates and imposed strict rules on the local Ruthenian peasants.
Among the settlers, there were many Jews. They were pushed from Poland itself under the pressure of city residents who wanted to reduce the economic competition. Many of the Jews were employed by the nobility as leases and estate managers. Dozens of new communities were established in Ukraine, mainly on the right bank of the Dnieper. The eastern side was a somewhat wild area. It was closer to the Crimea and dangerous to settlement, although some estates and cities were there and drew Jews looking for jobs. Southern to where the river bends, lived the Cossacks from the Zaporozhian Sich, a semi-nomadic society that maintained a routine of constant fighting with the Tatars. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth maintained strained relations with the Cossacks and tried to subordinate them to its authority while exploiting them for military usage.
The nobility mercilessly brutalized the general population and especially the serfs. The economic and social tension, which also led to strong hostility towards Jewish lessees, had gotten worse due to religious reasons. At the end of the 16th century, in the framework of the counter-reformation, the Jesuits have reached the area. Although they intended to fight any manifestation of Protestantism, they soon turned their attention to the Ruthenians, which almost all were Orthodox Christians. Sigismund III Vasa was a devout Catholic, as were most of the Polish nobles. Under these pressures, many of the Ruthenian nobles converted to Catholicism. Similar attempts, which were also expressed in establishing a local Uniate church and the persecution of Orthodox priests who refused to join it, were made towards the common people. The local's rage for all this was quickly channeled into acts of rebellion led by the Cossacks, who were experienced fighters and they rebelled eight times between 1592 and 1638.
In the 19th century, with the creation of Ukrainian nationalism, many historians tried to describe the conflict between a local Ruthenian independence movement and foreign Polish nobility and its Jewish servants. The great Magnates in the region were, in fact, mostly Catholics or Unites, but they were descendants of the original inhabitants, such as the Ostrogski family. The Voivode Jeremi Wiśniowiecki was the son of a well-known Orthodox family and converted to Catholicism at the age of 20. There are reports of cooperation between Jews and locals against the nobility and the Jews participation in Cossack raids. Like all the townspeople in the area, the Jews were obliged to participate in defending the towns in case of a siege. In the East Bank, many were obliged to carry the weapon in case of Tartar attacks.

The Events

The Outbreak of the Uprising

One of the victims of the landowners was a local junior nobleman named Bogdan Khmelnytsky. In early 1647, his property and his intended fiancé were taken by Daniel Czaplinski, apparently the deputy of the magnate Alexander Koniecpolski. When Bogdan Khmelnytsky turned to the courts and didn’t receive any response, a great rebellion began to develop, which was much bigger the previous ones.
In the spring of 1648, Khmelnitsky, who was appointed to be the Ataman of the Zapurozi, led an army of Cossacks against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. He made an alliance with the Tatars, who provided him with 4,000 cavalry under the command of Tugai Bay. In April he crossed the Dnieper with his army and won two crushing victories against the crown forces, one on the Yellow River on May 15 and the other in Kurson on the 26th.
The news of his victories sparked a huge uprising among the people throughout the country. The Cossacks and the masses massacred the Jews, nobles, Catholics, and Uniates wherever they reached. The disturbances spread to southern of today's Belarus, and the Cossack troops reached Pinsk. The eastern bank of the Dnieper, where the population was almost entirely Orthodox and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth's presence was weak, fell without a real struggle. The following day after the victory in Kurson, on the first day of Shavuot, on May 27, 1648, began a mass deportation of the Jews in the surrounding districts to the fortified cities, desecrating the holiday. About the same time, Yirmi Vishniewiecki withdrew from his estates in Lubny with his own army and took with him several hundred of Jews along with the other refugees. He kept gathering Jewish people on the way.
Nathan Neta Hanover, whose book " The Abyss of Despair " is the best-known chronicle of events, described what he heard about the riots in the eastern bank that fell into the hands of the rebels:
On the first day of June, Khmelnitsky's main camp was stopped at Bila Sarkawa and ceased moving westward. Yet, the masses in the territories that remained under the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth control continued to rebel. Some atamans Cossack, with the most dominant of them all- Maxim Krivonos, used their forces to support the acts of rebellion. On the tenth of June, 1648, Krivonos conquered the city of Nemyriv, where a large Jewish population had fortified. According to Hanover and other record-writers, he pretended to be a friendly force and flew flags of the Crown Army, while Cossack sources reported from inside. As soon as Nemyriv fell, the Cossacks slaughtered all the Catholics and the Jews inside. Hanover reported 6,000 Jews killed, an improbable number which was denied by modern historians but still provides a measure of destruction. Mordechai Nadav noted that events of the size of that in Pinsk, in which several dozen Jews were apparently killed during the invasion, were more typical of the events. Similar massacres took place in many other cities, such as Polona and Bar. In Nemyriv, the Jewish chronologists noted a mass refusal of Jews to offer the slaughterers to convert to Christianity and to be saved, although at the same time the Shakh wrote that "many Jews violated the covenant." A group of Jews which swore allegiance to the Cossacks and converted to Christianity rescued itself from the city after a short time, when Nemyriv fell into the hands of Vishniewitzky.
On June 18, Krivonos began a siege of Tulchyn, and broke through the wall on the 21st. The next day the fort fell. Then there was a time-out for several days and on June 26 the massacre took place. Hanover and others argued that the local commander, Duke Janusz Chetvartinsky, betrayed the Jews and gave them to the rioters while trying in vain to save his own life. Israel Halperin determined that there was no evidence of this and Chturtinsky probably tried to release all those who were inside by means of a bribe, but the Cossacks killed them all. He believed that the source of the rumor was because Cheturtinsky belonged to a devout Orthodox family and that is why the Catholics suspected him. Hannover noted that Jews were also offered to convert to Christianity, but they rejected it and chose death for the sanctification of God's Name. The historian Yechezkel Feram rejected Hannover's description and claimed that Hanover based on another person's testimony. Fram believed that the description was a distortion of the story "cliff of the times" about a similar sanction in Hommel that took place at the same time, on the 20th of June, 1648. Meir Meshbreshin reported that several rabbis urged the people to surrender and not to convert, and all of them were slaughtered, but this event is doubted as well.
Others like Hanover tended to link the sanctions of 1848-1988 to the Ashkenazi Kiddush tradition of the Middle Ages, from events such as the 1096 decrees of Blois from 1171. The day Nemyriv was conquered, 10 June 1648, is also the Memorial Day In memory of the victims of the Cossacks. Yet, there were no similar events like the mass suicide in the days of the Crusaders in 1650. Historian Jacob Katz tended to associate this to the erosion of the ideal of Kiddush Hashem in the past centuries, but Feram wrote that it remained as strong as ever. The difference between the riots was due to external circumstances. Unlike the Crusaders, the rebellious Ruthenians had no organized policy of conversion: they classified anyone who was not Orthodox as an enemy, but did not intended to spread their own faith. Also, there are reports of Jews who converted to Christianity voluntarily and still were killed. The Eastern Church had no direct connection with the rioters. For their part, they dealt with looting and killing for their own sake, nobility, Catholics and Uniates as Jews. Paul of Aleppo, who visited the country a few years later, told of a desire for extermination. Even the masses, who were not familiar with the halakhic elements of the hour of annihilation but were well aware of the principle of a long tradition, viewed the events as a politic class struggle rather than an attempt to convert them, as many reports indicate, both from the chronicles and from testimonies to the courts after everything happened.
In September the noble armies suffered a heavy defeat in the Battle of Filabetsi, and in fact, there was no significant force remained until Warsaw itself. Khmelnytsky advanced toward Lviv and Zamość. In Lviv, the city's residents were offered to extradite the Jews in return for lifting the siege, but they refused. As in all other cities, the Jews took part in its defense. At the end of November, fearing a prolonged battle in the winter and after the new Polish-Lithuanian king offered him extensive concessions, Khmelnitsky retreated to Kiev. The fighting resumed at the end of May 1649, and continued intermittently for years to come. Large-scale killings were carried out against the Ukrainian Jews and the parts of Belarus that fell into the hands of the rebels. The number of people who converted to Christianity, which many of them kept their new religion even after the conquest of their homes by the crown's faithful soldiers, was big enough that on the 2nd of May, 1650, King Jan Kazimierz gave a special order that allows all those who wished it to return to Judaism. Many were captured by the Tartars. Among the Jews, it was thought that the Tartars were interested in any Jew in order to sell them in slavery markets. However, they often wanted only slaves who would provide a worthwhile price. These included young women, men of working age and children. There were cases in which the Ruthenian masses rejected the attempts to sell them slaves who were not included among these classifications. It was also reported that the elderly and other non-wanted slaves were separated from the captured prisoners and burned alive so that they would not burden the caravans. However, the Tartars did not take part in the massacres known as Tulchyn and Nemyriv; these were the work of Maksym Kryvonis. The Cossacks themselves did not take slaves but killed those who fell into their hands. The Jewish communities joined forces in the efforts to redeem the Jewish slaves, which were located mainly in the large market in Constantinople. Large donations were made throughout the Jewish world: a special tax was imposed by the Council of Four Lands in areas not affected by the revolt, the Karaites in the Ottoman capital raised donations, and the main help came from a slavery-redeeming company in Venice whose emissaries came as far as Hamburg and Amsterdam to request charity. With these funds and its official delegate, the community of Constantinople redeemed 1,500 people by July 1651, in exchange for a total amount of 150,000 Spanish reais. The stream then decreased and in total there were 2,000 redeemed people in 1648, some in distant markets such as Persia and Algiers.
The number of Jewish victims was evaluated as great. Samuel Ben-Nathan Feidel, in his book from 1650, counted 281 communities destroyed and claimed that six hundred thousand Jews were killed. The Shakh on the other hand, noted that there were one thousand. Menashe Ben Israel wrote to Oliver Cromwell that there were one hundred and eighty thousand. Although in the 20th century, Isaac Schifer estimated that there were three hundred thousand killed or taken prisoner from 1648 to -1655. Modern research has greatly reduced estimates of the victims of the massacres: Professor Shmuel Ettinger estimated the entire Jewish population of Ukraine in 1648 at -51,325 persons, based on documents from that period. Prof. Shaul Stampfer claimed that there were 40,000, stating that "at most 50% and perhaps much less" than those who died at the outbreak of the revolt in 1648.

Additional disputes

In 1654 Tsardom of Russia gave Suzerainty to Khmelnytsky and their armies invaded together into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, both in Ukraine and in the north, in Belarus and Lithuania. At the beginning of August 1655 Vilna fell into the hands of the occupier and a mass slaughter was carried out, although the reports showed that most of the Jews had managed to escape in time. In October, Lublin was captured, where the chronicles cite about 2,000 Jews who died. It was the greatest disaster of the new battle. The historian Dov Weinryb, based both on Polish records and on personal reports, stated that the correct number was probably several hundred. The Russians also tended to take many prisoners, and a new wave of Jewish slaves reached the markets in 1665 and 1656. Once again, a great effort began to raise funds for their redemption.
In the summer of 1655 invaded a new enemy to the republic, the Swedish Empire led by King Carl Gustav. This war was the most destructive of all the struggles between Poland and Lithuania. It is still estimated to be worse than World War II in terms of the relative damage caused to the country. In what became known as the "Swedish Flood," the most affluent and populated areas of Poland were completely destroyed. The circumstances led to great hunger that year. Jewish reports staged the invaders as sympathetic towards them. Although they did not take special action against them except for a random killing, many Jews, together with the rest of the people, died of starvation, epidemics and sword. For example, the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz in Kraków was completely destroyed by the siege on the city in September–October 1655 and the survivors fled to Bohemia and Moravia.
The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was almost collapsing: Many nobles believed that Karl Gustav would do them good and change sides with their armies. The magnate Janusz Radziwiłł swore allegiance in return for protection from the Russians and cut off Lithuania from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. But the scales were tipped by the massacres and looting of the Swedes, and especially by the awakening of Catholic sentiment with the successful defense of the Jesna Gora Monastery since November. The Piłsudski began to resent the Swedish king, who neglected their affairs, and most of them renewed their loyalty to Jan Kazimierz. The masses of the people and the minor nobility, headed by Hetman Stefan Czerniecki, launched a guerilla war against the Lutheran conquerors. In the fall of 1656, the Czar estimated that Sweden might become too strong and started supporting the King of Poland.
The rebels, driven also by the betrayal of the Calvinist Radziwill, ran what they perceived as a struggle for the Catholic Church. Lutherans, Calvinists, neo-Aryans, Orthodox and Jews were all marked as enemies and suspected of collaborating with the Swedes. Different militias and the Crown Forces massacred them frequently. On January 22, 1656, the king confiscated the remains of Kazimierz and gave all the looting that could be extracted from it to the army after declaring that the Jews had cooperated with the enemy. In February 1656, Czerniecki killed 600 Jews, according to the records, when he liberated Sandomierz Castle. Poland, Lithuania and Sweden signed a peace agreement in 1660, and the fighting between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Moscow resumed. It continued on a relatively limited scale until signing the Truce of Andrusovo Agreement in 1667, which brought tranquility to the kingdom for the first time in 19 years. The Lithuanian communities paid a large sum to include in the contract a clause allowing all Jewish prisoners in Russia, with the exception of converts and women who were married, to return home.
The historian Dov Weinryb wrote that according to records about the size of Jewish communities in the 1970s and 1980s, which together with other data indicate that many survived by conversion or immigration, "a reasonable estimate" of all Jews killed - By the sword, by all sides, and by epidemics and famine - during the turbulent period that swept Poland from 1648 to 1677, "will be between 40,000 and 50,000, although historians point to far larger estimates, which are high enough to include between a fifth and a quarter of the Jewish population In Poland and Lithuania on the eve of the uprising. "

Following the Sanctions

The chaos that was in Poland following the sanctions brought the leaders of the communities and their rabbis into taking steps regarding the welfare of the refugees, both in material aid and in halachic discussions to allow a second marriage to women whose husbands had been lost. The problem of women whose husbands had been lost reached distant courts in communities where captives were redeemed and wanted to remarry. In Cairo, in a case cited in the "Divrei Noam", a group of women sent a messenger to Poland who returned with divorce documents from all their husbands.
The generation who lived at that time debated the question whether the sanctions were shedding clean blood for the sins of the House of Israel or punishment from god. Many adopted the first statement, but pamphlets published in Europe blamed the Polish Jewry of committing sins such as: loan interest, Folk distribution of Kabbalah books to the masses, raising pigs for non-Jews, lawlessness and more. The massive flight to the west also led to the renewed growth of the Holy Roman Empire as an important Torah center, after years of standing in the shadow of its neighbor to the east. Researchers in the past have frequently related the pogroms as a catalyst for the rise of Sabbateanism. Sarah, the wife of Shabtai Zvi, also became orphaned during it. Although this assertion lost its validity over time, Israel Halpern believed that the effort to raise funds for the redemption of captives throughout the continent hastened the horrific news of the events to the entire Diaspora and played an important role.
In memory of the heavy mourning, the rabbis decreed banquets and fancy costumes. Wearing silk and velvet was forbidden for three years. Women were forbidden to wear gold chains and gems for three years. It was forbidden to sing songs of joy for one year, except for wedding ceremonies, and the authority was given by the leaders of each community to extend the validity of the prohibitions for additional years.
In February 1650 The Council of Four Lands assembled in Lublin, where it was declared that the Memorial Day for the sanctions in Blois and for the day that nemyriv fell will be on the 10th of June, 1648 In memory of the victims. Lamentations and special prayers were written to be said on this day. Rabbi Yom Tov Lipman Heller then corrected the lament of "Ella Ezekara in Third Tears" for those who perished. In addition, various versions of the prayer "El Malei Rachamim" were also composed, to be recited on the 20th of Sivan, on Yom Kippur, on the Sabbath preceding Shavuot and on Shabbat Chazon.
Despite its many inaccuracies, "Abyss of Despair" has become a historical memory because of the high quality of Hanover's writing. It was published in more than twenty editions in several languages, and remained a major source until the 20th century. The sanctions of 1648 are mentioned in several literary works in Hebrew. The most famous of them are: "The Slave" by Isaac Bashevis Singer, "The Nazarene" by Shalom Asch, "A City In Its Fullness" by SY Agnon and the Ballad "the Rabbi's daughter" by Shaul Tchernichovsky.