KHMEL'NYTS'KYI AND THE JEWS

Jewish chroniclers of the seventeenth century provide vastly different and invariably inflated figures with respect to the loss of life among the Jewish population of Ukraine during the Khmel'nyts'kyi era.

Despite the correctives provided by recent scholarship, the old chronicles manage to retain a strong hold on the modern reader’s imagination. Perhaps the best known and most often published chronicle is the Yeven Metzulah, by the rabbi of Ostroh, in Volhynia, Nathan Hannover. A Hebrew version was first published in Venice in 1653, and has since then appeared in many transla­tions, including several in English under the title The Deep.Mire or of

Despair. In the introduction to the 1983 edition of the Hannover chronicle, an American specialist in Judaic studies, William B. Helmreich, still refers to the events of the Khmel'nyts'kyi era as ‘one of the worst catastrophes ever to befall the Jewish people.’ In the following excerpts from The Abyss of Despair, Hannover tells us why he chose his title, how the attitudes of the Cossack leader are supposedly characteristic of all Ukrainians, and, finally, what hap­pened to those Jews who were unable to escape from the Left Bank westward beyond the Dnieper River.

1 named my book yeven metzulah (the deep mire), because the words of the Psalmist [Psalms 69:3] allude to these terrible events, and speak of the oppressors, the Tatars and the Ukrainians as well as of the arch-enemy, Chmiel, may his name be blotted out, may God send a curse upon him.

Eor while he [Khmel'nyts'kyi) was soft spoken, he had seven abominations in his heart; a man plotting iniquity, in the manner of all the Ukrainians, who at first appear to the Jews as friends, and speak to them pleasant and comforting words, beguiling them with soft and kind speech, while they lie with their tongues and are deceitful and untrustworthy.

Whoever failed to escape or was unable to flee was killed. 'These persons died cruel and bitter deaths. Some were skinned alive and their flesh was thrown to the dogs; some had their hands and limbs chopped off, and their bodies thrown on the highway only to be trampled by wagons and crushed by horses; some had wounds inflicted upon them, and [were) thrown on the street to die a slow death; they writhed in their blood until they breathed their last; others were buried alive. The enemy slaughtered infants in the laps of their mothers. They were sliced into pieces like fish. They slashed the bellies of pregnant women, removed their infants and tossed them in their faces. Some women had their bellies torn open and live cats placed in them. The bellies were then sewed up with the live cats remaining within. They chopped off the hands of the victims so that they would not be able to remove the cats from the bellies. The infants were hung on the breasts of their mothers. Some children were pierced with spears, roasted on the fire and then brought to their mothers to be eaten. Many times they used the bodies of Jewish children as improvised bridges upon which they later crossed. There was no cruel device of murder in the whole world that was not perpetrated by the enemies. All the four death penalties; stoning, burning, beheading, and strangling were meted out to the Jews. Many were taken by the Tatars into captiv­ity. Women and virgins were ravished.... Similar atrocities were perpetrated in all the settlements through which they passed. Also against the Polish people, these cruelties were perpetrated, especially against the priests and bishops.

source: N athan I lanover, Abyss of Despair: The famous 1 yth-Century Chronicle Depicting Jewish I.ife in Russia and Poland during the Chmielnichi Massacres of 1648-1649, translated by Abraham J. Mesch. 2nd cd. (New Brunswick, N.J. and London 1983) pp. 25, 34, and 43-44.

chroniclers: ‘“Chmiel the Wicked”, one of the most sinister oppressors of the Jews of all generations,... and the figure principally responsible for the holocaust of the Polish Jewry in the period.’ His reputation among Jews remains unchanged, ‘even though in reality,’ the same source admits, ‘his control of events was rather limited.’¹ Whatever the validity of Jewish opinion about Khmel'nyts'kyi, the fact remains that in the socioeconomic system of the Polish-Lithuanian Common­wealth the Jews, alongside the Poles, had come to represent the oppressor. In the great social upheaval which began in 1648, the Jews found themselves caught between the proverbial hammer and anvil, and the result was the destruction of many of their communities.

By the summer of 1648, the Cossack-peasant revolts had spread farther west, into Podolia. At this point, an influential polonized Ukrainian magnate from the Left Bank, Jeremi Wisniowiecki, took matters into his own hands. Impatient with discussions of the Cossack question on the part of the Polish government in Warsaw, Wisniowiecki decided to attack the rebels. He was repulsed, however, by Kryvonis. This development also prompted Khmel'nyts'kyi to come out of his short-lived seclusion. He marched westward toward Volhynia, where in September 1648, together with Kryvonis, he routed a large Polish army of 80,000 soldiers near the village of Pyliavtsi. The Cossack army then moved on to L'viv, where after suc­cessfully cutting off the city from outside aid, they accepted a ransom from the urban authorities.

Now the way to Warsaw was open, and Khmel'nyts'kyi was urged by his Cos­sacks to strike there, at the heart of Poland. He set out in the direction of Warsaw but in November stopped at Zamosc, about a third of the way between L'viv and Warsaw.

Considering the broken Polish promises in the past - whether because of an absence of good will on the part of the king or, more likely, the interference of the Polish nobility - one might well wonder how it was possible for Khmel'nyts'kyi to believe things would be different this time. But whether or not he believed the Poles, Khmel'nyts'kyi still hoped to function within the Polish-Lithuanian Com­monwealth. As a result, he agreed to put a stop to unruly Cossack and peasant rebellions and to return home.

Khmel'nyts'kyi as a national leader

The hetman’s attitude began to change, however, after his arrival in Kiev. At the head of a victorious Cossack army, which had within the space of less than a year defeated Poland’s leading military forces, Khmel'nyts'kyi entered Kiev on Christ­mas Day (according to the Julian calendar) in January 1649. There he was greeted by the Orthodox metropolitan of Kiev, Syl'vestr Kosiv, and by the patriarch of Jerusalem, Paisios, who was in Kiev at the time. As they had done with Hetman Sahaidachnyi in 1620, the Orthodox hierarchy provided a religious and national ideological context for Khmel'nyts'kyi’s actions. The hetman was called a mod­ern-day Moses who had succeeded in leading his Rus' people out of Polish bond­age.

Khmel'nyts'kyi was undoubtedly affected by the new role conferred upon him. He is reported to have said to commissioners of the Polish king: ‘I have hitherto undertaken tasks which I had not thought through; henceforth, I shall pursue aims which I have considered with care. I shall free the entire people of Rus' from the Poles. At first I fought because of the wrongs done to me personally; now I shall fight for our Orthodox faith.... I am a small and insignificant man, but by the will of God I have become the independent ruler of Rus'.’²

Whether or not Khmel'nyts'kyi fully grasped the leadership role in which fate had cast him, in practical terms it was impossible for him to control the peasant uprisings or to expect that the masses, having had a taste of freedom, would calmly return home to their duties within the Polish socioeconomic system. More­over, the hetman must have been impressed by the Orthodox hierarchy’s expecta­tions of him, expressed by no less than a patriarch from the Holy Land itself. Khmel'nyts'kyi proceeded to undertake diplomatic negotiations with Moldavia, Walachia, Muscovy, and its allies the Don Cossacks, as well as with Protestant Tran­sylvania and the Lithuanian Prince Radziwill, who because of their own anti­Catholic interests might help him in his anti-Polish efforts.

It seemed inevitable that hostilities would break out again. By the summer of 1649, Khmel'nyts'kyi, together with his CrimeanTatar allies, had surrounded the Polish army led by King Jan Kazimierz at Zboriv. A peace, or, more precisely, a truce, was signed in August whereby (1) the number of registered Cossacks was raised to 40,000; (2) the Kiev, Chernihiv, and Bratslav palatinates (collectively known as Ukraine) were declared Cossack territory, to be rid of the Polish mili­tary, Jews, and Jesuits; (3) the Orthodox metropolitan was to be given a seat in the Polish Senate; and (4) an amnesty was declared for nobles who had participated in the uprising. Apart from the 40,000 on the register, those others who called themselves Cossacks as well as the rebellious peasants were expected to return as serfs to their landlords. While the clergy and Cossack officers were satisfied with the Zboriv agreement, the peasants and peasants-turned-Cossack clearly were not.

Khmel'nyts'kyi once again seemed to be wavering in his role as leader of the whole Rus' (Ukrainian and Belarusan) society. After all, he was imbued with gen­try values and concerned with social stability; he was not a revolutionary who favored the overthrow of the social order. In any case, the Zboriv peace gave him a convenient respite in which to begin organizing a structure for the rapidly expanding Cossack state. He made Chyhyryn the hetman’s capital and from there conducted extensive diplomatic negotiations in an effort to find allies who would share his vision of eastern Europe.

Khmel'nyts'kyi’s vision departed from the traditional approach of the Chris­tian powers, whether that of Catholic Poland and the Habsburgs or that of Ortho­dox Muscovy backed by the Eastern patriarchs. The traditional alliances had instinctively been directed against the Ottoman ‘infidels.’ Khmel'nyts'kyi, how­ever, hoped to form a great coalition of Orthodox, Islamic, and Protestant powers - Moldavia, the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Tatars, Transylvania, and Lithua­nia’s powerful Protestant figure Prince Radziwill - to force Poland’s rulers to make structural changes in their society. The Cossack hetman also hoped to entice Poland’s rival in the west, Brandenburg, and even Cromwell’s Protestant England into helping him force the restructuring of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a federation of three equal states - Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine - to be headed by a new king, Gyorgy Rakoczi of Transylvania.

The key to this grandiose scheme was initially the Danubian principality of Moldavia, where Khmel'nyts'kyi and the Tatars led a campaign in 1650 to force the Moldavian ruler (Vasile Lupu) to give his daughter in marriage to the het­man’s son, Tymish. The marriage finally took place in 1652, but only after further Cossack military intervention, which alarmed neighboring Walachia and Tran­sylvania and led to war with those two states and the death of Tymish in 1653.

Khmel'nyts'kyi’s war with the Poles continued while he was being drawn into Danubian politics. The attempted alliance with Lithuania’s Prince Radziwill failed (the prince instead sided with the Poles and captured Kiev during the Polish- Cossack conflict of 1651); the Cossacks were defeated in June 1651 at the Battle of Berestechko, in Volhynia; and Khmel'nyts'kyi agreed to abide by conditions set in the peace treaty signed at Bila Tserkva (September 1651). The Bila Tserkva agree­ment reduced the number of registered Cossacks to 20,000 and restricted their residence to the royal lands of the Kiev palatinate. The Bratslav and Chernihiv palatinates were returned to Polish governmental administrators, and nobles were allowed to return to their estates. Although the Bila Tserkva treaty was never rati­fied by the Polish Diet (it was blocked by the application of one member using the privilege of the liberum veto), Khmel'nyts'kyi upheld its provisions, even sending Cossack detachments to put down peasant uprisings against returning Polish noblemen in the Kiev palatinate. Not surprisingly, the hetman’s actions caused great discontent among the peasants and unregistered Cossacks, who in despera­tion moved farther east to lands along the upper Donets' and Don Rivers that were under Muscovite control. There they were allowed to form tax-exempt settle­ments, known as slobody, from which the whole region got its name - the Sloboda lands, or Sloboda Ukraine. Khmel'nyts'kyi was able to defeat Polish armies in 1652 (at Batih, in Bratslav) and in 1653 (at Zhvanets', in Podolia), and in the treaty signed at Zhvanets' (December 1653) the favorable conditions established by the 1649 Zboriv treaty were restored.

It was becoming increasingly clear to Khmel'nyts'kyi, however, that his efforts against the Poles could at best end in a stalemate, with no real improvement for the Cossack lands within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Also, with the death of his son, Tymish, in August 1653, it was equally evident that the hetman’s diplomatic effort to create a grand coalition against Poland had become entan­gled in the uncertainties of Danubian politics and in the end had produced noth­ing positive. Even his military alliances with the Crimean Tatars had proved uncertain at best - the khans having chosen to negotiate independently with the Poles during the battles at Zboriv (1649) and Zhvanets' (1653) and having retreated at a critical moment during the battle at Berestechko (1651). Finally, Khmel'nyts'kyi’s intention to submit as a vassal to the Ottomans (his submission was proposed in 1650 and confirmed by Istanbul in 1652) resulted in litde more than the sultan’s urging the Crimean khans to help the Cossacks. With failure evident in all corners, there seemed only one course of action left whereby Khmel'nyts'kyi might break the military and political stalemate with Poland. That alternative was the tsardom of Muscovy, and it is there that Khmel'nyts'kyi turned next.