A War of Religion

The author of the Eyewitness Chronicle, himself a participant in the Khmelnytsky Uprising, began his account with the following words: ‘The origin and cause of Khmelnytsky’s war is nothing other than the persecu­tion of Orthodoxy by the Poles and their impositions on the Cossacks.’^[331] Religious motifs remained dominant in the thinking of the seventeenth century, and many contemporaries saw the outbreak of the revolt led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky as the beginning of yet another of the wars of reli­gion that were so common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The concepts of religious war and the right of resistance on religious grounds were well developed in medieval and early modern Europe. Medieval political theory comprised both a demand for subordination to royal authority and an assertion of the right of resistance to the monarch on grounds of religious belief. There were at least two grounds on which a ruler could be declared tyrannical: usurpation of power and illegal ac­tivity. This often applied to situations in which the monarch violated the rights of the church or the prerogatives of the pope himself. In such cases, it was claimed that the monarch was no longer ruling according to God’s will, but was only tolerated by God, who made use of him to punish the monarch’s subjects for their sins.

With the onset of the early modern period and the advance of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the concept of the ‘sacred right of resistance’ began to be broadly applied by Catholics and Protestants alike. The former employed it to justify assassinations or broader resist­ance movements against Protestant rulers, while the latter made use of it to legitimize similar actions against Catholic monarchs. The wars of reli­gion in France called forth an unprecedented torrent of polemical litera­ture discussing the legitimacy of the Huguenot revolt. The Huguenots justified their rebellion against royal authority primarily with arguments of a dynastic character, claiming to defend the ‘legitimate’ right of the Bourbons to the French crown against the ‘illegitimate’ claims of the Guises, but also developed the notion that revolts in defense of religious liberty were legitimate. Their pamphleteers maintained that a king who persecuted the true church was a tyrant, and resistance to him was just, as he himself had rebelled against God.^[335]

The French wars of religion also witnessed the development of ideas of religious toleration and contractual relations between the estates and the king, who had undertaken to guarantee the liberties of the estates, in­cluding religious freedom. These same ideas were disseminated in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which came to be seen in the second half of the sixteenth century as a model of religious toleration. In 1573, when the newly elected king of Poland, Henri de Valois, fled to France (he became king of France under the name Henri III and died at the hands of a ‘tyrannicide’), the charter of the Warsaw Confederation, which guaranteed broad religious freedoms to the nobility, was adopted in the Commonwealth.

Since relations between the king and the nobiliary order in the Com­monwealth became contractual long before the early modern period, the West European notions of tyranny and resistance to it gained scant dis­semination there. In the Commonwealth, religious toleration became a condition of the contract, and its violation theoretically invalidated that contract, leading to a breach of relations between the king and his sub­jects. The principal forum in which the dissenters waged their struggle for religious freedom was the Diet. In Diet debates, in courts and tribunals that adjudicated suits concerning the violation of the religious liberties of the nobiliary order, and in multitudinous works of polemical literature, the Orthodox elite gained experience in the legal defense of its religious liberties.⁷

The Orthodox nobility limited its political activity almost exclusively to the Diet and was as far removed from the notion of revolt in defense of religious liberty as were the representatives of the early seventeenth­century Orthodox clergy. Quite symptomatically, Orthodox polemicists never developed any coherent theory of the right of resistance on religious grounds. Even such an Orthodox radical as Stefan Zyzanii was opposed to violence. Meletii Smotrytsky wrote that the ‘true church’ was more im­portant than any earthly kingdom, and Zakhariia Kopystensky asserted that Rus’ aspired to a heavenly kingdom, not a temporal one.⁸ The same notes were sounded in Metropolitan Iov Boretsky’s protestation of 1621, even though he was often accused—probably not without reason—of in­citing the Cossacks to revolt.⁹ Thus the Orthodox intellectuals con­sidered it inappropriate and dangerous to propagate the idea of religious warfare in publications or in protestations addressed to the authorities.

In the early 1620s, when the Cossacks, not uninfluenced by the Ortho­dox nobility and clergy, brought their religious demands to the forefront, they went considerably further in that respect than their predecessors had done. Even though the rights of the Cossack order, unlike those of the

(Warsaw, 1967); MirosIaw Korolko, Klejnot swobodnego sumienia. Polemika wokol konfederacji warszawskiej w latach 1573-1658 (Warsaw, 1974); Wisner, Rozroznieni w wierze; Dzicgielewski, O Iolerancje dla zdominowanych.

⁷ On the functioning of Diet democracy in the Commonwealth, see Bardach et al., Historia panstwa iprawa polskiego, pp. 106-12; Kriegseisen, Sejmiki Rzeczypospolitej Szlacheckiej. On the struggle of the Orthodox nobility in the Diet, see Bednov, Pravoslavnaia tserkov' vPol'she iLitve; Zhukovich, Seimovaia bor'ba (do 1608g.); idem, Seimovaia bor'ba (s 1609g.).

⁸ Velychenko, ‘The Influence of Historical, Political, and Social Ideas’, pp. 95-7.

⁹ In his protestation, Iov Boretsky wrote: ‘The goal and end is the heavenly kingdom and life with God Almighty. And the profit, trophy and reward is the crown of heaven. Others have our fatherland, while we have the mountainous places [a biblical reference to Jerusalem]; others have our bishoprics, while we have Christ.’ Only the concluding pages of the protestation, with their eschatological orientation, admit of any interpretation as a call to resistance (‘The years and days return to us that lasted from apostolic times to Constantine the Great.... The Day of Judgment approaches’) or an exhortation of the faithful to martyrdom (‘make haste freely on happy feet to holy martyrdom’). See Zhukovich, ‘Protestatsiia’, p. 153. nobility, were not guaranteed by royal oath, the Cossack officers, as shown in the preceding chapters, were thoroughly convinced of their right to revolt in defense of their ‘ancient rights and liberties’, which with the passage of time also came to include the freedom of the ‘Greek religion’.

Orthodox versus Catholics

Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s victories at Zhovti Vody and Korsun in May 1648 touched off a large-scale uprising in the Dnipro region; after the Battle of Pyliavtsi in September, the revolt spread deep into Right-Bank Ukraine, Podilia, and Volhynia. During the first weeks of the uprising the emis­saries sent by Khmelnytsky’s army to the settled area met with a degree of support that they clearly did not at first expect, and their appeals sum­moned forth a popular uprising of such dimensions that the hetman him­self was at times hard put to deal with it. The vitally important allies of the Cossacks—the Tatars on the one hand; the peasants and burghers on the other—all exacted a price for their support. The Tatars required booty, while the peasants and burghers demanded social vengeance and took it as they saw fit.

Among those who paid the price demanded by the allies of the Cossack elite were the Polish nobility and burghers, that is, Poles in general, as well as Jewish leaseholders and merchants, meaning—given conditions pre­vailing at the time of the uprising—Jews in general. Reports on local developments (mainly Polish accounts and letters) testified to the insurgents’ persecution of Catholics and Jews, which the hetman and his administration were powerless to control.^[337] Meanwhile, the Ukrainian population also felt the immediate effects of Tatar depredations in the summer of 1648. As the Eyewitness Chronicle attests, ‘Not only did they wreak perdition on the Jews and nobles, but the same misfortune befell the common people living in those lands; many fell into Tatar captivity, especially young craftsmen who shaved their heads in the Polish manner, with a forelock on top.’^[338]

Most of the Cossack leaders were clearly unhappy with the radicalism of the peasant mobs. Some Polish sources even make reference to serious conflicts between Khmelnytsky and the leader of the popular uprising in Right-Bank Ukraine, Maksym Kryvonis.^[339] The negative attitude of the Cossack officers to the ‘excesses’ of the popular uprising was reflected not only in Khmelnytsky’s actions against Kryvonis but also in written sources of Cossack officer provenance.

... when the common people heard that there was no longer a king in the coun­try, they all turned Cossack, both on this side of the Dnipro and on the other. They killed those of their lords who had not fled, as well as Poles, Jews, and Roman Catholic priests, pillaged [Roman Catholic churches], and took castles in which Poles and Jews had locked themselves up.^[340]

Muzhylovsky’s note described a situation well known to his contempor­aries. The Muscovite voevoda of Briansk, Nikita Meshchersky, reported to Moscow in June 1648 that ‘... it is said, Sire, that all kinds of volunt­eers who have gathered, and not Cherkasians [Ukrainian Cossacks], are fighting in their Lithuanian lands’.^[341]

The attitude of the Cossack officers toward the actions of the ‘common people’ in the summer of 1648 is also fully reflected in the Eyewitness Chronicle. In his description of the robberies and massacres of the first months of the uprising, the Cossack author affirms:

It was a rare individual at that time who did not dip his hands in blood and take part in the plunder of those estates. And at that time people of every station knew great sorrow and persecution at the hands of the common people... so that even if a man of standing did not want to associate with that Cossack army, he had to do so.¹⁵

The apparent attempts of some of the officers to stop the massacres or at least to limit their scope were reflected in the false rumors that circulated among the rebels to the effect that Colonel Hanzha, the man who led Cossack assaults on Uman and Tulchyn in the summer of 1648, was allegedly killed by his own men for sparing the lives of noblemen.¹⁶ It is quite clear that when robbery was involved, the insurgent peasants and burghers made little distinction between the possessions of the Catholic and Orthodox clergy. Evidence of this is to be found in Khmelnytsky’s proclamations intended to stop insurgent attacks on Orthodox monas­teries.^[342] Orthodox clergymen who carried out diplomatic and reconnais­sance missions among the Cossacks at the behest of their Polish patrons also found themselves in difficulty.^[343]

Orthodox solidarity was breached in other instances as well. Many Orthodox nobles, including the leader of the Orthodox party before the war, the Bratslav palatine Adam Kysil, did not join the rebel camp, but re­mained loyal to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Kysil and other Orthodox nobles were often employed by the authorities to mollify the rebels.^[344] Nevertheless, from the very beginning of the revolt, allegiance to Orthodoxy became the distinguishing mark of identification with Ruthenian identity, and thus with the uprising. Contrariwise, the oppos­ing ethnodenominational and social characteristics (Catholic-Pole­landlord; Hebrew-Jew-leaseholder), which were closely intertwined in mass consciousness at the time, defined the image of the enemy. Under such conditions, a change of religious allegiance sufficed to break the vi­cious circle of identity. The insurgents accepted converts to Orthodoxy as bona fide adherents to their cause. Thus, at the beginning of 1649, Bohdan Khmelnytsky said in addressing Commonwealth commission­ers: ‘I did not say that the innocent should be killed, but only those who do not want to join us or to be baptized in our faith.’^[345]

There are grounds to assume that representatives of Ruthenian noble families who had previously become Catholics or Protestants were generally willing converts to Orthodoxy. One of the best-known converts from Catholicism to Orthodoxy was the colonel of the Chyhyryn regi­ment of registered Cossacks, Stanislaw Michal Krzyczewski, a close friend of the hetman. Upon becoming an Orthodox, he began to make exclusive use of his second name, Michal, and entered the annals of the Khmelnytsky Uprising under the name Mykhailo Krychevsky. Iurii Nemyrych (Jerzy Niemirycz), the general chancellor of the Cossack Host during the hetmancy of Ivan Vyhovsky, who participated in the drafting of the Treaty of Hadiach (1658), converted from Socinianism to Orthodoxy.^[346] Undoubtedly, there were other cases of reconversion to Orthodoxy by members of Ruthenian nobility, although we know very little about the original religious allegiance of the middle-rank Cossack officers of the Khmelnytsky era.

Often, those who suffered most at the hands of the insurgents were Catholic monks and priests. In the very first days of the uprising, rumors began to reach Warsaw that Catholic churches and monasteries were being ruined and monks put to death.^[347] As attested by subsequent charges in nobiliary sources, monks were often shot or murdered, even when the nobles themselves were allowed to go free.^[348] Aware of the threat to their safety, monks belonging to Catholic orders and Catholic priests, along with nobles and the remaining troops of government and magnate armies, sought refuge in castles and other fortified points. But the nobil­iary forces, knowing of the insurgents’ hatred for the Catholic clergy, did not hasten to take those refugees under their protection. Thus the forces of the Kyivan palatine, Janusz Tyszkiewicz, dispatched to take up the de­fense of Berdychiv, made no effort to defend the discalced Carmelites who had taken up residence there; instead, ‘they ordered the monks to make themselves scarce, otherwise they would drown them’.^[349] To save their lives, the Catholic clergymen abandoned the wealth accumulated by their churches and convents in Ukraine and fled deep into Common­wealth territory. Lviv and ZamoSc became major rallying points for the refugees, and there is evidence that Jesuits and members of other Catholic orders began to arrive in Zamosc as early as July 1648.^[350]

Like the insurgents, the Commonwealth authorities tended to treat the war as a religious one.^[351] Just as the insurgents considered every Catholic priest a potential enemy, so the authorities regarded the Orthodox— priests in the first instance—as potential allies of Khmelnytsky. Such mu­tual suspicions and prejudices were by no means without foundation. Many Orthodox priests took part in the uprising and even led peasant in­surgent units. An instance of Orthodox clerical support for peasant and Cossack forces, characteristic of the early months of the uprising, is de­tailed in the so-called ‘confessata’ (information extracted under torture) of the Cossack scout Iarema Kontsevych. According to Kontsevych, ‘Afanasii, the bishop of Lutsk, sent Kryvonis 70 harquebuses, half a bar­rel of gunpowder, a sufficient quantity of lead, and they brought 7,000 in cash to attack Olyka and Dubno.’ Among those who knew of Kont- sevych’s activity was the priest of St Michael’s Church in Lavryniv Kut (Galicia), who told the scout: ‘we have better information because we write to one another, and news reaches Kyiv itself...’. Following his cap­ture on 31 July 1648, Kontsevych ‘admitted that the priest of Zavaliv wrote to the priest of Pidhaitsi in Stare Misto, and the priest of Pidhaitsi wrote to Archpriest Avramii of Ternopil, the bishop’s messenger. Letters are also being sent to the Cossacks.’^[352] One could cite further examples of Orthodox clergymen supporting the uprising and even leading insurgent units.^[353] Roman Catholic polemicists often accused the Orthodox clergy of having instigated the uprising, as they believed that only the clergy was capable of rousing the peasants to revolt.²⁹

Despite the importance of the religious element in the course of the up­rising as a prime indicator of allegiance to one of the warring camps, the significance attributed to it in the early documents of the hetman’s ad­ministration was less than secondary. This sheds light on the attitude of the movement’s leadership, the Cossack officer stratum, toward Ortho­dox institutions. The decade immediately preceding the Khmelnytsky Uprising, termed the period of ‘golden peace’ in older Polish historiog­raphy, was noted for the absence of major denominational conflicts. The 1620s, which had seen the restoration of the Orthodox hierarchy, the de­terioration of Orthodox-Catholic relations, the murder of Iosafat Kunt- sevych, and similar episodes, receded into the past. The Orthodox hierarchy headed by Metropolitan Petro Mohyla was officially recognized by the royal administration, and relations between the Orthodox and Uniates became generally stable. The hierarchies of both churches sought ways of attaining the ‘unification of Rus’’. The protracted conflict between the Orthodox hierarchy and the royal administration left Khmelnytsky and the insurgents with no clear idea of how to wage ideo­logical warfare with the Commonwealth.

Initially, the Khmelnytsky Uprising proceeded under temporal, secu­lar, motifs, not religious ones. An examination of Khmelnytsky’s corres­pondence of the spring and summer of 1648 shows clearly that his efforts to endow the uprising with legitimacy were dominated by arguments of a secular nature. Broadly speaking, three main levels of argument were em­ployed to legitimize the uprising. The first included attempts to show that Khmelnytsky was entitled to defend himself against the unlawful to slaughter the local Ruthenians’ (letter of August-September 1648 to Mikolaj Potocki in DOV, pp. 108-9).

According to reports from Kyiv dating from the early summer of 1649, as Cossack detach­ments led by Colonel Holota passed through the city on their way to do battle with Janusz Radziwill’s forces, local Orthodox priests blessed the Cossacks for the destruction of the Poles (‘as Holota proceeded... through Kyiv with his regiment, local priests, on meeting him, blessed him to destroy Poles as he went on’). See AGAD, ‘Archiwum Radziwillowskie’, dzial 6, no. 36, p. 9.

In July 1651, the Gazette de France noted that the Commonwealth authorities had intercepted a letter from the Orthodox bishop of Lviv calling upon Khmelnytsky to make his way to the city. According to the Gazette, the king ordered the bishop’s arrest. On reports in the Gazette de France about events in Ukraine, see the works of Il’ko Borshchak (Elie Borschak), including his ‘Roky 1650 i 1651 na Ukraini po “Frantsuz’kii hazeti”’, Litopys polityky, pys'menstva i mystetstva (Berlin) 2, nos. 15-16 (1924): 234-6; id., ‘Ukrai'ns’ki spravy 1649 r. po “Frantsuz’kii hazeti”’, ibid., 1, no. 6 (1924): 90.

²⁹ For a discussion of the views of Polish Catholic polemicists on the role of religion in the Khmelnytsky Uprising, see Frank E. Sysyn, ‘Seventeenth-Century Views on the Causes of the Khmel’nyts’kyi Uprising: An Examination of the “Discourse on the Present Cossack or Peasant War”’, HUS5, no. 4 (December 1981): 430-66. encroachments of a royal official. On this level, the argumentation gener­ally came down to the right of a nobleman, as a member of his social order, to defend his life, liberty, and property. At the second level, Khmelnytsky’s arguments included the right to defend the ‘ancient rights and liberties’ of the Cossack order, especially the registered Cossacks. Slogans and arguments pertaining to religion appeared only at the third level, although in time they acquired ever greater importance and came to overshadow arguments of a personal and corporate nature.^[354]

Demands to extradite Daniel Czaplinski, Khmelnytsky’s main enemy and persecutor, which were often repeated in the hetman’s letters of 1648 and 1649, fell off in subsequent years. As early as the first few months of the uprising, the name of Jeremi Wisniowiecki was already being added to that of Czaplinski, the ‘main culprit of the war’. The victory at Zboriv opened a completely new account of Cossack wrongs and reasons to con­tinue the conflict. The dimensions of the uprising greatly exceeded those of the personal injury done to the nobleman Khmelnytsky, and unilateral violations of the Zboriv treaty conditions now began to emerge as the principal grievance. Khmelnytsky’s arguments pertaining to the defense of ‘ancient Cossack liberties’ were exhausted even more quickly. As early as the first year of the uprising, its achievements exceeded the boldest ex­pectations of its organizers, while a demand for the revival of ‘ancient lib­erties’ would have meant the renewal of a register of only 8,000-12,000 Cossacks at best. At Zboriv, the Cossacks obtained an expansion of the register to 40,000 men, while the Pereiaslav Agreement with Muscovy (1654) brought confirmation of a register of 60,000: both figures con­siderably understated the actual number of Cossack troops.

Under such conditions, only religious slogans retained the potency as­cribed to them, and thus quite naturally grew in importance. With time, the appeal to defend the ‘Greek religion’ became an important factor in mobilizing Ruthenian society as a whole for armed struggle with the Commonwealth. Arguments of a religious nature, which included both purely denominational and ethnonational elements, made it possible to overcome the limitations of an appeal for the defense of personal (nobil­iary) or corporate (Cossack) privileges and to endow the uprising with a broader ideology shared not only by the nobility and the Cossacks, but also by the peasants, burghers, and, of course, the clergy.^[355] Moreover, the idea of defending religious liberty lent a desired legitimacy to the upris­ing not only in the eyes of the insurgents themselves, but of their immedi­ate and more distant neighbors as well. The religious idea made it possible to justify an uprising against a legitimate king.

As Khmelnytsky’s early documents attest, the idea of defending the ‘Greek religion’ first came into his field of vision after his victories at Zhovti Vody and Korsun. The hetman’s instructions to Cossack envoys to Warsaw dated June 1648 contain the following passage: ‘As for our clergymen of the age-old Greek faith, we earnestly request that they not be disturbed, and that the holy churches in Lublin, Krasnostav, Sokal and other towns that were forcibly held captive by the Union retain their an­cient freedoms.’^[356] This mention was clearly overshadowed by the other Cossack demands and had more to do with settling local denominational conflicts than with attacking the Union in general. Not until November 1648 did a demand for the abolition of the Union find expression in a letter of his to Prince Jan Kazimierz (‘that our Greek faith remain intact, as before, without the Union and Uniates, and that there be no Union anywhere’),³³ but even then that demand was expressed in very general terms and remained clearly secondary on the insurgents’ agenda. There was no marked change in the situation until early 1649, following Khmelnytsky’s ceremonial entry into Kyiv.

As Khmelnytsky entered Kyiv in December 1648, he was met by Patri­arch Paisios, Metropolitan Kosov, and representatives of the Kyivan clergy. Khmelnytsky’s discussions with Paisios must have contributed to shaping his new attitude of complete seriousness toward his mission in the Orthodox world, and the patriarchal blessing for his war with the Commonwealth finally gave him the long-desired legitimacy for his ac­tions. During Khmelnytsky’s stay in Kyiv, new ideological justification was found for the newly expanded goals of the uprising. The change in the hetman’s attitude to official Orthodoxy also appears to have been in­fluenced by changes in the leadership of the rebellion. If at first Khmel­nytsky drew support mainly from representatives of the Cossack officer stratum, by late 1648 there was a rather large and influential group of Orthodox nobles led by Ivan Vyhovsky in the leadership of the insurgent camp. Khmelnytsky certainly needed the knowledge and political experi­ence of this element, whose tradition was one of close association with the Orthodox Church. The new religious demands of the Cossack leadership should be also attributed to the fact that the Commonwealth was repre­sented in the negotiations by Adam Kysil, himself an ardent supporter of the Orthodox Church.

An indication of the change in the Cossack administration’s attitude to

³³ Ibid., p. 81.

religious matters was given by Khmelnytsky’s negotiations with Com­monwealth commissioners in Pereiaslav at the beginning of 1649. Before the delegation’s departure from Pereiaslav, Khmelnytsky handed its leader, Adam Kysil, the text of a proposed truce, as well as letters to King Jan Kazimierz and Crown Chancellor Jerzy Ossolinski. The letter to the king, known from many copies as the ‘Points of Petition of His Royal Majesty’s Zaporozhian Host’, included an extensive set of demands per­taining to the religious sphere. It began with a rather peremptory demand for abolition of the church union: ‘First of all we ask that the captivity, worse than that of the Turks, endured because of the Union by our Ruthenian people, who maintain the ancient Greek faith, be abolished, that is, that as of old, so now all of ancient Rus’ maintain the Greek rite...’. Khmelnytsky’s letter to the king is important as a formulation of the main lines of the insurgent administration’s religious policy. In general terms, that policy came down to the following points: abolition of the Union and transfer to the Orthodox of churches and properties that the Uniates had taken over; royal appointment of an Orthodox administra­tion in Kyiv; the expansion of Orthodox influence in the Senate; and re­strictions on the activity of Catholic religious orders in Ukraine.^[357]

The results of the military campaign of 1649 and, in particular, the vic­tory at Zboriv gave the insurgents another opportunity to present their demands pertaining to religion. As the battle neared its end on 7 (17) August 1649, the hetman sent the king the ‘Points of Petition of the Zaporozhian Host’. The document consisted of eighteen clauses, eleven of which concerned matters of religion and nationality. They may be sum­marized as follows: abolition of the Union on the territory of the Com­monwealth; transfer to the Orthodox of property held by the Uniates; equalization of the Orthodox clergy in rights with the Catholic clergy; guarantees of the existence of Orthodox churches in Cracow, Warsaw, and Lublin; a prohibition on the residence of Catholic monks on the ter­ritory of the Zaporozhian Host; and the assignment of royal officials of the Orthodox faith to that territory.^[358] The religious program formulated at Pereiaslav was considerably expanded at Zboriv. The demands for equalization of the Orthodox clergy with the Catholic and the assignment

of Senate seats to the metropolitan and two bishops were not accidental elements of the Cossack program. These had been major demands of the Orthodox initiators of the Union that they had been unable to secure in 1596. Now, under completely different circumstances, they were being advanced by Cossack diplomacy.

In the difficult negotiations at Zboriv,^[359] Khmelnytsky managed to ob­tain the king’s recognition of some of his principal demands, which per­tained to military and political affairs. Religious and national demands were met to a much lesser extent. The most important of them, that of abolishing the Union, was removed from the agenda and deferred to the subsequent Diet. The ‘Declaration of the King’s Grace in Response to the Points of Petition of the Zaporozhian Host’ (the title of the Cos­sack-Polish section of the Treaty of Zboriv) provided that administrative posts in the three Cossack palatinates of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Bratslav would be granted to noblemen of the Greek faith, and that the Jesuits would not have the right to maintain schools in Kyiv or other towns on Cossack territory. The king also promised to assign a Senate seat to the metropolitan of Kyiv, but that counted for little without the Senate’s con­sent. For Cossack diplomacy, the extent of the Hetmanate’s territory and the size of the Cossack register were paramount. The religious issue de­pended on the resolution of the first two points, for the brief Cossack-Polish truce (from late 1648 to the spring of 1649) had already shown that the implementation of conditions of any kind was guaranteed only on the territory controlled by the Zaporozhian Host.

The Treaty of Zboriv gave evidence of new elements in the Cossack at­titude to the Union. On the one hand, Cossack diplomacy continued to stress the violation of the rights of the ‘Ruthenian nation’ (the third clause of the Cossack demands at Zboriv stated that ‘the Union, as the persis­tent cause of the oppression of the Ruthenian nation... must be abol­ished...’).^[360] On the other hand, political considerations dictated that the principle of toleration be extended to the Uniates as well as to the Ortho­dox. The credit for bringing about a change of Cossack policy on the question belonged to Adam Kysil. His main argument in the discussion with the Cossack officers was the consistent application of the principle of religious toleration: ‘If you do not want your conscience to be com­manded, then you, too, must not seek to command.’^[361] Khmelnytsky at least provisionally accepted this argument of Kysil’s and sometimes made use of it himself. In a letter of November 1650 to the Volhynian nobility, expatiating on the idea of the return of Orthodox church property, he wrote, ‘And from Their Graces the lords, let everyone believe who wishes and as he wishes; we do not demand anyone else’s property, but our own.’^[362] Nevertheless, the demand to abolish the Union was removed from the diplomatic agenda only temporarily. Khmelnytsky could not completely renounce such a useful argument in his negotiations with the Polish side.

From the nobiliary and burgher movement of the turn of the seven­teenth century, the administration of the Hetmanate completely took over the view of the church union not as a separate ecclesiastical institu­tion or religious denomination, but as a royal intrigue intended to en­croach on the ‘ancient rights’ of the ‘Greek religion’ and the ‘Ruthenian nation’. Thus the main emphasis shifted from attempts to ‘unite Rus’ with Rus’’, characteristic of Orthodox thinking of the Mohyla period, to the treatment of the Union as a means of destroying the Orthodox Church, which corresponded to the tradition of Orthodox thought of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. No doubt, this treatment of the Union also reached back to Cossack participation in the religious struggles of the 1620s. As far as Khmelnytsky himself was concerned, there is every indication that the problem of a divided Rus’ simply did not exist. For all practical purposes, his Rus’ was one and Orthodox. In the purely military context, the Union counted for nothing, and its cultural superiority, which had attracted some Orthodox intellectuals in the 1620s, meant little not only to the Cossack officer stratum but also to the Orthodox nobility educated by Mohyla’s school. On the other hand, the Union was politically useful to the new Cossack authorities as a means of legitimizing the insurrection and as a bargaining chip in treaty negotiations with the royal administration.

Inasmuch as the Union provided the main argument for the claim of religious persecution of the Orthodox in the Polish-Lithuanian state, it was extraordinarily important to Khmelnytsky in legitimizing his insur­rection and subsequently to Muscovy in justifying its intervention in the war in 1654. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that anti-Uniate feelings ran high among the leaders of the uprising or its rank-and-file participants. If diplomatic documents placed primary emphasis on Uniate violations of religious liberty, the actions of the Cossacks and peasants showed that in their eyes the main enemies were Roman Catholics and Jews. These latter denominational categories were very readily transformed into na­tional and social ones. No such transformation seems to have applied to the Uniates. Relatively few instances of the killing of Uniates by Cossacks are known to have occurred, while Catholic and Jewish victims numbered in the thousands.^[363]

In practice, the Cossack struggle against the Union amounted to the seizure of Uniate churches and properties. On the popular level, the unity of religious rite maintained by Uniate and Orthodox Christians in the first decades after the Council of Brest counted for much more than the distinction between the two confessionalizing churches. At Zboriv, the real agenda of the Cossack administration with respect to the Union was al­ready apparent: the demand for its abolition was employed from time to time as a tactical device in negotiations with the royal administration, but in fact the hetman sought to obtain the transfer of the largest possible number of Uniate eparchies and church properties to the Orthodox hier­archy. Until the Treaty of Pereiaslav (January 1654), depending on the fortunes of war on the Ukrainian-Polish front, Cossack diplomacy made several attempts to put forward demands of a religious and national char­acter. These efforts yielded no long-term results, as the talks and negoti­ations were merely short breathing spaces in the bitter armed struggle, mainly intended to gain time to prepare for the next campaign.

Christians versus Jews

The Khmelnytsky revolt of 1648 entailed the destruction of numerous Jewish communities, the forced conversion to Christianity of hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews, and the expulsion of the rest of them from long-settled areas. What did the leaders and rank-and-file participants in the uprising think about the ‘Jewish question’? Why were Jewish commu­nities among the principal victims of the revolt? What was the attitude of participants in the uprising toward Jews as adherents to a different, non­Orthodox, and non-Christian, religion—Judaism?⁴¹

The first half of the seventeenth century witnessed an acute religious conflict in Ukraine, and the atmosphere of relentless religious struggle created a situation in which religious intolerance became a fact of every­day life. Nevertheless, it would appear that Jews were not immediately af­fected by the growing religious tensions in Ukraine, and at least initially there were more victims of religious violence among the Orthodox and Uniates than among the Jews.⁴² Although Ukrainians themselves did not produce any anti-Jewish pamphlets (on the agenda was the much more important question of struggle against the union of churches), there are clear indications that the attitude of the Ruthenian Orthodox elite in general and the Orthodox clergy in particular toward Jews was quite

⁴¹ Traditionally, research on the history of the Jewish population in seventeenth-century Ukraine has concentrated almost exclusively on two major topics: the social role of Jewry in Ukraine prior to the uprising and the fate of the Jewish population at the time of the revolt. See the following works: Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews: Late Mid­dle Ages and Era of European Expansion (1200-1650), vol. 16, Poland-Lithuania, 1500-1650 (New York and Philadelphia, 1976); Shmuel Ettinger, ‘Jewish Participation in the Settlement of Ukraine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ in Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, ed. Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster, 2nd edn. (Edmonton, 1990), pp. 23-30; Mordekhai Nadav, ‘The Jewish Community of Nemyriv in 1648: Their Massacre and Loyalty Oath to the Cossacks’, HUS8, nos. 3-4 (December 1984): 376-95; Frank E. Sysyn, ‘The Jewish Factor in the Khmelnytsky Uprising’ in Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, pp. 43-54; Jaroslaw Pelenski, ‘The Cossack Insurrections in Jewish-Ukrainian Relations’, ibid., pp. 31-42.

Only in the last two decades has more attention been paid to the history of ideas, views, and especially popular perceptions ofJews by their neighbors and vice versa. Frank E. Sysyn’s study of the views of the mid-seventeenth-century Polish priest Pawel Ruszel gives a good idea of Pol­ish attitudes toward Jews at the time of the uprising; Bernard Weinryb’s analysis of the informa­tion presented in contemporary Jewish chronicles helps to explain the reaction of Jews themselves to the events of the revolt; and Joel Raba’s extensive study of the fate of the Jews in mid-seventeenth century Ukraine adds a great deal to our knowledge of the perception of the Jewish tragedy by Jews, Poles, and Western Christians alike. See Frank E. Sysyn, ‘A Curse on Both Their Houses: Catholic Attitudes towards Jews and Eastern Orthodox during the Khmel’nyts’kyi Uprising in Father Pawel Ruszel’s Fawor niebieski’ in Israel and the Nations: Es­says Presented in Honor of Shmuel Ettinger, ed. Shmuel Almog et al. (Jerusalem, 1987), pp. ix-xxiv; Bernard D. Weinryb, ‘The Hebrew Chronicles on Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi and the Cossack- Polish War’, HUS 1, no. 2 (June 1977): 153-77; Raba, Between Remembrance and Denial, pp. 37-166. For a critique of Raba’s book and its interpretive strategies, see Frank E. Sysyn, ‘The Jewish Massacres in the Historiography of the Khmelnytsky Uprising’, JUS 23, no. 1 (Summer 1998): 83-9.

⁴² Quite characteristic in this respect is an observation in a letter from one of the Common­wealth representatives in Istanbul in the early 1620s: ‘All of Rus’ is so hostile to us... that it would prefer to live a thousand years with Jews, Turks, or Tatars than a year with us’ (Mytsyk, ‘Iz lystuvannia’, p. 312). negative. Orthodox opposition to the new calendar, introduced by the papacy in 1582, was largely based on the possibility that Easter could fall on the same day as Passover. In 1593, the Lviv Brotherhood published an anti-Jewish pamphlet by Meletios Pegas (Pigas), and the early modern Ruthenian didactic gospels were replete with attacks on Judaism and its adherents.^[364]

In the opinion of Shmuel Ettinger, the attitude of the Orthodox clergy toward the Jews reflected the mood of the Ukrainian burghers, who com­peted with Jewish merchants and artisans in the towns and played an im­portant role in contemporary church affairs. Ettinger also argues that the decades preceding the Khmelnytsky revolt witnessed greater conflict be­tween the Orthodox clergy and the Jews than between the latter and the Catholic clergy, explaining this by the more cautious attitude of Jews to­ward Catholics as the dominant religious grouping in the state.^[365] It may safely be suggested that in defining its attitudes toward the Jews, the Orthodox clergy was not showing any initiative, but simply following the lead of its Polish adversaries. Anti-Jewish literature of both the Protestant and Counter-Reformation varieties became accessible in Ukraine and ‘educated’ the Orthodox reading public in the latest trends of Christian anti-Judaism.^[366] Anti-Jewish attitudes of Western Christians found their way into Ukraine just as an increasing tide of Jewish immigrants flooded in from Western and Central Europe.

It was not only the Uniate Church that underwent the strong influence of Roman Catholicism. As shown earlier, the Orthodox Church was also reformed along Counter-Reformation lines by its metropolitan, Petro Mohyla, in the 1630s and 1640s. This Catholic influence was clearly re­flected in the anti-Jewish decisions of the Orthodox sobor of 1640.^[367] The sobor decided to forbid the Orthodox to buy meat from Jews and to pro­hibit Orthodox women from working for Jews as midwives and cooks. That decision clearly followed the general policy adopted by Roman Catholics in their dealings with the Jews and formulated by Pope Paul IV in the bull ‘Cum nimis absurdum’, issued in 1555. The bull marked the beginning of a new Counter-Reformation papal policy toward the Jews and, in particular, announced the creation of the first Jewish ghetto. Among other things, the bull deplored the fact that some Jews had Chris­tian nurses and maids working for them.^[368]

The decisions of the Orthodox sobor of 1640 are generally taken to indicate a rise in tensions between the Orthodox clergy and the Jewish com­munities, although it is difficult to determine to what extent the sobor’s decision influenced the Orthodox faithful. Apparently, some elements of this particular decree were hardly observed by the Orthodox at all. When in 1647 an Orthodox priest in a village near Lutsk, apparently in accord­ance with the sobor’s ruling, forbade his flock to buy meat from Jewish merchants, he was taken to court at the initiative of a local nobleman and fined a substantial sum of money.^[369] This episode suggests, nevertheless, that Orthodox priests attempted to implement some of the sobor’s deci­sions, and that eventually many provisions of anti-Jewish Counter­Reformation teachings found their way through the hierarchy and clergy of the Ukrainian churches to the masses of the faithful.

According to most researchers of Ukrainian-Jewish relations, antag­onism between Jews and Ukrainians was greatest in the towns and nobil­iary estates. In the first instance, Jews competed directly with Ukrainian burghers; in the second, they often represented the Polish administration and nobility in their dealings with the Ukrainian peasants. Thus Jewish-Ukrainian antagonism was keenest in the densely populated west­ern and central regions of Ukraine. In the Cossack steppes, on the other hand, the situation was rather different. In the first place, there were fewer Jews than in other regions; in the second, their social functions were different. Here Jews were pioneers and first settlers, just as the Cossacks were: they sometimes joined Cossack detachments and generally co­operated with the Cossacks in defending their settlements against Tatar raids.^[370]

One of the first indications of the spread of anti-Jewish attitudes among the Cossacks appeared in the early 1620s, when the Cossack elite began to involve itself actively in the religious and socio-political struggle in Ukraine. The alliance between Hetman Petro Konashevych- Sahaidachny and the Orthodox hierarchy, which had been reinstated under his protection in 1620, largely contributed to the ‘confessionaliza- tion’ of Cossackdom. More and more, the Cossacks began to regard themselves as protectors of Christianity in general and Orthodoxy in par­ticular. Although the image of Cossackdom as defender of Christianity was directed mainly against Islam, while the image of protector of Ortho­doxy was oriented against Catholicism and the Union, it was still the Jews of Ukraine who not uncommonly became victims of this newly acquired Cossack identity.

Such was the ideological background of one of the first Cossack attacks on Jews, which took place in June 1621. The attack began after a Cossack council at which a letter from Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem was read, the newly consecrated Orthodox metropolitan Iov Boretsky spoke, and a decision was made to appeal to royal authority in defense of the interests of the Orthodox Church. Judging by the available sources, there was no mention of Jews at the council; nevertheless, it was they who be­came the principal victims of the new Orthodox spirit of the Cossacks. The occasion for the attack was the discovery in Bila Tserkva of a dese­crated icon of Christ in a Jewish storeroom, which gave the officiating het­man, Iakiv Borodavka, grounds to allow the Cossacks to plunder Jewish dwellings throughout Ukraine.^[371] The association between Orthodoxy and anti-Jewish actions on the part of Cossackdom was also apparent in the Cossack revolts of the 1630s. By that time, Cossack-Jewish relations were sufficiently hostile that the major Cossack uprising led by Pavlo But (Pavliuk) in 1638 claimed the first Jewish lives.^[372]

The decade prior to the Khmelnytsky revolt witnessed the further de­terioration of Cossack-Jewish relations owing to the expansion of nobil­iary landholdings in the traditional Cossack areas. Jews were often employed by the nobles as leaseholders of their newly acquired posses- sions—a policy that thrust the Jewish population at large into the midst of the Cossack conflict with the authorities. Nevertheless, it was not the Cossacks who unleashed anti-Jewish violence in the first months of the uprising. The bloodiest episodes of the revolt took place in the summer of 1648, when Khmelnytsky’s army, observing a truce, was encamped at Bila Tserkva, while insurgent peasants on the Right Bank took the administration of justice into their own hands. Maksym Kryvonis, the leader of the popular uprising in Right-Bank Ukraine in the summer of 1648, also appears to have been the author of one of the earliest and strongest anti-Jewish statements to emerge from the rebel ranks. In a letter to Prince Dominik Zaslawski written in July 1648, Kryvonis complained bitterly about the actions of Prince Jeremi Wisniowiecki, who had tortured Orthodox priests, and stressed that the rebels were defending their faith, among other things. Kryvonis singled out the Jews as the cause of the rebellion and demanded their expulsion ‘beyond the Vistula’.⁵²

Social vengeance has long been considered one of the main reasons for Cossack attacks on Jews at the time of the uprising, and as such has been reflected in many sources of Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish provenance. The rebels generally blamed the Jews for many of the injustices visited upon Ukrainians before the revolt. The Eyewitness Chronicle (its probable author, the Cossack officer Roman Rakushka-Romanovsky, was a direct participant in the uprising) summarized those grievances as follows:

In the towns... the injustice was that a Cossack was not permitted to keep any drink at home for his own use, not only mead, liquor and beer, but homebrew as well.... While the lazy scoundrel, the lazy Jew grows rich, keeping several teams of horses, contriving onerous duties, ox taxes, wedding taxes, grain taxes, milling taxes, grinding fees and others, taking away estates.⁵³

216). As early as 1631, some residents of Lubny in Left-Bank Ukraine joined the Russian pretender Ivan, who claimed to be an ‘Eastern tsar and prophet’ and called for the destruction of the Jews. Those who joined him participated in an attack on Jewish shops and dwellings in Lubny. See B. N. Floria, ‘Novye svidetel’stva ob otnoshenii naseleniia Ukrainy k evreiam v per- voi polovine XVII v. (dokumenty)’ in Slaviane i ikh sosedi, vyp. 5, Evreiskoe naselenie v Tsen- tral’noi, Vostochnoi iIugo-Vostochnoi Evrope. Srednie veka—novoe vremia, ed. G. G. Litavrin et al. (Moscow, 1994), pp. 136-8.

⁵² See Jakuba Michalowskiego... ksiςgapamiςtnicza, pp. 88-9.

⁵³ Litopys Samovydtsia, pp. 46-7.

The Eyewitness Chronicle’s attitudes were also shared by the authors of folk dumas.⁵4

One of the basic sources on the ideology of the Khmelnytsky Uprising is the array of documents produced by Bohdan Khmelnytsky himself. Considering the attention paid to the hetman’s person by Jewish chron­iclers of the mid-seventeenth century, it comes as a complete surprise that few documents pertaining in any way to Jews are to be found in his diplomatic correspondence. Among the documents whose authenticity is not in question, we find only eleven references to Jews, most of them sporadic in nature. Those references are generally to be found in the context of explanations of the 1648 uprising.

The first reference occurs in a letter from Khmelnytsky to Crown Grand Hetman Mikolaj Potocki dated 3 March 1648. In addressing Po- tocki, Khmelnytsky began by indicating the injustices perpetrated against Cossackdom by the local administration—‘Their Lordships the border officials’—and colonels in charge of the register and the standing army, which was directly subordinate to Potocki. In that context, Khmelnytsky also made mention of the Jews. ‘We saw’, wrote the hetman,

that we were protected by no one, for neither are the letters of Your Gracious Lordship heeded nor are the orders and will of His Royal Majesty carried out; we are being ever more badly mistreated; we have suffered intolerable injustice and contempt even at the hands of the Jews. Such cruelties as have been perpetrated

⁵⁴ In the ‘Duma about the Battle of Korsun’, the Jews are accused of the following ‘sins’ com­mitted on behalf of the Poles:

Why did you raise such rebellion and alarums, Why did you build three taverns per mile? Why did you collect such high tolls— From every wagon Half a golden coin, From every man on foot, two small coins. You did not leave even the poor beggars alone, But took away their millet and eggs!

The abuses ofJewish leaseholders are described in almost the same words in the ‘Duma about the Oppression of Ukraine by Jewish Merchants’:

And they demanded as tax Half a golden coin from each wagon, And from a man on foot they took three small coins, From a poor beggar they took chickens and eggs...

Quotations from Ukrainian Dumy. Editio Minor: Original Texts, trans. George Tarnawsky and Patricia Kilina (Toronto and Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 159, 163.

Unfortunately, neither of the dumas quoted above can be considered a wholly reliable source, as they were recorded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even so, it is noteworthy that the dumas present virtually identical lists of injustices perpetrated by the Jews, and both are clearly consistent with the testimony of the Eyewitness Chronicle. On the Jewish theme in Ukrainian folklore, see Raba, Between Remembrance and Denial, pp. 215-23. against us, the servants of His Royal Majesty and of Your Lordship, our most gra­cious Lord, have not been experienced by Christians even in the Turkish lands.^[373]

Khmelnytsky called upon Potocki ‘to rescue us in such misfortune both from Their Lordships the officials and from the Jews, so that by the generous grace of Your Lordship, our gracious Lord, we may abide by our liberties according to the military rights granted us by His Royal Majesty...’.^[374]

These were probably the first Cossack grievances against the Jews ever to be aired in the course of Cossack negotiations with the government. They reflected the growing role of Jewish leaseholders as intermediaries in the uneasy relations between the Cossacks and the authorities. In this context it is not surprising that neither in 1648 nor in 1649 does Khmel­nytsky’s diplomatic correspondence refer to Jews in isolation. Jewish in­justices are mentioned in connection with mistreatment at the hands of officials of the royal administration, who are portrayed as those most re­sponsible for the uprising. The placement of Jews in the second or third echelon of the general hierarchy of enemies was of course characteristic not only of Khmelnytsky himself but also of his entourage—the Eyewitness Chronicle, after all, presents a similar hierarchy of enemies.^[375] Most probably, Khmelnytsky and his closest advisers shared many of the anti-Jewish sentiments of the rank-and-file Cossacks, peasants, and townspeople, but their own basic attitude to the Jews continued to reflect views characteristic of the Ukrainian nobility and Cossack officers. Al­though both social groups harbored mainly religious prejudices against Jews, they made a general practice of employing their services in the man­agement of their estates and in their business dealings. Accordingly, they were in practice more tolerant and pragmatic in their attitude to the Jews than any other stratum of the insurgents.^[376]

At the same time, seventeenth-century Cossackdom apparently sub­scribed to the principal theses of the Counter-Reformation on the ‘Jew­ish question’: Jews were tolerated by Christians only because sooner or later they would be converted to Christianity.^[377] Judging by the available sources, the outbreak of the Khmelnytsky Uprising was seen by some of its participants as an opportunity not only to exact social vengeance but also to carry out one’s ‘Christian duty’ by converting as many Jews as pos­sible to Orthodoxy. The actions of the rebels give no evidence of any simi­lar ‘missionary’ intention toward the Poles. In June 1648, a Muscovite emissary to Adam Kysil related that

many Jews, it is said, are being baptized and are joining their forces, but as for the Poles, it is said that even if they wish to be baptized, they do not accept them, but kill them all. And they even say that all the Poles in Poland and Lithuania should be killed, because they killed many Christians and converted them to the Polish faith by force.^[378]

Here, as in other sources,^[379] it is clearly Roman Catholics and not Jews who figure as the main enemies of the rebels. The latter appeared to be­lieve that the Jews could still be ‘redeemed’ by conversion to Orthodoxy.

The Jewish chronicles of the Khmelnytsky era speak of mass Jewish conversions to Orthodoxy. Nathan Hanover, the most authoritative of the Jewish chroniclers, presented conversion to Orthodoxy as the worst possible response for the Jewish communities attacked by the rebels. Of the three choices that confronted Jews at the time of revolt—to be mas­sacred, converted to Orthodoxy, or taken captive by the Tatars—Hanover advocates the third.^[380] The Tatars had no religious mission vis-a-vis the Jews: they massacred or captured for ransom not only Jews and Catholics but even their allies, the Orthodox rebels. According to Hanover, if Tatar captivity was not an option, it was better to die than to convert. Hanover definitely sides in that respect with Rabbi Jehiel Michael of Nemyriv, who on the eve of the rebel attack on the town allegedly ‘admonished people that if the enemy should come (God forbid) they should not change their faith, but rather be martyred for the sanctification of His Name’.^[381]

According to Hanover, the Cossacks first attempted to convert Jewish captives and then killed those who refused to accept Christianity. That was, apparently, the case in Tulchyn, where one of the Cossacks called thrice on the Jews to convert and exhorted those willing to change their religion to gather under his banner. Allegedly, no one responded, and the Jews of Tulchyn were massacred.^[382] But it appears from other sources that not all Jews willing to convert were spared. According to testimony in a rabbinic court that examined the case of a Jewish woman who wanted to be remarried after the death of her husband in a massacre, the Cossacks sometimes played cruel games with Jews indicating their willingness to convert. In that instance, the Cossacks allegedly gave non-kosher food to one of the Jews who tried to save his life by conversion, but then killed him.^[383]

In other cases, the rebels showed some respect for the religious convic­tions of their victims and tried to accommodate them at the time of their death. That was the case in Nemyriv, where, according to Meir ben Shmuel of Szczebrzeszyn, Rabbi Jehiel Michael—the same rabbi who be­fore the attack called on his people to die but not to abandon their faith— was brought to the Jewish cemetery at his request to be killed there.^[384] Nathan Hanover tells a similar story about a massacre in Ostrih, where the rebels allegedly granted the request of Jews to be killed at the cem­etery so that they could later be buried there.^[385] The record of a case heard at a rabbinic court shortly after the massacres shows that in one case the rebels allowed a captive Jew to choose how he would die (given a choice of decapitation or shooting, he chose the latter), to wash himself, and say a prayer before they killed him.^[386]

It is well known that among those Jews who did not convert there were survivors of the Cossack massacres. In most cases the rebels appear to have gone after Jewish men, while sparing the women. Young and middle­aged men were probably considered potential soldiers and hence killed mercilessly. As armies in mid-seventeenth-century Europe did not distinguish between combatant and non-combatant males, the Khmel­nytsky revolt followed the general pattern, but at the same time there were authoritative voices that pleaded for mercy in the treatment of women, the elderly, and children.^[387] The suggestion that in the Khmelnytsky Up­rising Jewish women had better chances of survival than Jewish men is also supported by rabbinic permissions to remarry given to Jewish women who had lost their husbands in the massacres.^[388] Hanover’s infor­mation, too, shows that in many cases women were spared by the Cos­sacks. In addition, he notes cases in which Cossacks would take Jews, especially representatives of rabbinic families, into captivity in order to ransom them at a later time.^[389]

Hanover, who was a rabbi himself and wrote to Jews in Italy in an at­tempt to secure their support for Jewish refugees from Ukraine, probably tended to downplay the scale of the forced conversion of Jews to Chris­tianity, emphasizing instead the martyrdom of the Jewish people during the Khmelnytsky Uprising. A similar attitude was taken by Meir of Szczebrzeszyn, who wrote that those Jews who converted ‘did not obey God’s commandments and transgressed them’, while those who were ‘honest did not escape... destruction’.^[390] Nevertheless, both Hanover’s and Meir’s comments on the forced conversions of Jews suggest that the number of converts to Orthodoxy was quite significant. Hanover estim­ates the number of Jewish converts in Right-Bank Ukraine at several hundred. Another comment of his on the return to Judaism after 1649 of ‘hundreds’ of forced converts, including Jewish women married to Cos­sacks, and ‘hundreds’ of converted children, also supports the suggestion that conversion was a mass phenomenon.^[391] Meir of Szczebrzeszyn did not offer any figures, but noted that ‘Many women denied their religion and married the Greeks [Orthodox] they had chosen; many Jews broke the Covenant.’^[392] The reports of the Jewish chronicles on mass conver­sions to Orthodoxy are corroborated by a proclamation of 1650 by King Jan Kazimierz allowing Jews who had been forcibly converted to Ortho­doxy a free return to Judaism.^[393]

The rebel view of the conversion of the Jews to Orthodoxy as one of the goals of the war is also reflected in some Ukrainian sources, including the Eyewitness Chronicle. Although its author makes reference to the com­pulsory nature of the conversions, he nevertheless complains with evi­dent asperity that most of the new converts eventually went back to their previous faith: ‘And at that time many of the Jews, fearing death, accepted the Christian faith, but then again, having bided their time and fled to Poland, they remained Jews, and it was a rare one who maintained the Christian faith.’^[394] This excerpt from the chronicle, like the accompanying phrase that refers to a broader context (‘And so there was not a single Jew remaining in Ukraine...’),⁷⁷ testifies to the chronicler’s view of Jews as a purely religious grouping. According to that way of thinking, it sufficed to change one’s religion to cease being a ‘Jew’ and gain acceptance by the rebels as an equal. It is noteworthy that Cossacks with first names and surnames of Jewish origin are listed in the Cossack register of 1649. It contains twenty-four surnames derived from the term ‘convert’ (perekhryst)—a possible name for someone who had converted to Ortho­doxy from Islam or Judaism. In the opinion of Susanne Luber, a student of the register, at least a few of the names included in it, such as Zhydenko, Zhydovkin, and Zraitel, indicate the possible Jewish origin of their bearers.^[395] Subsequently, a number of Jews who converted to Ortho­doxy at the time of the Khmelnytsky Uprising held high ranks in the Cossack army.

What was the reaction of the Orthodox clergy to the fate of the Jews in Ukraine at the time of revolt? Who was behind the ‘purification of the land’ clause of the Treaty of Zboriv, which prohibited the presence of Jews in Cossack Ukraine?^[396] Unfortunately, we know very little about the reaction of the hierarchs and almost nothing about that of the lower clergy. The latter can be deduced from the fact that the local clergy joined the revolt in large numbers and in some cases even produced leaders of Cossack detachments, hence it generally shared the attitudes of the rebel masses toward the Jews. The hierarchs, for their part, apparently had nothing against the ‘purification of the land’ or Jewish conversions to Orthodoxy. At the same time, there was a reluctant condemnation of the ‘excesses’ of the revolt. There is a report, for example, that Metropolitan Kosov intervened with the Cossacks on behalf of Jews whom they cap­tured in March 1649, securing their release.^[397] Paul of Aleppo, who ac­companied Patriarch Makarios of Antioch on his trip through Eastern Europe, recorded in his diary that his own heart and that of the patriarch ‘were burdened by sadness caused by the weeping’ of Jewish children, whose parents were tortured by Cossacks ‘to make them convert and re­veal their treasures’.^[398] Contemporary sources indicate that in many cases, when attacking Jews, the rebels were interested not so much in their con­version to Christianity as in their worldly possessions. The reaction of the upper Orthodox hierarchy in that respect was most probably the same as that of the Cossack officers and noblemen reflected in the Eyewitness Chronicle: they harbored anti-Jewish sentiments, but regretted the harshness of the mob violence.

It appears from Khmelnytsky’s official correspondence and other sources of Cossack officer provenance that the Jewish issue was among those repeatedly used by the hetman’s administration to legitimize the revolt. In letters to the Commonwealth authorities and foreign mon­archs, Khmelnytsky and his officers quite often referred to the Jews while explaining the causes of the revolt. One group of references to the Jews in Cossack documents was based on a comparison of the status of the bib­lical Jews in Egyptian captivity and the Rus' people under Polish rule. Comparisons of the people of Rus' with the Hebrews of the Old Testa­ment, and of Khmelnytsky with Moses, who led his people out of Egypt­ian captivity, are to be encountered in various seventeenth-century sources. In December 1648, Khmelnytsky was hailed as ‘Moses' by stu­dents of the Kyivan College who greeted him on his entrance into the city.⁸² A contemporary of the revolt, the Polish chronicler Wespazjan Ko- chowski, even wrote about the comparisons then being made between Khmelnytsky and the Maccabees.⁸³ The parallel between the Hebrews in Egyptian captivity and Ruthenians under the Polish yoke was also drawn by the compiler of the most authoritative of the Jewish chronicles, Nathan Hanover. In The Abyss of Despair, he described the hardships imposed on the Ruthenians by their Polish masters, employing a quotation from the book of Exodus that referred to the suffering of the Hebrews in Egypt: ‘Their lives were made bitter by hard labor, in mortar and bricks, and in all manner of services in the field.'⁸⁴

Hanover's parallel between the Hebrews and Ruthenians was not an isolated instance, as educated Ukrainian social circles also interpreted the Khmelnytsky era according to that paradigm. Among the sources that compare the Ukrainian (Ruthenian) people with the Hebrews in Egypt­ian captivity is Colonel Syluian Muzhylovsky's report on the outbreak of the war. ‘God Almighty has sh[own] mercy to the nation, as he once did to His people of Israel when they were held captive in Egypt', stated the colonel in his note to the tsar.⁸⁵ Muzhylovsky, who had studied at the Kyi- van College, belonged to the educated stratum of the Cossack officers, and his interpretation of the events of late 1648 and early 1649 largely re­flected that of the Orthodox elite involved in the uprising.

The identification of one's own people with the people of Israel and of national leaders with Moses was a rather common ideological practice in European political and religious discourse of the sixteenth and seven­teenth centuries. Such parallels were most often encountered among dis­sident religious minorities, of which there was no shortage in the post-Reformation period. Not surprisingly, these motifs also made their

⁸² See the text of Wojciech Miaskowski's diary of the Commonwealth embassy to Khmel­nytsky in late 1648 and early 1649, VUR, 2: 109.

⁸³ See Hrushevs'kyi, Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy, vol. 8, pt. 3, p. 127; vol. 9, pt. 1, p. 120.

⁸⁴ Hanover, Abyss of Despair, p. 28. Cf. the King James Version of the Bible, Ex. 1: 14: ‘And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of ser­vice in the field...'.

⁸⁵ VUR, 2: 128.

appearance in the writings of the Ukrainian Orthodox elite, which set it­self against the eastward offensive of the Counter-Reformation. The comparison of Ukrainians with the Hebrews in Egyptian captivity was in­tended by its authors to justify the uprising and endow it with legitimacy in the eyes of observers both foreign and domestic by portraying it as the revolt of a persecuted nation.⁸⁶

Khmelnytsky and other Cossack officers often accused their Com­monwealth correspondents of tolerating a situation in which Christians (the Rus’) were dominated by non-Christians (Jews). Some of Khmel­nytsky’s letters represent a direct appeal to Polish and Lithuanian Catholics for Christian solidarity against the Jews, as well as a rebuke to fellow Christians for allowing their co-religionists to fall under Jewish domination. One of Khmelnytsky’s documents, dating from 1656, con­tains the following comment on the matter:.. today and before th[is] the infidel Jews have had [great]er liberties than the Ortho[dox] and have [cele]brated their devotions, while the Ortho[dox have not had any liber­ties]’.⁸⁷ Writing to the tsar in 1649, Syluian Muzhylovsky went even fur­ther in that regard, accusing Prince Jeremi Wisniowiecki of persecuting Christians and even killing them, while affording protection to Jews: ‘[He takes the Jews with him], but cuts down the Christians in the towns.’⁸⁸

The motif of rebuking Polish and Lithuanian Catholics for treating the Orthodox worse than Jews appeared in Ukrainian writings even before the Khmelnytsky era, during the outburst of Orthodox-Uniate polemics in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In 1620, the Orthodox nobleman Lavrentii Drevynsky claimed that in Vilnius the Orthodox

⁸⁶ For a discussion of the Jews of the Old Testament as a model of nationhood in medieval and early modern Europe, see Hastings, Construction of Nationhood, pp. 4, 195-7. The compari­son of Khmelnytsky with Moses and of the Ukrainian people with the Israelites in Egyptian bondage first encountered during the years of the Khmelnytsky Uprising remained popular into the eighteenth century. This motif is most fully developed in the Heroic Verses on the Glorious Martial Deeds of the Zaporozhian Host, written in 1784:

But wait, Pole, the Lord is gazing from above At your injustice and righteously avenging The wrong done to the Cossacks, as to the Israelites, And punishing you, who are hard-hearted, like the Egyptians. God inspired Khmelnytsky, as He did Moses by faith and lineage, With zeal, so that he might restore liberty.

(‘Heroi'chni stykhy o slavnykh voiennykh diistviiakh Voisk Zaporoz’kykh...’ in Ukrams’ka Iiteratura XVIIIst. Poetychni tvory. Dramatychni tvory. Prozovi tvory. Ed. V. I. Krekoten’, comp. O. V. Myshanych [Kyiv, 1983], p. 79).

⁸⁷ DBKh, p. 521. Here and throughout, brackets indicate passages that are not entirely legible.

⁸⁸VUR, 2: 129. The complaints about the torture of Orthodox priests by Wisniowiecki’s forces and the demand for Jews to be driven beyond the Vistula are to be found in the above­mentioned letter ofJuly 1648 from Maksym Kryvonis to Prince Dominik Zaslawski. See Jakuba Michalowskiego... ksiςgapamiςtnicza, pp. 88-9. population had fewer rights than ‘even Jews and Tatars’.^[399] In 1621, de­fending the legitimacy of the newly ordained Orthodox hierarchy, Iov Boretsky noted in his protestation that the people of Rus’ had fewer rights than Karaite Jews, Socinians, Evangelicals, and Armenians.^[400] Similar arguments advanced by the rebels were fully accepted and even further elaborated by some Polish authors of the mid-seventeenth century.

One of those authors, a Catholic priest named Pawel Ruszel,^[401] wrote that Jewish leaseholders were continually devising new taxes to impose on the Ukrainian populace, and, as he had been told by ‘well-informed people... it was prohibited there for a Christian [Roman Catholic] or a Schismatic [Orthodox] to take the sacrament of holy matrimony, to have children baptized, without first having given over a certain tax to the Jew­ish leaseholder...'.^[402] Ruszel was by no means alone in blaming the Jews for the outbreak of the revolt. Jewish sources make repeated reference to attempts by Poles to buy off the rebels at the expense of the Jews. Such situations generally arose in the summer of 1648, during the advance of the peasant army led by Kryvonis on the Right Bank. Jews were surrendered mainly at the direct insistence of the rebels, who either demanded social vengeance, pursued their ‘missionary’ agenda, or sought to exploit the Jews and their wealth to pay off the Tatar forces allied with them.^[403]

Khmelnytsky’s correspondence with Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich con­tains a protest against Jewish domination of the Orthodox and, in effect, a call for exclusively Orthodox, not general Christian, solidarity. If in his first letter to the tsar, dated 8 (18) June 1648, Khmelnytsky made only passing reference to persecution by the ‘Godless Arians’, in his letter of 22 April (2 May) 1649 the hetman stated more directly, ‘And we entreat God that the Poles and the Jews no longer rule over Orthodox Christians, for they, being devious, have long been accustomed to shed Christian blood and perpetrate treason.’^[404] Khmelnytsky was clearly attempting to play simultaneously on anti-Polish and anti-Jewish attitudes. The latter were widespread in Muscovy and would find expression in 1654 with the outbreak of the Commonwealth-Muscovite War and the advance of Muscovite forces into Belarusian territory.^[405]

When it comes to the Orthodox world, the anti-Jewish motifs appear­ing in justifications of the uprising were intended to make an impression not only on Muscovy but also on the Orthodox East, as numerous East­ern Orthodox hierarchs visited Ukraine. Paul of Aleppo, who was in Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky Uprising, noted in his diary that ‘the Cossacks have taken over the whole country and recovered it for them­selves, uprooting the whole tribe of Poles, Armenians, and Jews...’. Here, the usual association of Poles with Jews in Orthodox sources is am­plified with a mention of the Armenians. This is probably an extrapola­tion to Orthodox-Armenian antagonisms in the Levant: at the beginning of the uprising in Ukraine, the authorities were just as wary of the Armen­ians (often also considered adherents of the ‘Greek religion’) as they were of the Ukrainians.^[406]

Khmelnytsky’s complaints about the persecution of Ruthenian Chris­tians by Jews were among the most effective measures that he took to le­gitimize the revolt in the eyes of Christian Europe.^[407] With their characteristic stress on the notion that ‘even Jews’ were perpetrating in­justices against the Cossacks, those letters were in complete accord with the papal bull ‘Cum nimis absurdum’, which considered it absurd and in­admissible that Jews should lord it over Christians instead of being their servants.^[408] Even Jews themselves, influenced by Counter-Reformation propaganda and centuries of Christian dominance, probably considered their role in Ukraine abnormal and humiliating to Christians. That perception is reflected in Hanover’s chronicle, in which the author notes with evident sympathy for the local peasants that ‘[s]o wretched and lowly had they become that all classes of people, even the lowliest among them [Jews], became their overlords’.^[409]

Study of the Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish sources of the mid­seventeenth century and of the actions of the Cossacks and the insurgent army as a whole leads to the conclusion that neither Khmelnytsky nor his entourage had a ‘Jewish program’ worked out in any detail. Several reasons may be adduced to explain this. Among them, as students have already noted, is the sporadic nature of Cossack-Jewish contacts (unlike those be­tween peasants and Jews) prior to the uprising and their initially non- antagonistic character. Another reason may be discerned in the fact that prior to the Khmelnytsky Uprising neither the Orthodox nor the Uniate Church had produced any anti-Jewish tracts to systematize its anti-Jewish arguments. As for the attitudes of the masses, to the extent that they can be reconstructed from the scarce information afforded by the written sources, iconography, and analysis of mass behavior, their anti-Jewish sentiment had two main components, social and religious. Those two components were closely interconnected, as were, apparently, the social (leaseholding) and religious (Judaic) elements of the image of the Jew in seventeenth­century Ukraine. The ethnic component does not appear to have been a factor at that time, for Jewish converts were welcome in Cossack ranks.

One of the paradoxes of the Khmelnytsky era that bears directly on the problem under discussion is the disproportion between the scant atten­tion paid to the Jewish question by the leaders of the uprising and the sig­nificant losses suffered by the Jewish communities of Ukraine during the years of the insurrection. The attitude expressed in Khmelnytsky’s letters is that the Jews should have shared the fate of the Poles, who were the Cossacks’ primary enemies. Proportionally, nevertheless, the Jews prob­ably suffered no fewer casualties than the Polish population of Ukraine. Whatever the actual numbers, the events of the summer of 1648 certainly made a far deeper impression on the social memory of the Jewish people than on that of the Poles.

To some extent, this disparity is a mirror image of another dispropor- tion—that between the considerable attention paid to the problem of church union in the Hetman’s official documents and the insignificant losses suffered by the Uniates during the years of the insurrection. Among many other things, these two disproportions indicate that the official ideology of the Khmelnytsky Uprising as reflected in the hetman’s docu­ments and writings and in elite proclamations was by no means invariably consonant with the attitudes, views, and convictions of the broad masses.

SIX