History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 1 of 3. From the Beginning until the Death of Alexander I (1825)

The South Russian population, though politically and agriculturally dependent upon the Poles, was far from being that patient "beast of burden" into which the rule of serfdom tried to transform it. Many circumstances combined to foster a warlike spirit in this population. The proximity of the New Russian steppes and the Khanate of the Crimea, whence hordes of Tatars often burst forth to swoop down like birds of prey upon the eastern provinces of Poland, compelled the inhabitants of the Ukraina to organize themselves into warlike companies, or Cossacks,123 to fight off the invaders. The Polish Government, acting through its local governors or starostas, encouraged the formation of these companies for the defense of the borders of the Empire. In this way Ukrainian Cossackdom, a semi-military, semi-agricultural caste, came into being, with an autonomous organization and its own hetman124 at the head.

Apart from the Ukrainian Cossacks, who were subject to the Polish Government, there were also the so-called Zaporozhian125 Cossacks, a completely independent military organization which lived beyond the Falls of the Dnieper, in the steppes of so-called New Russia, the present Governments of Yekaterinoslav and Kherson, and indulged in frequent raids upon the Turks and in constant warfare with the Tatars of the Crimea. This military camp, or syech,126 beyond the Falls of the Dnieper attracted many khlops from the Ukraina, who preferred a free, unrestricted military life to the dreary existence of laboring slaves. The syech represented a primitive military republic, where daring, pluck, and knightly exploits were valued above all. It was a semi-barbarous Tatar horde, except that it professed the Greek Orthodox faith, and was of Russian origin, though, by the way, with a considerable admixture of Mongolian blood. The Ukrainian and Zaporozhian Cossacks were in constant relations with each other. The peasants of the Ukraina looked up with pride and hope to this their national guard, which sooner or later was bound to free them from the rule of the Poles and Jews. The Polish Government failed to perceive that on the eastern borders of the Empire a mass of explosives was constantly accumulating, which threatened to wreck the whole Polish Republic.

Nor could the Jews foresee that this terrible force would be directed against them, and would stain with blood many pages of their history, serving as a terrible omen for the future. The first warning was sounded in 1637, when the Cossack leader Pavluk suddenly appeared from beyond the Falls in the province of Poltava, inciting the peasants to rise against the pans and the Jews. The rebels demolished several synagogues in the town of Lubny and in neighboring places, and killed about two hundred Jews. The real catastrophe, however, came ten years later. The mutiny of the Cossacks and the Ukrainian peasants in 1648 inaugurates in the history of the Jews of Eastern Europe the era of pogroms, which Southern Russia bequeathed to future generations down to the beginning of the twentieth century.

2. The Pogroms and Massacres of 1648-1649

In the spring of 1648, while King Vladislav IV. still sat on the throne of Poland, one of the popular Cossack leaders, Bogdan Khmelnitzki, from the town of Chigirin, in the province of Kiev, unfurled the banner of rebellion in the Ukraina and in the region beyond the Dnieper Falls. Infuriated by the conduct of the Polish authorities of his native place,127 Khmelnitzki began to incite the Ukrainian Cossacks to armed resistance. They elected him secretly their hetman, and empowered him to conduct negotiations with the Zaporozhians. Having arrived in the region beyond the Dnieper Falls, he organized military companies, and concluded an alliance with the Khan of the Crimea, who entered into a compact to send large troops of Tatars to the aid of the rebels.

In April, 1648, the combined hosts of the Cossacks and Tatars moved from beyond the Falls of the Dnieper to the borders of the Ukraina. In the neighborhood of the Yellow Waters and Korsun they inflicted a severe defeat on the Polish army under the command of Pototzki and Kalinovski (May 6-15), and this defeat served as a signal for the whole region on the eastern banks of the Dnieper to rise in rebellion. The Russian peasants and town dwellers left their homes, and, organizing themselves into bands, devastated the estates of the pans, slaying their owners as well as the stewards and Jewish arendars. In the towns of Pereyaslav, Piryatin, Lokhvitz, Lubny, and the surrounding country, thousands of Jews were barbarously killed, and their property was either destroyed or pillaged. The rebels allowed only those to survive who embraced the Greek Orthodox faith. The Jews of several cities of the Kiev region, in order to escape from the hands of the Cossacks, fled into the camp of the Tatars, and gave themselves up voluntarily as prisoners of war. They knew that the Tatars refrained as a rule from killing them, and transported them instead into Turkey, where they were sold as slaves, and had a chance of being ransomed by their Turkish coreligionists.

At that juncture, in the month of May, King Vladislav IV. died, and an interregnum ensued, which, marked by political unrest, lasted six months. The flame of rebellion seized the whole of the Ukraina, as well as Volhynia and Podolia. Bands composed of Cossacks and Russian peasants led by Khmelnitzki's accomplices, savage Zaporozhian Cossacks, dispersed in all directions, and began to exterminate Poles and Jews. To quote a Russian historian:

Killing was accompanied by barbarous tortures; the victims were flayed alive, split asunder, clubbed to death, roasted on coals, or scalded with boiling water. Even infants at the breast were not spared. The most terrible cruelty, however, was shown towards the Jews. They were destined to utter annihilation, and the slightest pity shown to them was looked upon as treason. Scrolls of the Law were taken out of the synagogues by the Cossacks, who danced on them while drinking whiskey. After this Jews were laid down upon them, and butchered without mercy. Thousands of Jewish infants were thrown into wells, or buried alive.

Contemporary Jewish chroniclers add that these human beasts purposely refrained from finishing their victims, so as to be able to torture them longer. They cut off their hands and feet, split the children asunder, "fish-like," or roasted them on fire. They opened the bowels of women, inserted live cats, and then sewed up the wounds. The unbridled bestiality of intoxicated savages found expression in these frightful tortures, of which even the Tatars were incapable.

Particularly tragic was the fate of those Jews who, in the hope of greater safety, had fled from the villages and townlets to the fortified cities. Having learned that several thousand Jews had taken refuge in the town of Niemirov in Podolia, Khmelnitzki dispatched thither a detachment of Cossacks under the command of the Zaporozhian Gania. Finding it difficult to take the city by storm, the Cossacks resorted to a trick. They drew nigh to Niemirov, carrying aloft the Polish banners and requesting admission into the city. The Jews, fooled into believing that it was a Polish army that had come to their rescue, opened the gates (Sivan 20 = June 10, 1648). The Cossacks, in conjunction with the local Russian inhabitants, fell upon the Jews and massacred them; the women and girls were violated. The Rabbi and Rosh-Yeshibah of Niemirov, Jehiel Michael ben Eliezer, hid himself in the cemetery with his mother, hoping in this wise at least to be buried after death. There he was seized by one of the rioters, a shoemaker, who began to club him. His aged mother begged the murderer to kill her instead of her son, but the inhuman shoemaker killed first the rabbi and then the aged woman.

The young Jewish women were frequently allowed to live, the Cossacks and peasants forcing them into baptism and taking them for wives. One beautiful Jewish girl who had been kidnaped for this purpose by a Cossack managed to convince him that she was able to throw a spell over bullets. She asked him to shoot at her, so as to prove to him that the bullet would glide off without causing her any injury. The Cossack discharged his gun, and the girl fell down, mortally wounded, yet happy in the knowledge that she was saved from a worse fate. Another Jewish girl, whom a Cossack was on the point of marrying, threw herself from the bridge into the water, while the wedding procession was marching to the church. Altogether about six thousand Jews perished in the city of Niemirov.

Those who escaped death fled to the fortified Podolian town of Tulchyn. Here an even more terrible tragedy was enacted. A large horde of Cossacks and peasants laid siege to the fortress, which contained several hundred Poles and some fifteen hundred Jews. The Poles and Jews took an oath not to betray one another and to defend the city to their last breath. The Jews, stationed on the walls of the fortress, shot at the besiegers, keeping them off from the city. After a long and unsuccessful siege the Cossacks conceived a treacherous plan. They informed the Poles of Tulchyn that they were aiming solely at the Jews, and, as soon as the latter were delivered into their hands, they would leave the Poles in peace. The Polish pans, headed by Count Chetvertinski, forgot their oath, and decided to sacrifice their Jewish allies to secure their own safety. When the Jews discovered this treacherous intention, they immediately resolved to dispose of the Poles, whom they excelled in numbers. But the Rosh-Yeshibah of Tulchyn, Rabbi Aaron, implored them not to touch the pans, on the ground that such action might draw upon the Jews all over the Empire the hatred of the Polish population. "Let us rather perish," he exclaimed, "as did our brethren in Niemirov, and let us not endanger the lives of our brethren in all the places of their dispersion." The Jews yielded. They turned over all their property to Chetvertinski, asking him to offer it to the Cossacks as a ransom for their lives.

After entering the city, the Cossacks first took possession of the property of the Jews, and then drove them together into a garden, where they put up a banner and declared, "Let those who are willing to accept baptism station themselves under this banner, and we will spare their lives." The rabbis exhorted the people to accept martyrdom for the sake of their religion and their people. Not a single Jew was willing to become a traitor, and fifteen hundred victims were murdered in a most barbarous fashion. Nor did the perfidious Poles escape their fate. Another detachment of Cossacks, which entered Tulchyn later, slew all the Catholics, among them Count Chetvertinski. Treachery avenged treachery.

From Podolia the rebel bands penetrated into Volhynia. Here the massacres continued in the course of the whole summer and autumn of 1648. In the town of Polonnoye ten thousand Jews met their death at the hands of the Cossacks, or were taken captive by the Tatars. Among the victims was the Cabalist Samson of Ostropol, who was greatly revered by the people. This Cabalist, and three hundred pious fellow-Jews who followed him, put on their funeral garments, the shrouds and prayer shawls, and offered up fervent prayers in the synagogue, awaiting death in the sacred place, where the murderers subsequently killed them one by one. Similar massacres took place in Zaslav, Ostrog, Constantinov, Narol, Kremenetz, Bar, and many other cities. The Ukraina as well as Volhynia and Podolia were turned into one big slaughter-house.

The Polish troops, particularly those under the brave command of Count Jeremiah Vishniovetzki, succeeded in subduing the Cossacks and peasants in several places, annihilating some of their bands with the same cruelty that the Cossacks had displayed towards the Poles and the Jews. The Jews fled to these troops for their safety, and they were welcomed by Vishniovetzki, who admitted the unfortunates into the baggage train, and, to use the expression of a Jewish chronicler, took care of them "as a father of his children." After the catastrophe of Niemirov he entered the city with his army, and executed the local rioters who had participated in the murder of the Jewish inhabitants. However, standing all alone, he was unable to extinguish the flame of the Cossack rebellion. For the commanders-in-chief of the Polish army did not display the proper energy at this critical moment, and Khmelnitzki was right in dubbing them contemptuously "featherbeds," "youngsters," and "Latins" ("bookworms").

From the Ukraina bands of rebellious peasants, or haidamacks, penetrated into the nearest towns of White Russia and Lithuania. From Chernigov and Starodub, where the Jewish inhabitants had been exterminated, the murderers moved towards the city of Homel (July or August). A contemporary gives the following description of the Homel massacre:

The rebels managed to bribe the head of the city, who delivered the Jews into their hands. The Greeks [Yevanim, i. e. the Greek Orthodox Russians] surrounded them with drawn swords, and with daggers and spears, exclaiming: "Why do you believe in your God, who has no pity on His suffering people, and does not save it from our hands? Reject your God, and you shall be masters! But if you will cling to the faith of your fathers, you shall all perish in the same way as your brethren in the Ukraina, in Pokutye,128 and Lithuania perished at our hands." Thereupon Rabbi Eliezer, our teacher, the president of the [rabbinical] court, exclaimed: "Brethren, remember the death of our fellow-Jews, who perished to sanctify the name of our God! Let us too stretch forth our necks to the sword of the enemy; look at me and act as I do!" Immediately thousands of Jews renounced their lives, despised this world, and hallowed the name of God. The Rosh-Yeshibah was the first to offer up his body as a burnt-offering. Young and old, boys and girls saw the tortures, sufferings, and wounds of the teacher, who did not cease exhorting them to accept martyrdom in the name of Him who had called into being the generations of mortals. As one man they all exclaimed: "Let us forgive one another our mutual insults. Let us offer up our souls to God and our bodies to the wild waves, to our enemies, the offspring of the Greeks!" When our enemies heard these words, they started a terrible butchery, killing their victims with spears in order that they might die slowly. Husbands, wives, and children fell in heaps. They did not even attain to burial, dogs and swine feeding on their dead bodies.

In September, 1648, Khmelnitzki himself, marching at the head of a Cossack army, and accompanied by his Tatar allies, approached the walls of Lemberg, and began to besiege the capital of Red Russia, or Galicia. The Cossacks succeeded in storming and pillaging the suburbs, but they failed to penetrate to the fortified center of the town. Khmelnitzki proposed to the magistracy of Lemberg, that it deliver all the Jews and their property into the hands of the Cossacks, promising in this case to raise the siege. The magistracy replied that the Jews were under the jurisdiction of the king, and the town authorities had no right to dispose of them. Khmelnitzki thereupon agreed to withdraw, having obtained from the city an enormous ransom, the bulk of which had been contributed by the Jews.

From Lemberg Khmelnitzki proceeded with his troops in the direction of Warsaw, where at that time the election of a new king was taking place. The choice fell upon John Casimir, a brother of Vladislav IV., who had been Primate of Gnesen and a Cardinal (1648-1668). The new King entered into peace negotiations with the leader of the rebels, the hetman Khmelnitzki. But owing to the excessive demands of the Cossacks the negotiations were broken off, and as a result, in the spring of 1649, the flame of civil war flared up anew, accompanied by the destruction of many more Jewish communities. After a succession of battles in which the Poles were defeated, a treaty of peace was concluded between John Casimir and Khmelnitzki, in the town of Zborov. In this treaty, which was favorable to the Cossacks, a clause was included forbidding the residence of Jews in the portion of the Ukraina inhabited by the Cossacks, the regions of Chernigov, Poltava, Kiev, and partly Podolia (August, 1649).

At last the Jews, after a year and a half of suffering and tortures, could heave a sigh of relief. Those of them who, at the point of death, had embraced the Greek Orthodox faith, were permitted by King John Casimir to return to their old creed. The Jewish women who had been forcibly baptized fled in large numbers from their Cossack husbands, and returned to their families. The Council of the Four Lands, which met in Lublin in the winter of 1650, framed a set of regulations looking to the restoration of normal conditions in the domestic and communal life of the Jews. The day of the Niemirov massacre (Sivan 20), which coincided with an old fast day in memory of the martyrs of the Crusades, was appointed a day of mourning, to commemorate the victims of the Cossack rebellion. Leading rabbis of the time composed a number of soul-stirring dirges and prayers, which were recited in the synagogues on the fateful anniversary of the twentieth of Sivan.

But the respite granted to the Jews after these terrible events did not last long. The Treaty of Zborov, which was unsatisfactory to the Polish Government, was not adhered to by it. Mutual resentment gave rise to new collisions, and civil war broke out again, in 1651. The Polish Government called together the national militia, which included a Jewish detachment of one thousand men. This time the people's army got the upper hand against the troops of Khmelnitzki, with the result that a treaty of peace was concluded which was advantageous to the Poles. In the Treaty of Byelaya Tzerkov, concluded in September, 1651, many claims of the Cossacks were rejected, and the right of the Jews to live in the Greek Orthodox portion of the Ukraina was restored.129

As a result, the Cossacks and Greek Orthodox Ukrainians rose again. Bogdan Khmelnitzki entered into negotiations with the Russian Tzar Alexis Michaelovich, looking to the incorporation, with the rights of an autonomous province, of the Greek Orthodox portion of the Ukraina, under the name of Little Russia, into the Muscovite Empire. In 1654 this incorporation took place, and in the same year the Russian army marched upon White Russia and Lithuania to wage war on Poland. Now came the turn of the Jews of the northwestern region to endure their share of suffering.

3. The Russian and Swedish Invasions (1654-1658)

The alliance of their enemies, the Cossacks, with the rulers of Muscovy, a country which had always felt a superstitious dread of the people of other lands and religions, was fraught with untold misery for the Jews. It was now the turn of the inhabitants of White Russia and Lithuania to face the hordes of southern and northern Scythians, who invaded the regions hitherto spared by them, devastating them uninterruptedly for two years (1654-1656). The capture of the principal Polish cities by the combined hosts of the Muscovites and Cossacks was accompanied by the extermination or expulsion of the Jews. When Moghilev on the Dnieper130 surrendered to Russian arms, Tzar Alexis Michaelovich complied with the request of the local Russian inhabitants, and gave orders to expel the Jews and divide their houses between the magistracy and the Russian authorities (1654). The Jews, however, who were hoping for a speedy termination of hostilities, failed to leave the city at once, and had to pay severely for it. Towards the end of the summer of 1655 the commander of the Russian garrison in Moghilev, Colonel Poklonski, learned of the approach of a Polish army under the command of Radziwill. Prompted by the fear that the Jewish residents might join the approaching enemy, Poklonski ordered the Jews to leave the boundaries of the city, and, on the ground of their being Polish subjects, promised to have them transferred to the camp of Radziwill. Scarcely had the Jews, accompanied by their wives and children, and carrying with them their property, left the town behind them when the Russian soldiers, at the command of the same Poklonski, fell upon them and killed nearly all of them, plundering their property at the same time.

In Vitebsk the Jews took an active part in defending the town against the besieging Russian army. They dug trenches around the fortified castle, strengthened the walls, supplied the soldiers with arms, powder, and horses, and acted as scouts. When the city was finally taken by the Russians, the Jews were completely robbed by the Zaporozhian Cossacks, while many of them were taken captive, forcibly baptized, or exiled to Pskov, Novgorod, and Kazan.

The Jews suffered no less heavily from the riot which took place in Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, after its occupation by the combined army of Muscovites and Cossacks in August, 1655. A large part of the Vilna community fled for its life. Those who remained behind were either killed or banished from the town at the command of Tzar Alexis Michaelovich, who was anxious to comply with the request of the local Russian townspeople, to rid them of their Jewish competitors.

Shortly thereafter a similar fate overtook the central Polish provinces on the Vistula and the San River, which had hitherto been spared the horrors of the Cossacks and Muscovites. The invasion of Sweden, the third enemy of Poland (1655-1658), carried bloodshed into the very heart of the country. The Swedish King, Charles Gustav, reduced one city after the other, both the old and the new capital, Cracow and Warsaw, speedily surrendering to him. A large part of Great and Little Poland fell into the hands of the Swedes, and the Polish King, John Casimir, was compelled to flee to Silesia.

The easy victories of the Swedes were the result of the anarchy and political demoralization which had taken deep root in Poland. It was the treachery of the former Polish sub-Chancellor Radzieyevski that brought the Swedes into Poland, and the cowardice of the Shlakhta hastily surrendered the cities of Posen, Kalish, Cracow, and Vilna, to the enemy. Moreover the Swedes were welcomed by the Polish Protestants and Calvinists, who looked for their rescue to the northern Protestant power in the same way in which the Cossacks expected their salvation from Orthodox Russia.

The Jews were the only ones who had no political advantage in betraying their country, and their friendly attitude towards the Swedes no more than corresponded to the conduct of the Swedes towards them. At any rate, their patriotism was no more open to suspicion than that of the Poles themselves, who joined the power of Sweden to get rid of the yoke of Muscovy. Nevertheless, the Jews had to pay a terrible price for this lack of patriotism. They found themselves, in the words of a contemporary chronicler, in the position of a man who "fleeth from a lion, and is met by a bear."131 The Jews who had been spared by the Swedes were now annihilated by the patriotic Poles, who charged them with disloyalty. The bands of Polish irregulars, which had been organized in 1656, under the command of General Charnetzki, to save the country from the invader, vented their fury upon the Jews in all the localities which they wrested from the Swedes.

The massacre of Jews began in Great and Little Poland, without yielding in point of barbarism to the butcheries which, eight years previously, had been perpetrated in the Ukraina. The Polish hosts of Charnetzki had learned from the Cossacks the art of exterminating the Jews. Nearly all the Jewish communities in the province of Posen, excepting the city of Posen, and those in the provinces of Kalish, Cracow, and Piotrkov, were destroyed by the saviors of the Polish fatherland. The brutal and wicked Charnetzki, to use the epithets applied to him by the Jewish annalists, or, to be more exact, the Polish mob marching behind him, committed atrocities which were truly worthy of the Cossacks. They tortured and murdered the rabbis, violated the women, killed the Jews by the hundreds, sparing only those who were willing to become Catholics. These atrocities were as a rule committed in the wake of the retreating Swedes, who had behaved like human beings towards the Jewish population. The humaneness shown by the Swedes to the Jews was avenged by the inhumanity of the Poles.

While the bands of Charnetzki were attacking the Jews in Western Poland, the Muscovites and Cossacks continued to disport themselves in the eastern districts and in Lithuania. Not until 1658 did the horrors of warfare begin gradually to subside, and only after terrible losses and humiliating concessions to Russia and Sweden was Poland able to restore its political order, which had been shaken to its foundation during the preceding years.