Rescue the Surviving Souls

The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

Adam Teller

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691199863
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia ebraica

A groundbreaking examination of a little-known but defining episode in early modern Jewish history A refugee crisis of huge proportions erupted as a result of the mid-seventeenth-century wars in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Tens of thousands of Jews fled their homes, or were captured and trafficked across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Rescue the Surviving Souls is the first book to examine this horrific moment of displacement and flight, and to assess its social, economic, religious, cultural, and psychological consequences. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in twelve languages, Adam Teller traces the entire course of the crisis, shedding fresh light on the refugee experience and the various relief strategies developed by the major Jewish centers of the day.Teller pays particular attention to those thousands of Jews sent for sale on the slave markets of Istanbul and the extensive transregional Jewish economic network that coalesced to ransom them. He also explores how Jewish communities rallied to support the refugees in central and western Europe, as well as in Poland-Lithuania, doing everything possible to help them overcome their traumatic experiences and rebuild their lives. Rescue the Surviving Souls offers an intimate study of an international refugee crisis, from outbreak to resolution, that is profoundly relevant today.

PART I

Wartime Chaos and Its Resolution

THE INTERNALLY DISPLACED IN EASTERN EUROPE

CHAPTER ONE

The Khmelnytsky Uprising and the Jews

The Jews in Ukraine before the Uprising

The year 1648 started nervously for the Jews of Ukraine. Rumors abounded concerning the possibility of another Cossack rebellion. This was nothing new. The last one, headed by the Cossack Hetman Pavlo But (known as Pavliuk), had taken place only a decade or so earlier in 1637–38. At that time, the Cossack forces, established in order to protect the Commonwealth’s southeastern border from enemy incursions, rebelled against their Polish masters, who had not only failed to pay their salary for a number of years but had broken their promise to improve the Cossacks’ social status. This would probably not have concerned the Jews greatly had not a considerable number of the local peasantry joined the Cossacks in their fight against Poland-Lithuania. These serfs saw the Jews not only as the eternal enemy of Christendom but also as agents of the hated Polish-Lithuanian regime that had colonized Ukraine. Jews became a target of the uprising and it seems that many hundreds lost their lives.¹

On looking back at these events, the Jews of 1648 would also have found much to alleviate their fears. The violence had lasted only a few months. A resolute Polish response, divisions within the Cossack leadership, and an unpropitious international situation had led to the surrender and swift execution of the Cossack leaders one after another.² There was, on the surface at least, little reason to expect that if a rebellion did break out again it would not end the same way. Many Jews, who were indeed acting as agents of the Polish nobility in Ukraine on the ground, began to gather intelligence for their masters about the war preparations of both Cossacks and peasants.³ Though some seem to have felt sympathy for their Ukrainian neighbors, most were aligned with the hegemonic Polish regime.⁴

While this was the logical and obvious choice, it would, in the context of 1648, have tragic consequences because the root causes of the uprising were largely to be found in Polish policy toward the people of the region. In terms of social and cultural development, the economy, religious status, military policy, and political and geopolitical orientations, the Polish nobility and sometimes the king too were acting in ways that were bound to bring tensions in Ukraine to a boiling point.

Ukraine had been ceded to the Polish Crown as part of Poland’s unification with Lithuania in 1569 and, within a short time, moves were made to integrate it into the Polish polity. Initially, the local princely elite began to speak Polish and adopt Polish customs in order to become part of the Polish nobility, already a dominant force. Within a short time, they also converted to Roman Catholicism. Their intermarriage with Polish nobility, as well as a certain degree of land appropriation by Polish nobles, meant that the feudal lords of the region, whether or not their roots were in Ukraine, were now viewed as foreign by many of the local inhabitants.⁵ As the seventeenth century unfolded, the influx of Polish noblemen became much more visible.

The effects of this on the Jews were significant, if indirect. In order to make the fertile Ukrainian lands as profitable as possible, their noble owners began to implement the feudal system that had been so successful in Crown Poland. It worked like this: instead of paying money dues, peasants had labor duties on the estate farms. The grain that was grown was then sold—either for export or on local markets, or in the form of alcoholic beverages (beer and vodka) marketed to estate subjects through a monopoly held by the owner.⁶ Jews, who were very active in the urban markets, played key roles in this process, mostly through the sale of alcohol in taverns. In Ukraine, far distant from the river networks leading to the international markets in Gdańsk, grain export was not significant, which made the Jews’ roles all the greater. The estate owners, appreciative of the income created by the Jews, began to encourage them to settle on their estates.⁷

In addition, Jews, whose economic prowess had already benefited the estate owners in the realm of trade, also began to find their way into estate management. This came about through the system of estate leasing that developed during the sixteenth century. Rather than devote time and energy to estate management, the noble owners—particularly of the huge estates known as latifundia—preferred to lease out their lands for three years in return for a fixed payment made on signing the contract. This gave them a guaranteed income up front, while leaving the day-to-day administration in the hands of the leaseholder, who had a vested interest in efficient administration, since any income he made over and above the price of the lease formed his profit.⁸ For wealthy Jewish businessmen (individually or in consortia), whose economic skills were trusted by the estate owners, the high profits that these leases brought them proved extremely attractive. The problem was that profits were achieved through the slow but constant raising of the peasants’ labor dues—a situation the serfs resented.

The advantage of the estate leases for the Jews was that the leaseholder could break them down into a series of subleases, each of which he could then give to another Jew. It soon became clear that living in Ukraine could bring great wealth, so many Jews moved there. The region’s Jewish population seems to have grown from some 4,000 in 1569 to about 40,000 in 1648.⁹ What ratcheted up the tension was the fact that the Jewish leaseholders, called in Polish arendarze, found themselves running noble estates in place of the feudal lords. This gave them enormous power over their subjects. The local population, which consisted mostly of Orthodox Christians, found it demeaning enough to have to serve Roman Catholic lords. To be subservient to a Jewish master was felt a terrible humiliation—and a contradiction of the basic structure of a Christian society, in which Jews could be tolerated provided they held no positions of authority over Christians.

Nonetheless, for all the anger this caused, the Jews do not seem to have been the major problem for the Orthodox Christians. Their main complaints were against the Catholics, whose mistrust of the Orthodox led to a series of discriminatory policies. Even the 1596 creation of a Greek-Catholic (Uniate) Church, which was meant to allow locals to retain their religious rites and practices while swearing allegiance to the pope in Rome, faltered due to continued Catholic suspicion of the Ukrainian population.¹⁰ Worse still, as the seventeenth century progressed, the attitude of the Polish nobility toward the peasantry of Ukraine, both Orthodox and Uniate, became increasingly harsh, even brutal.

On the Orthodox Ukrainian side, the first half of the seventeenth century saw the beginnings of a cultural florescence that would lead to the strengthening of their religious and ethnic identity as an independent group. Of particular importance was the reestablishment in 1620 of a church hierarchy (Metropolitanate) that was subordinate not to Moscow but to Constantinople. In addition, the foundation of the Kiev Collegium by the Orthodox Metropolitan and theologian Pyotr Mogila in 1632, as well as his encouragement of local publishing, helped shape a new Ukrainian intellectual elite. Though these developments were not a direct cause of the uprising, they created an atmosphere that was receptive to the idea of independence from the Commonwealth.¹¹

In fact, the trigger for the uprising came from a different place entirely. The Cossack forces were also highly disaffected in 1648. Following the brutal crushing of the 1637–38 rebellion, the number of registered Cossacks, entitled to rights and privileges similar to those of the middling nobility, was reduced to just six thousand. There were many thousands of other Cossacks, not included in the register, who, though well-armed military men, lived more or less as outlaws in the unsettled region of Zaporizhia on the lower Dniepr. The registered Cossacks’ requests to increase their number and improve their status met with favor from King Władysław IV, who was planning a new crusade against the Ottoman Turks. The nobles in the Sejm, suspicious of both the king and the Cossacks, nixed this idea in 1646, leaving the latter very resentful.¹²

The planned crusade also did little to improve the Commonwealth’s relations with the Ottoman Empire. Still, the Sublime Porte did not face off with the Commonwealth directly but through an intermediary—the Crimean Tatars. To keep the peace, the Polish Crown was supposed to pay an annual tribute to their leader, the khan, though it had not done so for a number of years. Since relations between the Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire, and the Crimean Tatars were never really stable, the Cossack Hetman (leader), Bogdan Khmelnytsky, identified in them a crucial diplomatic opening to exploit. Since he planned to put pressure on his sovereign lords in Poland to give him what he wanted, he put together a Cossack-Tatar alliance that would give him the military clout to back up his demands.¹³

This was an extremely bold and imaginative move. The Tatars, descendants of Ghengis Khan’s Golden Horde, were a warlike group who made their living by attacking the regions around the Black Sea and capturing slaves whom they could sell for a profit in Istanbul.¹⁴ The Commonwealth was supposed to pay its annual tribute to reduce the threat of Tatar attacks on its territory. In addition, the Cossack units were in place to guard its southeastern border against such incursions, which could take many thousands of slaves each year. The Commonwealth’s relative success in preventing these attacks was one of the causes of Ukraine’s rapid development in the years before 1648.¹⁵ For the Cossacks to join forces with the Tatars was to turn the accepted military situation on its head.

Khmelnytsky himself, motivated personally perhaps by his bitter rivalry with the Polish nobleman Daniel Czapliński, entered into negotiations with the Tatar khan Islam Gerey III in February 1648. Within a short time, they had concluded an agreement ensuring Cossack-Tatar cooperation in military campaigns against the Commonwealth. The first of these was to take place in the spring of that year. Greatly strengthened by this crucial support for his struggle, Khmelnytsky felt confident enough to begin the uprising. The Jews of Ukraine had much to be afraid of. ¹⁶

The Jews’ Experience of the War

The Khmelnytsky uprising was not a single experience for the Jews. This was mostly because there were at least five military forces at work, each of which had a different attitude toward them. For the Cossack armies under Khmelnytsky’s leadership, the Jews, though a problem, were by no means always high on their list of priorities. The Cossacks’ basic grievances were aimed at the Polish authorities—particularly the nobility in the Sejm—and concerned issues of money and status.¹⁷

As a result, though their treatment of Jews could be brutal, they were, sometimes at least, willing to accept money instead of putting them to the sword. However, it was impossible to know in advance what they would do. In the two most infamous massacres of Jewish communities during the initial phase of the uprising, the Cossacks led the attack on the Jews in Nemyriv in early J...