Stories of Khmelnytsky

Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising

Amelia M. Glaser, Amelia M. Glaser

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804794961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the legendary Cossack general who organized a rebellion that liberated the Eastern Ukraine from Polish rule. Consequently, he has been memorialized in the Ukraine as a God-given nation builder, cut in the model of George Washington. But in this campaign, the massacre of thousands of Jews perceived as Polish intermediaries was the collateral damage, and in order to secure the tentative independence, Khmelnytsky signed a treaty with Moscow, ultimately ceding the territory to the Russian tsar. So, was he a liberator or a villain? This volume examines drastically different narratives, from Ukrainian, Jewish, Russian, and Polish literature, that have sought to animate, deify, and vilify the seventeenth-century Cossack. Khmelnytsky's legacy, either as nation builder or as antagonist, has inhibited inter-ethnic and political rapprochement at key moments throughout history and, as we see in recent conflicts, continues to affect Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian national identity.

Part I

The Literary Aftermath of 1648

1

A Portrait in Ambivalence

The Case of Natan Hanover and His Chronicle, Yeven metsulah

Adam Teller

IN 1994, YO’EL RABA, a Polish-born Israeli scholar, wrote a comprehensive survey of the historiography surrounding the Jews’ fate during the Khmelnytsky uprising, which he called Between Remembrance and Denial.¹ Though written in the State of Israel at the end of the twentieth century, this work of monumental scholarship was firmly in a Jewish historiographical tradition whose roots go back at least to the Middle Ages, because it focused very narrowly on issues of Jewish martyrology.² Raba’s goal was to see how the fate of the Jews massacred in the uprising was reflected in historical depictions of the events from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. His analysis was given a clearly twentieth-century aspect by his decision to use a nationalist framework to analyze his sources: these were largely divided into Jewish, Polish, or Ukrainian writings, setting up not just comparisons but confrontations between the three.

In fact, Raba framed his whole work around the question of Holocaust denial—dedicating the book “To the memory of the victims of the Holocaust which is denied while the survivors are still alive.” In this highly emotive context, what Raba saw as the downplaying of Jewish suffering in writings on the seventeenth century became subsumed in the category of Holocaust denial.

Though contemporary reviews were quick to critique Raba’s work for this, new approaches to understanding the events were neither suggested nor developed.³ It is my goal here to reconsider how the Jews’ part in the uprising—and particularly their attitude toward it—developed. In order to do this, I shall look beyond the vivid descriptions of death and destruction in the Jewish historical chronicles composed in the 1650s to the portrayal of Ukrainians, Cossacks, and particularly Bohdan Khmelnytsky himself.

Five short Hebrew chronicles and one “historical song” in Yiddish were published in these years. One other remained in manuscript, to be published only at the end of the nineteenth century.⁴ For the most part, these were extremely short texts, focusing almost entirely on the sufferings of the Jews and paying little or no attention to the broader historical context in which they occurred. Two of them—Tsok ha-‘itim by Meir of Szczebrzeszyn and Petaḥ teshuvah by Gavriel Schussberg of Rzeszów—contained a certain degree of detail that could shed some light on the larger picture.⁵ Only one, however, Yeven metsulah by Natan Neta Hanover of Zasław, paid significant attention to the developments in the non-Jewish world that led up to the outbreak of the uprising and shaped its course. I shall, therefore, focus most of my discussion on this text.⁶

Hanover, the author, who fled his hometown in the face of the Cossack assault of summer 1648, joined the stream of Jewish refugees spreading across Europe, passing through the Holy Roman Empire and Amsterdam, and ending up in Italy in 1652. He eventually reached Venice, where he published his chronicle. He was a talented writer, having previously made his living as a preacher, and he put his literary skills to excellent use in his historical chronicle. After completing the text, Hanover seems to have received rabbinical ordination in Italy, since he took up the post of rabbi first in Jassy in 1660, and subsequently in Ungarisch Brod, where he was killed during the Ottoman push to Vienna in 1683.⁷

Yeven metsulah is written in limpid Hebrew prose, eschewing the flowery language beloved of the rabbinic authors of his generation. Though the book quotes from the classical sources of Jewish culture to add depth to its narrative, it refers much more to the Bible, well known from the weekly synagogue readings, than to the complex Talmudic text. As a result, though uneducated Jews who did not know any Hebrew would not have been able to read Yeven metsulah, it was not necessary to be a full-blown Talmudic scholar in order to understand it. This undoubtedly led to its popularity with a relatively wide audience and to as many as four editions before 1800.⁸

Hanover’s skill as a writer meant that his prose was of such deceptive simplicity that many generations of historians have taken it as a wholly credible firsthand testimony of events.⁹ It is only recently that more critical readings have begun to reveal the levels of artifice in the text, and the literary means he employed to get his messages across.¹⁰

The book itself is quite short. After an author’s foreword, the text is divided into three sections. It opens with an historical introduction, which discusses the political, religious, economic, and military background to the events, starting from the accession of Zygmunt III in 1593. The body of the book focuses largely on the massacres of the Jews in various towns. Structured episodically, descriptions of the strategic and political maneuvering of the Polish and Ukrainian camps are used to connect the various sections, providing some explanation of how the events unfolded. The third and final section of the text consists of an encomium to the Polish-Jewish society supposedly destroyed in the uprising.

This tripartite structure, as well as the wealth of detail—particularly of events in the non-Jewish world—marked Hanover’s text out from the chronicles that preceded it. The extent to which Hanover had read the Jewish texts published before his own is not entirely clear. He had certainly read Tsok ha-‘itim, for he lifted phrases and even sections directly from it.¹¹ As far as the other works go, it is simply impossible to tell. However, even a cursory comparison reveals that Hanover’s was a highly original work, written in its own way and taking an independent line in describing and explaining events.

This is abundantly clear even in the foreword he appended to his text. In it, he claimed that the events of the uprising had been foreseen by no less a prophet than King David, who had written a series of allusions to them into the book of Psalms. He did so with numerology: by substituting a number for each letter of the verses he quoted, Hanover could add them up and then show how other phrases directly linked to the uprising had letters that made the same arithmetical total. Although his math was often quite shaky, many of the phrases he used featured the name of Khmelnytsky quite prominently. For example, he showed that the verse “I am sunk in the deep mire” (Psalms 69:3) had the same value as the phrase “Khmel and the Tatars joined together with the Orthodox Christians.” Thus, in Hanover’s presentation, Khmelnytsky was playing a crucial—and Divinely ordained—role in the events. Of course, this did not endear Khmelnytsky to Hanover, who heaped traditional Jewish invective on him, calling him “the oppressor Khmel, may his name be blotted out, [and] may God send a curse upon him.”¹²

One remarkable thing about this portrayal is that Hanover’s was the only published text to give Khmelnytsky such a central role. Most of the others mentioned him, but it was generally only in passing as hetman of the Cossack forces, often without invective. In fact, the popular chronicle Megilat ‘efah did not mention Khmelnytsky at all!¹³ Thus, the fact that in the Jewish communal memory Khmelnytsky came to be identified not just as the leader of the Cossacks but as an archetypal and murderous enemy of the Jews should be seen as a direct result of Hanover’s writing.¹⁴

This being so, it might have been expected that Hanover would present Khmelnytsky and the Ukrainians in an unsympathetic light throughout his chronicle. Such was not the case. Though hostile, Hanover’s portrayal was multifaceted, and in one or two places even ambivalent, suggesting a much more complex attitude toward the man and especially his cause.

This can be seen in the historical introduction to the book. There, Hanover explained the motivations of both the Cossacks and the Ukrainian masses in joining the uprising. In this discussion, the Jews, though they appeared, were not central. Hanover identified three major causes of the unrest: the Counter-Reformation policy of Zygmunt III¹⁵ and his successors, which discriminated against the Orthodox Church in Ukraine; the economic exploitation of the peasants as part of the Polish colonization of the region; and the Cossacks’ struggle to improve their status and conditions of service. His descriptions emphasized the degradation caused to the Ukrainian peasants: “the Orthodox people became gradually impoverished. They were looked upon as lowly and inferior beings and became the slaves and the handmaids of the Polish people and of the Jews.”¹⁶

His descriptions of an earlier rebellion might even be said to have evinced a measure of sympathy for the Ukrainians: “there arose an Orthodox priest, named Nalevaiko, to avenge the cruel treatment accorded his people, whom he exhorted in the following words, ‘How long will you keep silent at the cruelties perpetrated by the Polish people’.”¹⁷ Another rebel, Pavluk, whose 1637 uprising was the first to target Jews, was also described as avenging the wrong done to his people.¹⁸ For Hanover, then, these rebellions were, in fact, responses to genuine wrongs inflicted on the Ukrainian population. He understood the complexity of these events and was not willing to ignore it even when Jews had been attacked.

On the issue of economic exploitation too, which formed a major part of the Jews’ income in Ukraine, Hanover’s attitude toward the peasants was quite sympathetic. He described their situation, using a verse from Exodus (1:14): “Their lives [i.e., those of the Ukrainian peasants] were made bitter by hard labor, in mortar and bricks, and in all manner of services in the house and the fields.” He continued: “So wretched and lowly had they become that all classes of people, even the lowliest among them [i.e., the Jews.—A.T.], became their overlords.”¹⁹ In this short section, Hanover displayed a highly relativist stance, which allowed him to identify with the suffering Ukrainians and speak, as it were, in their voice as they described the Jews as “the lowliest of people.” It was a highly unusual tactic in premodern Jewish writing, enabling him to give voice to the religious humiliation felt by the Orthodox in the face of Jewish empowerment during the Polish colonization of Ukraine. Beyond this, however, it actually recast relations between the Jews and their neighbors in a new light: in this reading, the Ukrainian peasants had become the suffering Children of Israel and the Jews the cruel Egyptians!

Hanover was not the only one to notice this reversal. Joel Sirkes, the leading rabbinical authority of the previous generation, who had served as rabbi in a number of Ukrainian communities before taking on the prestigious Kraków rabbinate, wrote, “Cries of oppression are emanating from gentiles in most areas, that the Jews are lording it over them and controlling them like kings and noblemen.”²⁰ Sirkes’s teacher, Rabbi Feyvish of Kraków, also expressed himself on this point. Criticizing the Jewish arendarze who leased entire noble estates, and kept them at work on the Sabbath day, he wrote: “when the Jews were enslaved in Egypt, they took care not to work on the Sabbath. How much the more so now when we are not the slaves but the masters, should we take care to keep the Sabbath day holy.”²¹ Once again, the rabbi was describing the reversal of the Egyptian slavery: the Jews had become the Egyptian masters, the Ukrainian peasants the Israelite slaves.

These texts seem to show that Jewish leaders were aware that the Jews’ role in settling the Ukraine on behalf of the Polish Crown had brought them great power, which was arousing serious antagonisms among the Ukrainian peasantry. More than that, however, the texts that cast the Ukrainians as the Children of Israel being ruled over by the Egyptians/Jews might seem to have been expressing some identification or sympathy with the peasants’ plight. It seems reasonable, therefore, to suggest that among the Jews of mid-seventeenth-century Ukraine there were those who did not view their participation in the colonization as a wholly positive thing, and who identified with the plight of the local population.

Hanover himself seems to have suggested such a possibility in the next section of his chronicle. Before he plunged into the bloody descriptions of the Jewish massacres, he gave his own take on the background to Khmelnytsky’s decision to embark on the uprising. He did so by telling the complex story of the future hetman’s relations with the magnate Koniecpolski family, which owned the estates on which he lived. Though it did not agree in every detail with the picture arising from other sources, Hanover’s story certainly had much in common with them. It described Khmelnytsky’s difficult relations with the aged Stanisław Koniecpolski and their continuation with his son, Aleksander, and his wife Joanna Barbara Zamoyska. Khmelnytsky’s betrayal of the Koniecpolski campaign against the Tatars was described, as was the subsequent confiscation of Khmelnytsky’s property, his imprisonment, pardon, and finally flight.²²

There was, however, one way in which Hanover’s story departed dramatically from all the other sources: the roles that he ascribed to Jewish actors were unique to his narrative. Hanover mentioned two Jews who were instrumental in the events. The first was Zechariah Sobilenki, who worked in the Koniecpolski administration as the arendarz (and so governor) of Khmelnytsky’s hometown of Chyhyryn. When Zechariah heard Khmelnytsky boast of his betrayal of Koniecpolski’s Tatar campaign, he informed his noble lord, who had the Cossack imprisoned. The second Jewish figure was called Jacob Sobilenki, the same surname as the first.²³ Jacob was one of Khmelnytsky’s confidants and helped him secure his release from prison by accusing the first Sobilenki of lying. On...