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KHMELNYTSKYI AND THE JEWS
Jewish chroniclers of
the seventeenth century provide vastly different and invariably inflated
figures with respect to the loss of life among the Jewish population of
Ukraine during the Khmel'nyts'kyi era. The numbers range from 60,000-80,000
(Nathan Hannover) to 100,000 (Sabbatai Cohen) killed and from 300
communities to 670,000 households destroyed. Almost with¬out exception,
today's specialists on the period reject what they describe as the grossly
exaggerated figures in the chronicles. The Israeli scholars Shmuel Ettinger
and Bernard D. Weinryb speak instead of the 'annihilation of tens of
thousands of Jewish lives,' and the Ukrainian-American historian Jaroslaw
Pelenski narrows the number of Jewish deaths to between 6,000 and 14,000.
Despite the correctives provided
by recent scholarship, the old chronicles manage to retain a strong hold on
the modern reader's imagination. Perhaps the best known and most often
published chronicle is the Yeven Metzulah, by the rabbi of Ostroh, in
Volhynia, Nathan Hannover. A Hebrew version was first published in Venice
in 1653, and has since then appeared in many transla¬tions, including
several in English under the title The Deep Mire or The Abyss of Despair.
In the introduction to the 1983 edition of the Hannover chronicle, an
American specialist in Judaic studies, William B. Helmreich, still refers
to the events of the Khmel'nyts'kyi era as 'one of the worst catastrophes
ever to befall the Jewish people.' In the following excerpts from The Abyss
of Despair, Hannover tells us why he chose his title, how the attitudes of
the Cossack leader are supposedly characteristic of all Ukrainians, and,
finally, what hap¬pened to those Jews who were unable to escape from the
Left Bank westward beyond the Dnieper River.
I named my book YEVEN METZULAH
(THE DEEP MIRE), because the words of the Psalmist [Psalms 69:3] allude to
these terrible events, and speak of the oppressors, the Tatars and the
Ukrainians as well as of the arch-enemy, Chmiel, may his name be blotted
out, may God send a curse upon him. This book may thus be a chroni¬cle to
serve future generations.
For while he [Khmel'nyts'kyi] was
soft spoken, he had seven abominations in his heart; a man plotting
iniquity, in the manner of all the Ukrainians, who at first appear to the
Jews as friends, and speak to them pleasant and comforting words, beguiling
them with soft and kind speech, while they lie with their tongues and are
deceitful and untrustworthy.
Whoever failed to escape or was
unable to flee was killed. These persons died cruel and bitter deaths. Some
were skinned alive and their flesh was thrown to the dogs; some had their
hands and limbs chopped off, and their bodies thrown on the highway only to
be trampled by wagons and crushed by horses; some had wounds inflicted upon
them, and [were] thrown on the street to die a slow death: they writhed in
their blood until they breathed their last; others were buried alive. The
enemy slaughtered infants in the laps of their mothers. They were sliced
into pieces like fish. They slashed the bellies of pregnant women, removed
their infants and tossed them in their faces. Some women had their bellies
torn open and live cats placed in them. The bellies were then sewed up with
the live cats remaining within. They chopped off the hands of the victims
so that they would not be able to remove the cats from the bellies. The
infants were hung on the breasts of their mothers. Some children were
pierced with spears, roasted on the fire and then brought to their mothers
to be eaten. Many times they used the bodies of Jewish children as
improvised bridges upon which they later crossed. There was no cruel device
of murder in the whole world that was not perpetrated by the enemies. All
the four death penalties; stoning, burning, beheading, and strangling were
meted out to the Jews. Many were taken by the Tatars into captiv¬ity. Women
and virgins were ravished.... Similar atrocities were perpetrated in all
the settlements through which they passed. Also against the Polish people,
these cruelties were perpetrated, especially against the priests and
bishops.
SOURCE:
Nathan Hanover, Abyss of Despair:
The Famous 17th-Century Chronicle Depicting Jewish
Life in Russia and Poland during the Chmielnicki Massacres of 1648-1649,
Translated by
Abraham J. Mesch. 2nd ed.
(New Brunswick, N.J. and London 1983) pp. 25,34, and 43-44
SOURCE: Herodotus, The History,
translated by George Rawlinson, Great Books of the Western World, Vol. VI
(Chicago, London, and Toronto 1952), pp. 134-135•
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