Bogdan Chmielnicki (or, as transliterated from the Cyrillic alphabet, Khmelnitsky [1595—1657] led the Cossack and Ukrainian peasant uprising between 1648 and 1649 against Polish rule in the Ukraine, wreaking havoc on hundreds of Jewish communities in the process. Traditional Jewish commentary placed “Chmiel the Wicked” in the ranks of Amalek and Haman— symbols of absolute evil and boundless, irrational hatred for Jews. Chmielnicki and his followers committed acts of appalling cruelty against Jews, although the Catholic Poles were the main enemy for him and his followers. Jews were attacked as allies of the Poles, since they often served as administrators of the estates of the Polish nobles.
To term these massacres antisemitic is problematic, not only in the obvious sense that Jews were not attacked because of their “Semitic race” (a concept that would have had no meaning at the time) but also even in the looser, more all-encompassing use of the term antisemitic. The hatred expressed by Cossacks and Ukrainian peasants seems to have emerged primarily from “real” or “normal” resentments over economic exploitation and from nationalistic fervor, as distinguished from a Christian hatred deriving from fantasies about Jews and an irrational demoniza-tion of them that had little relation to Jewish activity in the real world. That Jews were known to consider the Ukrainian peasants to be a lower form of humanity, little better than beasts of the field, no doubt stoked hatred for them, but such attitudes were hardly restricted to the Jews; they were the norm among the Polish, as well as the Russian, upper classes. Resentment found expression in religious terms, in that Jews were threatened with death if they would not convert to Christianity and synagogues were desecrated, but Christians acted with comparable cruelty and brutality to other Christians; Catholic priests were a special target of Chmielnicki and his Orthodox Christian followers. Still, the Jews, since they were the immediate agents of the Polish ruling classes in the exploitation of the Ukrainian peasants and were more numerous than either the nobility or the clergy, were often first in line, as it were, for violent retribution. It was a brutal age, one in which religious identities were closely linked to social and economic position, and in the end, it is impossible to untangle religion from other factors.
Contemporary Jewish accounts of the massacres placed the numbers of Jewish dead at around 100,000, a figure that mounted in subsequent accounts to hundreds of thousands. But most recent historians have scaled back considerably the probable number of deaths, in part simply because the population of Jews in the eighteenth century could not possibly have risen to the levels it did in Ukrainian and Polish lands if there had indeed been a mid-seventeenth-century massacre in which a major part of the Jewish population (which totaled approximately 350,000) was killed. Nonetheless, contemporary Jews considered the Chmielnicki massacres to be the third great destruction of the Jewish people, the greatest since ancient times, and a devastating blow to Jewish life in the area. Refugees clogged adjoining lands, and migration out of the Ukraine became more the norm than migration into it, as had been the case since the late Middle Ages (although, clearly, large numbers of refugees returned once the uprising had subsided). The messianic movement of Shabbetai Zevi that swept the area in the years after the massacres was no doubt influenced by them, although modern scholars differ in how powerful the impact was; some see the massacres as a gruesome but brief and not terribly significant interruption in the remarkably steady growth and expansion of Polish Jewry in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.
It is revealing that Jewish deaths in the Chmielnicki massacres, whatever their actual numbers, were little noted in the histories subsequently written by Ukrainians, Poles, or Russians. For Ukrainians in the twentieth century, Chmielnicki became a national hero. He may, then, be counted as an example of how one people’s villain is another’s hero, one people’s tragedy another’s triumph.
—Albert S. Lindemann
See also Haman; Poland; Russian Orthodox
Church; Shabbetai Zevi
References
Hanover, Nathan. Abyss of Despair / Yeven Metzu-lah: The Famous 17th Century Chronicle Depicting Jewish Life in Russia and Poland during the Chmielnicki Massacres. Translated by A. Mesch and edited by William B. Helmreich (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2002).
Israel, Jonathan I. European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
World History
