boiled over in the form of a Cossack attack on Jews in Poltava, in which 200
Jews were killed and several synagogues destroyed.
This was the background to the rise of Bogdan Chmielnicki as the leader of
the Cossacks. He was staunchly anti-Polish. According to legend, a Polish
noble had pillaged his tent, carried off his wife, and flogged his son to death.
By 1648, he had been elected hetman by one of the Cossack clans, and then
negotiated alliances with the other clans. In the spring of 1648, he incited the
Cossacks to rise against the Poles. Between May 6 and May 15, the first
encounter between Cossacks and the Polish army, the Poles were crushed, and
the whole region erupted in open rebellion.
The ensuing breakdown of law and order included attacks on Jews
throughout the region. As one observer noted, these attacks were brutal:
Killing was accompanied by barbarous torture; the victims were flayed
alive, split asunder, clubbed to death, roasted on coals, or scalded with
boiling water. ... The most cruelty, however, was shown the Jews. They
were destined for 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. Jews were butchered without mercy. Thousands of Jewish
infants were thrown into wells, or buried alive.Young Jewish women, when spared, were forcibly baptized and taken as wives.
In response, some Jews fled to walled cities, hoping for protection there. This
turned out to be even more tragic. In several cases, the attacking Cossacks
promised the Poles inside the city walls that the Poles would be spared if they
handed over the Jews. By 1650, the worst was over as the Polish army finally
managed to restore order. But upheavals continued in Poland. In 1654,
Russian and Swedish invasions begin, and continued for nearly a century.
The events of 1648–9 left a permanent impact on Polish Jewry. The num-
ber of Jews killed was in the tens of thousands; some estimate the death toll
to have been as high as 100,000. Dozens of Jewish communities in southern
Poland were devastated, and never fully recovered. Jews learned a valuable
political lesson from these events, namely that passivity and total reliance on
the authorities for protection were no longer wise. During the Russian inva-
sion of Poland in 1654, Jews played a more active role in defending Poland by
helping to build barricades, dig trenches, and provision soldiers. At the same,
time, the Catholic Church, particularly its more fanatic elements, reasserted
its authority in Poland after 1648. Students at Catholic colleges periodically
attacked Jews; in 1657, there was a blood libel accusation in Grodno.
The events of 1648–9, moreover, set in motion a demographic shift within
Polish Jewry – specifically, an exodus of Jews from the small towns of southern
Poland. Some went westward to Germany, the first stage of a westward movement
World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750 125