Scythians, who invaded the regions hitherto spared by them, devastating them uninterruptedly for two years (1654–1656). The capture of the principal Polish cities by the combined hosts of the Muscovites and Cossacks was accompanied by the extermination or expulsion of the Jews. When Moghilev on the Dnieper130 surrendered to Russian arms, Tzar Alexis Michaelovich complied with the request of the local Russian inhabitants, and gave orders to expel the Jews and divide their houses between the magistracy and the Russian authorities (1654). The Jews, however, who were hoping for a speedy termination of hostilities, failed to leave the city at once, and had to pay severely for it. Towards the end of the summer of 1655 the commander of the Russian garrison in Moghilev, Colonel Poklonski, learned of the approach of a Polish army under the command of Radziwill. Prompted by the fear that the Jewish residents might join the approaching enemy, Poklonski ordered the Jews to leave the boundaries of the city, and, on the ground of their being Polish subjects, promised to have them transferred to the camp of Radziwill. Scarcely had the Jews, accompanied by their wives and children, and carrying with them their property, left the town behind them when the Russian soldiers, at the command of the same Poklonski, fell upon them and killed nearly all of them, plundering their property at the same time.
In Vitebsk the Jews took an active part in defending the town against the besieging Russian army. They dug trenches around the fortified castle, strengthened the walls, supplied the soldiers with arms, powder, and horses, and acted as scouts. When the city was finally taken by the Russians, the Jews were completely robbed by the Zaporozhian Cossacks, while many of them were taken captive, forcibly baptized, or exiled to Pskov, Novgorod, and Kazan.
The Jews suffered no less heavily from the riot which took place in Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, after its occupation by the combined army of Muscovites and Cossacks in August, 1655. A large part of the Vilna community fled for its life. Those who remained behind were either killed or banished from the town at the command of Tzar Alexis Michaelovich, who was anxious to comply with the request of the local Russian townspeople, to rid them of their Jewish competitors.
Shortly thereafter a similar fate overtook the central Polish provinces on the Vistula and the San River, which had hitherto been spared the horrors of the Cossacks and Muscovites. The invasion of Sweden, the third enemy of Poland (1655–1658), carried bloodshed into the very heart of the country. The Swedish King, Charles Gustav, reduced one city after the other, both the old and the new capital, Cracow and Warsaw, speedily surrendering to him. A large part of Great and Little Poland fell into the hands of the Swedes, and the Polish King, John Casimir, was compelled to flee to Silesia.
The easy victories of the Swedes were the result of the anarchy and political demoralization which had taken deep root in Poland. It was the treachery of the former Polish sub-Chancellor Radzieyevski that brought the Swedes into Poland, and the cowardice of the Shlakhta hastily surrendered the cities of Posen, Kalish, Cracow, and Vilna, to the enemy. Moreover the Swedes were welcomed by the Polish Protestants and Calvinists, who looked for their rescue to the northern Protestant power in the same way in which the Cossacks expected their salvation from Orthodox Russia.
The Jews were the only ones who had no political advantage in betraying their country, and their friendly attitude towards the Swedes no more than corresponded to the conduct of the Swedes towards them. At any rate, their patriotism was no more open to suspicion than that of the Poles themselves, who joined the power of Sweden to get rid of the yoke of Muscovy. Nevertheless, the Jews had to pay a terrible price for this lack of patriotism. They found themselves, in the words of a contemporary chronicler, in the position of a man who "fleeth from a lion, and is met by a bear."131 The Jews who had been spared by the Swedes were now annihilated by the patriotic Poles, who charged them with disloyalty. The bands of Polish irregulars, which had been organized in 1656, under the command of General Charnetzki, to save the country from the invader, vented their fury upon the Jews in all the localities which they wrested from the Swedes.
The massacre of Jews began in Great and Little Poland, without yielding in point of barbarism to the butcheries which, eight years previously, had been perpetrated in the Ukraina. The Polish hosts of Charnetzki had learned from the Cossacks the art of exterminating the Jews. Nearly all the Jewish communities in the province of Posen, excepting the city of Posen, and those in the provinces of Kalish, Cracow, and Piotrkov, were destroyed by the saviors of the Polish fatherland. The brutal and wicked Charnetzki, to use the epithets applied to him by the Jewish annalists, or, to be more exact, the Polish mob marching behind him, committed atrocities which were truly worthy of the Cossacks. They tortured and murdered the rabbis, violated the women, killed the Jews by the hundreds, sparing only those who were willing to become Catholics. These atrocities were as a rule committed in the wake of the retreating Swedes, who had behaved like human beings towards the Jewish population. The humaneness shown by the Swedes to the Jews was avenged by the inhumanity of the Poles.
While the bands of Charnetzki were attacking the Jews in Western Poland, the Muscovites and Cossacks continued to disport themselves in the eastern districts and in Lithuania. Not until 1658 did the horrors of warfare begin gradually to subside, and only after terrible losses and humiliating concessions to Russia and Sweden was Poland able to restore its political order, which had been shaken to its foundation during the preceding years.
The losses inflicted upon the Jews of Poland during the fatal decade of 1648–1658 were appalling. In the reports of the chroniclers the number of Jewish victims varies between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand. But even if we accept the lower figure, the number of victims still remains colossal, excelling the catastrophes of the Crusades and the Black Death in Western Europe. Some seven hundred Jewish communities in Poland had suffered massacre and pillage. In the Ukrainian cities situated on the left banks of the Dnieper, the region populated by Cossacks, in the present Governments of Chernigov, Poltava, and part of Kiev, the Jewish communities had disappeared almost completely. In the localities on the right shore of the Dnieper or in the Polish part of the Ukraina as well as in those of Volhynia and Podolia, wherever the Cossacks had made their appearance, only about one-tenth of the Jewish population survived. The others had either perished during the rebellion of Khmelnitzki, or had been carried off by the Tatars into Turkey, or had emigrated to Lithuania, the central provinces of Poland, or the countries of Western Europe. All over Europe and Asia Jewish refugees or prisoners of war could be met with, who had fled from Poland, or had been carried off by the Tatars, and ransomed by their brethren. Everywhere the wanderers told a terrible tale of the woes of their compatriots and of the martyrdom of hundreds of Jewish communities.
An echo of all these horrors resounds in contemporary chronicles and mournful synagogue liturgies. One of the eye-witnesses of the Ukraina massacres, Nathan Hannover, from Zaslav, gives a striking description of it in his historical chronicle Yeven Metzula132 (1653). Sabbatai Kohen, the famous scholar of Vilna,133 brought this catastrophe to the notice of the Jewish world through a circular letter, entitled Meghillath Efa,134 which was accompanied by prayers in memory of the Polish martyrs. In heartrending liturgies many contemporary rabbis and writers, such as Lipman Heller, Rabbi of Cracow, Sheftel Horovitz, Rabbi of Posen, the scholars Meïr of Shchebreshin135 (Tzok ha-`Ittim,136 1650) and Gabriel Shussberg (Petah Teshuba,137 1653), lament the destruction of Polish Jewry. All these writings are pervaded with the bitter consciousness that Polish Jewry would never recuperate from the blows it had received, and that the peaceful nest in which the persecuted nation had found a refuge was destroyed forever.
4. The Restoration (1658–1697)
Fortunately these apprehensions proved to be exaggerated. Though decimated and impoverished, the Jewish population of Poland exceeded