Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century 9780691199863
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r escu e t he su rv i v i ng sou l s
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Rescue the Surviving Souls t he g r e at j e w ish r ef ugee cr isis of t he se v en t een t h ce n t u ry
Adam Teller
pr i nc et on u n i v e r si t y pr e ss pr i nc et on & ox for d
Copyright © 2020 by Princeton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press.princeton.edu Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire ox20 1tr press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-691-16174-7 ISBN (e-book) 978-0-691-19986-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956498 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Editorial: Eric Crahan and Thalia Leaf Production Editorial: Kathleen Cioffi Production: Danielle Amatucci and Jacqueline Poirier Publicity: Alyssa Sanford and Kate Farquhar-Thomson Jacket image: An Ottoman Jewish family welcomes a Jewish refugee from Poland for the Sabbath in Izmir, 1648–49. © The Oster Visual Documentation Center, Beit Hatfutsot, Old Core Exhibition This book has been composed in Miller Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of Americ a 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Rachel
עצם מעצמי ובשר מבשרי
Con t e n ts
Preface · xi Note on Place-Names and Transliteration · xvii Maps · xix Introduction
1
PA RT I
WA RT IME CH AOS A N D ITS R ESOLU TION: THE IN TER NA LLY DISPL ACED IN E A STER N EUR OPE
chapter 1
The Khmelnytsky Uprising and the Jews
23
chapter 2
The Chaos of War: Violence and Flight
31
chapter 3
The Refugees outside Ukraine
40
chapter 4
Facing the Refugee Experience
51
chapter 5
The Second Wave of Wars
62
chapter 6
Return and Reconstruction
76
chapter 7 Resolution PA RT II
88
CA P TUR E , SL AV ERY, A N D R A NSOM: THE TR A FFICK ED IN THE MEDITER R A N E A N WOR LD
chapter 8 Introduction
95
chapter 9
The Captives: From Ukraine to Crimea
98
chapter 10
From Crimea to Istanbul
[ vii ]
107
[ viii ] Con ten ts
chapter 11
Ransoming Captives: The Religious, Cultural, and Socioeconomic Background
116
chapter 12
On the Istanbul Slave Market
124
chapter 13
David Carcassoni’s Mission to Europe: The Sephardi Philanthropic Network
132
chapter 14
The Role of Italian Jewry
142
chapter 15
The Jews in the Land of Israel and the Spread of Sabbatheanism
160
chapter 16
The Fate of the Ransomed
180
chapter 17
Transregional Contexts
191
PA RT III
W EST WA R D: THE R EFUGEES IN THE HOLY ROM A N EMPIR E A ND BEYOND
chapter 18 Introduction
199
chapter 19
Background: German Jews and Polish Jews before 1648
206
chapter 20
The Trickle before the Flood: Refugees in the Holy Roman Empire, 1648–1654
215
chapter 21
On the Road: The Struggle for Survival
223
chapter 22
Over the Border: Refugee Settlement in the Empire’s Eastern Regions
231
chapter 23
Polish Jews Meet German Jews: The Refugees Elsewhere in the Empire
243
chapter 24 Amsterdam
259
Con ten ts [ ix ]
chapter 25
Starting New Lives
272
chapter 26
The End of the Crisis
286
Conclusion293 Appendix: The Question of Numbers · 307 Notes · 309 Bibliography of Primary Sources · 357 Index · 365
pr eface
writing this book, which has taken over a decade, has led me on an intellectual journey that I could not possibly have i magined at the outset. It began as a modest exercise in economic history focused on the ransoming of the Polish Jews captured by Tatars during the 1648 Khmelnytsky uprising. It has ended up as an economic, social, religious, and cultural history of a huge refugee crisis that embraced almost all the major Jewish centers of the seventeenth c entury. More than that, it has taught me that the uprising and the wars that followed it were not—as contemporary scholarship still holds—of passing significance but in fact set in motion a series of processes that would eventually reshape the Jewish world. High among t hese were the ways in which eastern European Jewry was so successful in overcoming the massive destruction and trauma it underwent. Rather than sinking into obscurity, it was able to bounce back and become the largest and arguably the most vibrant Jewish center from the eighteenth century until the Holocaust. Another was that the cooperation between Jews in far distant places as they struggled to relieve the refugees’ suffering became much more intensive and purposeful, making this the first step on the long road to the creation of the closely interconnected Jewish world we know t oday. Finally, the massive move of populations engendered a wide range of cultural encounters and interactions that would help set the stage for the development of modern Jewish identity. The book’s gaze, however, remains firmly fixed on the events of the mid-seventeenth c entury. At heart it tells a h uman story, focusing on the experiences of the refugees and captives themselves and examining them, as far as possible, on the basis of firsthand accounts. Only then does it begin to trace their fates and the attempts of various Jewish communities to help them in all the different environments where they found themselves: eastern, central, and western Europe, Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, and the Ottoman Empire from the Black Sea region to North Africa. Tracing even the bare outlines of such wide-ranging developments was made particularly difficult because they had dropped out of the grand narrative of Jewish history. They seem to have been overshadowed on the one hand by the traditional martyrological approach to the 1648 uprising itself and on the other by the huge spiritual upheaval engendered by the [ xi ]
[ xii ] pr eface
appearance and conversion of the false messiah, Shabtai Zvi, immediately after it. Yet the more I looked, the more I discovered that virtually every local history of the Jewish communities involved in events mentions the appearance of the Polish Jewish refugees as a moment of importance in its development. I had, therefore, to return to this huge, mostly pre-Holocaust, literature and extract the pieces of the story one by one. I was also amazed at the sheer wealth of primary sources that had survived even though, like the references in the historiography, they w ere not to be found in a single place. They were scattered across a vast range of materials of different types and often comprised just a few lines. Forced to engage in an arduous, though also hugely enjoyable, process of historical detective work, I amassed literally hundreds of source fragments from which I was finally able to reconstruct the course of events as a kind of mosaic. My problems did not end there, however. The story to be told was not confined to the setting of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had been the focus of my research until then. I had a great deal more to learn— the history of the Crimean Tatars and the Ottoman Empire, Mediterranean piracy and ransoming, and the nature and activities of millenarian Protestant groups in Amsterdam and London, to name but a few of the topics. There was also a linguistic issue to be faced: the sources were in no less than twelve languages. Still, inspired by the importance of the questions I was exploring, I decided to face the challenges and do all I could to overcome them. The result, despite its inevitable deficiencies, has, I believe, much to say to a range of audiences. Those interested in the Jewish past w ill learn of a crucial but overlooked chapter of early modern Jewish history, and through it see the significance that anti-Jewish violence has had for the development of Jewish life. For this study considers not just the numbers of dead but, more importantly, how the survivors (and other Jews) struggled to overcome the effects of the violence and in so doing created a new reality for themselves. Another key issue treated h ere is that of Jewish cultural development. By examining the reshaping of the Jewish world in the wake of the refugee crisis, this study identifies the forces of change not only in the non-Jewish setting in which each contemporary Jewish society found itself but also in a range of intra-Jewish connections and contacts that joined them one to another.
pr eface [ xiii ]
hose whose concerns lie elsewhere should find the book of interT est too. Its analysis of the Jews’ transregional philanthropic networks in and around the early modern Mediterranean sheds new light on the cross- cultural nature of life there, particularly highlighting a hitherto unknown range of connections between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Its focus on Jewish ransoming practices will also deepen our understanding of this important aspect of early modern life in the Mediterranean environment. Perhaps most pertinently of all, this is one of the few historical studies of a refugee crisis, studying it in all its phases, from beginning to end. Dealing with refugees is an issue that continues to trouble us even t oday, so investigating how past societies faced those same challenges can provide scholars examining them in contemporary settings a range of new perspectives. I could not have written a book of such complexity without a g reat deal of help from many friends and colleagues. First among them is David Ruderman. His enthusiastic support for me and my scholarship over many years has been of crucial importance in helping me complete the project. I have also enjoyed the ongoing help and support of Gershon Hundert and Steve Zipperstein. Thank you all very much indeed. In addition, I should like to thank Hava Turniansky and Elḥanan Reiner, who, first as teachers and then as colleagues, opened my eyes to the enormous importance of old- Yiddish literature for understanding the cultural history of early modern Ashkenazi Jewry. A number of colleagues generously agreed to read parts of the manuscript, ranging from single chapters to the entire book. Thank you to (in alphabetical order) Bernard Cooperman, Mikhail Kizilov, Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, Maud Mandel, Ada Rapoport-Albert, and Shaul Stampfer. I am also grateful to the two anonymous readers chosen by Princeton University Press for their very helpful comments, particularly t hose that pushed me to refine my thinking on the issues of gender and religious solidarity. Many other friends have shared their expertise with me in various ways, from helping translate difficult texts to elucidating points of detail. Lewis Aron, Ofer Ashwal, Galit Atlas, Amiri Ayanna, Israel Bartal, Shlomo Berger z”l, Jay Berkovitz, Francesca Bregolli, Palmira Brummet, Mania Cieśla, Hal Cook, Robert Davis, Beshara Doumani, Suzanne Duff, Susan Einbinder, Jacob Goldberg z”l, Molly Greene, David Griffiths, Joseph Hacker, Daniel Hershenzon, Igor Kąkolewski, Debra Kaplan, Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Konstanza Kunst, Michael Miller, Tara Nummedal, Derek Penslar, Jennifer Poliakov, Agnes Romer-Segal, E. Natalie Rotman, Noga Rubin, Tamar Salmon-Mack, Jonathan Sarna, Tamar Shadmi, Noa Shashar, David Sorkin,
[ xiv ] pr eface
Andrew Sparling, Richard Teller, Joshua Teplitzky, Francesca Trivellato, Anat Vaturi, Rebekka Voss, Carsten Wilke, and Rebecca Wolpe provided me with much-needed help. Thanks to you all. This research was supported with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Jewish History in New York, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Dean of Faculty’s Office, the Program in Judaic Studies, and the Humanities Research Funds at Brown University. I should also like to thank the staffs at the following institutions who helped me in the course of writing the book: the National Library of Israel, the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, the Warsaw University Library, the Katz Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and the Rockefeller Library at Brown University. The Beit Hatfutsot Museum in Tel Aviv generously gave me permission to reproduce the picture that adorns the cover. David Cox of Cox Cartographic Ltd. prepared the maps. I presented parts of the research at forums in different institutions and benefited greatly from the comments I received there. I am grateful for the invitations to speak at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, Brandeis University, the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, the Davis Center at Princeton University, the Simon-Dubnow-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur at the University of Leipzig, the University of Frankfurt a.M., Yale University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Maryland, the Medieval and Early Modern History Seminar and the Middle East Studies Seminar, both at Brown University, and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. I should like to thank the AJS Review for its permission to republish in the introduction to this book parts of my article “Revisiting Baron’s ‘Lachrymose Conception’: The Meanings of Violence in Jewish History,” AJS Review 38, no. 2 (2014): 431–43. My thanks also to Brigitta van Rheinberg, Eric Crahan, and the staff at Princeton University Press for their belief in this project and their help in bringing it to final fruition, as well as to Jennifer Backer for her skilled copyediting. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my f ather, Neville, and my b rother, Matthew. Dad read each chapter as I wrote it and gave me the kind of incisive critique that only a professional writer with over sixty years of experience can. Matt read the completed manuscript with the practiced eye of an award-winning travel writer and gave me invaluable advice as I began the revisions. I am incredibly grateful to you both.
pr eface [ xv ]
Finally, researching and writing this study would have been quite inconceivable without my wife, Rachel Rojanski, by my side. Her influence on every aspect of my life, intellectual and mundane, is immeasurable, and her love is the foundation on which all else is built. She is truly my soul mate and I dedicate the book to her with all my love. Brookline March 2019
no t e on pl ace-n a m es a n d t r a nsl i t er at ion
the historical geography of the regions discussed in this book is very complex. The borders between states and regions were fluid and changed regularly. The boundaries between the different ethnic and cultural groups that inhabited any given area w ere also highly porous, which meant that different populations might be living in the same space at the same time. One of the concrete expressions of this complexity is the issue of place- names. Not only would t hese change as any given region or town changed hands, but each of the different groups living t here would have had its own name for it. In some cases, the differences might have been small, in o thers very significant. This leaves the author of a study such as this in a bind when it comes to choosing one form over another. The solution I have a dopted here is to use contemporary place-names as far as possible. In cases where a previous name is likely to be more familiar to readers, I have included it in parentheses after the first mention of the place. Well-known English versions of place-names, such as Warsaw and Königsberg, have been adopted in only the most commonly used cases. The notes and bibliography use a simplified system of transliteration from Hebrew and Yiddish that should make the sense of the words clear to those who know the languages in question.
[ xvii ]
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map 7. Silesia, Bohemia, and Moravia.
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r escu e t he su rv i v i ng sou l s
Introduction
What Is This Book About? In the mid-seventeenth c entury, a huge wave of Jewish refugees and forced migrants from eastern Europe spread across the Jewish communities of Europe and Asia. Sparked by the anti-Jewish violence of the g reat Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648 in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the flight continued during the subsequent Russian invasion that began in 1654 and then in the fight against the Swedish occupation that lasted from 1655 to 1660.1 Destitute, often traumatized by their experiences, and lacking any means of support, t hese refugees posed a huge social, economic, and ethical challenge to the Jewish world of their day. Communities across that world, touched by the crisis, answered this challenge in unprece dented ways and, both individually and jointly, began to organize relief for the Polish-Lithuanian Jews wherever they now found themselves.2 The aim of this book, therefore, is to examine this refugee crisis, its causes, its development, and what that meant in human terms for those caught up in it, as well as how the Jewish communities of the day organized to deal with it and what its consequences were for the future development of Jewish life. At its heart are three major questions, whose answers not only are crucial for understanding the events of the seventeenth century but also have significance extending well beyond it. The first asks how Jewish society reacted to the persecution and vio lence suffered by the Jews of Poland-Lithuania. Clearly, suffering is not an abstract t hing and must be studied in its particular historical context, in this case the seventeenth century; the same goes for the responses to it. However, the matter does not end there. How contemporaries understood these phenomena—and so reacted to them—was determined by the Jews’ [ 1 ]
[ 2 ] In troduction
cultural background, and this, though s haped by its immediate context, was rooted in an ancient and very diverse religious tradition. To understand the meaning of the events for the Jews of the seventeenth c entury, then, we must look back at the history of Jewish suffering and responses to it in previous times. On quite a different level, we w ill also see how the events analyzed here played a significant role in determining the development of Jewish society wherever they were felt. So, examining the Jews’ reactions to the persecution and suffering of mid-seventeenth-century eastern Europe is of crucial importance for understanding the Jewish experience not just at the time but long before and long a fter it. The second question asks about the character of the relationship between the various Jewish communities that cooperated to help the refugees. On one level, the relationship between the different centers during the seventeenth-century refugee crisis was based on the direct contacts between them; on another level, the common effort of helping the mass of unfortunates fleeing persecution and suffering brought different centers closer together, even when the direct contacts between them w ere sporadic and weak. On top of that, Jewish communities across the world shared a sense of belonging to a single collective that made them feel responsible for Jews suffering elsewhere. Since this multifaceted relationship was key in shaping relief strategies in the different places where the refugees found themselves, its elucidation is a central issue here. However, asking what connected the Jewish communities of the seventeenth century inevitably leads to asking about both the history of t hose connections and their future influence. In that way, this study, though it deals with only one historical setting, will also allow us to revisit one of the most difficult questions in the study of the Jewish past: What is it that has united the Jewish experience across such g reat distances of time and space? The third of the questions this study asks deals with how the nature of the refugee crisis in the seventeenth c entury may have something to contribute to the ways in which we understand the history of refugee issues in general. We live in a time in which the mass movement of populations has become a global problem. The existence of so many p eople fleeing vio lence, persecution, or extreme poverty presents western society in particu lar with a range of extremely complex economic, social, cultural, political, and moral issues. Though still something of a stepchild in the rather presentist field of refugee and forced migration studies, the historical study of refugee issues is increasingly valued because of the perspectives it can offer on contemporary problems.3
In troduction [ 3 ]
The period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century is particularly fertile ground for this kind of study because it seems to have witnessed the first modern examples of refugee crises. In fact, according to Nicholas Terpstra, refugee movements actually characterize the early modern period since they w ere an expression of the new religious feelings aroused in the period of the Reformation.4 However, there are signs that the focus is beginning to move away from the questions of persecution and religious identity involved in refugee movements to issues of relief. Terpstra deals with t hese in his book, as does David van der Linden in his work on Huguenot refugees in the Dutch Republic.5 The present study is also meant to be a contribution to this new direction. It takes as its starting point not the religious tensions that led to the mass flight of Jews from eastern Europe but the experiences of the refugees themselves. The discussion focuses on how they reached safety and were looked after, their interactions with the communities they found there, and the choices they made in rebuilding their lives. This, then, is a socioeconomic and cultural history of a refugee crisis that asks not how it was caused but how it played out on the ground and how it was resolved.
Approaching the Issues Though the implications of the questions to be asked h ere are broad, the study itself is limited to the seventeenth-century refugee crisis, by which I mean both the experiences of the displaced and the efforts to help them. It was not the first such crisis in Jewish history—the expulsion and flight of the Jews from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century, for example, had caused their own upheaval a hundred and fifty years earlier.6 Still, the seventeenth-century crisis was extremely extensive in terms of both geographical range and communities affected. It was felt from Amsterdam in the west to Safivid Iran in the east, and from the Baltic coast in the north to Ottoman Cairo in the south and touched both Ashkenazi and Sephardi centers. The major Jewish communities involved included Kraków, Poznań, Slutzk, Prague, Vienna, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Venice, Padua, Mantua, Istanbul, and Jerusalem. In working together on behalf of the refugees, they began to exploit the various possibilities that had developed in the early modern world for transregional and cross-c ultural connections between different Jewish centers. The need for concerted action on behalf of the Polish Jews strengthened the ties between these communities and
[ 4 ] In troduction
significantly increased the range of intercommunal cooperation. In fact, it was the first time that so many different Jewish centers had been brought into such purposeful contact with each other. Most of the relief work was done on the local level, where individual communities were faced with a stream of destitute and desperate refugees needing homes as well as some means of support. The generosity with which the communities responded by opening their homes to the strangers or donating money to support them gave the refugees the opportunity to survive u ntil they could decide on their f utures. T hese could involve either a difficult and dangerous return to a previous home or a no less difficult start to a new life in new surroundings. The costs of the crisis were extremely heavy for the refugees themselves. Not only forced to leave their homes and lose much of their property, most had, in one way or another, suffered (or witnessed) astonishing brutality during the wars and in the experience of flight and/or capture.7 Thus the devastation they felt not only was due to displacement and impoverishment but had significant psychological and spiritual aspects as well. Tens of thousands of shattered lives had to be rebuilt in the wake of the crisis, presenting the refugees with a challenge that went beyond the social and the economic. In order to overcome the horrors they had undergone, they needed to make sense of what had happened to them so that their terrible experiences would become part of a cohesive life story rather than a shattering blow to it.8 This was best done in the realm of religious thought and ritual. Spiritual leaders, from the greatest rabbis to the lowliest preachers, struggled to find meaning in the tragedy. In addition, a g reat deal of religious poetry and prayer was composed, and time found in the calendar for communities (mostly Ashkenazi) to recite it together. In eastern Europe, a special day of memory and fasting was instituted, which provided the kind of social support that the returned refugees needed to work through their traumatic memories and normalize them within the framework of their daily lives.9 So, w hether one looks at the social, economic, religious, or psychological aspects of the refugee crisis, it would seem that the local, regional, and transregional solutions that the Jews of the mid-seventeenth c entury found were remarkably successful. In fact, though it took more than two decades, the refugee crisis appears to have come to a more or less happy end just a few years a fter the last of Poland-Lithuania’s wars was concluded in 1667. By that time, most of the Jews who had originally fled were
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finally settled, having e ither resumed their previous lives back home or started new ones in new places.
Methodological Questions: Rethinking the Jewish Past The first step in understanding this complex set of events must involve the reconstruction of the flight itself. The analysis will begin at the level of the refugees’ individual experiences, as difficult and horrifying as they were, since almost everything that was done during the crisis was aimed at relieving the suffering of individuals, w hether on their own or in groups. The study will then discuss how Jews across the world organized in order to relieve the terrible distress that confronted them. This organ ization took many forms—social, economic, cultural, and religious—and was done on three levels: locally, in individual communities; regionally, through the collaboration of communities in a given territory or polity; and transregionally, by means of cooperation between communities in different territories or polities. The relief efforts, by their very nature, involved Jews in a range of different places meeting the refugees whom they wanted to help, an encounter that could have significant cultural consequences for all involved. These too will be examined. Of course, this transregional cooperation had its limits. A number of communities either refused to take in refugees or shipped them out almost as soon as they arrived. Beyond that, a not insignificant number of unscrupulous individuals were happy to exploit the wave of philanthropic activity for personal gain. Though neither of these w ere major phenomena, they were as much a part of the response to the refugee crisis as intercommunal generosity and so cannot be ignored. In fact, it is r eally only by understanding the limits of Jewish solidarity that its full significance can be understood. The study w ill conclude with a discussion of the extent to which all the philanthropic activity succeeded in the short and the long term, and how it helped shape the f uture of Jewish life for both the refugees themselves and the societies in which they ended up.10 Such an analysis seems to fly in the face of two generally accepted ways in which contemporary Jewish historiography conceives of the Jewish past. The first involves downplaying the significance of anti-Jewish persecution in Jewish history, while the second emphasizes the unique importance of interactions with surrounding non-Jewish societies and cultures for the development of Jewish life. Accordingly, before embarking on the
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study, I should explain why I think it is time to revisit t hese popular preconceptions about Jewish history.
the importance of the lachrymose conception For most historians of the Jewish past, the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648 is synonymous with just one thing: huge massacres of Jews. Known popularly as gezeirot taḥ ve-tat, what seems to concern scholars most about them is the number of Jewish victims.11 This has led to a very narrow focus on events, which conceals as much as it reveals. Though many thousands of Jews were massacred, many more fled the violence and survived. The intensive search for demographic data on the dead, important as it is, has left the experiences of the survivors largely unexplored. And since it was precisely them to whom the task of rebuilding Jewish life fell, that seems a terrible oversight. This study, then, proposes a new approach to gezeirot taḥ ve-tat focusing not on the violence but on its consequences, local, regional, and transregional. At the heart of the discussion are not the dead but the living—the survivors, particularly t hose who fled the violence. In order to understand the full significance of the uprising for Jewish history we need to look closely at their experiences, not only during the war but a fter it, too. They were not simply a body of passive victims but individual people, each doing whatever s/he could, first to survive and then to reconstruct meaningful lives. Though they w ere initially swept up in events well beyond their control, it was the subsequent decisions they made and the actions they took that r eally determined the long-term effects of the uprising for Jewish life. No less important than the survivors were those outside the war zone who helped them survive. They too had to deal with the immediate consequences of the violence, w hether in the form of refugees turning up on their doorsteps or in the ever-mounting requests for money to help relief efforts elsewhere. In response, they developed policy on the local and regional levels and organized better forms of long-range cooperation, sometimes joining communities separated by thousands of miles. This work touched the refugees in their struggle to survive but also, in the consequent interaction of local Jews with the refugees from eastern Europe, influenced both the social life and the cultural development of the communities themselves. Beyond that, the more intensive forms of trans regional cooperation helped shape a much more interconnected Jewish world better suited to face the challenges of changing times.
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This rather broader way of looking at a major outbreak of anti-Jewish violence also has implications for the way we approach writing Jewish history. It suggests the need to rethink one of the fundamental axioms of con temporary historiography: deemphasizing the importance of anti-Jewish violence in order to avoid what Salo Baron, the doyen of twentieth-century Jewish historians, famously termed “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” For Baron, “the lachrymose conception” was one that saw in anti- Semitism and persecutions of Jews the moving force of Jewish history across the ages.12 He rejected this idea, dominant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that “it would be a m istake . . . to believe that hatred was the constant keynote of Judeo-Christian relations, even in Germany or Italy. It is in the nature of historical records to transmit to posterity the memory of extraordinary events, rather than of the ordinary flow of life . . . the history of the Jewish people among the Gentiles, even in medieval Europe, must consist of more than stories of sanguinary clashes or governmental expulsions.”13 Baron’s view of the past thus juxtaposed two different, even diametrically opposed states: “the ordinary flow of life” and outbreaks of anti- Jewish violence. The first, he posited, referring to the period before the French Revolution, was a long-lasting norm, while the second w ere just short-lived exceptions. It was these two assumptions—that the “ordinary flow of life” was the realm in which the major developments of Jewish history occurred and that violence was essentially an extraordinary phenomenon of transient significance—that allowed him more or less to bracket out persecution from the historical processes he described. This idea has been extremely influential. Baron’s students, and following them their students, have continued his approach, extending it beyond the premodern period, for which he originally intended it, to modern Jewish history, too.14 In his study of religious violence in medieval Spain, David Nirenberg took Baron’s argument in a slightly different direction. He argued that religious violence was indeed a factor of significance but located that significance within the society in which it occurred. This was a systemic view, which understood religiously based attacks as part of the broad social and cultural system on which daily life was based. In fact, Nirenberg viewed that kind of violence as a key means of stabilizing a society made up of many different religious groups.15 Nirenberg’s view seemed to contradict Baron in two ways: it contended first that attacks on Jews w ere a part of what Baron had termed
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“the ordinary flow of life,” and second that they w ere a factor of great significance in determining the nature of that life. Where he agreed with Baron was in his insistence that anti-Jewish violence was not a determining factor in the broader sweep of Jewish history. For Nirenberg, its significance was strictly limited to its own time and place and was not to be sought elsewhere.16 However, as this study shows, the effects of the mid-seventeenth- century violence w ere not limited just to the time at which it occurred. It sparked not only a massive shift of populations but significant, sometimes long-term, processes of social, cultural, and religious change. Thus the waves of refugees set in motion by gezeirot taḥ ve-tat, far from being of just contemporary significance, w ere a major f actor in the development of Jewish life in the decades, even the centuries, to come. That suggests that Nirenberg was right in portraying as too sharp the dichotomy that Baron drew between normalcy and persecution. However, the everyday life that Baron viewed as the stage on which Jewish history played out was deeply influenced not only by violence, as Nirenberg’s book argued, but also, as this study demonstrates, by its long-term consequences. Of course, Baron was correct when he argued that violence and suffering should not be seen as the only, or even the major, moving force in Jewish history, but by insisting that persecution and its effects w ere not a part of “normal” Jewish life, he was unable to see what significance they did have. So, in its focus on anti-Jewish violence and persecution as one key factor in the processes of Jewish history, rather than as a brutal interruption to longer-term developments, this study offers a nuanced corrective to Baron’s approach. In fact, it suggests that a return, albeit in limited form, to “the lachrymose conception” is not only justified but actually an essential tool for understanding the Jewish past.17
interactions with jews, interactions with non-j ews: the contexts of jewish history Though this book examines the fate of Polish-Lithuanian Jews, it is not a study of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry. Rather, it traces three groups of displaced Polish-Lithuanian Jews in the diff erent environments in which they found themselves. The first group consisted of Jews who had fled from their homes but remained within the Commonwealth as what is t oday called “internally displaced persons.” The second were Jews captured by Crimean Tatar forces who w ere then shipped to Istanbul for sale on the
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slave markets. There, the local Jews with the help of a transregional fund raising effort involving most of the communities of Europe in one way or another ransomed as many as they could. The third w ere Jews, sometimes in organized groups, who had been displaced during the Commonwealth’s wars with Russia and Sweden and made their way as refugees westward mostly to the Holy Roman Empire where they threw themselves on the mercy of the impoverished Jewish communities there.18 Though each of t hese environments was unique, they w ere not unconnected. The refugees created personal contacts between them: individual families w ere often split, with one member ending up in one place, and another in another. Sometimes, the same individual might even move from one to another, either during the return home or as a way to raise money to ransom a relative. T hese (and other) travelers also helped create information networks that allowed refugees in one place to learn about the fate of loved ones in another. Perhaps more important, t hose engaged in relief work in one region were often in contact with t hose doing the same in another. Letters asking for help, usually in the form of money, were sent from Poland-Lithuania to the Jewish communities of Germany and Italy; from Venice (the clearing house for ransom money) to other communities in Italy, as well as to Germany and the Ottoman Empire; and from Istanbul to communities everywhere asking for help in ransoming the huge numbers of Jews on the slave markets t here.19 Relief efforts could be complex, involving a w hole range of different transregional activities: the Viennese community not only sent relief money to the suffering Jews of Poland and took in the large numbers of refugees reaching the town but copied fundraising letters received from the Jewish communities of the Commonwealth and sent them on to the Jewish communities of Italy. In addition to letters, money itself, usually in the form of bills of exchange, was sent from one region to another—seemingly with little concern for the political borders it had to cross. Thus, large sums were sent by the Jews of Venice to communities in the Commonwealth, as well as to t hose of the Ottoman Empire, particularly Istanbul. It was not just letters and bills of exchange that traveled between communities as part of relief efforts; p eople did too. In addition to the victims of violence, emissaries representing different communities and groups crisscrossed Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. The Jewish communities of Poland sent numerous individuals to central and western Europe to raise money to help in their relief efforts, while the Jews of Istanbul sent p eople to Italy and the Sephardi communities of western Europe to
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raise funds to help with captive ransom. Even the Lithuanian Jews sold as slaves to merchants in Iran sent emissaries to the west to raise money. These men went to Jewish communities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire, and Italy, all of whom donated money to help ransom the captives in the Safivid empire. The story of the refugee crisis would seem, therefore, to be a kind of transregional “connected history,” in Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s terms.20 The wars in Poland-Lithuania and the widespread diffusion of the refugees stimulated the development of a range of different connections between regions and communities far distant from each other. They did not create these connections: p eople, letters, information, ideas, and money had all circulated between Jewish communities before 1648. Rather they intensified them to levels hitherto unknown, relying, of course, on the greatly improved possibilities for communication that had developed by the mid- seventeenth century. Beyond that, the seventeenth-century Jewish communities also did not create the improved channels of communication they exploited.21 The early modern period as a w hole is often characterized as a period of intensification of contact among different regions and centers, and in that sense, the Jewish experience must be seen as part of a much broader phenomenon. This might seem to suggest that the process of tightening intercommunal bonds would have occurred without the refugee crisis. While that is not implausible, it would nonetheless seem very likely that without the stimulus of having to deal with tens of thousands of indigent Jewish refugees, the process would have taken much longer and the connections made would have been considerably less robust. The case of the Sephardi trading diaspora that developed during the previous century can help demonstrate this. Following the great exodus of Jews from the Iberian peninsula at the end of the fifteenth c entury, a steady wave of so-called New Christians, people of Jewish background who lived openly as Christians, left during the sixteenth for fear of persecution by the Inquisition. However, while most of the original Jewish expellees had settled in the Ottoman Empire, many of the New Christians remained in western Europe, settling in the great mercantile entrepôts of the Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic coast. Others traveled across the Atlantic looking for peace, security, and a good living in the New World. Some New Christians returned to Judaism, setting up Jewish communities in their new homes, while others preferred to remain Christian (and yet others seemed to vacillate between the two). Nonetheless, they
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remained connected to each other as a group. As much as to family connections, this was due to their common cultural background in Spain and Portugal. That, together with their geographical dispersion, meant that they w ere very well-placed to exploit the expanded transregional patterns of trade that characterized the age. After a long period of slow growth, a very extensive “Spanish-Portuguese” mercantile network developed by the end of the sixteenth c entury, stretching from the New World in the west to the Indian subcontinent in the east and connecting some of the most vibrant economies of the day.22 Based on the kinship, ethnic, and, to a certain extent, religious relations within the group, this trading network flourished for about a c entury and a half largely as a part of the burgeoning European colonial economy. At heart, it was a mercantile arrangement, whose functioning was determined, as Francesca Trivellato has shown, as much by economic logic as ethnic solidarity.23 Its fate, too, was determined by the contours of the world economy: when these began to shift in the mid-eighteenth c entury, the Sephardi trading diaspora declined and eventually disappeared.24 The philanthropic network examined here, though it overlapped the Sephardi mercantile one, was of a different nature entirely. It developed as a result of an acute humanitarian crisis within Jewish society and its goal was to solve that critical problem as affecting only Jews. The network was made up not of individual merchants but of communal bodies (and their leaders) and it was based on Jewish ideals of philanthropy mandated in Jewish law.25 That meant that the solidarity that underlay it was to a very great extent religious in nature. Mercantile logic— as well as the strong element of self-interest involved in any economic transaction—was a much less pronounced element in the philanthropic network, which demonstrated instead a significant degree of altruism. In addition, though connections with the non-Jewish world always played a crucial role in the relief efforts it undertook, the network as a w hole was not dependent upon them and, when necessary, worked around the non- Jewish authorities. In many ways, then, the philanthropic network had a much wider range than the mercantile one. In addition, the fact that the connections it created between its constituent parts w ere founded in Jewish law— particularly that concerning captive ransom—gave it additional flexibility and strength. Though possibly less immediate than the kind of ethnic bonds that underlay the Sephardi network, the connections based on shared religious principles (which not coincidentally excluded the non- Jewish world) seem to have called upon deeper and more powerful strata
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of identification, perhaps similar to those identified by Gershon Hundert in his study of eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Jewry.26 Clearly the network was formed to deal with a specific philanthropic need and so largely ceased to function once it was met. Yet the intercommunal connections that it helped forge continued to grow and strengthen as time passed. In fact, as we shall see, the massive spread across the Jewish world of information and new religious ideas created by Sabbatheanism relied to no small extent on the improvements in communication during the refugee crisis. In short, the philanthropic network developed in order to meet the pressing needs of the refugees, but the intensification in the circulation of people, money, letters, information, and ideas that it engendered had a longer life, serving to both shape and strengthen the bonds between its constituent parts. This book, then, approaches the history of the Polish Jewish refugee crisis as a study of a group—the Jews—whose experience transcended political borders. What was it, then, that connected them? Though Jews in the seventeenth century clearly had a sense of their own peoplehood, it was tied very closely to their religious tradition, making the distinction between national solidarity (in the premodern sense) and religious solidarity almost irrelevant. Jews suffering far away were referred to as “brothers” while the motivation to help them was based on the Jewish laws of philanthropy. On top of that, Jews from different places (and their communities) maintained a range of different connections with one another, which also affected their willingness to help in times of crisis. As a result, while the discussion h ere treats local conditions in each of the three regions where the refugees w ere to be found—eastern Europe, central and western Europe, and the eastern Mediterranean—as the crucial factors they undoubtedly were, it also examines the nature of the connections between them, w hether in the form of shared religious tradition or more concrete ties, in order to provide a nuanced understanding of precisely what it was that moved Jews in such completely different settings to cooperate with each other. Such a “double contextualization”—local and transregional—also has a significance well beyond the study itself, since it suggests an additional dimension to the way Jewish cultural history is currently understood. One of the axioms of contemporary Jewish historiography is that the context for the development of Jewish culture in any given time and place is to be found in the culture of the society within which the Jews lived. David Biale has put this succinctly: “the culture of a minority group such as the Jews can never be separated from that of the majority surrounding it.”27
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However, the logical conclusion of such an approach is that there is little or nothing that connects Jewish cultures across space and time.28 Though most scholars understand the development of Jewish culture in any given place as the creative interplay between the Jewish heritage borne by the community and the non-Jewish cultural context in which it found itself, they pay little or no attention to the contemporary Jewish context in which that community might have functioned. However, as this study shows, Jewish communities in widely different places maintained with each other a range of connections, social, economic, and cultural, that were of crucial importance in their development. Those ties were of varying strengths and intensities depending on the particular circumstances, but there was no time when they did not exist at all. Thus, in order to understand the development of any given Jewish community, it is not enough just to look at the non-Jewish environment in which it found itself. Connections with other Jewish centers of the day also provided crucial conduits for the transfer of people, goods, news, and ideas, and these too must have influenced its development. By examining them—in other words, by contextualizing the communities we study, each in its contemporary Jewish setting—we can see also how the connections between distant communities might have formed them into a “Jewish world.” So, for all that it examines a single set of events, this study of the mid-seventeenth-century Polish Jewish refugee crisis emphasizes the more general importance of transregional phenomena in shaping Jewish culture and giving it common features that crossed the cultural bound aries of the non-Jewish world in which the Jews were embedded.
A Note on Terminology Two terms that appear throughout this book, “refugee” and “trauma,” are defined in a number of ways in current research. It is important, therefore, to explain how they are being used here. Since the term “refugee” is now held to have quite a limited meaning due to the complex politics of contemporary relief programs, the umbrella concept of “forced migration,” which contains within it a number of dif ferent categories, is often preferred.29 These include: refugees (people who, owing to a well-founded fear of persecution, find themselves outside their country of origin); the internally displaced (those forced to flee from their homes as a result of armed conflict but remaining within their country of origin); the victims of h uman trafficking; and t hose leaving their homes against their wills as a result—or in fear—of government policy of some sort (today often concerned with development). This study, though
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it prefers the term “refugee” to “forced migrant,” deals with all four categories, treating each separately as a problem with its own unique set of characteristics. The term “trauma” is often felt to be greatly overused in the academy, not least in the fields of critical theory and literary studies.30 This study eschews t hose approaches, viewing trauma only as a psychological prob lem faced by individuals. Indeed, for most psychologists today trauma is a diagnostic concept. It refers to an experience of such severity that it overwhelms the brain’s ability to assimilate it as a rational (narrative) memory. It is instead stored in a different part of the brain as a so-called emotional memory—“fragmentary sensory and emotional traces: images, sounds, and physical sensations.”31 Without the mediating effect of narrative memory, certain stimuli can act on the emotional memory of a traumatized subject retriggering all or part of the awful feelings aroused by the traumatic experience and causing the same extreme emotional and physical reactions as the event itself. When this process is particularly severe or uncontrollable, it is defined as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The reasons why some horrific experiences overwhelm the brain while others do not, and even more why a certain experience will overwhelm some people but not o thers, are still unclear.32 For that reason, this study follows the usage of psychologist Nigel Hunt in his study, Memory, War, and Trauma. There, he uses a definition of traumatized individuals that goes beyond t hose specifically diagnosed with PTSD to include p eople who are also struggling to deal with traumatizing experiences at a lower level of intensity.33 A similar approach is adopted by Richard Mollica, founder and head of Harvard University’s Program in Refugee Trauma, in his study on the treatment of refugee trauma.34 Adopting this broader definition of the terms “trauma,” “traumatic,” and “traumatized” allows the discussion here to preserve a sense that the refugees w ere being forced to deal with terrible horrors both when they w ere on the road and in the years that followed, while at the same time acknowledging that there is no way to diagnose what their precise psychological condition was.
The Sources Very little has been written about this crucial episode in early modern Jewish history, and what there is has tended to focus on just one aspect of the issue rather than the broad picture. The first to deal with the question seems to have been the late nineteenth-century Jewish scholar David
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Kaufmann in an essay on the ransoming efforts on behalf of the Polish Jewish captives in Istanbul that was based on contemporary correspondence. It was not until the 1960s that the subject was picked up again, this time by the Israeli scholar Yisra’el Halperin, who published two seminal articles on the ransoming efforts. His are the only studies to date that embrace the transregional aspects of the story, dealing as they do with ransoming in both eastern Europe and the Sephardi world. Inspired by Halperin, two further essays have been written on the question, though neither has a wide perspective, one by Yosef Kaplan dealing in depth with ransoming in Amsterdam, the other by Daniel Carpi focusing on Padua.35 This study has eschewed the narrow approach, broadening its focus well beyond that even of Halperin. In d oing so, it came up against a significant problem because its source base was highly fragmented. There was never any central, or even regional, organization dealing with Jewish refugee issues to collect and preserve the relevant documentation so the historian’s usual technique of working through a body of archival sources was quite impossible. Instead, the story had to be reconstructed from myriad individual sources that appear almost at random in a whole series of different materials and that can often be identified only after a complex process of detective work. Problematic as that undoubtedly was in creating a systematic discussion, in research terms it was a blessing in disguise. The enormous range of source material of quite different genres made for a much richer set of perspectives on the topic. It became possible not only to reconstruct the pathways of the refugees and the forms that the relief efforts took but to gain insights into the experiences undergone by individual refugees as well as the thoughts and motivations of those helping them. More than that, it permitted an examination of the crisis on the three major levels in which it took place: the personal, the local, and the regional/transregional. One of the most remarkable features of the source base was its wealth of firsthand accounts of the refugee experience. In addition to two personal chronicles, I found literally dozens of shorter texts, usually of just a few sentences.36 These fell into two basic categories: testimony presented to rabbinic courts in cases of missing husbands and autobiographical vignettes embedded in the introductions to rabbinic works. The first were verbatim accounts transcribed in the original Yiddish and published in collections of responsa. The second, more literary texts were written in Hebrew and provided a brief explanation of the author’s suffering in order to thank God for his survival or to arouse the sympathy of potential readers and buyers. The two kinds of texts complemented each other in
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important ways: while the autobiographical vignettes reflected the experience of educated men, the testimonies contained a great deal of evidence given by the rest of society, especially w omen; and while the testimonies brought details of flight only in as far as they impinged on evidence of the husband’s death, the vignettes placed the author’s refugee experience front and center. As with all firsthand accounts of this kind, it was extremely difficult to assess their accuracy. However, since the importance of the texts lay less in what they told about g reat historical events and more about the individual experience of flight, their limited perspective became a virtue rather than a drawback. Beyond that, the basic similarity of so many accounts from widely differing sources strongly suggested a significant degree of accuracy. While these sources were excellent for examining experience on the individual level, they were less helpful in reconstructing the broader picture of mass flight or capture—a problem most strongly felt in trying to reconstruct the process of being captured and sent from Ukraine to the slave markets of Istanbul. To do that, memoirs of non-Jewish provenance were of great help, even if they mentioned Jews only in passing. Two of the most important of these were the multivolume memoir of the Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi, which recorded his extensive journeys inside the Ottoman Empire and beyond from the 1630s to the 1670s, and the account of Marcin Broniowski, the Polish ambassador to Crimea in the late sixteenth century.37 My understanding of the intermediate level of the crisis—the encounter of the refugees with the different communities they reached—relied to a very great extent on Jewish communal archives of various sorts. Though the survival of such material from seventeenth-century Europe is very patchy, many of the collections that do remain contained information about the refugees from Poland-Lithuania. This study relies on documents from the following Jewish communities (in alphabetical order): Amsterdam, Frankfurt a.M., Hamburg, Kraków, Mantua, Padua, Poznań, and Venice. On the regional level, the records of the Jewish councils of Great Poland, Lithuania, and Moravia also contain documentation about the refugees, as do those of the Council of Four Lands in Poland.38 These sources are supplemented with records from non-Jewish authorities in various places. Of particular importance here are records from Slutzk in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (today in Belarus) and Vienna, as well as imperial legislation dealing with the regions of Moravia and Silesia in the Holy Roman Empire.39
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The Jewish communal records, insofar as they mention contacts with other communities regarding relief efforts, were also helpful in assessing the nature and extent of the highest, transregional aspect of the refugee crisis. Particularly important was the archive of the Italian Jewish community in Mantua, which preserves a great deal of its correspondence on seventeenth-century refugee issues with other communities, particularly Istanbul, Venice, and Vienna.40 The best source for understanding the transregional organization, particularly around fundraising for captive ransom, was the personal correspondence of the two figures who spearheaded the effort, Shmu’el Aboab and Moshe Zacuto from Venice. Though not officially appointed, t hese two men organized the transregional philanthropic efforts of the Sephardi communities of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. For the most part, these included ransoming Sephardi merchants captured by pirates, supporting Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, and raising money for communities or individuals in distress. Following 1648, they added fund raising for ransoming the captives in Istanbul to the long list of c auses they supported. Both highly educated, Aboab and Zacuto maintained their correspondence in Hebrew.41 A final class of sources I used that are worth mentioning here are vari ous contemporary Yiddish-language compositions—most often short poems or stories—that addressed the refugee crisis in one way or another. These were published as chapbooks for the popular market and so their value lies less in reconstructing events and more in illuminating attitudes on the Ashkenazi street.42 Taken together, this set of sources, though fragmentary, was extremely rich. It allowed me to examine the refugee crisis from a wide range of perspectives and to integrate them together into a complex whole. This study will, therefore, treat the Polish Jewish refugee crisis, in all its settings and on all its levels, as a single, interconnected phenomenon with a beginning, middle, and end.
The Structure of the Book In order to encompass all that in a single monograph, what follows is divided into three broad parts, each of which addresses the experiences of one particular group of refugees. The first deals with the internally displaced who remained within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the second with those trafficked to the slave markets of Istanbul, and the third with the refugees who fled westward to the Holy Roman Empire. The
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geographical nature of the division has its own advantage in that it allows us to examine the different forms that relief took in each region: the relief of halakhic (legal), spiritual, and psychological problems are emphasized in the first part, the transregional fundraising effort to help ransom the captives in Istanbul in the second, and the difficulties faced by the Jewish communities of the empire in dealing with the refugees, as well as the tensions that arose as a result, in the third. Each part is organized chronologically, from the first waves of refugees in 1648 to their settlement or return home in subsequent decades. The discussion, however, does not end there. By examining the interactions between the Polish Jews and the Jews in each of the settings in which they found themselves, it goes on to tease out some of the longer-term consequences of the crisis. These could be quite immediate, such as helping facilitate the spread of the Sabbathean movement, or could be felt years later, such as with the positioning of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry to tighten their profitable relationship with their magnate masters during the eigh teenth c entury or the development of modern German Jewry (and German Jewish identity) into the nineteenth. A number of motifs can be found in all three parts that serve as links between them. The first is the development of an informal network of information that brought news from one region to the o thers. The second deals with the issues of identity and identification that the refugee crisis caused. Many Jews had their identity brutally stripped from them while others took advantage of the situation to alter theirs, which presented Jewish societies across the Jewish world with the problem of determining the identity of the refugees who reached them. The third concerns issues of gender: the refugee experience had a number of clearly gendered aspects not limited to the immediate context in which they arose. The conclusion draws these threads together to show how all the separate pieces of the crisis combined into a complex w hole. In addition to the motifs already mentioned, it explores the significance of the communications that developed between various communities as well as the nature— and limits—of the solidarity that bound the Jews of diff erent places during the crisis. It then shows how the various relief strategies used in the three regions formed part of a single philanthropic approach that Jewish society as a whole had at its disposal to deal with problems of this kind. And once the outlines of the crisis have become clear, assessing the degree of success Jews across the world had in dealing with it will demonstrate just how important a moment this was in the development of the Jewish world on the brink of modernity.
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Finally, a word about narrative style. In addition to organizing the book into three parts, I have structured the discussion in each around three different perspectives: that of the individual refugee, that of the local community engaged in relief work, and that of t hose working on transregional issues. This was a challenging way to write, and I had to take g reat care to ensure that the transition from one to another was logical and smooth so as not to give the text a fragmented feel. The choice to adopt such a narrative strategy was a conscious one. It was an expression of my deeply felt belief that only through the integration of all three points of view into a single narrative would the book be able to examine the crisis in the kind of human terms that are absolutely crucial for understanding refugee issues—in the past as in the present.
pa rt i
Wartime Chaos and Its Resolution The Internally Displaced in Eastern Eur ope
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The Khmelnytsky Uprising and the Jews
The Jews in Ukraine before the Uprising The year 1648 started nerv ously for the Jews of Ukraine. Rumors abounded concerning the possibility of another Cossack rebellion. This was nothing new. The last one, headed by the Cossack Hetman Pavlo But (known as Pavliuk), had taken place only a decade or so e arlier in 1637–38. At that time, the Cossack forces, established in order to protect the Commonwealth’s southeastern border from enemy incursions, rebelled against their Polish masters, who had not only failed to pay their salary for a number of years but had broken their promise to improve the Cossacks’ social status. This would probably not have concerned the Jews greatly had not a considerable number of the local peasantry joined the Cossacks in their fight against Poland-Lithuania. T hese serfs saw the Jews not only as the eternal enemy of Christendom but also as agents of the hated Polish- Lithuanian regime that had colonized Ukraine. Jews became a target of the uprising and it seems that many hundreds lost their lives.1 On looking back at t hese events, the Jews of 1648 would also have found much to alleviate their fears. The violence had lasted only a few months. A resolute Polish response, divisions within the Cossack leadership, and an unpropitious international situation had led to the surrender and swift execution of the Cossack leaders one after another.2 There was, on the surface at least, little reason to expect that if a rebellion did break out again it would not end the same way. Many Jews, who were indeed acting as agents of the Polish nobility in Ukraine on the ground, began to gather intelligence for their masters about the war preparations of both Cossacks and peasants.3 Though some seem to have felt sympathy for [ 23 ]
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their Ukrainian neighbors, most were aligned with the hegemonic Polish regime.4 While this was the logical and obvious choice, it would, in the context of 1648, have tragic consequences because the root causes of the uprising were largely to be found in Polish policy toward the people of the region. In terms of social and cultural development, the economy, religious status, military policy, and political and geopolitical orientations, the Polish nobility and sometimes the king too were acting in ways that were bound to bring tensions in Ukraine to a boiling point. Ukraine had been ceded to the Polish Crown as part of Poland’s unification with Lithuania in 1569 and, within a short time, moves were made to integrate it into the Polish polity. Initially, the local princely elite began to speak Polish and adopt Polish customs in order to become part of the Polish nobility, already a dominant force. Within a short time, they also converted to Roman Catholicism. Their intermarriage with Polish nobility, as well as a certain degree of land appropriation by Polish nobles, meant that the feudal lords of the region, w hether or not their roots w ere in Ukraine, were now viewed as foreign by many of the local inhabitants.5 As the seventeenth century unfolded, the influx of Polish noblemen became much more visible. The effects of this on the Jews were significant, if indirect. In order to make the fertile Ukrainian lands as profitable as possible, their noble owners began to implement the feudal system that had been so successful in Crown Poland. It worked like this: instead of paying money dues, peasants had labor duties on the estate farms. The grain that was grown was then sold—either for export or on local markets, or in the form of alcoholic beverages (beer and vodka) marketed to estate subjects through a monopoly held by the owner.6 Jews, who w ere very active in the urban markets, played key roles in this process, mostly through the sale of alcohol in taverns. In Ukraine, far distant from the river networks leading to the international markets in Gdańsk, grain export was not significant, which made the Jews’ roles all the greater. The estate o wners, appreciative of the income created by the Jews, began to encourage them to settle on their estates.7 In addition, Jews, whose economic prowess had already benefited the estate owners in the realm of trade, also began to find their way into estate management. This came about through the system of estate leasing that developed during the sixteenth c entury. Rather than devote time and energy to estate management, the noble owners—particularly of the huge estates known as latifundia—preferred to lease out their lands for three
The K hmeln y tsk y Upr ising a nd the Jews [ 25 ]
years in return for a fixed payment made on signing the contract. This gave them a guaranteed income up front, while leaving the day-to-day administration in the hands of the leaseholder, who had a vested interest in efficient administration, since any income he made over and above the price of the lease formed his profit.8 For wealthy Jewish businessmen (individually or in consortia), whose economic skills w ere trusted by the estate owners, the high profits that these leases brought them proved extremely attractive. The problem was that profits w ere achieved through the slow but constant raising of the peasants’ labor dues—a situation the serfs resented. The advantage of the estate leases for the Jews was that the leaseholder could break them down into a series of subleases, each of which he could then give to another Jew. It soon became clear that living in Ukraine could bring great wealth, so many Jews moved t here. The region’s Jewish population seems to have grown from some 4,000 in 1569 to about 40,000 in 1648.9 What ratcheted up the tension was the fact that the Jewish leaseholders, called in Polish arendarze, found themselves running noble estates in place of the feudal lords. This gave them enormous power over their subjects. The local population, which consisted mostly of Orthodox Christians, found it demeaning enough to have to serve Roman Catholic lords. To be subservient to a Jewish master was felt a terrible humiliation— and a contradiction of the basic structure of a Christian society, in which Jews could be tolerated provided they held no positions of authority over Christians. Nonetheless, for all the anger this caused, the Jews do not seem to have been the major problem for the Orthodox Christians. Their main complaints were against the Catholics, whose mistrust of the Orthodox led to a series of discriminatory policies. Even the 1596 creation of a Greek- Catholic (Uniate) Church, which was meant to allow locals to retain their religious rites and practices while swearing allegiance to the pope in Rome, faltered due to continued Catholic suspicion of the Ukrainian population.10 Worse still, as the seventeenth century progressed, the attitude of the Polish nobility t oward the peasantry of Ukraine, both Orthodox and Uniate, became increasingly harsh, even brutal. On the Orthodox Ukrainian side, the first half of the seventeenth century saw the beginnings of a cultural florescence that would lead to the strengthening of their religious and ethnic identity as an indepen dent group. Of particular importance was the reestablishment in 1620 of a church hierarchy (Metropolitanate) that was subordinate not to Moscow but to Constantinople. In addition, the foundation of the Kiev Collegium
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by the Orthodox Metropolitan and theologian Pyotr Mogila in 1632, as well as his encouragement of local publishing, helped shape a new Ukrainian intellectual elite. Though these developments w ere not a direct cause of the uprising, they created an atmosphere that was receptive to the idea of independence from the Commonwealth.11 In fact, the trigger for the uprising came from a differe nt place entirely. The Cossack forces were also highly disaffected in 1648. Following the brutal crushing of the 1637–38 rebellion, the number of registered Cossacks, entitled to rights and privileges similar to t hose of the middling nobility, was reduced to just six thousand. There were many thousands of other Cossacks, not included in the register, who, though well-armed military men, lived more or less as outlaws in the unsettled region of Zaporizhia on the lower Dniepr. The registered Cossacks’ requests to increase their number and improve their status met with favor from King Władysław IV, who was planning a new crusade against the Ottoman Turks. The nobles in the Sejm, suspicious of both the king and the Cossacks, nixed this idea in 1646, leaving the latter very resentful.12 The planned crusade also did little to improve the Commonwealth’s relations with the Ottoman Empire. Still, the Sublime Porte did not face off with the Commonwealth directly but through an intermediary—the Crimean Tatars. To keep the peace, the Polish Crown was supposed to pay an annual tribute to their leader, the khan, though it had not done so for a number of years. Since relations between the Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire, and the Crimean Tatars w ere never r eally stable, the Cossack Hetman (leader), Bogdan Khmelnytsky, identified in them a crucial diplomatic opening to exploit. Since he planned to put pressure on his sovereign lords in Poland to give him what he wanted, he put together a Cossack-Tatar alliance that would give him the military clout to back up his demands.13 This was an extremely bold and imaginative move. The Tatars, descendants of Ghengis Khan’s Golden Horde, were a warlike group who made their living by attacking the regions around the Black Sea and capturing slaves whom they could sell for a profit in Istanbul.14 The Commonwealth was supposed to pay its annual tribute to reduce the threat of Tatar attacks on its territory. In addition, the Cossack units w ere in place to guard its southeastern border against such incursions, which could take many thousands of slaves each year. The Commonwealth’s relative success in preventing these attacks was one of the c auses of Ukraine’s rapid development in
The K hmeln y tsk y Upr ising a nd the Jews [ 27 ]
the years before 1648.15 For the Cossacks to join forces with the Tatars was to turn the accepted military situation on its head. Khmelnytsky himself, motivated personally perhaps by his b itter rivalry with the Polish nobleman Daniel Czapliński, entered into negotiations with the Tatar khan Islam Gerey III in February 1648. Within a short time, they had concluded an agreement ensuring Cossack-Tatar cooperation in military campaigns against the Commonwealth. The first of t hese was to take place in the spring of that year. Greatly strengthened by this crucial support for his struggle, Khmelnytsky felt confident enough to begin the uprising. The Jews of Ukraine had much to be afraid of. 16
The Jews’ Experience of the War The Khmelnytsky uprising was not a single experience for the Jews. This was mostly b ecause there were at least five military forces at work, each of which had a different attitude toward them. For the Cossack armies under Khmelnytsky’s leadership, the Jews, though a problem, were by no means always high on their list of priorities. The Cossacks’ basic grievances w ere aimed at the Polish authorities—particularly the nobility in the Sejm—and concerned issues of money and status.17 As a result, though their treatment of Jews could be brutal, they w ere, sometimes at least, willing to accept money instead of putting them to the sword. However, it was impossible to know in advance what they would do. In the two most infamous massacres of Jewish communities during the initial phase of the uprising, the Cossacks led the attack on the Jews in Nemyriv in early June 1648 but not in Tul’chyn just a c ouple of weeks l ater. During the siege of Lviv in October of that year, when the town council refused to turn the Jews over to him, Khmelnytsky agreed to accept a ransom of 200,000 red zlotys instead.18 He offered a similar deal to the town of Zamość in early November. These seem to have been cases of strategic thinking. Campaigns like those of the Cossacks were extremely costly, and negotiated settlements meant that the wealth of the victims was paid directly to the Cossack command and not taken as loot by individual soldiers.19 Attacking the Jewish population took second place. The second force with which Ukrainian Jewry had to deal was the mass of Ukrainian peasants who joined the uprising once it began to prove successful. These were untrained and undisciplined bands that were very hard to control. As a contemporary observer put it, “peasant unruliness has reached such heights that it is like a second army for Khmelnytsky.
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They [i.e., the peasants] destroy the towns in which the nobility and the Jews make a stand, committing unheard of massacres.”20 At the outset of hostilities, the peasants seem to have followed a Cossack leader called Maksym Kryvonis, a figure about whom little is known but who might have wanted to set himself up as a rival to Khmelnytsky. Though the peasants’ hostility was mostly aimed against Polish Catholics, they harbored enormous hatred of the Jews, whom they blamed for all their day-to-day problems. Death at the hands of the peasant masses could be very cruel as well as brutal.21 The testimony of one of the survivors of the Tul’chyn massacre, given to the rabbinical court in Lviv on August 6, 1648, is helpful in understanding the complexities of the situation. A man called Hanan, son of Mikhel from Tomaszów, gave the following deposition concerning the murder of one Leib from Krotnica,22 who had, together with his brother Melekh, taken up an arenda in a village called Komerhid,23 near Tul’chyn: About eight days before the massacre in Tul’chyn . . . there was fighting [in the region], but no-one wanted to let [the local population] get away. The noble lord forced them all to flee in g reat distress from Komerhid to Tul’chyn. So Leib and his b rother Melekh came h ere, too. I was with them in the fortress. . . . Then the noble lord Shmetvitinsky24 did a deal with the Cossacks to hand the Jews over to them; on the Thursday, these captives were taken away to Uman. On the Saturday, the peasants arrived, running into the courtyard outside the fortress . . . Leib and his b rother Melekh were standing in a corner at the end of the courtyard; I was between them. Then I ran away with some other people and saw that the [peasants] immediately began to kill the people in that corner. I saw my grandmother and my stepmother killed with the o thers; escape was next to impossible. Next, thousands of peasants [broke] into the fortress, so [those who had] fled t here were killed in that place.25
This account clearly distinguishes between the different forces at work.26 First, the Cossacks made the deal with Czetwertiński, owner of the town, for him to hand over the Jews not b ecause they wanted to kill them or force them to convert. Their goal was to take them as captives and have them redeemed by local Jews. The prisoners were sent to Uman because that was the headquarters of the Cossack general in charge of the siege.27 Most important here is the fact that the massacre itself was perpetrated not by the Cossacks but by the peasants, who stormed the fortress a few days later, once the siege had been successful.
The K hmeln y tsk y Upr ising a nd the Jews [ 29 ]
The Tul’chyn story also points out another group with which the Jews had to contend. As we have seen, the Jews tended to see themselves as allied with their Polish lords and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Polish nobility, on the other hand, though they had enriched themselves through working with the Jews, do not seem to have felt any kind of group commitment to them. Some, like Jarema Wiśniowiecki, offered them protection, while others handed them over to their enemies without compunction. Such was the case in Tul’chyn. The Jews had agreed to participate in the urban militia against the enemy attacks in return for protection by the lord of the town, Czetwertiński. However, once the situation became desperate, Czetwertiński simply handed the local Jews over to the Cossack leader in an attempt to buy him off. The problems faced by Ukrainian Jewry were no less complicated when it came to the townspeople. On the whole, this was a group that saw the Jews as economic competitors and opposed Jewish settlement in the towns. Little surprise, then, that in Nemyriv they betrayed the local community to the Cossacks. On the other hand, the exigencies of wartime could sometimes mitigate previous hostilities. In Lviv, the refusal of the municipal council to hand the Jews over to Khmelnytsky was explained by one of its members, Samuil Kushevich, in the following terms: When Khmelnytsky saw the daring of the city and [how] we w ere all courageously ready to die, he wrote to us . . . desiring that we hand over all the Jews, as they w ere the cause of the war. . . . We gave the response that there were two reasons why we could not hand over the Jews. First, because they w ere not our subjects, but were subjects of the King and the Republic. Second, because they had borne all the expenditures and discomforts equally together with us and were ready to die, both alongside us and for us.28
As if all this w ere not complicated enough, the Jews had to deal with yet another armed group during the uprising. This was the Tatar army, led by Islam Gerey III and his deputy, Tugay Bey. Since selling or ransoming slaves was the Tatars’ major source of income, their alliance with Khmelnytsky and joint campaigns with him w ere really only a means of increasing the pool of potential slaves on which they could draw. For them, it was business as usual.29 Jews had never figured prominently among the slaves taken by the Tatars, perhaps because for most of the period before the uprising few of them had lived in the villages of the border regions that the Tatars attacked. In fact, even during the 1648–49 Ukrainian campaigns themselves, the
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Jews were a relatively unimportant group as far as they were concerned. This is certainly the impression received from the contemporary Tatar chronicle of Haj Mehmed Senai of Crimea,30 which describes the campaigns of 1648 in detail but gives only one brief mention of Jews: On Tuesday (the 17th of that month),31 the khan decided to halt close to a royal castle called Zhivotiv. Before he arrived, a certain colonel . . . of . . . hetman . . . Khmelnytsky had been t here with his men and taken the c astle. The population and inhabitants of that place w ere Jews, all of whom, together with their families, servants, children and all their goods and chattels, the Cossacks brought as a present to the khan. . . . On the spot, the khan divided the Jews up as gifts for all his . . . [commanders].32
For their part, the Jewish chroniclers made great play of the Jews being taken into slavery by Tatars, with the most famous description to be found in Nathan Hanover’s chronicle Yavein metsulah. Interestingly enough, Hanover also chose to focus his narrative on the experiences of the Jews of Zhyvotiv, a small town in central Ukraine. In his retelling, the Jews there surrendered to the Tatars, preferring to go into captivity in hope of being ransomed rather than being killed or forced to convert by the Ukrainian forces.33 Zhivotiv was clearly, then, the site of a major take of Jewish slaves. It was not the only one, however. Hundreds of Jews were soon taken captive, the numbers rising with each new Tatar campaign. Of course, in reality, the choice of captivity or death was never as clear for the Jews of Ukraine as Hanover portrayed it. The Tatars preferred to take as captives only those whom they thought they could sell for profit in the slave markets of Istanbul—very often young women. All others they would either try to ransom to the local Jewish communities or simply kill on the spot.34 In all the chaos of the uprising, the Jews of Ukraine seem to have understood that the different groups they faced threatened their lives in two major ways: through violent attack and through capture. Escape, too, was possible—through conversion to Christianity or flight. Conversion was not only an unpalatable choice for most but not always possible in the chaos of the conflict; nor was it a complete guarantee of survival. For all its many dangers, flight must have seemed a much better option. Thousands upon thousands of Jews chose it.
ch a p t er t wo
The Chaos of War v iol e nce a n d f l igh t
fleeing from the uprising could take many forms, depending on the circumstances. The uprising began in early 1648 with the fomenting of unrest in the Cossack heartland of Zaporizhia, particularly the region of the lower Dniepr river.1 The trouble soon spread to more northerly regions of left-bank Ukraine,2 causing panic among the Polish nobles settled there, who began to flee, calling for a military invasion to put an end to the unrest.3 This was not a very urbanized region, so formal Jewish communities w ere few and far between. Most of the Jews t here lived as one-or two-family units in villages where they leased and ran taverns. As the vio lence began to take its toll, many of them decided to flee too, making for the larger and well-fortified towns to the west of the Dniepr river.4 It was a highly dangerous journey. The huge distances to be traveled and the sparse Jewish settlement meant that it was necessary to spend the nights with Christians. While much (probably the majority) of the local population did not harbor murderous feelings toward Jews, it was impossible to identify at the outset whom to trust. A deposition given to the rabbinical court in Ostroh on August 29, 1649, though dealing with slightly different circumstances, clearly expressed these problems: We—that is, my husband, Avraham ben Yisra’el, and I—fled from the mob, [going] from village to village, until we came to one called Zviriv.5 There we came across a good peasant, who put us up for about three weeks. Then my husband said, “Why are we sitting h ere? Let’s go on. Maybe we w ill come to a Jew.” Then we came to a village called Preslovich where I got unwell.6 My husband sat beside me in the non-Jew’s [ 31 ]
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house. Then the hooligans came . . . and a villager . . . handed my husband over to them. They tied him hand and foot . . . and kept him overnight. . . . Early in the morning, they came to him and said, “What shall we do with you? Shoot you or behead you?” He asked to be shot. . . . Then I came and asked them to shoot me too. One hooligan said to another, “Cut off her head.” The other answered, “She’s sick. She’ll die anyway.” . . . Another hooligan shot him through the heart from behind and he fell. The hooligans left and I sat beside my husband. He remained alive for half an hour, not saying anything, just sleeping. Then his soul left him . . . I buried him with [the help of] the non-Jew [with whom we were staying]. Still sick, I remained with the non-Jew for three weeks after my husband’s death.7
Nonetheless, despite all the difficulties, the refugees continued to make their way westward to areas with more dense Jewish settlement. The communities in the fortified towns of Ukraine, such as Nemyriv, Tul’chyn, Ostroh, Izyaslav, Polnoye, Vinnitsa, Starokostiantyniv, and Bar, soon became swollen with refugees from outlying areas far and near. This situation continued until May, when matters took a terrible turn for the worse for the Polish nobility and the Jews. On the twenty-sixth, the Polish army under the joint command of Grand Hetman Mikołaj Potocki and Field Hetman Marcin Kalinowski was cut to pieces by the Cossack forces near Korsun. The defeat was total: not only w ere the maces and standards captured, the two generals themselves were taken prisoner.8 As if this was not bad enough, news then reached Ukraine that the Polish king had died.9 Since the monarchy was elective rather than dynastic, this meant that the Polish and Lithuanian nobility had to withdraw to the capital to begin the arduous process of choosing a new king. So, with the Polish army defeated and the high command in Warsaw effectively para lyzed, the field was open for Khmelnytsky and his Tatar allies to do as they wanted. Emboldened by this turn of events, the Ukrainian peasantry joined the uprising in the tens of thousands, turning it into a massive popular rebellion. The fortified towns of Ukraine w ere no match for the enormous forces thus released and fell to the rebels, one after another. Nemyriv fell on June 10, Tul’chyn on June 21, Vinnitsa on July 1, Polnoye on July 22, Bar on July 25, and Starokostiantyniv on July 26. Ostroh and Izyaslav also fell in the last week of July.10 For the Jews, who e ither lived in t hese towns or had fled to them, this proved no less than disastrous. Part of the prob lem was that Khmelnytsky himself did not take part in the early summer
The Ch aos of Wa r [ 33 ]
campaign, leaving it to his lieutenants, who led untrained Cossack bands and the inflamed peasant mob. As each town fell, its Polish noble and Jewish inhabitants (including refugees), as well as its Catholic and Uniate clergy, were cruelly put to the sword in a series of mass murders.11 Once it became clear that the city walls and the existence of a c astle or fortress were no guarantee of safety, Jews would flee from town to town hoping to stay ahead of the advancing armies; they w ere also joined by survivors of previous massacres, anxious to get as far away from the war zone as possible. The stream of Jewish refugees rapidly became a flood. This created an enormously chaotic situation in which hundreds or thousands of panic-stricken Jews found themselves on the roads desperate to find safety where they could. Those who had more foresight or had cooler heads prepared for flight ahead of time e ither by hiding what wealth they possessed (often by burying it) or by giving it to a trusted non-Jewish neighbor for safekeeping.12 In this way, they hoped to have something to return to at the war’s end. The rest were forced to take with them as much of their movable property as they could. This could be problematic not just because it slowed them down but because it made them excellent targets for the dishonest and the unscrupulous—Jews and non-Jews alike. Hanover included a firsthand account of such a flight in his chronicle: We were informed in the Holy Community of Izyaslav that the Tatars and Ukrainians were besieging Polnoye . . . [so] whoever was able to flee, fled. We abandoned our homes that w ere filled with all sorts of valuables. . . . We thought only of saving ourselves and our sons and daughters . . . I and my family . . . fled to the Holy Community of Mezhyrichi. . . . We intended to stay t here for “Shabbat Ḥazon”13 so that we could be informed in the meantime what the situation was in Polnoye. . . . On the Sabbath eve, we w ere stunned by the evil tidings that reached us through the noble Wiszowaty, who was governor of Polnoye. He said, “Polnoye has been taken. All the nobles and Jews have been murdered and the e nemy is now attacking Izyaslav. . . .” The mass of the people believed that the Commander [of the Polish army] had fled back to Poland. The heads of the Ostroh community announced that no Jew should remain there or in [nearby] Mezhyrichi. . . . “ We cannot trust the Ukrainian inhabitants of the city not to harm us.” So, everyone fled. Anyone who had a horse and cart took that. Those who did not have one, even though they had enough money to buy one, would not wait
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but took their wives and children by the hand and fled on foot, throwing away all their belongings. T hose with h orses and carts, but who were weighed down with possessions . . . would unload them at an inn and give them to the innkeeper so that they could travel light. On that Shabbat Ḥazon, there was a column three h orse and carts wide on the road, and for a stretch of seven miles—the entire distance between Ostroh and Dubno—the road was jammed with h orses and carts one b ehind the other and a w hole throng of pedestrians. Within two hours on that Shabbat Ḥazon, three mounted men—one Jew, called Moshe Tsoref, and two noblemen—chased a fter us, saying, “Why are you g oing so slowly? The e nemy is close on our heels. They are now in Mezhyrichi; we barely escaped.” Immediately indescribable panic and confusion seized the Jews. Everyone threw silver, gold, utensils, books, pillows, and bed covers from their carts so they could get away more quickly. The field was cluttered with gold, silver, and clothes, but no Jew stopped to take them. . . . Some left everything b ehind, including the horse and cart, and fled for their lives into the woods with their wives and children. Many women and men who had taken their children by the hand let go of them in the panic. . . . [The next day], we learned the truth. The Commander had not fled to Poland but traveled to the town of Kremenets. Things calmed down and from then on, the pace lessened. We walked from place to place through towns and villages, sleeping on the roads. And even then, we found no rest for our weary souls. We were robbed and crushed, despised and hated. . . . Every night that we spent in a Ukrainian inn, we were afraid that the innkeeper would kill us in the night, because they were all rebels. When we got up in the morning still alive, we would recite the blessing, “Blessed are You, who brings the Dead to Life.”14
This account of the kind of communal flight that accompanied the early phase of the 1648 campaign paints an astonishingly vivid picture of the uncertainty and fear that people felt as they fled. It also shows the chaos created when so many people were on the move at once. One or two other aspects of the experience are also seen in this description. The first concerns the transmission of information. It would seem that, though the news reported from one to another was not always accurate (a common occurrence in wartime), there was a considerable flow of information between Jews and non-Jews as everyone strove to understand what was going on around them. This text certainly gives no sense of the
The Ch aos of Wa r [ 35 ]
Jewish communities as isolated in any way from their surroundings in this regard.15 Hanover also emphasizes the breakdown of social structures involved in flight. All the money owned by the socioeconomic elite would not be enough to hire a h orse and cart if time did not permit it. Even families, though they might have tried to flee together, lost contact in the panic— parents lost children, wives husbands, and so on. The sense of impoverishment, particularly the loss of wealth and possessions, is very strong in this narrative. It is also tied in with a much greater loss, that of security. The refugees seem to have felt—and indeed to have been—very exposed and vulnerable. All the physical and psychological defenses built up over generations of living in the Jewish communities of various towns were stripped from them, and they were now seemingly alone and defenseless in a very threatening world. Underlying this was the fear of violence and murder. If the Jews could expect l ittle mercy from the Cossacks and the Tatars, they feared the most bestial treatment at the hands of the peasants. In Hanover’s words: Some [Jews] were skinned alive and their flesh thrown to the dogs; some had their hands and legs cut off, with their bodies thrown on the highway to be run over by wagons and trampled by horses; others were seriously, but not mortally wounded and thrown aside to die slowly, writhing in their own blood until their souls left them. Many were buried alive. The enemy slaughtered infants in their mothers’ laps. Many children w ere torn into pieces like fish. They slashed the bellies of pregnant women, removed their fetuses and punched them in the face. They tore open the bellies of some of these women and put live cats in. They then sewed up their bellies and cut off their hands so that they would not be able to take the live cats out of their bellies. They hung infants on their mothers’ breasts. They skewered some of the children, roasted them over a fire and then brought them to their m others to eat. Sometimes they would use the bodies of Jewish c hildren to make bridges to cross over.16
hese are so unspeakably horrifying descriptions that it is hard to believe T that such acts w ere perpetrated in reality. Prominent in the text is the bestial violence against w omen’s bodies, particularly their reproductive organs. This suggests that in addition to the ubiquitous threat of rape, Jewish women in Ukraine lived in fear of something even worse: sadistic attacks on them as m others, responsible for bringing a new generation into the world.
[ 36 ] ch a pter t wo
Ukrainian scholar Natalia Yakovenko, noting similar stories of attacks on Poles and Ukrainians in Polish and Ukrainian chronicles of the time, has suggested that the texts might be symbolic in nature. In her view, the extreme nature of the writing and the emphasis on excessive cruelty, as well as acts of martyrdom, might have been a way of expressing the idea that the overthrow of the accepted order should be followed by the purification of the land, which the authors of the chronicles understood to be the most profound meaning of the events.17 While this may have been the case, it remains impossible to determine w hether it was the authors’ depictions that w ere symbolic or w hether the perpetrators did t hose particular things for their symbolic value. And of course, whatever might actually have happened, the Jewish refugees across Ukraine believed—and w ere terrified by—these horrific rumors. The descriptions of these acts of what we would today call “ethnic cleansing” found in depositions given to the rabbinic and the Polish courts are considerably less extreme than those in the chronicles, though still very harrowing.18 Mistress Buna’s testimony concerning the murder of her husband, which was reported to the rabbinical court of Istanbul in the late 1660s, is just one example: About twenty years ago, the Cossacks came to Nemyriv and took about 150 Jewish householders from the town to a courtyard where they locked them in. They then dug a very big, deep pit in the courtyard and killed the Jews as they w ere standing at its edge. As he was killed, each one fell into that deep pit. The first to be killed was her husband, who fell straight in. Afterwards, they killed all the o thers who fell in to the pit on top of him. Then they covered them up with soil and put in so much that t here was a great mound. She also testified that she was the only survivor, because a monk begged them not to kill her as he wanted to convert her and raise her as his daughter.19
Another aspect of the violence emphasized in the Hebrew chronicles is the attack not just on Jews but on Judaism itself. Stories are told of vellum Torah scrolls being ripped up and used as shoes, synagogues destroyed, and holy books ripped to shreds and scattered on the streets. On a more physical level, the chronicles tell of Jewish c hildren murdered in a twisted parody of kosher slaughter and rabbis and mystics killed while at prayer, while the testimonies talk of Jews being put to death for refusing to eat non-kosher meat.20 Of course, the basic motivation of the uprising had little to do with Christian-Jewish tensions. Catholic-Orthodox hostility was a much more
The Ch aos of Wa r [ 37 ]
significant issue for the rebels. The Jews w ere targets of violence as a result of the economic services they gave the Catholic Polish nobility and the improved social standing that they had enjoyed as a result. Nonetheless, religious hatred was never far below the surface.21 The ultimate form of this kind of religious violence was, of course, when Jews were given the option of converting to Orthodox Christian ity or being killed. Refusing to convert at the price of one’s life was called “Sanctifying God’s Name”—Kiddush ha-shem—and was held to be a pinnacle of faith. According to Jewish law, it is permissible to do whatever necessary to save one’s life, except in three cases. These are when the alternative to death is engaging in idol worship, murder, or incest. Forced conversion was thus a situation that called for martyrdom.22 All the Hebrew chronicles retell stories of Jewish men refusing to convert and thus being killed as an act of piety. The goal of the authors seems to have been to create a posthumous image of Polish Jewry as holy p eople. When the texts do refer to conversion, it is usually Jewish women who are blamed for taking the cowardly way out. This may be the reflection of a situation in which many more w omen than men w ere given the option of converting since they were more highly prized by their captors, though it is more likely simply to have been an expression of misogyny. In fact, the surviving records suggest that many Jews, men and w omen, chose to convert rather than be killed. As time went on, the geographical range of the violence spread, too. Cossack forces moved north into Lithuania, taking Gomel, Chernihiv, Starodub, and Pinsk. The Lithuanian Hetman Janusz Radziwiłł orga nized a largely successful counterattack, but not before many thousands had died and t here had been mass murders of Jews in most of t hese towns, the largest probably in Gomel. In the fall of 1648, Khmelnytsky himself took his armies first to Red Ruthenia (the region around Lviv) and then deeper into Crown Poland, reaching as far as Zamość. Although the larger communities, such as Lviv, Zhukva, and Zamość, survived the sieges and were able to ransom themselves, the scale of destruction in the smaller towns and villages was extensive.23 The sources do not permit any kind of estimation of either the number of Jewish lives lost (during the campaigns themselves and in associated violence) or the dimensions of the Jews’ flight to safety elsewhere. This problem of numbers is not restricted to Red Ruthenia. T here is no satisfactory way even to estimate the full extent of the mass murder, mass conversion, and particularly the mass flight of Jews during the Khmelnytsky uprising. Some of the Hebrew chronicles do give the numbers of
[ 38 ] ch a pter t wo
Jewish dead in various communities, but taking into account the fact that there was no way that the authors could have received accurate data, as well as the conventions of contemporary historical writing, which made no demand of accuracy, these figures should be treated with great caution.24 Polish correspondence of the time sometimes also mentioned the killing of Jews in various places, often giving large numbers of dead. Here, too, it seems unlikely that the authors had accurate knowledge of what had taken place, making their remarks appear more like wartime horror stories than authorized accounts. As far as conversion is concerned, even t hese kinds of quantitative sources are lacking. The first Hebrew chronicle to be published about the uprising, Tzok ha-ʾitim, which was written in rhyme, deals with the phenomenon in a single verse: Many women betrayed the religious law and married Greek Orthodox men as they had chosen. Many Jewish [men also] broke the covenant and did not keep God’s commandments. Those forced to convert were still careful but they did not surrender their souls. They w ere the only ones to survive.25
This was typical in that it mentioned large numbers of converts, particularly women, but made no attempt to bring numbers. In the introduction to his uncle’s book Shivrei luḥot, Yitzḥak Mokhiaḥ from Trembowla wrote, “And when the Jews do not want to repent and weep in the synagogues . . . then, for their sins, they are forced to weep in e nemy hands u nder all kinds of torture . . . as we have heard from those who have returned from captivity and the tens of thousands of w omen and children who w ere defiled among the gentiles.”26 Though the figure of “tens of thousands” is given here, it is clearly typological and tells us only that conversion was very widespread. As far as the dimensions of Jewish flight are concerned, even this kind of figure is lacking. Despite all the problems with the source base, Shaul Stampfer collected together e very piece of information available dealing with the numbers of Jewish dead and refugees in the four regions that made up Ukraine in 1648. Through painstaking analysis, he reached the following conclusions. Of the 40,000 or so Jews he calculated to be living in the Ukrainian regions in 1648, some 18,000–20,000 perished during the uprising—a huge percentage of the population. This figure included not only those murdered but also those who died in the famines and plagues that followed the military campaigns. Stampfer went on to conclude that there must have been at least a further 6,000 Jews who left Ukraine as
The Ch aos of Wa r [ 39 ]
refugees or captives (this does not include the internally displaced who fled from town to town without leaving the region). T hese figures, though undoubtedly speculative, seem to be the best approximation we can reach. Sadly, however, they say nothing about the numbers of dead and refugees in either Lithuania or Red Ruthenia and the rest of Crown Poland, which surely boosted both numbers significantly.27 The issue of the refugees within Ukraine seems to have been a truly major problem, at least in the early stages of the uprising. The dangerous conditions on the roads meant that t hese people were desperate to find sanctuary within the walls of a town. In some cases, Jews w ere allowed to settle—at least temporarily—in places hitherto forbidden them. In 1649 t here is evidence of Jewish refugees in Kiev, for example.28 On the other hand, towns that already had a Jewish community were sometimes unwilling to allow additional Jews to s ettle within their boundaries. In 1649, the Sejmik (local noble council) of the Przemyśl region issued an order forbidding Jews and other refugees from settling in the town.29 The fear of moving from place to place was so g reat that when Jews heard that General Jarema Wiśniowiecki had allowed a column of Jewish refugees the security of joining his camp followers, they made him a kind of folk hero.30 Nonetheless, conditions w ere so difficult that many Jews decided to do all they could to leave the war zone and find security elsewhere. The refugee issue thus ceased to be a local m atter and began to affect Polish- Lithuanian Jewry as a whole.
ch a p t er t hr ee
The Refugees outside Ukraine
in the introduction to his book Tif ’eret Yisra’el, Yisra’el ben Aharon, rabbi of Shklov in Belarus, included a short autobiographical vignette: When I was eight or nine, I studied with a private teacher in Hlusk.1 It was the beginning of the 1648 massacres and we had been driven out of our land. My father and teacher, the pious R. ‘Aharon Yafeh had been a rabbi in the Uman community in Ukraine, and we had been driven out of there. E very day a fter the evening prayer, I used to go up on the roof with the volume of the Talmud I had for my studies, to practice reading. While I was up there, I would burst into floods of tears, pray to the Holy One Blessed Be He, and bang my head on the roof—all in prayer to the God of Israel that he would reveal to me the light of his Holy Torah.2
We can only guess at the kind of traumatic experiences the young Yisra’el ben Aharon must have undergone in his flight from Ukraine to Belarus that would have brought him to such an emotional extreme. We can also only wonder how many other refugees from the horrors of the uprising had similar responses—Yisra’el’s text is extremely rare in its candor. What we do know is that the boy and his family were part of a flood of Jewish refugees who decided to leave the war zone of Ukraine to seek security further away. There were two main directions of flight at this stage. One was westward, across the Vistula river, to the large settled communities of Little Poland and G reat Poland. The other was northward into the G rand Duchy of Lithuania. In both places, the sudden influx of large numbers of refugees, most of whom w ere destitute, posed a series of problems to those bodies that administered Jewish life. The challenges that had to be met were dealt with on the regional and local levels. The first can be seen most [ 40 ]
The R efugees ou tside Uk r a ine [ 41 ]
clearly in the responses of Lithuanian Jewry to the refugee issue, the second in those of the Kraków community. We will begin in Lithuania.
Regional Solutions: The Lithuanian Jewish Council and the Refugees The first mentions of the Ukrainian Jews’ flight to Lithuania can be found in the Hebrew chronicles.3 Clearly, the refugees either did not know or were beyond caring that there were Cossack units active in Lithuania until at least November 1648—the towns of Gomel, Pinsk, and Brest in the southern part of the Grand Duchy were all sacked.4 In fact, the Cossack forces reached as far north as Slutzk in the fall of 1648, though they failed to take the town. The Polish army under Janusz Radziwiłł then mounted a major counterattack, and though the uprising continued in Ukraine, the G rand Duchy of Lithuania does not seem to have suffered significant attacks again.5 Perhaps one thing that persuaded the refugees to make for Lithuania was the absence t here of the massive popular uprising that had treated the Jews so cruelly in Ukraine. This is not to say that Jews w ere not killed in Lithuania, too. The town of Pinsk in Polesie was taken by the Cossacks on October 26, 1648; they held it for about two weeks. Though much of its Jewish population had fled beforehand, many of t hose who remained w ere massacred by the town’s Orthodox inhabitants. On the basis of surviving court records, Mordechai Nadav has found the names of about fifty Jews killed during the attack. By mid-November, Janusz Radziwiłł had retaken the town, and its inhabitants began to return.6 The Ukrainian Jews were thus coming to a region dealing with the aftermath of the Cossack campaign that already had its own internal refugee issues. Little surprise, then, that the refugee question came up for discussion in the Lithuanian Jewish Council in its session of January 1649—the first since the outbreak of the uprising. The Council was a regional body comprised of lay and rabbinic leaders from Lithuania’s three leading communities: Brest, Pinsk, and Grodno.7 It had existed for at least twenty-five years. On average, it met e very two years to deal with the Jews’ tax assessment for the state and to represent them before the non-Jewish authorities. It also made a series of rulings on issues, which it saw as important to Lithuanian Jewry as a whole, including communal organization and welfare systems. In the 1649 meeting, the first problem on the agenda was the Jews held for ransom by enemy forces. In an attempt to keep prices down, the
[ 42 ] ch a pter thr ee
amount to be paid as ransom for any individual was capped at 10 zlotys, with the money to be returned by the Council. Following this, the welfare of the other refugees had to be ensured. The Council confidently agreed to help defray the expenses incurred by each community that took in refugees.8 This was quite in keeping with previous Council policy, which had regulated concerted Jewish action in times of danger and had generally been prepared to help cover expenses.9 The problem, however, was only just beginning; the wave of refugees from Ukraine continued to grow. At the Council’s next meeting in March 1650, much more attention was paid to the refugee question, with concern expressed for the welfare of the elderly, women, and young girls. Communities w ere expected to support a certain number of poor refugees according to their size and/or tax assessment. The idea was for them to include the foreign refugees within the recognized group of the local poor for whom they w ere responsible. The number of refugees was clearly beginning to concern the Council, which ignored its e arlier promise to defray some of the costs involved in looking a fter them. Instead, it mooted sending guards to the communities on the Ukrainian border to ensure that no more refugees arrived to overburden Lithuanian Jewry’s welfare system.10 The pressures continued to mount. The Sejm of the Commonwealth, desperate to find new sources of income to finance the war, and unable to hike the taxes paid by the Jews of Poland hard hit by the Khmelnytsky uprising, began to squeeze the relatively unaffected Jews of Lithuania. Their poll tax rose from 12,000 zlotys in 1647 to 24,000 zlotys in 1648. There w ere special imposts of 6,000 zlotys in January 1649 and 12,000 zlotys in January 1650. In 1652, the poll tax was raised to 30,000 zlotys and reached 40,000 only two years later. The podymne or hearth tax was reimposed at the level of 16,000 zlotys in 1650 and was raised to 20,000 only two years later.11 This massive increase in their tax bill clearly affected the ability of the Council and the individual communities to deal with the refugees. In its meeting of December 1651, the Council announced that Lithuania would be willing to support 2,000 poor Jewish refugees over the following year.12 One might assume that this meant that there were many more in the country, but even if 2,000 was an accurate assessment, it means that—in a conservative estimate—the refugees must have made up about 2 percent of the population.13 This was a huge burden, and u nder its pressure, communal organizations began to unravel. The communities could no longer support all the refugees from their budgets, so half w ere housed with
The R efugees ou tside Uk r a ine [ 43 ]
individuals who had to look a fter them at their own expense. Worse, the Council lost faith in the ability of the communities to pay their obligations, demanding that payments owed it by individual communities be underwritten by wealthy individuals.14 Some communities even closed down the local yeshiva to save money.15 Demands on Lithuanian Jewry from abroad also grew. The Council received letters from Jews in the Land of Israel, complaining that they were being reduced to penury b ecause the annual support payments from Lithuania had stopped.16 In addition, the Jewish leaders of Istanbul also wrote, demanding that Lithuanian Jewry help cover the costs of redeeming the thousands of east European Jewish captives in the slave markets there. The Council agreed to the demand, requesting that the communities make special collections and send the money to the Lublin fair, whence it would be sent to Istanbul, presumably via Lviv.17 The next meeting of the Council was delayed u ntil March 1655, by which time a Russian invasion was under way from the east. In the meantime, the situation had continued to deteriorate. In addition to the prob lems of the Ukrainian refugees, t here was a whole new issue of local refugees: Belarussian Jews who had fled in the face of the Russian advance. Special monthly collections were instituted to help ransom captives.18 The refugees were to be allowed to settle wherever they could and to continue doing whatever business possible, just like the Ukrainian Jews.19 In order to preserve its income, the Council proposed that the refugees set up an organization to register themselves in their temporary homes so as to continue paying taxes.20 The financial pressures were enormous: collecting money from the communities—especially that owed to the state as taxes— had become so difficult that the Council asked the non-Jewish authorities to help them collect it.21 Here, too, the refugee issue was significant. The communities were ordered to stop refugees leaving the country in search of a better home. If they left, tax revenues would drop.22 At that point the Russian war overwhelmed the Jews of Lithuania and the Council ceased to function. It did not meet again for nearly seven years, u ntil December 1661, when the Russian army was contained in eastern Belarus. At that meeting, the atmosphere was more relaxed, perhaps because in the meantime, Lithuanian Jewish leaders, acting indepen dently, had persuaded the Sejm to reduce their tax burden to less than half of what they had been paying in 1654.23 Reconstruction was at the top of the agenda: there were regulations about reestablishing the yeshivot, bringing to justice non-Jews who had murdered Jews, and rescheduling communal debts. Refugee issues were almost ignored: the only direct
[ 44 ] ch a pter thr ee
reference was the regulation on ransoming captives, which set the communities’ contribution at 50 zlotys, beyond which the Council would help. Finally, the Council ordered a new census of Lithuanian Jewry, presumably in order to reorganize tax collection.24 These last two regulations suggest that many of the Ukrainian and Belarussian refugees had returned home, with the others successfully integrated into their new communities.
On the Communal Level: Refugees in Kraków In the summer of 1648, Gavri’el Shussberg, an educated young man from the southern Polish community of Rzeszów, was one of the first to witness the flood of Jewish refugees fleeing war-torn Ukraine. He wrote: Full of curiosity, I . . . stood at the highway by Rzeszów . . . the town closest to [the region where] all the Jewish victims [fell], and the main place where the refugees broke their journey. They would always come to us, telling their troubles to all and sundry, as would the injured and the wounded, and t hose few who had escaped being killed. . . . It was the very beginning of the flight.25
Rzeszów lay on the main route connecting southeastern and southwestern Poland, so when the war broke out in Ukraine, refugees would often travel first to Lviv (or somewhere close by) and from there to Kraków, passing Shussberg’s hometown on the way westward. The young man clearly listened closely to the refugee stories told and retold in Rzeszów and perhaps even wrote them down, for they formed the basis of his detailed historical chronicle.26 As Shussberg’s account suggests, Kraków was indeed one of the major centers for which refugees made. Its Jewish community was situated more or less in the shadow of the Royal C astle—the Wawel—which presumably made it seem one of the most secure places in the Commonwealth. For young people, its reputation as a center of Torah study also made it an attractive choice. The personal chronicle of Yehudah ben Nissan Katz from Zhukva makes this clear. Katz had been sent to study at the famous yeshiva of Ostroh in 1648. Then the war broke out, and just a fter Yom Kippur (September 26, 1648), he was forced to flee. I said [to myself] where should I run to, if not to a well-established and wealthy community. Once I had tasted the very dregs of that evil [time] and passed through destroyed and deserted [communities], facing the
The R efugees ou tside Uk r a ine [ 45 ]
sword by day and the ice by night . . . I said nothing would be better for me than to travel to the Kraków community, a major Jewish center. There my soul would find peace, I would be able to recover and to sit in the study halls to drink from the cup of all wisdom.27
The journey was not an easy one. He seems to have returned first to his home in Zhukva, picked up his wife and son who lived t here, and then set out for Kraków. In the chaos of the time, his parents-in-law e ither could not or would not join him, and he lost contact with them: I did not know where they w ere b ecause I had fled [from Ostroh] to Kraków and they could not travel with me due to the great panic. A man left his father and mother28 and everything unraveled. No-one asked after his friend to find out where he was, everyone was afraid.29
The journey took Yehudah and his wife about three weeks, and while they were on the road, their son, Nissim, died. Though the text of the chronicle is fragmentary at that point, it would seem that a Tatar soldier murdered him.30 The young couple finally reached Kraków on Friday, October 16.31 Yehudah’s description also points to a problem that would concern the leaders of Polish Jewry when they met in session as the Council of Four Lands. When families broke up during their flight, particularly if young children were separated from their parents, it could become very difficult to reunite them. The children themselves might not be able to say precisely who they (or their parents) w ere. Cases where young children w ere forced to convert in order to survive while their parents w ere killed, but the Jewish community was able eventually to claim them back, raised a similar issue.32 The problem was not just the immediate one of trying to return children to their families. The Jewish leaders w ere extremely concerned with preventing cases of inadvertent forbidden (i.e., incestuous) marriages later in life. Their solution was to instruct Jewish f athers to write special tags to put around their c hildren’s necks with their family details.33 It is not clear to what extent this was practical. Certainly, a fter the war was over, the Chief Rabbi of Poznań recommended that e very Jewish man caught up in the chaos draw up a family tree to prove he was who he said he was.34 In fact, as we w ill see, this was by no means the only time that a sudden influx of refugees forced Jewish leaders to reevaluate the ways in which they verified p eople’s identity. In his chronicle, Yehudah tells that, once he reached Kraków, he was given special treatment by the community leaders. The Chief Rabbi of
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the community, the renowned Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, took time away from his teaching to question him closely on his experiences in Ukraine.35 Yehudah was clearly one of the first refugees to come to Kraków and people w ere still very interested in hearing his story. Within a short time, however, the number of refugees swelled to hundreds, if not more. Most were indigent and many did not have the kind of education that Yehudah Katz had. Such refugees were not welcome guests with the social elite. The Kraków community had to boost its charity budget quite dramatically.36 In wartime, this was no easy proposition. Like the Jews of Lithuania, Kraków Jewry was subjected to increased taxation demands in order to cover the costs of the war. The nobles who had invested money in the Jewish community demanded its return without delay. Church institutions, too, fueled by the belief that the Jews were responsible for the war, put their own forms of pressure on the community, to deal with which large sums had to be found as bribes.37 Worse than that, wartime conditions meant that the Kraków Jews’ income from trade fluctuated, sometimes wildly: in the first period of the uprising, from 1648 to 1649, it seems to have fallen dramatically (trade with the Lublin and Sandomierz regions, for example, dropped by over 50 percent). However, by 1650, it seems to have picked up again. There were probably two reasons for this: first, the uprising itself entered a period of quiet in 1650 and thereafter was increasingly limited to Ukraine, allowing other regions to recover; second, as conditions in central Europe improved following the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, trade with Silesia and other parts of the Holy Roman Empire—the German lands, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia—as well as Hungary and the Spisz region of Slovakia, grew rapidly. By 1651, the Kraków community’s international trade had grown by over 20 percent from its 1648 levels.38 Unfortunately, the upswing was rapidly followed by a catastrophic crash in 1652, when plague hit the town and its Jewish community. The outbreak seems to have started in Ukraine and quickly spread across southern Poland to Kraków, where the presence of large numbers of refugees in cramped and presumably unsanitary conditions in the Jewish quarter meant that it hit the community very hard.39 All those who could—prominent among them the leaders of the Jewish community— fled the town, making a temporary home in the small and unaffected communities of the region, such as Olkusz and Zator.40 In Kraków itself, conditions were extremely difficult, as the heads of the community explained in a letter of August 18, 1652.
The R efugees ou tside Uk r a ine [ 47 ]
Of the dead, more have died of starvation than of plague. They could not be buried because they did not have the necessities—linen for shrouds and wood for coffins. For that reason, many are laid on the ground until their bellies split, their bodies become distended, and worms and maggots begin to eat them. Last Friday, a hundred [Jews] were buried together, and all b ecause t here w ere no coffins. The gravediggers themselves have died. Until now, more than a thousand [Jews] have died—great students and pious leaders—the least of whom could have made a complete world. For our sins, t hose who survive are already weak and exhausted from starvation. Their situation is grave; they have run out of money—even after we made a special collection before we left Kraków. Now, at our committee [meeting] h ere in Olkusz, we have made another special collection41 for the poor, but that too w ill not be enough to cover [even] half of what they need.42
This text formed part of a letter written for fundraising purposes, so it is possible that the descriptions were sensationalized, though we know from other sources that the situation was indeed desperate.43 In fact, we have two such letters that the Kraków community wrote in the summer of 1652. Both were sent to the Jewish community in Vienna and both were attempts to raise money to help relieve the distress of the Kraków Jews and the refugees in the town. In the first, dated July 24, 1652, the community was quite up-front.44 It acknowledged that it was not asking for war relief (such requests w ere already being made by other communities) but for help in dealing with refugees in time of plague and starvation. The letter stressed that although the community had done its best to look after them, the financial situation in Kraków had got out of hand. They requested the Jews of Vienna to spread the news of Kraków’s distress to the communities both of Frankfurt a.M., as well as other German towns, and of Venice, as well as other Italian towns. Of course, the Kraków leaders also requested help from the Jews of Vienna themselves: “We are absolutely confident of Your Honors that as you are so willing to help distant [Jews] in distress, you w ill help [us]—all the more as we are related to you by blood and by marriage.”45 It is interesting that rather than relying on any religious imperative connected with charitable giving, the letter stressed the network of personal connections between the two communities as the major motivation for giving.46 This notwithstanding, in order to encourage the flow of donations, the Kraków leaders also wrote
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that they would send a representative with the letter, whose job it would be to travel to the various communities and talk to them in person. The decision to write the letter, its authors added, had not been an easy one: “Woe is us that we have reached such a level of poverty that we have been forced to drop our mask [of shame] in order to keep this mass [of Jews] alive and save the poor survivors [of the massacres].”47 The Kraków leaders w ere not engaging in some kind of fake humility. When the Poznań community began fundraising on its own behalf in August 1652, it had precisely the same reaction: “We have been forced to drop the mask of shame from our faces and to send [a representative] to Germany [to encourage them] to donate money.”48 For a century or so until 1648, the large communities of Poznań and Kraków had been perhaps the wealthiest and most important centers of Jewish life and learning in Europe. To be suddenly reduced to begging for money must have been a terrible humiliation. Less than a month a fter sending the letter, the Kraków leaders found themselves writing back to their counterparts in Vienna to thank them for their generosity.49 A donation of some 90 red zlotys—worth about 450 regular zlotys—had been raised for them in Vienna (though t here was a problem with one of the promissory notes, as the merchant on whom it was drawn had died in the plague). Like any good fundraisers, the authors of the letter added that the sum given was by no means enough and reiterated their request that the Viennese community let the other communities know of Kraków’s desperate need. Nonetheless, the Kraków leaders seem to have been so encouraged by their success in raising money by letter that they decided not to send out a representative to drum up donations, preferring instead to spend the money they saved directly on refugee relief. Kraków was neither the first nor the only Polish Jewish community to ask the communities of central and western Europe for help in supporting refugees or ransoming captives taken during the uprising. The community of Bar had written to Amsterdam as early as the summer of 1648—even before the town fell to the Cossacks at the end of July—presumably to ask for help in dealing with the masses of local refugees thronging t here.50 The community of Ostroh received a donation from Amsterdam in the fall of 1650 and had a representative raising money in Venice in the summer of 1652.51 In the summer of 1651, Lviv, too, had representatives in Venice in search of financial support.52 They may have been responsible for the donation made to the Lviv community by the Jews of Amsterdam on December 13, 1650, and they may also have been the unnamed representatives from Poland recorded as collecting donations in Hamburg earlier in
The R efugees ou tside Uk r a ine [ 49 ]
the fall.53 In addition, as we have seen, the community of Poznań sent its own representative to the Jewish communities of the Holy Roman Empire in the summer of 1652. Communities writing or sending representatives to each other in dif ferent countries to request financial help was not an entirely new phenomenon. We know of one or two German communities during the Thirty Years’ War who asked for help from Italy.54 Still, the enormous suffering caused by the outbreak of the Khmelnytsky uprising seems to have made it much more common. The community representatives w ere not the only Polish-Lithuanian Jews to leave the country. A considerable number of the refugees did, too. Some went on personal missions to collect money to ransom loved ones, but most were just looking for a secure place in which to settle. Many simply crossed the border to Moravia or Silesia and made their homes there.55 One such was Yehudah Katz. On the street in Kraków one day he met an acquaintance from the Silesian community of Ptaszków (in German, Vogelsdorf ).56 His acquaintance regaled him with stories of how good life was there and how easy it would be to set up in business. Katz was persuaded, packed up his family again, and left Kraków for Silesia, where, as his friend had promised, he did very well—at least u ntil his wife died.57 There is simply no way of telling how many of the refugees of the Khmelnytsky uprising left Poland in the late 1640s and early 1650s. Enough fragmentary evidence has survived to suggest that it was not a negligible number, but that is all that can be said. In fact, the sources make it clear that it was not u ntil the l ater 1650s, when the uprising was over but the next round of wars (with Moscow and with Sweden) was its height, that really significant numbers of Jewish refugees reached central and western Europe.58 Perhaps for most Ukrainian refugees, the long journey to western Poland was enough and they had neither the strength nor the resources to go any further. In all, what happened in Kraków during the years of the uprising seems to have had much in common with what we saw in Lithuania. In both cases, communal resources w ere swiftly overwhelmed by the sheer number of refugees. In Lithuania, the Jewish regional council continued to function and devoted much thought to devising means of dealing with the issues and using resources from within the region to solve the prob lems. In the end, despite all the problems, it does seem to have been reasonably successful. The records from Kraków show that when the double blow of refugees and plague finally brought the community to its knees, its
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leaders felt that they had no other option but to ask for help from Jewish communities outside the Commonwealth—particularly t hose with whom they had family ties. Other Polish communities had the same thought— but all seemed to have acted independently, and so in competition with each other. In practical terms, this was probably not effective policy. Having said that, we do know that Polish Jewish leaders—both lay and rabbinic—were concerned to deal with problems arising from the uprising. The Council of Four Lands’ ruling on the issue of child identity is a case in point. It was just that the measures they devised had less to do with the day-to-day difficulties of dealing with masses of indigent refugees than with helping survivors face the spiritual—and thus psychological—issues that their terrible experiences raised for them. Over the long term, the decisions taken in this regard would prove extremely beneficial for the Jews of Poland (and Lithuania), helping put them back on their feet at war’s end.
ch a p t er fou r
Facing the Refugee Experience
Trauma oward the beginning of the uprising, a Jewish refugee from western T Ukraine who had made his way to the community of Pinczów, about fifty miles northeast of Kraków, appeared before the rabbi, very distraught, though, according to the text, of sound mind. His name was Me’ir ben Asher Lemel and he said: I have transgressed before the Lord God of Hosts in the sin of masturbation, through evil thoughts and touching a married w oman though we did not sleep together as man and wife and I had no intercourse with her.1 [At the time] I made a full and complete confession before two rabbis, who arranged a program of repentance for me, which I fulfilled. However, today it means nothing to me for I can see that God is taking out His anger on His p eople, Israel. I say [to myself] perhaps it is my sins that have caused all this. So, please be [even more] strict with me with [further] very harsh punishments.2
The rabbi of Pinczów made no comment on Me’ir’s feelings of guilt and responsibility for the massacres of Jews in Ukraine. Instead, he checked to make sure that the story was true and that Me’ir had not committed adultery and then gave him a strict regimen of repentance for the sin of the flesh he had committed. The rabbi also appended a second ruling, which stated that once Me’ir had done his repentance, anyone who picked a fight with him or his f amily would be severely punished. Perhaps he was afraid that people would take Me’ir’s assertion of guilt seriously and vent their anger on him for all the deaths in Ukraine.
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Though the lack of detail makes it difficult to tell precisely what was going on, this strange story does suggest that those who had lost loved ones or been through the traumatic experience of fleeing for their lives could not but be marked psychologically. We have already seen Yisra’el ben Aharon from Uman, the boy alone on a roof in Hlusk in 1648, weeping uncontrollably and banging his head as he begged God to impart some of His Divine Light. In the case of Me’ir ben Asher Lemel, it is possible that he insisted on his guilt for the massacres b ecause d oing so allowed him to overcome his feelings of impotence in face of all the violence. Taking upon himself the responsibility for the horrors would have allowed him to feel that he had not just been passively swept up in events—his actions had had an effect on them. That would have made him a figure of importance in the world, not just another miserable refugee. So, in a strange and rather twisted fashion, his urgent desire to do further repentance might have been a way of helping him restore some sense of order and meaning to a life that had been brutally turned inside out.3 An even darker picture emerges from the chronicle of Yehudah ben Nissan Katz, who also suffered very traumatic experiences during the uprising. Apart from his flight from Ostroh and the terrible journey from there to Kraków, he lost his mother, presumably during the siege of Zhukva, his son on the road to Kraków, and his father during the plague there. More than that, just as he had been beginning to prosper in his new home of Vogelsdorf, his wife had a miscarriage and died. Of everything he had gone through, what seems to have affected him most was that in the chaos of his flight, he had not managed to say goodbye to his mother, who died before he could see her again.4 Though he did not write a g reat deal about his feelings or how he viewed his life, Yehudah Katz has left us a rare testimony as to his emotional state, for in his chronicle he gives a detailed account of a dream he had while a refugee in Kraków. Like many Jews in premodern times, Katz believed that dreams were of Divine provenance and could be prophetic in nature, so he wrote down all he remembered. This is how he described it: I was walking in the house that belongs to my father-in-law . . . [g oing from] room to room, large and small, alcoves, balconies, and halls, and they were all open. Not a single one of them had an opening [in the wall], a door, or a window. Then I came to the large room—the shtub5—where we had always lived together, eating and drinking in contentment. I noticed that this room, too, was open, with no opening [in the wall], door, or window; t here was no t able, no chair, no bed, and
Facing the R efugee Ex per ience [ 53 ]
no lamp, just “the abode of God”6 in complete ruins. I was astonished by how it looked, with no-one sitting there. I was walking back and forth, worried and hurting, weeping and wailing from the sadness it caused me. And while I was walking, as I used to do from time to time, my face [full of] anger, I saw a dove fluttering at the top of the wall not making a sound. Sometimes it would fly [down] under the house’s benches and I would chase after it [trying] to catch it, but it would get away from me and I could not take it. Every time I would make a grab for its wings it would fly away from one to corner to another u ntil I was tired and worn out from chasing it. . . . I said, “I will see what happens to it.” The dove did not find a resting place for its foot7 . . . and flew out through the win dow. I sat and waited in case it would come [back] in the evening.8
To understand what this text can tell us of Yehudah’s internal world— what the refugee experience had done to him—would require detailed psychological analysis. Since he has been dead some three hundred years that is clearly impossible. I therefore asked two contemporary experts in the field of psychoanalysis, Lewis Aron, professor of psychoanalysis at New York University, and Galit Atlas, a senior analyst working in New York, to read the text and tell me what they saw in it. This was their response: A contemporary analyst would not be asking the patient what the dream means b ecause to do that would be immediately to jump to conclusions and so intellectualize the process. Nor would the con temporary analyst interpret the dream based on symbols and narrative alone b ecause that would mean operating from the therapist’s assumptions and framework of thought. Instead, a good contemporary analytic therapist would engage the patient in a process that would hope to see where the patient would and could go with this dream. It is very much an interactional or inter-subjective process. Having said that, of course we would also use our own intuitions, theoretical framework, and subjective reactions. Since, in this case, the subject is no longer alive, t hose are all we have to go on. So, bearing in mind the limitations, this is how we would read the dream: The main idea that we find in it is related to what we would call “self states” (versions and aspects of the self, some of which are dissociated from the conscious self-image) and to the house as depicting the subject’s own mind/soul. The dreamer here is destroyed, ruined. He has no boundaries to protect him, no windows to give him air or to escape through, and no-one to be with him. The dove can be seen as representing a part of himself that he is looking to catch. (Perhaps it is that part
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of himself that will go outside to find out if it is safe, though, of course we cannot know what personal meanings a dove might have had for him. For example, “Dove” might have been a nickname of a beloved family member. We cannot know such details.) The world into which Noah sent the dove was one of complete destruction. But the dream expresses the unconscious feelings, so the house is the unconscious self-state that was destroyed with trauma. No opening! No future! Everything is ruined. We would also think of his concern or focus on openings as expressing his own preoccupation with boundaries, borders, openings in his body and bodies around him— boundaries that w ere invaded, penetrated, destroyed—as well as his concern with protection, walls, geographical boundaries and borders. We feel quite strongly that this is someone who has been psychologically destroyed, completely so.9
Of course, the account of the dream is a text written by a single individual, which means that in addition to the limitations of how we can read it, we cannot know how representative it is. Since each person had a differ ent psychological makeup and experienced different things while fleeing, it is impossible to generalize on the effects of the refugee experience. As we have seen, for some, like Yehudah Katz, they were clearly extremely powerful. On the other hand, these phenomena are not fixed. T hose who suffered in the wake of the events might have managed to overcome their problems with the passing of time.10 It is heartening to read, for example, that writing later in life, Yisra’el ben Aharon—the boy from Hlusk— showed no sign of continuing depression but rather expressed his happiness as rabbi of Shklov.11 This should serve to remind us that any form of diagnosis is quite impossible—and the expressions of trauma we have seen h ere might not have amounted to PTSD in the view of a modern doctor. What does emerge quite clearly from these texts, however, is that the refugee experience was not something that could just be pushed to one side and forgotten. It was of huge significance in the lives of t hose who survived it and had to be dealt with in one way or another.
Coming to Terms Spiritually The refugees w ere not the only ones who had to come to terms with the terrible events in Ukraine. Polish-Lithuanian Jewry as a w hole was affected. They had enjoyed a century of growth, expansion, and enrichment—and though violence was a part of their daily lives, so it was for everyone in
Facing the R efugee Ex per ience [ 55 ]
that society. In relative terms, they felt safe and secure. It took just a few months in the summer and fall of 1648 to shatter that feeling. Jewish society was thrown into deep shock. That feeling was made worse by the fact that members of the rabbinic elite, particularly those of a mystical bent, had prophesied that 1648—or to be precise, the Jewish year 5408, which had begun in the fall of 1647— was to be a messianic year. However, instead of the Messiah of the House of David and a miraculous return to the Land of Israel, Polish-Lithuanian Jewry had received Bogdan Khmelnytsky, Maksym Kryvonis, and a series of brutal massacres. As one observer put it, “[As if] it was not enough that we did not get the Resurrection of the Dead, tens of thousands more w ere killed instead.”12 For most Jews, the mass murder was a sign of God’s anger with His people Israel. As the refugee from Izyaslav and most famous chronicler of the uprising, Nathan Hanover, put it, “Behold, our iniquities testify against us. We have sinned, and the Lord has found out the iniquity of his servants. Would the Holy One, Blessed be He, dispense judgment without justice?”13 Of course, the question on everyone’s mind was: What w ere the sins that had caused this disaster? In a sermon given in the summer of 1648,14 when the massacres were in full swing, Yisra’el ben Binyamin of Bełżyce spoke extensively on this issue. He focused on the relationship between the Jewish people and the Greeks, using the Zohar to connect the latter with Nogah (Venus).15 In kabbalistic thought, Nogah is the tongue of the balance measuring Israel’s good deeds and bad. More than that, Nogah can be influenced by the Jews’ actions: when they sin it becomes cruel. So it was the Jews’ sins that had made the Greeks (by which he meant the Orthodox peasants and Cossacks) cruel and so brought about the massacres. He did not, however, specify the nature of the sins, thinking perhaps of a general failure to keep the commandments.16 Another preacher, Betsal’el ben Shlomo from Slutzk, was prepared to be more specific. Writing sometime a fter the uprising—it is not clear precisely when—he charged, “Now look, Jews, how great is the punishment for transgression of the Sabbath and for its transgressors . . . bloodshed . . . famine, captivity, and whole regions uprooted . . . in G reat Poland, Little Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and [Red] Ruthenia.” He went on to point a finger at those responsible: “Most of t hose [Jews] who live in villages and run businesses, called arenda . . . do not keep the Sabbath for they make their living with the non-Jews, live among them, and pick up their ways.”17 Berakhiah Bereikh, a preacher in Kraków who fled to Amsterdam in the late 1650s, expanded the list of the sinners in the introduction to his
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book of sermons published in 1662.18 He started with those who taught, studied, and preached using the new intellectual system known as pilpul ḥilukim.19 He went on to mention transgression of the Sabbath by all t hose whose “living was from arenda—those who leased towns or villages from the nobles, so they could sell t here beer, vodka, and mead. On Sabbaths and festivals [they had their] non-Jewish serving girls do the sales . . . some also kept pigs.”20 Other c auses of the uprising he found in the sale of rabbinical posts, the employment of uneducated cantors who mismanaged the prayer services, and the popularization of kabbalah in print and on the street.21 If the first sermon we mentioned was too vague in finding the c auses of the uprising, this one was surely too broad. It is worth noting, however, that in two of t hese three texts, the same Jewish arendarze, whom the peasants blamed for exploiting them, were blamed by the rabbis for living too close to the peasants and so failing to keep the Sabbath. A strange kind of cross-cultural ascription of guilt! In order to react to the question of responsibility in a rather more sophisticated fashion, some commentators preferred a different explanatory paradigm from the traditional sources: “It is those whom the Lord loves that he punishes.”22 This allowed them to avoid pinning the blame for the tragedy on one group or another in Jewish society b ecause that would have ended up making the victims responsible for their own deaths. Moreover, blaming the survivors would have meant that they w ere being held directly responsible for the death of their loved ones, which also seems to have been an unacceptable idea. Avraham Ashkenazy gave quite concrete expression to this approach in his chronicle, Tzaʾar bat rabim: “It was not for their own sins that they were punished but for t hose of the [whole] generation, in this country or elsewhere.”23 It was, as usual, Hanover who gave the idea its most comforting expression: “Since the day the Holy T emple was destroyed, the righteous have died for the sins of the generation.”24 Taking all these attempts to make sense of the tragedy together, it seems clear that the religious thinkers did not develop any kind of unified conceptual framework to allow the survivors—and the rest of Polish Jewry—to work through their traumatic experiences. That would be done not in the spiritual realm but in the public sphere.
Social Policy and Its Psychological Benefits From mid-March to mid-April 1650, the Council of Four Lands, Polish Jewry’s lay leadership, met in special session with leading rabbis to address some of the most important issues facing Polish Jews at that time. Though
Facing the R efugee Ex per ience [ 57 ]
the records of the meeting have not survived, contemporary sources do shed some light on the discussions.25 Foremost among them w ere questions of identification. We have already seen the ruling aimed at ensuring that displaced c hildren knew who their f amily was. More important than that, however, was a question related to identifying the dead. In order to remarry, Jewish women who had lost their husbands had to prove beyond a doubt that their spouse was, in fact, dead. Jewish law sets a particular evidentiary standard for this. In wartime, with thousands of refugees traveling from place to place, it was extremely difficult to meet it, so there was a danger that after the war, Polish Jewish society would be overwhelmed with a huge number of bitter and angry “grass-widows” (Hebrew, agunot). The Council and the rabbis seem to have drawn up regulations to help deal with this issue.26 Another issue to be faced was that of conversion. A g reat many Jews in Ukraine (and not only there) had either been forced to convert or chosen to do so out of fear. For the most part, this had been to Orthodox Chris tianity, the religion of the peasants and the Cossacks. Jewish law does not recognize conversions—voluntary or forced—so Jewish society felt a pressing need to have the converts return to the religion of their fathers.27 Less than a month after the Council’s meeting, the new king, Jan Kazimierz, issued a ruling on the matter. Granted at the request of “Our Jewish subjects,” his order permitted all Jews who had converted to Orthodoxy during the war, whether by force or from fear, to return to Judaism without let or hindrance.28 Unfortunately, the text does not make it clear precisely what was meant by the phrase “Our Jewish subjects.” Nonetheless, since the Council not only represented Polish Jews but also had the resources and the manpower to petition the king, it seems most likely that it had sent a delegation to the Royal Court in Warsaw with instructions to obtain such a document.29 A no less momentous decision of the 1650 Council meeting was the establishment of a day of remembrance for the dead—a general day of fasting and prayer for the Jews of Poland-Lithuania. It was to take place each year on the Jewish date, 20 Sivan, which was held to be the day on which the mass murder had begun, the day of the g reat massacre at Nemyriv. It is not entirely clear who first instituted the fast. The rabbi of Vilnius, Shabtai ha-Kohen, who as a Lithuanian leader would have had no place at the Polish Council, claimed the idea as his. For their part, the Polish rabbis stated that it was they who had first conceived of the general fast.30 This was clearly meant to be a day for the living—and especially the survivors—to remember the dead. The memory it preserved, however, was of a very particular nature for it was not tied solely to the event that had
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triggered it. In fact, the anniversary of the Nemyriv massacre, 20 Sivan, was by no means the day on which e ither the uprising or the mass murder of Jews had begun. That had been several months e arlier. Instead, what recommended this date to the rabbis was that it had already been used as a memorial day by Jews some centuries before. It had commemorated the deaths caused by a blood libel at Blois in France in 1171. The memory that the Polish-Lithuanian rabbis were creating was thus one that connected the events of 1648 with the larger continuum of Jewish suffering. It did not take long for Polish and Lithuanian Jews to begin composing special prayers to be read on that day.31 Much of this liturgical poetry did not make a g reat effort to relate directly to the events of 1648 and inserted only the barest of concrete historical details: the year, the groups involved in killing Jews, the major sites of massacres, and the names of prominent rabbis who were killed. What they emphasized much more were the kinds of atrocities committed on the Jews. Most of the prayers also included some kind of call for Divine vengeance. On the whole these were not as long or as vehement as t hose to be found in the prayers composed in the wake of the 1096 Rhineland massacres. Nor were they for the most part directly connected with the prayer for redemption (though that too was usually included). An exception was the elegy written by Yitzḥak ben Avraham Moshe Yisra’el, rabbi of Leszno (in Hebrew, Lissa).32 Its final verse reads: Strengthen the legs of the failing, the sighing and the wailing, See the blood of Your servants on your Porphyrion33 and on the day of vengeance have no mercy, Spill out your anger, destroy the enemy and avenger,34 Remember the stoned and the burned, the murdered and the strangled. Send us the Redeemer and rebuild Jerusalem, Let us sink our roots by the w ater.35
The mention here of those still suffering, who w ere openly called in other such prayers “survivors,” is a reminder that these were prayers written by and for t hose who remained alive. This form of remembrance sat squarely in the medieval tradition of how Ashkenazi Jews memorialized such traumatic events, portraying them typologically as belonging to broad and long-lasting patterns of Jewish experience.36 For the early modern Jews of Poland-Lithuania, however, that seems no longer to have been enough. They wanted prayers that would also express their own specific experiences and suffering.37
Facing the R efugee Ex per ience [ 59 ]
The tensions this aroused can be seen in the demands made of Yom- Tov Lipmann Heller, rabbi of Kraków, to write a prayer for the dead of Ukraine. After the Council of Four Lands had established the general fast on 20 Sivan, an enterprising publisher in Kraków asked the rabbi to compose special prayers to be recited on that day so that he (the publisher) could print and sell them. Heller’s initial response was to say that nothing really new had happened, so it would be better simply to make a selection of prayers composed in previous generations and use t hose. This does not seem to have satisfied either the publisher or the community, for a little later the rabbi decided to write some new verses of his own describing the Ukrainian massacres. These he added to a twelfth-century prayer by Eliʾezer ben Natan, a scholar and poet who had written in the wake of the medieval Rhineland massacres.38 He explained that he had changed his mind in order to “go in the ways of peace,” which presumably meant to placate the Jews of Kraków. Even that did not satisfy the Kraków community, by then not only full of refugees and refugee stories but also ravaged by the plague. They went back to Heller and respectfully but firmly asked him to write a prayer specifically for them.39 This time he agreed and wrote an entirely new elegy. Sixty-eight lines long, it was devoted solely to the experiences of the uprising.40 Having said that, Heller did not abandon the sense of connection with past tragedies. The poem opened “These will I remember” (in Hebrew, Eleh ezkerah), which is also the opening of the famous prayer for the ten g reat rabbis martyred by the Roman emperor Hadrian, recited every Yom Kippur and Tishaʾ be-Av, the two major days of repentance and fasting in the Jewish calendar. Like the other prayers composed for 20 Sivan, the historical framework of Heller’s Eleh ezkerah was rudimentary, while the descriptions of the atrocities were very detailed indeed. Unlike the other prayers, and perhaps at the request of the Kraków Jews, it devoted significant space to survivor and refugee experience. One verse (i.e., four lines) was devoted to the fate of those taken into slavery by the Tatars, two others to the experience of the refugees in Kraków during the plague. H ere are the verses referring to the refugees: The one called by His name, created, formed, and made for His glory,41 Was at first harmed not physically, but in his [worldly] possessions, So he [fled] before the sword42 and made his way across the Vistula,
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Poverty awaited him; he hoped for light, darkness came; for strength, catastrophe came.43 You became a plague for Your p eople; no disease or disaster passed them by.44 Their splendor was defiled, they went down into the grave, and we did not learn our lesson.45 Buried in fields and forests, neither they nor news of them made it to town. There w ere no boards for coffins, and linen for shrouds was in short supply.46
In the end, the prayers composed for 20 Sivan never fully resolved the tension between the survivors’ need for liturgy specific to their experience and the traditional requirement to connect contemporary disasters with those of the past. This probably reflected the needs or desires of the survivors themselves, who wanted prayers that would both express their own experiences and tie them in with the Jewish past. The importance of the latter lay in the feeling that by integrating the massacres into the long history of Jewish suffering, the survivors could see themselves as participants in the cosmic drama of God’s relations with His people Israel. All the terrible events and traumas they had undergone were not a sign that God had abandoned them. Quite the reverse: they w ere living proof of His ongoing relationship with them. Beyond these theological issues, the special day and prayers recited on it seem also to have provided the kind of psychological crutch that many of t hose touched by the traumatic events would have needed to move on from their experiences. One of the most important ways of overcoming trauma is to integrate the horrific memories into the survivor’s life story.47 The fast of 20 Sivan provided a controlled framework for remembering the events and, by its very nature, integrated them into the flow of Jewish life by means of its regular place in the calendar. The prayers recited on that day presented, in a very stylized way, descriptions of at least some of the horrors of the uprising. This allowed survivors to revisit their memories in the secure setting of the synagogue, with their family and their community around them. The use of communal prayer, together with the refusal to attribute blame to survivors, is significant here because it allowed them to receive the kind of social support that is very important in the process of recovery from wartime trauma.48 As we have seen, the connection of the 1648 fast with a medieval one also provided a broad (and comforting) conceptual framework for interpreting
Facing the R efugee Ex per ience [ 61 ]
the traumatic events. This would have been yet another source of help in the process of integrating the terrible memories into the way survivors perceived the course of their lives. Finally, setting aside a specific day on which to remember the events presumably also provided survivors with a setting in which to talk about their experiences without embarrassment.49 Obviously, the leaders who instituted the fast day knew nothing about the treatment of trauma or the positive psychological benefits that their decision might bring to survivors. They were simply following a tried and tested tradition stretching back into Jewish antiquity.50 Nonetheless, when one looks at the speed with which Polish-Lithuanian—and particularly Ukrainian—Jews managed to resume the threads of their lives after the uprising, the kind of psychological help and support that the general fast day gave them can surely not have been a negligible f actor. It should come as no surprise, then, that the establishment of the general fast proved an outstanding success in the Commonwealth.51 Though by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it seems to have been honored mostly in the breach, its memory continued to reverberate among Euro pean Jews u ntil the Holocaust—and even after.52 Even more telling is the fact that the memories of the Khmelnytsky uprising preserved by 20 Sivan w ere strong enough to overshadow the memories of the terrible events and acts of mass murder committed during the wars that followed it. Jewish popular memory embraced the first and ignored the second, even though, in reality, t here was precious l ittle to choose between them. The events of the second round of wars also caused further waves of Jewish refugees, this time not just within the Commonwealth but across Europe and Asia.
ch a p t er f i v e
The Second Wave of Wars
fter the disasters of 1648 and 1649, the Commonwealth under its a new king, Jan Kazimierz, gradually turned the tide in Ukraine. Its successes were both military (victory at the Battle of Berestechko in 1651) and diplomatic (it managed to sever the diplomatic connection between the Cossacks and the Tatars). This was good news for the refugees since conditions quieted down significantly, allowing them to begin returning home. The end of the uprising was signaled when the Cossacks signed a treaty with Moscow at Pereiaslav in 1654, and it looked as if the emergency had been resolved. The price Poland-Lithuania had to pay was bearable: though it lost control of left-bank Ukraine, and Jews were no longer allowed to live and do business t here, the vast region of right- bank Ukraine, which was better developed and so created g reat wealth, remained a part of the Commonwealth.1 However, the sighs of relief were short-lived. At Pereiaslav, a new Russian-Cossack alliance was formed. Khmelnytsky recognized Tsar Alexis as his overlord, and the tsar promised to recognize left-bank Ukraine as an autonomous Cossack Hetmanate under Khmelnytsky’s rule. One consequence was that the Cossack forces would now be available to support the Russian army. Emboldened by this, and hoping to improve his access to the Baltic while simultaneously weakening Sweden, the tsar invaded the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with Cossack units fighting alongside his army. A Cossack incursion into western Ukraine, with some Russian support, also helped pin down Polish troops there, keeping them away from the war in the north. The Lithuanian army, underfinanced by Warsaw and weakened by the uprising, was unable to resist the Russ ian advance. First to fall was the town of Smolensk, then Vitebsk and Mahilioŭ (Mogilev). After that, [ 62 ]
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the army pushed deeper into Lithuania, taking Vilnius on August 8, 1655.2 The Jews of Lithuania, though not a political issue as they had been in Ukraine, w ere still targeted. The Russian soldiers—known for their brutality—viewed them both as a source of money and as Christ-killers, whom they, as Orthodox Christians, should seek to convert at any price. Little surprise then that Lithuanian Jewry played an active role in the defensive actions. They not only helped finance strengthening urban fortifications and provided ammunition and supplies for the soldiers but also took up arms themselves and fought alongside their neighbors.3 While Lithuania was reeling under this attack, the new Swedish king, Charles X Gustav, invaded Poland during March 1655. As a major Baltic power at that time, Sweden had as its most pressing rival Moscow and its ambitions in the Baltic. However, rather than engage his enemy openly, the king preferred to strengthen his position at the expense of a weakened Commonwealth. Sweden’s well-trained army, composed to a g reat extent of mercenary troops, swept Poland before it. Poznań surrendered on July 25, Warsaw fell on September 8, and Kraków was taken on October 19. Totally defeated, King Jan Kazimierz had no choice but to flee the country and hope for a chance to return.4 Poland’s Jews viewed the Swedish invasion with concern. Any military activity was always dangerous for the civilian population—and they, as a hated religious minority, were also open to attack. In addition, as an urban group, they w ere relatively wealthy and thus easy pickings. As a result, some Jews chose to flee before trouble reached them. Many, however, returned quite soon, perhaps b ecause the Swedish soldiers, for all the trouble they brought, turned out to be nowhere near as brutal to the Jews as the Cossack or Russian forces.5 The winter of 1655 was the moment of change. The Swedish army was besieging the Jasna Góra monastery outside Częstochowa, home to the famous icon known as the “Black Madonna.” A handful of monks and some local noblemen managed to lift the siege and save the Madonna. Hailed as a miracle, this event became a rallying call for the remaining Polish forces. The king returned to Poland, traveling to Lviv, where, in April 1656, he held a special ceremony which “crowned” Our Lady of Częstochowa as Queen and Protector of Poland in order to rally his people against the Protestant (Swedish) invader. Inspired by this, the Polish forces regrouped u nder the leadership of Hetman Stefan Czarniecki, who led them in a guerilla war to harry, then drive out the Swedes.6 For the Jews, this was a terrifying development. The difficult, but manageable, Swedish army was now replaced by Polish
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forces, fired up with religious and patriotic fervor. These soldiers vented their anger not just on the Protestant Swedes but on t hose they saw as traitors for helping them—this meant local Protestants and, of course, Jews. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews were killed, and a mass exodus began. And as if that was not enough, the Cossack and Russian forces pushed west into Crown Poland, taking Lublin in October 1655 and perpetrating a huge massacre of Jews in the town.7 As Poland’s situation improved, the king assembled a traditional army and began campaigning against the Swedes, who were slowly but surely driven out of the strongholds they had taken. An invasion from the south, under the Transylvanian prince Jerzy Rakoczy, was eventually repulsed. The end came in May 1660, when Poland and Sweden signed a peace agreement in the small town of Oliwa. All in all, it was an advantageous peace for the Commonwealth since, a fter five years of campaigning, Sweden had made no territorial gains.8 It also allowed the king to turn his full attention to the Russian forces. He had managed to break the Cossack-Russian agreement by offering Bogdan Khmelnytsky’s successor, his son Iurii, a new agreement. The 1658 Treaty of Hadiach was supposed to establish a Ukrainian polity that would join the Commonwealth as an equal partner with Poland and Lithuania.9 Though the plan came to nothing, the Cossacks’ agreement with Muscovy was not renewed, which allowed the Polish army to drive back the Orthodox (Russian) invaders toward its eastern border. The war continued sporadically until the Peace of Andrusów was signed in 1667.10 On one level, it could be said that Poland-Lithuania successfully weathered the storm that began with Khmelnytsky in 1648 and ended in Andrusów some nineteen years later. Despite finding itself in desperate straits more than once, the Commonwealth overcame its enemies and so, with the onset of peace, was able to begin a process of reconstruction. However, the price it had paid for the years of war was incredibly high, so getting the country back on its feet was a very complex operation. Poland- Lithuania’s Jews, too, had suffered huge losses during the wars, not the least of which was the number of Jews who had been uprooted from their homes and forced to start new lives elsewhere, often in difficult—not to say traumatic—conditions. Beyond that, many of the refugees displaced by this second wave of wars left the Commonwealth never to come back.11 It is to the experience of t hese people that we now turn. We w ill look first at the refugees in the parts of Lithuania u nder Russian occupation, then at those in the westerly regions where the Swedish and Polish armies fought it out in the second half of the 1650s.
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Lithuania: Internal Migration and Flight Abroad here is little doubt that the Jews of Lithuania feared a Russian invasion, T a feeling that must have grown once the campaign got under way. For example, when Smolensk was taken, its Jews tried to hide from the soldiers dressed as Christians, though they w ere easily discovered because they did not know how to make the sign of the cross. Given the choice to convert or die, some converted, while the rest were bundled into a wooden building and burned alive. In Mahilioŭ, the Russian army gathered the Jews together in a column as if to expel them, but they had not gone far before the accompanying soldiers turned on them and killed them.12 A different situation developed in Vitebsk. There, a few hundred Christians and Jews w ere taken captive and deported to the Russian interior. The two groups developed a close relationship in captivity with the Christians writing to the Polish king as follows: We, the officials, nobles, and citizens of the Vitebsk region, currently imprisoned in the Land of Muscovy, declare that the Jews of . . . Vitebsk, together with their wives and c hildren w ere captured by . . . the Russian forces . . . and sent to Muscovy. There, they were [sent] first to G reat Novgorod [where they] remained for a few weeks u nder great guard in a dark dungeon in g reat misery and suffering. Neither they nor us w ere given any food by the prince, [who] tormented them with such terrible imprisonment. Quite a few of them—several score— perished and froze to death from all the terrible things they suffered, both there in Great Novgorod and on the road. Later, like the nobles . . . these Jews from Vitebsk were . . . brought to Kazan, where they . . . are [now] being kept in prison. Despite extreme pressure from Moscow, none of the Jews gave in to the . . . threats and converted to Chris tianity. Rather, as faithful and loyal subjects . . . loving both His Royal Highness and our Republic, they did not let themselves be led astray. They await the grace of God that, by the mercy of His Royal Highness, they might be freed from this Russian imprisonment.13
The authors of the petition explained their positive attitude t oward the Jews by presenting in g reat detail the active role Jews had played in defending the town before it fell. In fact, this was not the only group of Jews deported to Moscow. Some were taken to serve as slaves to the Boyars (the Russian nobility); many others were kept for ransom. If the money was not forthcoming when the Boyar needed it, he could sell on the captives to a third party. In this way, a group of Jews from Shklov,
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imprisoned in Astrakhan, were sold to Persians and sent to Iran across the Caspian Sea.14 According to a report that reached Belarus, they were all drowned on the voyage. We know of another group of 50–100 Jewish captives who made it to Iran alive, where they remained for a number of years awaiting ransom.15 For the most part, however, Lithuanian Jews managed to evade capture and the horrors of imprisonment in the east. Instead, those who could traveled west, looking for a stronghold that would protect them from the invading forces. Quite a number of them chose the relatively large town of Slutzk, owned by Bogusław Radziwiłł, a scion of one of Lithuania’s leading magnate dynasties. The appearance t here of such a large number of refugees needing help more or less forced the Slutzk community to develop some kind of policy toward them. There is nothing to suggest that what it did was in any way out of the ordinary, so taking a closer look at what happened in the town should shed some light on the ways in which refugees were helped on a local level across the Commonwealth. The Jewish community in Slutzk was relatively new in 1648. Though there were always religious and social tensions in the town, in the vast majority of cases, relations between the different ethnic and religious groups that lived there were peaceable. In fact, cooperation worked not only in the ordinary sphere of daily life. In her study of the town’s preparations in the face of the Russian military advance across Belarus and the threat of an extended siege in 1655, Barbara Pendzich concluded that all the groups in town, including the Jews, cooperated in strengthening the urban defenses and laying in stores of food.16 Jewish refugees do not seem to have come to Slutzk immediately after the outbreak of the Khmelnytsky uprising in 1648. In fact, the reverse was true. Hanover recounts that the local Jews had fled the town before the Cossacks got t here.17 We do not know precisely when t hose Jews returned to Slutzk, nor when refugees started to arrive. However, the town council complained that increasing numbers of Jewish w omen had been peddling bread on the streets since 1652, which might indicate that by that time there w ere at least some refugees t here.18 By 1655, however, the Slutzk community was home to a significant number, most presumably Jews fleeing the Russian army.19 Fortunately for them, though Russian forces besieged Slutzk in the fall of 1655, it was one of the few Belarussian towns not to fall. As normal life resumed, the community had to find a way of dealing with the mass of refugees. The first problem was finding them housing, which it seems to have done by placing them in private homes despite the
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resultant crowded conditions. This brought the community into conflict with the town council, which wanted to prevent any growth in the town’s Jewish population. In its discussions of May 2, 1655, the council ordered that only Jews whose names appeared in the town register be allowed to live there, stating that “the numbers [of the Slutzk Jewish population] have grown greatly so that four or five families are living in a single house.”20 Another tactic the community seems to have a dopted was to take over houses previously owned by Christians in return for defaulted loans. On December 13, 1658, Radziwiłł’s commissars in Slutzk issued an order banning both local and “foreign” Jews (by which it meant refugees) from acquiring h ouses and courts outside their designated streets. To judge by the continual growth in the number of Jewish-owned h ouses in the town in the second half of the seventeenth century, this order was never enforced.21 The next issue was to help the refugees make some kind of living. We have seen that Jewish w omen would take to the streets to sell baked goods. Though no reason is given for this, baking was perhaps one of the few skills that female refugees—particularly widows—could exploit in order to make a living.22 Jewish men got involved in a wider range of mercantile activity, mostly petty trade. In normal times, the Slutzk community itself would have done its best to remove these interlopers. However, in the early 1650s, the Lithuanian Jewish Council had ordered that refugees be integrated as far as possible into the local economy.23 Doing this brought the community again into confrontation with the town council, which wanted to stop Jews from outside Slutzk from d oing business in the town.24 So, as well as having to use scarce communal resources to help the refugees, the community also had to deal with the non-Jewish authorities that would do whatever they could to drive them out. In Slutzk, this took a particularly ugly turn. On July 14, 1657, Bogusław Radziwiłł issued an order stating that he had received information that Jews from various places w ere thronging into the town and bringing the plague with them. All t hose “foreign” Jews w ere to be expelled and any local Jews caught hiding refugees w ere to be dealt with severely.25 Fortunately for the community, for reasons that are not entirely clear, this order was not carried out. It was only in the spring of 1659 that an excuse was found finally to get rid of the unwanted Jewish population. On April 17, a local orthodox priest (protopop) wrote to Radziwiłł complaining that “a Ukrainian Jew from the [Ukrainian] village of Królewiec . . . became a Christian with his wife and children. . . . After the death of his first wife, he took a second, living as a
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Christian for over a decade. . . . Having now come to Slutzk, he, his wife and children born into Christianity have, at the instigation of the rabbis, become Jews with great blasphemy and outrage to God.”26 On hearing the charge, Radziwiłł’s commissars in Slutzk demanded an explanation from the local community. It confidently replied that the convert’s return to Judaism was legal under the 1650 royal ruling mentioned earlier.27 The commissars, however, rejected this claim, arguing that the royal order had not been endorsed by the Sejm and so had no validity on noble estates, like those of the Radziwiłłs. The convert’s return to Judaism was thus deemed illegal. This provided the pretext necessary, and by early June the expulsion of the “foreign” Jews was u nder way. On June 7, the Slutzk community was ordered to present the commissars a register of local Jews,28 and on June 9 the order to expel all the others was given.29 It was carefully worded: opening with the description of the case of the convert from Ukraine, it went on to order that all such Jews leave Slutzk. It then admitted that there was, in fact, only one other such Jew in town. This notwithstanding, the order continued: “since the number of wandering Jews has grown both in the town of Slutzk and in other towns in the estates of our noble lord [i.e., Radziwiłł], and since it is difficult to distinguish within this group whether there are other baptized Jews, we hereby order by the will of our Noble Prince that all the foreign Jews, who are not his subjects and legally settled on his estates, leave them by June 24.” This was a very neat transformation of an order pertaining to a specific case into a general expulsion of refugees. Once again, however, the legislation seems to have been ineffective. New expulsion orders were made a number of times in the early 1660s, and complaints continued to be made of “foreign” Jews thronging the town. This suggests that some refugees had remained t here despite the original expulsion order, that others had been expelled but soon returned, and that the stream of new refugees to Slutzk had not s topped. None of these Jews could have lived in the town without the help of the local Jewish community, whose treatment of the refugee issue can only be described as a remarkable success. If developments in Slutzk shed light on the ways in which early modern Jewish communities in the Commonwealth (and elsewhere) organized to help refugees in the mid-seventeenth century, those in Vilnius point to phenomena that w ere characteristic only of the situation during the second wave of wars we are looking at here.
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One of the refugees, a distinguished rabbi called Moshe Rivkes, has left a detailed description of the flight from Vilnius: When the e nemy began to get close to Vilnius on Wednesday, July 28, 1655, almost the entire community fled for its life and left the town together. Those who had prepared carts and horses for themselves loaded them up with their wives, sons, d aughters, and a little of their property, and left. Those who had not done so, left on foot with their families, carrying the little boys on their shoulders. With God’s mercy, I met a nobleman’s official who had some village carts. I put my family on those and sent them out of town to wait a few miles outside Vilnius. I stayed on there on my own, because I did not yet believe it was dangerous. When evening came, a terrible panic overcame me, and the next day, 29 July, I left with my staff in my right hand, I had my tefilin pouch and a book of calendrical law30 in my left . . . I began to have all kinds of thoughts—who knows where my exile w ill take me. . . . We went as we could . . . and came to the edge of the Žemaitija31 region close to the Prussian border. We found no respite there—and so the verse, “He who runs from a lion will meet a bear”32 came true for us. What happened was that a company of Swedish troops arrived. They stripped the very skin off our backs, demanding huge payments every day. In the end, together with some of my f amily and the rest of the people, I had no choice but to board a sailing ship. We were on our way to Amsterdam.33
What is important here is not the fact that there was a mass flight of Jews. We saw that in Ukraine. The crucial change was that the new refugees w ere leaving well ahead of time, which seems to have given them the chance to organize their journey. There is certainly none of the sense of panic and chaos in the text, as there was in Hanover’s description of the flight from Izyaslav. The Jews of Vilnius were not the only ones to organize leaving the town before the invasion. The Jews in Pinsk did precisely the same thing.34 Unlike the previous wave of refugees, t hose fleeing Vilnius and Pinsk also seem to have gone in groups rather than as individuals. One thing that seems to have distinguished Vilnius Jewry from the other Lithuanian communities was that they were not looking for refuge in a nearby town. They were leaving, as Rivkes said, for an unknown destination. As we shall see, group, or even communal, flight seems to have been one of the characteristics of the second wave of refugees, at least in its early stages.
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The second noteworthy thing in Rivkes’ story is the fact that he, together with many other Jews from Vilnius, was not fleeing just the town but the country itself. Their route took them northwestward from Vilnius toward East Prussia, with its major Baltic ports of Königsberg (Kaliningrad) and Memel (Klaipėda). Not only Jewish refugees took this route; many of the Catholics and Protestants who w ere fleeing the wrath of the Orthodox Russian forces made their way there, too.35 Rivkes complained of the depredations of the Swedish forces he met on the road; other refugee groups, so a popular Yiddish song of the day, “An Elegy for the Lithuanian Jews,” tells, w ere robbed by peasants during their flight.36 Once in East Prussia, however, the Christian refugees stayed put u ntil they could return, while a significant number of the Jews sailed for Hamburg or Amsterdam. The entry of so many Jewish refugees to East Prussia—where they were not officially allowed to live—could not be ignored. The G rand Elector of Brandenburg, Friedrich Wilhelm, who was also Duke of Prussia, initially tried to control the flow by granting them f ree passage to Memel, presumably to steer them away from Königsberg. Though the order he gave had a pragmatic purpose, its language was generous and so gives the impression that it also expressed some humanitarian feeling. Nonetheless, it could not stem the tide of refugees, many of whom did end up in Königsberg. The wealthier among them seem to have continued doing business in order to survive. The destitute, as always, struggled—hungry and ill. The Prussian townspeople did not want an influx of Jews, rich or poor, and began to put pressure on Friedrich Wilhelm. Within a few months he had changed his tune entirely. In an order of July 10, 1657, addressed to the Königsberg town council, the duke expelled the Jews from the towns of East Prussia, if not from the duchy as a w hole, giving them only three days to leave. The excuse he gave was fear of the plague. While this must have been very real, it is noteworthy that the Christian refugees from Lithuania, who were presumably also a health risk, were not expelled. Despite the order, some Jews remained in the duchy, leading to attempts in the early 1660s to limit them from doing trade or remaining permanently in Königsberg. As the fighting in Lithuania drew to its end later in the decade, the Jews who had not sailed to Hamburg or Amsterdam presumably began to make their way back home.37 Other refugees, like Aharon Shmu’el Kaidonover, another rabbinic scholar from Vilnius, did not aim for East Prussia but traveled westward into the heartlands of Crown Poland. However, like many of the Ukrainian
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refugees who had done so before them, those Jews did not find safety. Kaidonover settled in Lublin, where he had to live through the huge massacre of the community by Russian and Cossack troops in the fall of 1655. He managed to escape that, too, fleeing Poland for the German lands.38 Many of the other Lithuanian refugees in western Poland suffered the same fate, finding themselves caught up in the horrors of the war against the Swedes.
Western Poland: Fleeing the War Writing after the war, Yaʾakov ben Yeḥezki’el ha-L evi, who had, at age eight, fled his home of Złotów (in German, Flatow) together with his father, found it necessary to explain why it was that the Jews had suffered the murderous attentions of the Polish army but not t hose of the Swedish. He wrote that the Swedish king “has never had Jews under his sovereignty, so he came to Poland and treated them well.”39 To that we might add that during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the Swedish army had, more than once, used Jewish merchants to supply their forces in the Holy Roman Empire and thus had good reason to treat them fairly.40 The commander of the Polish forces, Stefan Czarniecki, felt no such restraints. He viewed his war against the Swedish invaders as a war of religion: he was defending the Catholic heartlands of Poland against the Protestant invader. He turned his wrath on the small Protestant communities that still existed in some Polish towns and, of course, on the Jews, who were viewed in conservative Catholic circles (and not only there) as the archetypal traitors.41 There is little evidence to suggest that Jews helped the Swedish army in its campaign; in fact, many sources suggest that Jews helped defend their homes against the invaders alongside their neighbors.42 The only people to cut a deal with the Swedish king against Poland were members of the nobility itself. The most prominent of t hese were two Radziwiłł cousins, leading Lithuanian magnates, who signed an agreement supposedly repealing the u nion between Poland and Lithuania and aligning the latter with Sweden in return for its support in their war against Russia.43 This does not seem to have checked the bloodthirsty rampage of the Polish forces. Though it is hard to estimate precisely how many Jews w ere killed, the memorial prayers composed in the wake of the fighting did mention each community in which Jewish martyrs had fallen. From t hese we know that dozens of Jewish centers in G reat Poland and L ittle Poland were attacked, and at least some of their members murdered.44
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In terms of fleeing their homes, some Jews preferred not to wait to see how the Swedish army might treat them but set out at the first sign of trou ble. From the big towns, such as Poznań and Kraków, it was often those who had somewhere to go to or knew that they would be well received who went first. This was not just a Jewish phenomenon. Wealthy Christians also traveled abroad for the duration of the war. For those people who wanted to leave, Jewish or non-Jewish, a family or business connection with the German lands was clearly an advantage. Thus, for example, after the war broke out, Avrom ben Yosef Segal left Poznań, where he lived on a permanent basis, to travel to his hometown of Hanover. A little later, presumably once he had organized m atters t here, he returned quietly to Poznań, picked up his wife, and returned with her to Lower Saxony.45 This had to be done in secret b ecause the Polish communities did not want their richest members to leave since it was they who formed the backbone of the economy not only of the community in general but of the communal institutions in particular. Permission to move away might eventually be granted, but generally at a very great cost.46 Another group able to move relatively easily were rabbis—at least the more distinguished among them. The Chief Rabbi of Kraków, Yehoshuʾa Heshel,47 fled the town, initially for Moravia before eventually ending up in Vienna.48 Ḥayim Bochner, who ran a yeshiva in Kraków, seems to have left the town together with all his students before the Swedish war caught up with him. He, too, ended up in Vienna.49 It was not only Kraków rabbis who enjoyed “star status” as refugees: Moshe Rivkes of Vilnius was welcomed into Amsterdam with open arms, as was Shabtai ha-Kohen, also from Vilnius, in the Moravian town of Holešov.50 If the flight from the larger towns was of a more individual nature, presumably because most people did not believe that such a place would ever fall to the enemy, the situation in the smaller towns was quite differ ent. Yuda ben Ephraim Ḥayim of Piła experienced the Swedish wars in a number of such places and tells of his experiences in a personal chronicle written in Hebrew: When the panic about the war began, we were in Wronki. It got worse every day on account of the Swedish invasion of Poland. . . . So we fled to Grodzisk. When we got there, t here was no way through Jews’ Street because it was full of carts ready to flee to Silesia. They were completely full [with goods and possessions] and the c hildren—of all ages—were sitting on top of them. They all left together. We stayed in my u ncle Zalman’s house because our cart was only going to Grodzisk and there
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was no teamster to take us any further. A fter . . . about a week, the news came that there was peace in our land, meaning that the King of Sweden would rule Poland. T hings were calm that year, so some of the people began to return. . . . We stayed at my uncle’s . . . until after Passover 1656. . . .51 Then the Swedish rule over Poland got weak, the Poles attacked them, and they [i.e., the Swedish forces] began to flee the country. . . . The Jews also fled before the sword [going to] e very land, scattered and broken. May God protect the survivors. So we [decided] to flee Grodzisk . . . but then we received a message from the lord [of the town] in his castle [ordering] that no-one leave the town. Anyone who dared to do so would lose his residence rights. . . . [As I was not from Grodzisk, I decided to leave anyway.] We traveled all night, in fear of the Lord and in terror of the peasant rabble. . . . We ended up in Lipiny,52 where there w ere twenty-four [Jewish] families from Grodzisk.53
What stands out in this account is the fact that the flight from Grodzisk, which took place early in the war, was planned—just as the flights from Vilnius and Pinsk in Lithuania had been. Evidently the news of the Swedish invasion had reached the community ahead of time, giving it the chance to leave en masse. There was time to hire carts and teamsters, pack up their goods in an orderly manner, and set out before t hings got too chaotic. Their goal was Silesia, only a few miles to the west—and they traveled there together. Even when they reached their destination, it would seem that the group did not split up entirely—some twenty-five families chose to stay together in Lipiny. Of course, this did not mean that t here w ere no acts of individual flight and no Jews who preferred to stay in Poland as refugees rather than leave the country. The author of the account himself is one such example (at least until 1656). Nonetheless, this type of organized travel meant that relatively large numbers of Jews could leave Poland and settle in areas that had no real support system to look after them. There are some signs that t hese refugees, initially at least, planned eventually to return home. In many cases, however, later developments meant that the flight became permanent and so the mass movement of people formed the basis for the rapid development of Jewish life in Moravia, Bohemia, and the German lands in the second half of the seventeenth century.54 The ferocity of the Polish counterattack, particularly the attacks on the Jews, seems to have come as a surprise. At that point, organized flight
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was no longer a possibility. As people began really to fear for their lives, it became a case of everyone for him-or herself. However, as Yuda’s account shows, once they had reached Silesia, such individuals or families were sometimes able to meet up with the previous wave of refugees who had left just a year earlier. For the lord of the town, it was the second flight that was problematic enough for him to want to stop it. This suggests that the first group of refugees, who left in organized fashion before the Swedish invasion, had won his acceptance, presumably by promising to return when t hings quieted down (though t here is no documentary basis for this). When it looked as if the town was g oing to lose its entire Jewish population at the time of the Polish counteroffensive, the lord did what he could to put a stop to the exodus by threatening the Jews who left that they would not be able to come back. Like the leadership of the larger Jewish communities mentioned e arlier, he seems to have seen the Jews of the town as an important resource that he did not want to lose—particularly as he faced a period of rebuilding the town and its wealth once the wars w ere over. Not all urban authorities w ere as keen to keep the Jews in the town or to welcome back the Jewish refugees who had left. The town councils, which represented the Christian townspeople who tended to view the Jews as interlopers and unwanted competition, could be very harsh toward them. Such was the case in Olkusz in Little Poland.55 Sometime in early 1655—that is, before the Swedish forces entered Little Poland—the Jewish community there seems to have packed up and left for Silesia, where they stayed for about two years. By that time, Czarniecki had forced the Swedes northward and Little Poland was liberated. The king had also issued a number of decrees allowing all t hose who had fled the fighting to return to their homes.56 Encouraged by this, the Olkusz community decided to come back. They packed up all their goods and chattels a second time, loaded them on thirty barges, and traveled back to the town, presumably along the upper stretch of the Vistula river.57 They arrived to a cold welcome. The king’s o rders notwithstanding, the town gates were locked against them. Not only did the town council refuse to let them in, it sent men armed with clubs to drive them away. After a few days hanging around outside the walls, the Jews decided to leave behind all the property and real estate they owned in the town and return to Silesia. Sadly for them, that was not the end of the story. While on their way back, they w ere waylaid by thieves who hijacked their barges and robbed them of everything they had, money, clothes, jewels, horses, and any
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other valuables. Completely destitute, the refugee column turned back to Olkusz, hoping, as it stated in its deposition, “to find some compassion.” None was forthcoming. Encamped outside the walls once again, the Olkusz community was exposed not only to the elements and to disease but also to the violence and demands of the soldiers still in the town. Trying to enter into negotiations with the intransigent town council, the Jews quoted the royal decrees permitting them to return home. Even those did not move the townspeople. At that point, the refugees had little choice but to go to court. They accused the town of Olkusz of endangering their lives, stealing their property, and, most pertinently, failing to honor the royal decrees. Though we do not have the final verdict of the trial, we do know that the Jews were back in the town within the year.58 This was clearly an extreme case, but it once again points to the kind of organized and communal flight that seems to have characterized the early period of the Swedish wars. It also raises the final point of the discussion here: the issue of return. Despite the fact that it had fled to Silesia, the Olkusz community clearly wanted to return home as soon as it was safe. They w ere not the only Jews to feel that way. Though a significant number of the refugees never made it back to the Commonwealth—either by force of circumstances or by choice—many more did return and rebuild their lives. So successful were they that within a generation or two, Polish- Lithuanian Jewry had made up its losses from the wars and found its way to the very heart of the magnate economy, amassing g reat wealth as it did so. In a very real sense, then, the ways in which the refugees managed to return to their homes, overcome the traumas they had experienced, and pick up the threads of their past existence paved the way for their f uture success.
ch a p t er si x
Return and Reconstruction
the process of returning home after spending time as a refugee was complex. It began with the decision to resume one’s former life rather than look for better conditions elsewhere. Once that step had been taken, the returning refugees, together with t hose who had remained b ehind, had to rebuild their society—sometimes almost from scratch—which involved dealing with a range of social, economic, and religious problems. Finally, steps needed to be taken toward growth, first to recoup all that had been lost during the wars and then to ensure the community’s f uture development.
The Decision to Return Home The chaos of wartime conditions meant that there was a constant stream of Jewish refugees, often in the thousands, moving from place to place within the Commonwealth. The organized attempts to flee notwithstanding, this was for the most part a very large, uncontrolled—even uncontrollable— movement of p eople, often indigent, traumatized, and desperate. For some, even the act of flight did not help. Running from town to town or struggling from the Commonwealth’s eastern regions to the heartlands of Crown Poland did not bring them to safety, since the wars that continued to sweep the country engulfed them t here too. In such conditions, the idea of returning home at the earliest opportunity must have seemed an attractive option. A number of different groups took it. The first were those who had fled their hometown but not left the region, the second w ere t hose who had traveled g reat distances but remained within the Commonwealth, and the third were those who had left the country. This last group can itself be divided into two: some [ 76 ]
R etur n a nd R econstruction [ 77 ]
had left the country of their own f ree will, mostly from western Poland toward Moravia and Silesia, while o thers had been taken captive and sent eastward to be sold as slaves or ransomed by fellow Jews in the Ottoman Empire. Each had its own considerations. The refugees with the strongest motivation to return had probably remained reasonably close to home. Captives who had been ransomed but found themselves in the strange surroundings of the Ottoman Empire (where the Jews were not, for the most part, Ashkenazim and spoke the Spanish-based language of Ladino rather than Yiddish) were presumably also very anxious to return home, though that would have been tempered by the high cost and great danger involved in long-distance travel in such difficult times. The choice facing the refugees whose flight had taken them long distances, either within the Commonwealth or outside it, was whether to try to start a new life where they found themselves or to go back home to pick up the threads of the past. It would seem that many of the Jews who had fled west out of Poland chose not to return, preferring the more settled conditions of the German lands. What the internal refugees did is much harder to work out. The major demographic sources for the third quarter of the seventeenth century in both Poland and Lithuania are registers of taxpayers.1 Refugees do not show up in such lists, making it almost impossible to determine not only how many they w ere but also where they w ere living. The very rapid growth in the number of Lithuanian Jews in the last quarter of the seventeenth century may possibly reflect the decision of at least some refugees to stay t here rather than return to Ukraine or other parts of Poland. Beyond that kind of speculation there is little else to be said. It is clear, however, that many Jews chose to return home, particularly to Ukraine. This was not always easy. The sheer size of the disaster that had taken place there gave many pause for thought. Parallels were drawn between the destruction in Ukraine (in Hebrew, Ḥurban) with the destruction of the T emple in Jerusalem—the greatest tragedy in Jewish history.2 People began to ask themselves w hether one could (or should) return to such a place. Evidence of this feeling can be found in an entry in the community rec ord book (in Hebrew, pinkas) of the Chortkiv community: “As a result of the terrible disasters of 1648 in Ukraine, when the w hole region of Podilia was thrown into an uproar, and also b ecause here in Chortkiv . . . false accusations and the wickedness of the local nobility led to a number of Jews being publicly martyred, the Rabbis of the Four Lands ruled that no
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Jew should live h ere.”3 Such an order forbidding the return to Ukraine seems to echo the traditional (though probably unhistorical) view that rabbinical authorities had not allowed Jews to resettle in Spain after the 1492 expulsion. Apart from this text, however, t here is no other evidence that any ban on returning to Ukraine was ever given, and indeed, unlike what happened in Spain, Ukrainian Jews did return home just as soon as the fighting had died down, though this could take a year or more.4 They returned to a land ravaged by war, with towns largely destroyed and Jewish communities sometimes quite literally decimated. What that felt like can be seen in an autobiographical vignette written many years later by Me’ir Tarnopoler, who remembered vividly his childhood experience of returning to his hometown of Ternopil’: In 1648 . . . had the Grace of God not moved my father and one or two other community members to move quickly and flee the fighting, we would probably all have died. We were hurried from town to town and from place to place, in the heat and the cold. . . . When winter came, we went back to our own town. Our h ouses had been burned down and our property taken over by strangers [i.e., non-Jews]. . . . [We had] many years of sorrow. While our father was alive, he would look after us, [like a bird] watching over its chicks. . . . [But] after he passed away . . . our daily lives became unbearable.5
As well as pointing out the emotional difficulties the refugees suffered in returning to such devastation, this short text also tells of some of the more concrete problems they faced. First and foremost, their economic situation was much worse than it had been before the war. Their property, particularly if it was real estate, was likely to have been destroyed or seriously damaged in the fighting. Other possessions w ere often stolen or appropriated in their absence. In such conditions, simply surviving from day to day must have been a serious challenge, and with life on a knife- edge, any other problems (such as the loss of a breadwinner as we can see in Tarnopoler’s account) had the most serious consequences.
Reconstruction Once they had decided to go back, the returnees faced the problem of actually gaining entrance into town. This was not usually an issue in Ukraine, where the Jews’ roles in the urban economy before the war had
R etur n a nd R econstruction [ 79 ]
been significant enough that their return would not be hindered. It was in the older and better-established towns, particularly t hose owned by the king, that the burghers would sometimes try to exploit the wartime conditions to get rid of their Jewish competitors. This is what happened in the case of Olkusz. In Vilnius, too, during the Russian occupation, the townspeople wrote to the tsar, requesting that the Jews be removed from the walled town to the suburbs on the far side of the Vilia river.6 On the w hole, however, t hese cases were rare—and unsuccessful. Despite the additional suffering they caused to the refugees, it did not take long before the Jews could return to their prewar homes. Once the Jews w ere back in town, they had to reconstitute Jewish society. In many towns, the Jewish community administration seems to have been up and running quite quickly.7 The next concern was ensuring the community’s economic base. This meant getting back as much as possible of the property abandoned when the Jews fled. In many, if not most, cases, buried property was retrieved, and the friends and neighbors to whom the Jews had entrusted their possessions returned them without demur.8 However, sometimes things had been stolen and their new o wners did not want to give them back. In such cases, the Jews had to go to court for restitution.9 Moshe Rosman has studied the first two years of the Jews’ return to the Ukrainian town of Dubno on the basis of the urban records. He noted that within weeks of the return of peace, the urban institutions of the town council and the court had reconstituted themselves and were dealing with myriad cases of claims and counterclaims concerning stolen property or damages. Jews did not make up all the plaintiffs. There were many cases of Polish noblemen and townspeople from different ethnic groups trying to get their money or property back (or to hang onto their ill-gotten gains).10 Jews were also among t hose accused of stealing property.11 Though religious and ethnic tensions had played a large part in the outburst of violence, the courts seem to have ignored this aspect of events. Whether Jews, Catholics, or Orthodox Christians were involved, the cases were treated purely as civil or criminal m atters. Both during and a fter the period of wars, many thousands of such cases w ere pursued in e very part of Poland-Lithuania, as the refugees struggled to put their lives back together. It is perhaps a sign of Jewish society’s confidence in the Commonwealth’s legal system that even a fter the violence they had suffered at the hands of their non-Jewish neighbors, Jews took the time to appear before the court to pursue their claims for justice against them.12
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This was not just a male phenomenon. Jewish w omen, many of them widowed by the fighting, could—and did—come before the bench, just like men. The high proportion of w idows in society meant that t here were more families at whose head stood a woman. In such conditions, women could own h ouses, run businesses, and manage financial affairs without interference.13 This meant that they too often found themselves g oing to court to reclaim stolen property. Though it does not seem to have been a very common occurrence, there are enough cases to show that it was normal practice. Here are two examples. On June 26, 1649, Dawidowa Nimizowka of Dubno went to court to get her property back. She had returned with the other refugees to find her possessions stolen and a non-Jew living in her house, so she sued him.14 In another case following the g reat massacre in Lublin in the fall of 1655, Marynka, the w idow of Israel Ickowicz, took Mikołaj Cioka to court, charging that u nder cover of the fighting and the plague that followed, he had repeatedly stolen property that belonged to her.15 We do not have the verdicts in either of t hese cases, but it is the fact that it was Jewish w omen who were active in bringing suit that is impor tant here. The status of w idows was also at the root of one of the major social issues the returning refugees had to contend with. On the face of t hings, it concerned the status of women unable satisfactorily to prove that their husbands were indeed dead. As mentioned earlier, Jewish law demands a high level of certainty in the identification of the dead husband before the wife can formally be declared a w idow and thus permitted to remarry. Though t here was some leniency on the question of testimony—even the woman herself and non-Jews were acceptable witnesses and hearsay testimony could be heard—the identification itself had to be made within three days of death and had to include incontrovertible evidence as to the corpse’s identity. If this was lacking, the woman could not be declared a widow, could not fulfill the customs of mourning, and could not remarry. She was left in a kind of social limbo, still “chained” (Hebrew, agunah) to her missing husband.16 The significance of this issue, however, went far beyond w omen’s status because it also concerned the estate of the missing man. There were at least two parties with interests involved: the w oman, who wanted to receive back her marriage portion, and the heirs, who wanted to take possession of their inheritance. Without at least some evidence of the husband’s death, the estate could not be touched. Once that was forthcoming, legal determinations w ere made more difficult by the fact that financial
R etur n a nd R econstruction [ 81 ]
atters, such as inheritance, w m ere decided according to different evidentiary standards from widowhood. This created a very complex gray area where, in some cases, the wife could receive her payment while the heirs were left with nothing, and o thers in which the opposite held true.17 The Jewish judges were thus left with a good deal of room for maneuver. They often needed it as they found themselves trapped between the desire to alleviate the suffering of the agunot, the fear that in freeing t hese women to remarry the judges might be making them adulterers and their children bastards, and the pressures of Jewish society (here in the form of the heirs) that needed to mobilize all its resources in order to survive. As we have seen, the Council of Four Lands and Poland’s leading rabbis met in 1650 to try to relieve these tensions, though the fact that their rulings have not survived suggests that they were unsuccessful in doing so.18 Decisions w ere thus mostly made on an ad hoc basis, which meant that the future of many Jewish w omen was dependent on the individual outlook of the various judges making the rulings (who were, of course, all men).19 Jewish popular memory holds that the rabbis did all they could to help the agunot. Recent research has begun to question this and, certainly, many of the written records that survive demonstrate a rather strict approach.20 Sadly, no firsthand account by an agunah has survived to tell us of their struggles with the Jewish legal system or of the suffering that their harsh and demeaning social status caused them. Another socioreligious issue that was extremely difficult to resolve satisfactorily concerned Jews who had converted to Christianity during the wars but wanted to return to Judaism.21 Not all converts felt that way; some (perhaps many) preferred to remain Christians. These were not only people on the margins of society. In October 1657, after the end of the Swedish occupation of Kraków, the wealthy Jewish merchant Jakub Palti’el Rubinowicz converted to Catholicism. Though his motivation for doing so is not entirely clear, as Hieronim Rubinkowicz, a Christian, he pursued a successful career among the urban elite in the town of Kazimierz, even becoming a member of the town council.22 Those who wanted to return to Judaism could find themselves in complicated situations. As we have seen, though the king issued an order in 1650 allowing all Jews converted by force to Orthodox Christianity to return to their ancestral religion, it was not always honored. Beyond that, it did not refer to all conversions. The Jews who w ere forcibly baptized into Roman Catholicism during Czarniecki’s campaigns in western Poland were given no such freedom, which meant that if they did choose to rejoin their community, they did so at their own peril.23
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Acceptance back into the Jewish world was not always automatic. Jewish law mandates that even u nder duress, it is forbidden for Jews to convert.24 They should rather be martyred. So, following the strict letter of the law, there should have been no converts left to want to return. Nonetheless, given the realities of wartime life, there were many Jews returning from captivity who had converted but now wanted to resume their previous lives. This raised the question of how they should be treated. The great legal authority of the previous c entury, Rabbi Moshe Isserles of Kraków, had taken an independent line on this question, giving a lenient ruling that forced converts who wanted to return should be accepted unconditionally.25 Many seventeenth-century judges and rabbis seem eagerly to have adopted this approach and allowed all Jewish male converts who wanted to return to do so.26 Those rabbis were, however, evading a very difficult question. Had all the Jews who had converted actually been forced to do so? There had been those who had converted ahead of time in order to avoid trouble. Legally speaking, this counted as a voluntary conversion and was a very serious sin indeed. Perhaps for this reason some rabbis questioned Isserles’ position. In a responsum written at the height of the Czarniecki campaign in Great Poland, Ḥanoch the Preacher ruled that returning converts should be treated with suspicion and forced to undergo penances before being allowed to rejoin Jewish society. It is not clear how influential his ruling was.27 The situation of Jewish women converts, freed from captivity and wanting to return to Judaism, was even more complex. In addition to the issue of the nature of their conversion, married w omen had to face the question of w hether they had willingly had sex with their captors. If that was the case—even if they had agreed to let their captors sleep with them because they feared for their lives—they would be forbidden to their husbands, lose their dowry, and not be accepted back into Jewish society.28 Of course, in most cases it was impossible to determine w hether (or under what conditions) a Jewish w oman had slept with her captors. Once again, Rabbi Moshe Isserles had provided a lenient ruling, saying that if a woman captive who had been forced to convert returned to Judaism at the first possible opportunity, she was not to be suspected of adultery.29 Nonetheless, some rabbis (and husbands) exerted pressure to have these captive women divorced in their absence.30 In order to receive the divorce in absentia, all the husband had to do was to put in escrow with the court a sum worth the woman’s original dowry, which was to be
R etur n a nd R econstruction [ 83 ]
handed over to her on her return.31 As a result, returning women converts often had to face a g reat deal of suspicion from e ither their husband or local society or both. This might have persuaded at least some of them that it was better not to return at all.32 The third challenge facing the returning refugees was resuming their economic life. As the text by Me’ir Tarnopoler suggests, this was often very difficult—at least in the immediate postwar period. The urban markets were in disarray, regional and transregional trade was difficult and dangerous, and the high levels of destruction meant that production levels had fallen dramatically. Fortunately, this was only a temporary problem. As time moved on, production rose and the markets reasserted themselves. Provided they could survive the immediate postwar depression, the returning refugees could expect to go back to making a living at their old occupations—even if not at prewar levels. The final phenomenon of the immediate postwar years to be examined here brings us back to the courts. As Jewish life began to resume, t here was a wave of prosecutions for murder brought by Jewish men and women against those suspected of killing members of their (i.e., the Jews’) families. These were criminal prosecutions, and though they noted that the murders had taken place during the war, they did not view that as in any way pertinent to the case at hand. The accused w ere mostly peasants and townspeople who had taken the law into their own hands and murdered Jews during the chaos created by the fighting. Regular soldiers (Cossacks, etc.) w ere not charged, presumably b ecause their actions w ere viewed as legitimate acts of war.33 Bringing murderers of Jews to trial was known in Ashkenazi Jewish culture as “taking revenge” and was by no means a new phenomenon in the mid-seventeenth century.34 Still, a contemporary authority, Rabbi Menaḥem Mendel Krokhmal, originally from Kraków but living in Moravia during the wars, explained the purpose of this kind of revenge as follows: “If, God Forbid, [we] did not take revenge on the murderer, then Jewish blood would be worthless and people would continue to treat them [i.e., the Jews] in this way. This would endanger e very Jew on the roads.”35 In this sense, legal “revenge” was a communal imperative. In fact, in quieter times, these prosecutions were supported by the local community, which sometimes even covered all the costs.36 The postwar depression meant that communal institutions generally did not have the resources to help. In his responsum, Krokhmal ruled that the community should only pay if special expenses were incurred, such as hiring a lawyer or giving bribes.
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Bringing such a prosecution had implications beyond the communal. First and foremost, it allowed surviving f amily members the satisfaction of feeling that justice had been done. There was a financial incentive, too. According to the General Privilege of Polish Jewry, renewed by each new Polish king on his accession, anyone convicted of murdering a Jew had to pay a fine, half of which went to the victim’s family and the other half to the Royal Treasury.37 The use of the term “revenge” for these acts of prosecution is interest ing because it brings them into a kind of dialogue with Jewish liturgy.38 Almost all memorial prayers, whether dealing with contemporary events or with the Jews’ suffering in antiquity, include some kind of call for Divine Revenge on the non-Jewish murderers. That vengeance would be seen only at the end of days, so no matter how deeply felt the Jews’ belief that God would indeed avenge their suffering, it did not assuage their feelings of anger and helplessness in their present circumstances. Bracketing the religious passivity of the prayers together with the active prosecution of the murderers under the single rubric of revenge allowed contemporary Jews to feel that their legal actions were in some way an expression of God’s will. More than that, it gave them the sense that God was not simply allowing them to suffer year after year until the arrival of the messianic age. Instead He was encouraging Jews to play an active role in their own fate, in which He Himself was taking a hand. There must have been a g reat deal of satisfaction in that. In times of g reat trauma, such as the mid-seventeenth-century wars discussed h ere, the turn to the courts had an added benefit. Modern research on how individuals overcome traumatic experience suggests that the quest for revenge, which is often expressed in various vengeful fantasies, is not helpful in the healing process: In the third stage of recovery, the survivor . . . recognizes that the trauma cannot be undone and that her wishes for compensation or revenge can never truly be fulfilled. She also recognizes, however, that holding the perpetrator responsible for his crimes is important not only for her personal well-being but also for the health of the larger society.39
By telescoping the need for revenge with the search for justice, seventeenth- century Jewish society seems to have overcome the dichotomy expressed in this quote. One might even speculate that by providing outlets for revenge in both liturgy and litigation, it allowed the traumatized Jews of
R etur n a nd R econstruction [ 85 ]
Poland-Lithuania to sublimate their dark fantasies and channel the harmful feelings in directions more conducive to their mental health. Thus in social, economic, religious, legal, and possibly even psychological terms, the Jewish survivors, rebuilding their shattered lives, also helped create a very solid foundation for the future growth of their communities. This was a process not without tensions and difficulties, and there was much suffering along the way. Still as the 1650s progressed and made way for the 1660s, the Jews of Poland-Lithuania were able to position themselves for f uture growth and development.
Toward the Future The decades a fter the end of the wars saw Polish-Lithuanian Jewry consolidate its position in the towns. Previously, they had often had to live in a cramped Jewish quarter a good distance away from the main market square even in the private, noble-owned towns. As the second half of the seventeenth century progressed, however, Jews began to move into the houses around the market square—any town’s economic hub.40 Mordechai Nadav found the same phenomenon for the Jews of Pinsk and concluded that flight had actually given the Jews an advantage over the Christians who had remained b ehind. The latter group lost everything in the various destructions of the town while the Jews—at least t hose who only fled locally—were able to preserve some of their wealth. In that situation, the poverty-stricken townspeople often turned to agriculture to survive, tending the lands and gardens they had been given around the town. The Jewish community, which had no agricultural land of its own, was left free to move into much more central positions both in the urban markets and within the town itself.41 This kind of repositioning seems to have been a general phenomenon. One of the mechanisms Jews used to acquire houses previously owned by Christians was to take them in lieu of debts.42 Another was to rebuild property at their own expense and take possession u ntil the previous owner could pay his share, by which time it was hard to dislodge them.43 In some cases, the town council responded angrily to this development, but there was little it could do.44 Even in Slutzk, where the governors and the town council joined forces to expel the refugees in 1659, the Jews managed to purchase over three-quarters of the houses around the market square over the following twenty-five years.45 By the century’s end, Jews were clearly a dominant force in the towns, particularly the small towns of
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the Commonwealth’s eastern regions, whose economy was based largely on the sale of agricultural produce. The large royal towns of western Poland, particularly Kraków, Poznań, Gdańsk, and Lublin, did not witness this development, presumably because their town councils w ere strong enough to prevent it. It was in the private towns and the smaller royal towns, where the noble governor had significant freedom of action, that the Jews did particularly well. Stefan Bidziński, royal governor (in Polish, starosta) of the small town of Chęciny in southern Poland, explained why he supported increased Jewish settlement in the introduction to the privilege he granted to the town’s Jewish community in 1668: Jews once lived in . . . Chęciny but w ere l ater burnt [out] and destroyed by the Cossack and Swedish invasions—[and o thers] w ere forced to flee by the plague. . . . [So,] taking into account . . . the [fact that] the town was later sacked and . . . [the fact] that the Jews were previously settled here, and [taking] particular [note of] the benefits which w ill accrue [from them] . . . and in order that the Royal incomes (from which the starostwo also benefits) should not be lost, I hereby grant them my . . . license to buy empty plots in the market square and on the streets [of the town] and develop them . . . [as well as freedom of trade].46
The starosta gave two main reasons why he was granting the Jews this very favorable privilege. The first was that their settlement was nothing new; they had lived in Chęciny before the wars. The second was that, in return for letting them develop the town and its markets, he wanted them to create more wealth, which would translate into greater income for both the king and himself as governor. The first argument was not strong. Though Jews had indeed lived in Chęciny before 1648, their presence had been tiny. In 1629, there had been only 24 Jewish families in the town out of 327.47 It was clearly not their prewar contribution to urban life that persuaded Bidziński to entice them back with this privilege. What he really seems to have expected is that the Jews would be a major force in pulling the town out of the slump caused by Cossack and Swedish invasions. They seem to have answered his call. By the mid-eleventh c entury Jews owned 65 houses in town—17 of these on the market square. This made them a significant proportion of the urban population and helped enrich the town and its governor.48 Chęciny was by no means the only town to see Jews returning or immigrating in the wake of the wars. Jews seem to have negotiated terms of settlement, in the form of community privileges, in towns owned or run
R etur n a nd R econstruction [ 87 ]
by members of the nobility, especially the fabulously wealthy and power ful magnates.49 It was this last group above all that had the resources to undertake the processes of reconstruction that w ere vital for the Commonwealth after so many years of fighting. Having exploited Jewish economic skills to improve the income from their estates in the period before 1648, they quite naturally returned to the Jews when they began to rehabilitate the economic basis of their lands in the second half of the seventeenth century.50 Though Polish-Lithuanian Jewry had received a number of potentially knockout blows from 1648 to 1667, it had displayed remarkable resilience. By the time the magnates began to call on them, the processes of community rebuilding and socioeconomic reconstruction w ere far enough advanced that the Jews w ere able to take up their invitation. Beyond this, the relative weakness of the non-Jewish townspeople meant that the prewar economic relationship between magnates and Jews not only resumed but in fact intensified. And since the magnates would become the major political, social, and economic force in Poland-Lithuania for at least the next c entury, the Jews soon found themselves in a much more comfortable position, able to leave the traumas of the past b ehind them and move into the f uture with some confidence.51
ch a p t er se v e n
Resolution
it is proba bly true that t here is never a r eally good solution to a refugee crisis. T here is too much suffering on a mass scale and too many attendant problems to allow for satisfactory treatment. Mostly it is a question of responding to urgent problems as they arise and improvising answers on the spot. This certainly seems to have been the case in the seventeenth- century Commonwealth, where there were no strong central authorities, non-Jewish or Jewish, to implement broad principles of policy. Even those bodies that did exist, such as the Jewish regional councils, could not formulate a coherent plan. As masses of indigent Jews entered Lithuania from Ukraine, for example, the Lithuanian Jewish Council issued a string of different legislative o rders over a period of years in an attempt to keep a measure of control over the situation. Nothing that they did could achieve that, so different solutions were tried each time. Nonetheless, though it was unable to contain the problem, matters did not seem to spin totally out of control. Perhaps this was the most that could be hoped for. If truth be told, in face of the terrible losses, population movements, sickness, and poverty suffered by the Jews of the Commonwealth from 1648 to 1667, simply containing the problem was no mean feat. In a conservative estimate, the Jewish population lost some 40,000 people. The deaths w ere mostly a result of fighting within the war zone and of the aftereffects of flight (including sickness and plague). To t hese must be added the Jews who left the country, e ither as captives or of their own f ree will, and those who converted to Christianity, never to return. Altogether, this made up some 10 to 20 percent of the total Jewish population. In Ukraine the losses reached a staggering 40–50 percent.1 The Jews’ financial losses during the wars were vast, too. Much of their property, including real estate, was destroyed in the fighting, with [ 88 ]
R esolu tion [ 89 ]
more abandoned or stolen during their flight. To this should be added the enormous drain of taking to the road for long periods of wartime with little or no income. On top of t hese individual losses, the authorities levied extraordinary taxes on the Jewish communities, which could also face various demands from the different military forces they encountered. It was in these conditions that Polish-Lithuanian Jewry had to find some way of dealing with the refugee issue itself. It must have seemed never-ending, for during the period of the wars, there was a constant stream of Jewish refugees, first fleeing the fighting, then looking for somewhere to stay, and finally, in part at least, returning home. These were mostly individuals or families desperately trying to stay alive (though in the early period of the Swedish and Russian wars, some communities organized to leave en masse). Mostly poor, and often ill, the refugees became an additional burden on the communities they traveled through or stopped in. The best solutions seem to have been found on the local level. In individual communities, like Slutzk and Kraków, refugees w ere taken into private homes and the communal monopoly over economic activity in the town was also relaxed to allow them to work. This was not a perfect solution. The non-Jewish authorities, who wanted to keep the local Jewish population as small as possible, could take measures to get rid of the refugees, leading to great tension. The crowded conditions also posed a health risk and made outbreaks of plague even more serious than they would other wise have been. Nonetheless, many of the refugees w ere able to find a place to stay and take stock of their situation before moving on—either back home or out of the country. Women seem to have played important roles in refugee society, both during their flight and on their return home. This could involve no little personal bravery, as we saw in the case of the refugee woman confronting her husband’s murderers in their flight from Ukraine. In fact, women seemed to have faced greater threats of violence than men: in addition to the kinds of violence and murder inflicted on all Jews, Jewish w omen were also targeted for their bodies, which the mob wanted to defile either through rape or through brutal attacks on their reproductive organs. In addition, they had to deal with serious suspicion, not to say hostility, in male-dominated society, concerning, among other things, their loyalty to their religion and their faithfulness to their husbands. Nonetheless, when it came to reconstituting their and their families’ lives in the wake of the uprising, the refugee women were active not only in their economic
[ 90 ] ch a pter sev en
activity (a continuation of prewar trends) but also in bringing non-Jewish murderers to justice. Looking a fter masses of poor and frightened refugees in the places they found themselves was not cheap. Communal budgets w ere very often overstretched. Under the weight of outbreaks of plague, like that in Kraków in 1652, they more or less collapsed. A number of communities swallowed their pride and began to send letters or representatives to wealthy communities abroad to raise the money they needed. How much help this was is not entirely clear. The religious and social issues raised by the wars—and particularly the experience of flight—were also quite intractable. Efforts to bring back converts were only partially successful: a royal order was obtained permitting Jews who had converted to Orthodox Christianity to return, but it did not help converts to Catholicism. On the other hand, the policy of welcoming back returning converts, particularly women, was not universally adopted. The issue of agunot proved similarly difficult to resolve satisfactorily. Thus women seem to have faced greater challenges than men. Simply surviving the attacks and, if necessary, returning to Judaism were not enough. On their return home, many continued to suffer u nder an additional burden of suspicion because they were women, which must have made their reintegration all the more difficult. In fact, the only policies that seem to have been widely adopted were in the areas of religion and culture. Polish-Lithuanian Jewry did agree to establish a special day of fasting and remembrance, to be held annually on 20 Sivan. It served Jewish society on a number of levels. It provided a controlled and communal way for the many who had suffered traumatic experiences during the wars both to remember what they had gone through and to integrate t hose memories into their daily experience. By also evoking a medieval blood libel, it allowed the Jews to connect their personal experiences with the long history of Jewish suffering, which formed part of God’s relationship with His people, Israel. In an equally remarkable way, seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Jews also managed to sublimate the natural—b ut psychologically harmful—desire for revenge on their attackers. Calls for divine vengeance formed part of much of the liturgical poetry composed for the fast of 20 Sivan, as for many Jewish memorial prayers, yet it was expected only at the end of days. However, contemporary Jews had another means of extracting “revenge.” In their culture, this meant doing everything in their power to bring the murderers of their loved ones to justice (as they understood
R esolu tion [ 91 ]
it). This was an empowering act, which might have helped relieve the feeling of helplessness that accompanies traumatic experiences. While these measures could not cure the most seriously—that is, pathologically—traumatized, they could go some way toward helping the majority of the Jewish population whose suffering was not so extreme. Perhaps most significantly for the Jews of the time, they provided a sense that the disaster that had overcome them was not a sign that God had abandoned them. Even the seemingly mundane act of bringing the guilty to trial must have seemed somehow to make them part of the Divine plan for vengeance. While each of the measures discussed here provided only a partial solution to the problems facing the Jews of the Commonwealth, when taken together they seem to have been enough to help survivors get back on their feet relatively quickly. As the ravaged communities filled up with returning refugees, they began expanding into areas of town and sectors of the market previously closed to them. The reason seems to have been that they were able to resume their former lives more quickly than were their non- Jewish neighbors, who proved unable to check the Jews’ growth as they had done in the past. So why were the Jews able to recover more quickly? One possible answer might be found in the act of flight itself. However difficult surviving as a refugee might have been, it was perhaps safer than staying in town as a target for the different armies that came rampaging through. Refugees, particularly t hose who left in an organized way, might also have been able to save more of their property than the townspeople who w ere looted on multiple occasions.2 This raises the question of w hether the losses suffered by the Jews were actually smaller than those of their non-Jewish neighbors. Comparative data from Ukraine are not available, but it seems likely, on the w hole, that the local Ruthenian population would not have suffered losses as g reat as t hose of the Jews, who w ere a major (if secondary) target in all the fighting. Organized flight was also very rare there. Things w ere different in the western parts of Poland affected by the Swedish war, where, initially at least, Jewish communities w ere able to plan their responses ahead of time. Demographic data suggest that the total urban population of these regions might have fallen by as much as 70 percent during the wars.3 Since t hese studies do not distinguish between Jews and non-Jews, it is hard to know precisely what the relative proportions were. However, bearing in mind that Jews did not make up a very significant part of the urban population of Great and Little Poland
[ 92 ] ch a pter sev en
before 1648, it might be argued that the brunt of the losses in t hose regions fell on the non-Jewish townspeople. Perhaps the major difference between the Jewish and non-Jewish urban populations in the postwar years was also demographic. Beginning sometime in the 1670s, Polish-Lithuanian Jewry entered a period of rapid demographic growth, which allowed it to overcome its wartime losses and expand quickly. It continued throughout the eighteenth century, giving Polish-Lithuanian Jewry a population of some 1,000,000 at the turn of the nineteenth century. For the non-Jewish townspeople, on the other hand, the decades a fter the Peace of Andrusów w ere a period of demographic stagnation, which did not end u ntil well into the eighteenth c entury. This difference cannot be explained by means of survival rates during the war. Rather it was an outcome of the Jewish community’s greater success in dealing with the problems raised by the wars and so creating a socioeconomic (and cultural-religious) platform for population growth. In the end, the partial solutions that Jewish society found to the challenges of the wartime years seem to have been enough. With their help, the shattered communities w ere able to absorb the refugees and begin the process of rebuilding their lives. That is why when the magnates undertook the task of postwar reconstruction and wanted to use Jews to help them, the communities of the Commonwealth were socially, economically, religiously, and psychologically ready to answer their call. The secret of the Jews’ success seems, then, to have been their ability to adapt to changing conditions, their flexibility under pressure, and their skill in improvising partial solutions to difficult problems. It is particularly noteworthy that while most Jews experienced the traumas of the war years as individuals, families, or small groups, the postwar reconstruction was carried out to a great extent as communities, suggesting that the strength of communal structures and a sense of mutual responsibility w ere of key importance, too.
pa rt ii
Capture, Slavery, and Ransom the trafficked in the mediterranean world
ch a p t er eigh t
Introduction
in 1658, yaʾakov koppel margolis, a young Jewish man from Ukraine, found himself in Venice, desperately looking for money. Since he was well educated, he decided to raise what he needed by writing and publishing a book, whose sales, he hoped, would bring in the necessary funds. To encourage prospective buyers, he told his life story in its introduction: Swept up by the . . . catastrophe that hit the land of Poland . . . I, my son and my daughter, [were part of the mass] of captives sent into exile. They [put] us in iron chains . . . and took us away to a foreign country. . . . In tears, I asked myself, who is with me? Who will protect me? Who in heaven will . . . rescue me from these stormy waters? [So] I decided to go to the [local] leaders, [thinking that] they can f ree captives from their imprisonment and [through them] God, the Just Creator of the World, will release me from my captivity. . . . [And indeed, thanks] to Him . . . the famous leaders, those righteous and pious benefactors of the Istanbul community— and in particular those scholars who study Torah day and night and take care of the Jews held by cruel masters . . . took pity on me and had me ransomed. . . . But [despite this] God has treated me harshly and my c hildren remain in captivity . . . I have travelled from country to country collecting money, small sums and large, [for my] poor lambs who await me e very day, lost in the clutches of cruel and evil men.1
Koppel would not have been able to put out the book, commentaries on various aggadot (rabbinic legends), without help. So, he ended with a note of thanks to his patron, Shlomo Ḥai Saraval. Of Saraval, who was a member of Venetian Jewry’s executive council, Koppel wrote: “He is the perfect [ 95 ]
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scholar, adorned with the Crown of Torah, who has devoted his w hole life to supporting the poor of the Land of Israel and [to fulfilling] the great commandment of ransoming captives.”2 Saraval’s help was therefore part of a broader philanthropic effort that included both ransoming captives and supporting Jewish settlement in the Holy Land. Koppel’s story was not uncommon for the Jews of Ukraine in the 1650s. As we saw in part 1, a very large number of them w ere taken captive by Crimean Tatar forces to be ransomed or sold into slavery. In fact, once captured, these Jewish w omen and men found themselves trapped in two major international economic systems of the period. While neither was exclusively, or even predominantly, Jewish, they both absorbed the waves of Jewish captives coming from eastern Europe in the years following 1648 and determined their fate. The first was the international trade in Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, and Circassian captives carried out by the Crimean Tatars with the support of the Ottoman Empire. Centered largely on the Black Sea region, this trade reached as far north as the Russian steppe and the Polish interior in its search for captives and as far south as Istanbul, where they w ere sold on the slave markets.3 The second economic system was piracy in the Mediterranean—and in particular the responses to its depredations. The Mediterranean was a highly dangerous place in t hose years with pirates, both Muslim and Christian, making their living by selling the goods they had stolen and ransoming the travelers they had captured. As a result, many p eople around the Mediterranean basin were engaged in raising money to ransom captives, often held in distant countries. This was not a unified effort: each family, community, or religious group acted on behalf of its own members with little or no coordination with any other.4 The Jews, too, developed their own organization for ransoming t hose captured by pirates. This meant that when the east European Jews came onto the slave markets, there was already a Jewish system for ransoming captives in place ready to swing into action on their behalf.5 In his text, Koppel tells us how this process felt on the receiving end. Swept up by the Tatar forces, he was put in chains and brutally taken from his home. He was then transported, frightened and disoriented, to Istanbul to be sold as a slave. It was at that moment that he found himself transferred from the Black Sea slavery system to the Mediterranean ransoming system. The Jewish communities of the region, most prominently in Venice but also in Livorno and Istanbul, had already put in place economic arrangements to enable the ransoming of Jews, so Koppel only
In troduction to Pa rt II [ 97 ]
needed to identify himself to the Istanbul Jewish leadership as a yeshiva student from Poland in order to be ransomed. That is also why, when he needed to find the money to free his children, he ended up in Venice. Thousands of Polish-Lithuanian Jews followed paths similar to that of Yaʾakov Koppel, and their fates are at the heart of this part of the book. We will follow them from the moment of their capture in Ukraine, on their journey to the Tatar homeland of Crimea, and finally to their ransom (or sale) in Istanbul. At that point, we w ill broaden our focus to examine the extensive transregional efforts made by Jewish communities in Europe, Asia, and Africa to raise money to redeem the captives and get it to Istanbul. We will also look at the points of contact and overlap between the ransoming network and the parallel philanthropic network tasked with supporting Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. Finally, we w ill return to the now-freed captives to see how they rebuilt their lives either by returning home or by settling in the various places in the Mediterranean basin where they had ended up. Two major issues are at the heart of the discussion. The first concerns the slave trade itself and how its market conditions s haped the fate of the captured Jews. This is important to understand, because although the treatment Jews received from their captors, and later from the slave traders, was experienced in an intensely personal way, the forces determining that treatment were often entirely impersonal. The second deals with the effort to ransom the Jewish captives from eastern Europe and is focused on the transregional Jewish philanthropic networks that raised huge sums and transported them the long distances to the slave market, examining them in terms of both their form and their function. We will also look closely at the motivation of those who supported the ransoming effort, focusing on the bonds of solidarity that connected the Jewish world of the mid-seventeenth century and persuaded strangers to contribute money to ransom captives from a foreign country held sometimes thousands of miles away. What precisely was the nature of this solidarity, how was it related to the refugee crisis, and how was it translated into action?
ch a p t er n i n e
The Captives f rom u k r a i n e to cr i m e a
The Black Sea Slave Trade The Tatar raids of 1648 in which so many Jews w ere taken captive w ere by no means a new phenomenon. Even before the final Ottoman conquest of Crimea in 1475, the Genoese colony in Feodosia (Caffa) had had a reputation as a center of merciless slave traders.1 The first major Tatar incursion into the southern regions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth took place in 1468 and was followed by hundreds more over the next two and a half centuries. The invading forces would pillage and rob whatever they could, but their main goal was to take captives for sale as slaves either in Crimea itself or in Istanbul. In fact, the slave trade was the mainstay of the Crimean economy so the khan and his forces needed to renew their supply on a regular basis. They did this by mounting raids not only into Ukraine but also into the southern Russian steppe regions, as well as Circassia on the eastern littoral of the Black Sea. According to Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, the Tatars took on average about 10,000 captives each year, making Black Sea slavery a very big business indeed, roughly comparable in size to the Atlantic slave trade in the same period.2 It formed a terrible drain on the region’s resources. The regional powers, Moscow and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, were thus forced to deal with the Tatar threat, which they did in a number of ways. Most importantly, they paid an annual tribute to the khan, in return for which he agreed not to attack their lands. In addition, military precautions were taken. Over the course of the seventeenth century, Russia constructed forts across its southern borderlands and employed loyal militias to man [ 98 ]
The Ca pti v es [ 99 ]
them.3 The Commonwealth made less of an effort to build fortresses but created from the Cossack forces special, privileged army units tasked with defending it against Tatar attacks. In addition to t hese “registered Cossacks,” there w ere also unaffiliated Cossack forces, stationed in the border region of the lower Dniepr river, known as Zaporizhia. They did not just engage in defensive actions but exploited their maritime skills in mounting independent, sometimes devastating seaborne raids on Tatar (and Ottoman) targets throughout the Black Sea region.4 None of t hese efforts at stopping the Tatars proved very successful, and slaving raids continued into the eighteenth century. The reason for this lay in the close connection between Crimea and the Ottoman Empire. The Tatars, though retaining a measure of independence because of their Mongol heritage, were Ottoman subjects. In addition, the Ottoman sultans viewed the Black Sea as their own private reserve.5 Any invasion from the north, aimed at shutting down Tatar operations, would therefore have brought serious diplomatic and military consequences that both the Commonwealth and Moscow were interested in avoiding. As a result, the populations in the border regions—and sometimes much deeper in the interior—continued to suffer. Maurycy Horn has calculated that between 1605 and 1647, there were 76 Tatar incursions into the Commonwealth alone, over half of which w ere major raids.6 The appearance of the Tatar army in Ukraine struck fear into local inhabitants, as Guillaume de Beauplan, a French military engineer who served there during the 1640s, described: It is an amazing sight for anyone to witness for the first time. . . . Trees are not thicker in a forest than h orses are at such times on the plain, and seen from afar they resemble a cloud rising from the horizon, growing larger and larger as it rises, striking terror into the hearts of even the most daring. . . . [The] units range h ere and t here among the villages besieging them by placing four groups of guards around each village, and burning g reat bonfires all night long for fear lest even one peasant should escape. Then they sack and burn it, killing all t hose inhabitants who resist, and capturing and taking away all those who yield.7
The Jews in the Black Sea Slave Trade By the time of the uprising Jews in Ukraine w ere well aware of the dangers of the Black Sea slave trade, having come into more intensive contact with the Tatars in the decades before 1648 when the number of Jews
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in the region reached significant proportions.8 As a result, Jews in some Ukrainian towns bore arms in local militias as part of the urban defenses against Tatar incursions.9 Others engaged in efforts to ransom well-to-do Polish noblemen captured by Tatars, though whether they did so as agents employed by the captives’ families or as individual entrepreneurs remains unclear.10 A number of Jews w ere also captured and ransomed in the first half of the seventeenth c entury. One such case happened in 1614. A Jewish w oman from Ukraine was captured by Tatar forces and taken to Crimea. Her husband did his best to ransom her but was unable to meet the high price set by her captor. His efforts continued for some six years, at which point he was advised to hire a Jewish agent to travel to Crimea and negotiate her ransom. The agent found the Jewish w oman living in the Tatar’s h ouse as a f ree w oman, mother to one child and pregnant with another. She was initially unwilling to be ransomed, fearing that she would lose her c hildren. In the end, however, she agreed and the Tatar set terms: the agent was to go back to the husband and return within three months bringing a ransom of 100 red zlotys (some 600 regular zlotys) and a fur hat made of sable. This proved impossible and the deal fell through.11 We know of this story b ecause the husband then approached Rabbi Yekil ben Binyamin Aharon with a request that he be allowed to divorce his wife in her absence and remarry. As we saw e arlier, the issue in such cases was w hether the w oman had willingly slept with her captor. Rabbi Yekil ruled that she had, once again demonstrating that female captives carried an additional burden: even were they redeemed, as women they faced a suspicious, not to say hostile, Jewish society if they returned home. The rabbi held not only that her behavior showed her guilt but that the Tatar had demonstrated genuine affection for her by setting conditions that would make her ransom impossible. Among them, the rabbi noted that he [i.e., the agent] was required to bring the ransom to him [i.e., to the Tatar in Crimea]. It was unreasonable to expect [the agent] to bring the ransom to a foreign country. The usual custom is for the captor to bring the captive close to the borderlands and for [the agent] to bring the ransom close to the borderlands and to do the swap t here.12
This is significant h ere for another reason: it shows that the usual arrangements for ransoming captives from Crimea w ere well known in Jewish society, which meant that local Jews presumably had experience with them. So, when Jews in Ukraine began to be captured by the Tatar forces
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in large numbers in 1648, they must have had some idea of what awaited them.
Capture and Captivity in 1648 and After The surviving sources make a precise chronological reconstruction of the capture of Jews by Tatars impossible. We do know that the Tatars took large numbers of Jews in Zhyvotiv on June 6, 1648, and in Pohrebyshche at about the same time. Many Jewish captives were taken in Polnoye on July 22, in Volodymyr-Volynsky in the first week of September, and in Husiatyn shortly after that. As we saw earlier, Jews captured by Cossack forces in Tul’chyn w ere handed over to the Tatars as part of the plunder. There must have been many other occasions where Jews were captured, either en masse in the towns or in smaller numbers, that have left no trace in the sources. Jews, of course, w ere not the Tatars’ only target. In its choice of captives, the Tatar “harvesting of the steppe,” as they called it, did not discriminate between different ethnic or religious communities. That meant that the vast majority of those sent to the slave markets came from the largest group in the population, the Orthodox peasantry. Prisoners of war, very often Catholic Poles, made up another very important body of captives— especially noble generals, such as Mikołaj Potocki and Marcin Kalinowski, captured at Korsun, who could be expected to yield a very high ransom. As the number of captives grew, columns of prisoners in chains trudging across Ukraine on their way to Crimea became a common sight. One con temporary Polish observer, writing in June 1648, estimated the number as 200,000, clearly a highly inflated figure.13 The Ottoman chronicler Mustafa Naʾima, writing years later, recorded the total number of captives as 40,000. This figure, too, was probably exaggerated.14 Eventually, the new king, Jan Kazimierz, managed to put an end to the fighting. He did so by promising the khan a renewed tribute at a much higher level than previously if he would withdraw from the campaign. The Tatar leader, happy to take money from the Commonwealth in lieu of captives, agreed to return home, leaving a seriously weakened Khmelnytsky to sue for peace.15 Of course, this agreement did not stop future Tatar incursions and the slaving continued. As before, Jews were captured in large numbers. When the fighting broke out in the north of the Commonwealth during the second wave of wars in the later 1650s, more Jews, particularly in the G rand Duchy of Lithuania, found themselves taken from their homes as part of
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the slave trade. Some were taken by local troops and held until their families could raise the price of a ransom. O thers were taken directly by Tatar forces or w ere captured by the Cossack or Russian armies and sold on to the Tatars for profit. Yet o thers were captured by Russian forces and sent to the Russian interior either, as we saw in the case of the Jews from Smolensk, to await ransom or to be sold to slave merchants for resale. It is impossible even to estimate how many Jews were captured during the period from 1648 to 1667. Though the Hebrew-language chronicles did mention numbers of Jews captured in various places on different occasions, they were prone to exaggeration, and not even consistent with each other. For example, in Nathan Hanover’s book Yavein metsulah, the number of Jews captured in Zhyvotiv and three nearby communities was given as 3,000.16 In a slightly later work, Tzaʾar bat rabim by Avraham ben Shmu’el Ashkenazy, that number had grown to 9,000.17 While Hanover’s figure is to be preferred to Ashkenazy’s, both are probably highly exaggerated. And as we will see, not all those taken by the Tatars actually made it to the slave market, killed e ither by their captors or by the traveling conditions. This makes any attempt to draw a stark distinction between numbers of casualties and numbers of captured highly problematic. When it came to summing up the total number of Jewish captives sold or redeemed in Istanbul, contemporary Jewish society measured them in the tens of thousands. Hanover gave a figure of 20,000, while a source from the turn of the eighteenth century mentioned 30,000.18 There is no way of verifying these figures, which seem more typological than precise, or of providing alternative estimates. The best we can say is that many thousands of Jews were captured and swept up in the slave trade. So what was the experience of being caught and sent into captivity? In his chronicle, Nathan Hanover portrayed it in a somewhat positive light. When he retold the story of the capture of Zhyvotiv and Pohrebyshche, he created a kind of dialogue between Jews and Tatars. The former, awaiting the fall of their communities, spoke first: If we wait u ntil the Ukrainians reach the city, they w ill have their way with us and we w ill all e ither perish or be forced into baptism (God forbid). It is preferable to fall captive to the Tatars because we know that the Jews, our brothers in Constantinople and in the other Turkish communities are very compassionate and w ill ransom us.
A little later in the text, when the Tatars accepted the Jews’ surrender, they were moved to mercy by their captives’ prayers for the dead and responded: “Do not despair and do not deny yourselves food or drink.
The Ca pti v es [ 103 ]
here are ritual slaughterers among you; let them slaughter as many T sheep and oxen as you need, and we w ill soon bring you to your b rothers in Constantinople to be ransomed.”19 This rather idyllic literary portrayal served Hanover in a c ouple of ways. First, it further emphasized the bestial cruelty of the Orthodox Ukrainian uprising by comparing it to the merciful treatment Jews received at the hands of the Muslim Tatars. And second, it played up the importance of Jewish solidarity for the survivors of the massacres.20 It did not, however, come close to expressing the realities Jews faced when captured by Tatars. Another chronicler, Gavri’el bar Yehoshuʾa Shussberg from Rzeszów, seems to have been a little closer to the truth in his book Petaḥ teshuvah. Under the heading “In the Zhyvotiv community they burned the elderly, the babies and the children, took the young men and women into captivity,”21 he wrote: The Tatars burned the babies and the elderly [in Zhyvotiv] b ecause they did not want to take them captive. It was young men and w omen that they picked out for captivity. And the verse, “They sold my p eople for no fortune; They set no high price on me,”22 was fulfilled there, because one person would be sold for [only] one zloty and a few groszy.23
Shussberg was not the only contemporary to remark on the Tatars’ choice of captives, though most emphasized that only young women were the captives of choice.24 Market forces seem to have been at work. The potential profits to be made on the slave markets had to be weighed against the cost (and difficulty) of transporting captives over long distances, not to mention the problem of captives dying during the journey. The best bet for profit-seeking Tatars seems to have been beautiful young w omen and healthy young men, who had a better chance of reaching the market alive and could be sure of bringing the best prices.25 They therefore had a chance of survival. The rest of Jewish society could expect l ittle mercy. Nonetheless, the actual moment of capture in the chaotic conditions of wartime did offer some possibilities for negotiation. If a captive could promise the payment of a ransom by family members or communal institutions, then his or her chances of survival were much improved. Of course, since Jewish society in Ukraine had crumbled u nder the violent onslaught of the uprising, the possibility of raising this kind of money was slim.26 The confused conditions on the ground also presented some opportunities for escape. While, as Hanover intimated in his text, physical flight into the waiting arms of the peasant mob might have been a case of “out of
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the frying pan into the fire,” there were sometimes other options. The following is a deposition by a Ukrainian Jew, Me’ir bar Yitzḥak, taken before a rabbinic court in Istanbul in 1655: I was taken into captivity together with Mister Henoch from Pohrebyshche. I asked him . . . if he was married and he answered that . . . his wife, Mistress Dinah, had vanished into captivity. Then the order came down from the Cossack general that the Tatars would kill all the male prisoners and leave the women alive. And straight away the Tatars began to kill all the Jewish men, among them Mister Henoch. I saw [it] with my own eyes. . . . Me, they dressed me up in w omen’s clothes because my beard had not yet started to show, and so I escaped death.27
Most Jewish men captured by the Tatars w ere not so lucky. Another aspect of the captive experience that Me’ir bar Yitzḥak’s testimony revealed was the reshuffling of social connections. Jews w ere brutally ripped from their homes and families and found themselves in a column of prisoners, who w ere for the most part non-Jews. Naturally the Jewish prisoners, usually complete strangers, gravitated to each other and struck up friendships. Once the situation became calmer, they began to exploit their new social networks to ask around for information about family members, loved ones, and friends with whom they had lost contact. On rare occasions, the contact might be renewed: we saw that Yaʾakov Koppel went into captivity with two of his children. We also know of a Jewish woman captive who made contact with her son, also in captivity, and learned from him of her husband’s fate before they w ere split up again.28 And in one quite remarkable case, a Jewish man persuaded his captor to buy his wife and child, presumably from another Tatar, and take the whole f amily into captivity together.29 These stories w ere clearly the exception. For most Jews (and non- Jews), being taken captive meant that they had lost everything. The life they had left b ehind was over, their families, friends, and communities lost to them. The realities of captivity were harsh: they were tied together with ropes or straps made out of animal hides, and many had little more than the clothes they stood up in. Ahead of them lay a long, difficult, and even dangerous journey during which they were at the mercy of their captors, who would not hesitate to kill them if they could no longer fetch a good price on the market. Even though they knew about the possibility of being ransomed at the end of their ordeal, it must have seemed a very distant hope.
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here is little evidence to help reconstruct the journey from Ukraine to T the Black Sea. However, the first step seems to have been to be made part of a column of captives.30 After a b attle some prisoners stayed with their captors, while o thers w ere shared out among officers and men as booty. In addition, Cossacks who had taken prisoners tried to sell them to a willing Tatar. Some Tatars themselves might have preferred a quick and easy profit by selling their captives to one of their comrades. That moment, between capture and being made part of a column, was particularly risky for the captives. If their captor felt he could not get any value out of them, he might simply kill them on the spot. It was only by being put in a group destined for Crimea that a prisoner could avoid that danger. In the conditions of 1648, however, even this does not seem to have been an easy proposition. The problem was that the startling victories by the rebel forces and their Tatar allies meant that huge numbers of prisoners had been taken, many more than could reasonably be sent to Crimea. This led to a glut on the market, and the value of captives fell dramatically. Still, even at rock-bottom prices, the Tatar slavers, who already had very large numbers of prisoners, seem to have been unwilling to buy more— particularly b ecause bringing too many to the slave markets would drive down prices t here, too. In a conversation with the Ottoman traveler and memoirist Evliya Çelebi, the khan himself claimed that he had captured no less than 200,000 Jews between 1648 and 1654 but had been forced to sell them each for just the price of a pipe of tobacco.31 The low prices (and the danger they represented) made a strong impression on Jewish society. In addition to Gavri’el Shussberg’s chronicle quoted earlier, the Yiddish popular song “Kine al gezeires hakehiles dekak Ukraineh” (“An Elegy for the Attacks on the Communities of Ukraine”), published in 1648, described the problem too: “Better I had not been born than to see my people so shamefully torn. The world said nothing when we were offered for a farthing32—and there was no buyer.”33 It was not only Jews that w ere affected. The Lithuanian nobleman Albrycht Radziwiłł wrote in his memoirs: “it came to the point that the Tatars would give just a single horse for a nobleman—or a number of peasants.”34 By June 1649, prices had fallen still further. The Orthodox chronicler Joachim Jerlicz noted that at that time the cost of a Christian captive was that of a whip or even just a pinch of tobacco.35 In Tatar captivity, human life was very cheap. The journey from Ukraine to Crimea seems to have taken about three weeks.36 The conditions of the march w ere so brutal that Evliya Çelebi, who wrote about this slave trade in his memoir, expressed surprise that
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any of the captives made it to Crimea at all.37 On arrival in the khan’s capital of Bahçesaray the prisoners were divided up one last time: the khan himself took a tenth, and his officers and men took the rest.38 The captives were now ready to be sent to the slave market. This was a critical moment, for it was during the sale that local Jews might ransom them and thus ensure their freedom. And, if that failed to happen, it was then that they would come into the possession of a new owner. What kind of a person that was and how s/he treated their slaves would determine the fate of the Jewish captives. A sympathetic master (or mistress) might offer a measure of independence and even the possibility of working to earn enough money for a ransom. A cruel master would mean a miserable life lived in harsh—sometimes unbearable—conditions.
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From Crimea to Istanbul
The Experience of Captivity in Crimea One of the most interesting narratives of Tatar captivity in this period comes from an unexpected source. The American adventurer Captain John Smith, later famous for his encounters with the Powhatan “princess” Pocahontas in V irginia, was himself captured by Tatars and sold into slavery in Crimea at the beginning of the seventeenth c entury while fighting as a mercenary in the region. In his memoirs, which included a very dramatic—not to say fanciful—account of his eventual escape from captivity, he told how, as a newly acquired slave, he was first stripped and shaved, then shackled with an iron collar and dressed in a rough goat hair coat, before being put to work as an agricultural laborer. He described the conditions in which he found himself as “so bad, a dog could hardly have lived to endure [them].”1 Smith was just one of tens of thousands of such captives sold into slavery by Tatars during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and this aspect of his story does not seem to have been much out of the ordinary.2 Unfortunately his description is brief, but, as Mikhail Kizilov has shown, there are a number of other contemporary sources that help shed more light on the captives’ experience.3 One of the most important is the memoir of Evliya Çelebi, who visited Crimea in the 1660s. Among other t hings, he describes the arrival of a group of Christian captives at the Tatar headquarters, as well as the response of the local Christian community: When the Christians saw the dejected and lamentable state of their people who had been captured by the Tatars and brought there, they began to weep and wail at the top of their voices. That night, some of those who been kept in the c astle, helpless and hungry, emerged and, [ 107 ]
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since they had been marked for slavery, w ere brought before the Holy Leader.4 One of them was shown mercy, the others were [forcibly] converted to Islam, and then taken away.5
The Polish ambassador to Crimea in the late sixteenth century, Martin Broniovius (in Polish, Marcin Broniowski),6 provides more detail: The condition of captives is very miserable among the Tatars, for they are grievously oppressed by them with hunger and nakedness, and the husbandsmen with stripes, so that they rather desire to die than to live. Many of them [i.e., the captives] moved with the present calamity and folly, tell the Tatars that they are gentlemen and have wealthy and rich parents and friends. They promise of their own accord a great and almost inestimable ransom, which the barbarous, impious, covetous, hungry and cruel nation seeks almost daily to increase with all kinds of subtleties and examinations, [and so] ties them in fetters and uses them therefore more hardly.7
Though all these descriptions deal with Christians captured by Tatars, the situation the Jewish captives faced following 1648 cannot have been significantly different. No firsthand accounts of their experience have survived, but the kind of difficult conditions they had to endure do seem to have been described in a religious poem (piyyut) written by the Karaite pilgrim Yosef ben Yehoshuʾa a few years later. He was traveling to Jerusalem from his home in the Polish town of Derażno, when he was captured and taken to Crimea in 1666. In his poem, Joseph tells of his terrible imprisonment inside the khan’s palace at Bahçesaray. There he was shackled with a chain around his neck, u ntil he managed to raise enough to money to ransom himself. Left destitute by that effort, he had to abandon his pilgrimage and so stayed in Crimea to study with local scholars.8 Yosef ’s experiences also serve to remind us that there w ere two separate Jewish groups in Crimea. One was the Talmudic, so-called Rabbanite, Jews; the other was the Karaites. These last were a Jewish sect, initially from Babylonia, which had split off from the majority of the Jewish world at the turn of the ninth century. Led by Anan ben David, they opposed the acceptance of the Talmud, then sweeping the Jewish world as the authoritative legal text. The Ananites, l ater renamed Karaites, rejected the interpretative thrust of rabbinic Judaism, preferring to lead their lives according to the plain text of the laws found in the Torah. Never a dominant
From Cr ime a to Ista nbul [ 109 ]
force in the Jewish world, Karaism enjoyed a number of periods of growth and development, first in Babylonia and then, about a c entury later, in Jerusalem. From about the eleventh c entury, Karaite communities began to flourish in the Byzantine empire, and it did not take long before they spread to the Crimean peninsula, particularly in the wake of the great Mongol invasion of the thirteenth c entury. There they became a significant group, whose influence lasted from the fourteenth until the early nineteenth century. The Karaite penetration of eastern Europe continued at the end of the f ourteenth c entury, when major communities developed in Troki, Łuck, and Halicz. Though never very large in demographic terms, Karaite society in the region continued to grow and develop throughout the early modern period. Despite the theological tension between them, rabbinic and Karaite Jews recognized their shared heritage and were treated by non-Jewish society as two parts of a single group.9 Certainly the hostile forces during the Khmelnytsky uprising and subsequent wars made no distinction between them.10 Thus it was that both Rabbanite and Karaite Jews found themselves among the captives imprisoned in Crimea, awaiting sale or ransom. Since, according to one contemporary account, t here may have been as many as 30,000 captives, Christians and Jews, in Crimea in 1648, the vast majority would have been sold.11 Some would have been bought by locals, others by professional merchants for resale elsewhere—most commonly Istanbul or Iran. Of t hose purchased by Crimean masters, most of the w omen were given h ousehold work, which could include the provision of sexual services to their masters, while the less fortunate men (like John Smith) were made to work as agricultural laborers or, even worse, condemned to the life of a galley slave, chained to the oars. T here is no way of telling how many of the captives, Jewish or non-Jewish, were sold in this way: a letter read into evidence at the rabbinic court of Istanbul sometime a fter 1648 attests to the fact that at least a few Ukrainian Jewish captives remained in Crimea.12
In the Hands of the Slave Merchants Professional merchants would most often buy their slaves at the official slave markets, the most important of which was in Feodosia (Caffa), and then ship them out to Istanbul for resale. The volume of slaves passing through the peninsula on an annual basis must have run into the many
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thousands, and conditions in the markets w ere horrific. Evliya Çelebi explained: The great slave bazaar is [held] in a large courtyard . . . and is a strange and horrible [sight]. It is referred to in the saying, “he who sells a man, cuts down a tree, or bursts a dam is cursed by God in this world and the next. . . .” This is about the slave dealers, who are as merciless as they come. If you have not seen the market, you have not seen anything. They drag mothers from their sons and daughters, sons from their fathers and brothers—and sell them with much wailing, screams for help, moaning, and crying.13
Clearly, being ransomed was a much better option. However, this was not always easy b ecause it involved a deal being brokered, and in most cases, the captives themselves were not in a position to do that. They needed an agent to negotiate on their behalf. As a result, most ethnic or religious groups, including the Jews, had their own agents to work out the price for freeing their own captives. In fact, Jews were prominent in these ransoming deals, presumably because they w ere active among the slave traders. Slaving was a Jewish business with deep roots in the region. Jews are known to have lived in Crimea since the first c entury of the Common Era, and from the seventh century on they formed part of the Khazar kingdom. The first mention of Jewish slave traders comes from the end of the eleventh c entury—a period when Jews across east-central Europe were engaged in the business.14 Jewish life continued to flourish in Crimea in the wake of the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth c entury, particularly in the regions u nder Genoese rule.15 Since the slave trade was very active during this period, there is no reason to assume that the Jews were not involved. If so, they were by no means the only ones. Armenians, and of course Tatars, were prominent slave merchants too. Their role in the ransoming system is described, in somewhat jaundiced tones, by Martin Broniovius: The agent who well knows the craft and deceitfulness of the Tatars . . . tells the Tatars that they [i.e., the captives] are neither noble nor rich . . . nor will ever be able to pay the price [demanded]. . . . Yet the agent is diligent that they be inscribed in the catalogue, and if they [i.e., the agents] have a purpose to ransom any with their own money, they hold it expedient to suborn Jews or Tatars and other merchants being corrupted with money, by whom, [the captives] being as it w ere neglected and rejected by the agent, they are released at a far easier rate.16
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Presumably the merchants who acted as a front for the ransoming agents did not do so out of the goodness of their hearts but for a fee. With Jews so deeply engaged in the slave trade, it is surprising that so few of the Jewish captives from Ukraine following 1648 were actually ransomed in Crimea. Not only are t here no sources dealing with the ransoming of Jewish captives there, the extensive list of places mentioned in the Hebrew chronicles as having helped with ransoming effort makes no mention of Crimea or its Jewish settlements.17 In addition, the chronicle “Sefer devar sefatayim” written by the Crimean Rabbanite scholar David ben Eliʾezer Lekhno at the turn of the eighteenth c entury mentions the large number of slaves captured by the khan’s forces in 1648 but says nothing of their ransoming in Crimea.18 It is impossible to determine why the local Jews and Karaites did not do more to help, but perhaps the huge number of captives overwhelmed them. They may have thought it better for the Jewish slaves to be shipped to Istanbul where t here was a very large and wealthy community that could afford to ransom them.
Refuge in Moldavia and Wallachia In addition to those taken to Istanbul via Crimea, there w ere other Ukrainian Jews captured by Tatars whose experiences were different. Quite a number ended up in the provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia (present- day Romania). Some seem to have fled t here, while o thers were brought there as captives. Since this region was a semiautonomous subject of the Ottoman Empire, its sympathies, initially at least, seem to have been with Khmelnytsky. As a result, its first decision, made in early October 1648, was to order that Jewish (and Polish) refugees would not be admitted.19 However, this does not seem to have been a viable policy, not least because Tatar and Ottoman forces interested in attacking more westerly regions of the Commonwealth regularly crossed the provinces. On their way back from campaigning, they came with captives, some of whom would have been sold to locals while others escaped. There was simply no way of keeping Poles and Jews out. There w ere also financial incentives for accepting them. In November 1648, a group of captives, Polish and Jewish, numbering some 7,000 seems to have been hijacked from its Tatar captors on the Wallachian border. The Wallachian ruler took charge of the prisoners and, according to a contemporary source, gave them to local monasteries and even to some merchants—presumably for them to make a profit from the ransom.20 The
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possibility of being rescued from the Tatars before reaching Istanbul and so being ransomed much closer to home was, not surprisingly, viewed by Jews very positively. Hanover’s version of the story reflects this: “At that time, Khmelnytsky the Oppressor took all his forces and attacked Wallachia, devastating the whole country. This was because they had given sanctuary to a number of nobles and Jews, and b ecause the Wallachians had taken a few hundred Jews from the Tatars by force, and then released them [my emphasis].”21 Another group of Jews to find themselves in Moldavia and Wallachia were those who had been sent to the slave markets of Istanbul and been ransomed. If, after that, they could put together enough resources, they made the journey back home. The route back to Crimea and across the dangerous lower Dniepr region of Zaporizhia was clearly too hazardous. A better bet for those returning to the Commonwealth was to reach the western littoral of the Black Sea and then travel north through Wallachia. As early as the beginning of the 1650s, groups of captives returning this way could be found in the Wallachian capital, Iaşi.22 By the end of the decade, the Jewish population in the provinces seems to have grown to sizable proportions. That, at least, was the impression of Conrad Jacob Hiltebrandt, a German pastor from Stettin on the Baltic coast, who accompanied a Swedish diplomatic mission to Ukraine, Hungary, and Istanbul in 1656–57.23 He left a memoir of his travels and, when describing his visit to Wallachia in late 1656, had this to say about his encounters with Jews there: This place is packed with Jews, some of whom have fled h ere from Poland, o thers from Ukraine, a fter the Cossacks had driven them off their land. We could buy mead, vodka, and other goods from them. . . . A certain Jew called Abraham got close to us. He asked the [Swedish?] envoy to take him with him to Ukraine b ecause he had something to deal with there. The envoy agreed because the Jew spoke German and Russian and could be helpful during the journey as a translator. The whole time we were talking, he [i.e., Abraham] stood beside the envoy’s sled and with much emphasis and in great sorrow told him about the terrible massacre of his p eople, the Jews in Ukraine, perpetrated by the Cossacks. And as we went, he showed us the route taken by the Tatars when they invaded Poland.24
Hiltebrandt was not the only traveler in the region to come across Jewish refugees in the 1650s. The Archdeacon of Aleppo, Paul Zaim, who
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traveled with his father, the Patriarch of Antioch, on his mission to Moscow in 1655–59, also wrote an account of his travels in the region. At one point he noted: “When in Moldavia, we asked Janaki [i.e., Jonah] the Jew, who had taken refuge there, what the Hetman Akhmil [i.e., Khmelnytsky] had done to the Jews in Poland. He answered, ‘He has done them more injury and made greater slaughter of them than ever Vespasian did of old.’ ”25 So while reaching Wallachia and Moldavia might have allowed many to avoid the terrible journey to Istanbul, it clearly did little to help them get over the awful traumas of the uprising. T hese remained deeply etched into their consciousness and were retold to anyone willing to listen.
The Road to Istanbul We have no firsthand accounts written by Jews of the experience of being taken as captives to Crimea and then to Istanbul. It is not clear why this is the case, especially bearing in mind that many of those who became refugees in eastern or central Europe did write about their experiences. Perhaps the crushing financial burden of finding first a ransom in Istanbul and then the money to return home to Poland-Lithuania was such that survivors simply did not have the time or the resources to devote themselves to writing. The best contemporary description we have is that written by Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, rabbi of Kraków, in his elegy for the dead of the uprising, Eleh ezkerah:26 In misery they walked to Kedar’s home,27 captives28 to the men of Kedar, In galleys, boats, and ships, they sailed the sea to another land.29 The sons of Keturah, the Egyptian slave woman, punished the sons of Sarah, the Hebrew mistress. Angrily they took their sticks to them—leaving bruises, injuries, and open wounds.30
Since the name Kedar was the biblical term used in Jewish culture to refer to the Tatars and Keturah was another name for Abraham’s maidservant, Hagar, mother of Ishmael, this verse clearly talks about the capture of the Jews by the Tatars and their transfer by sea to Istanbul. L ittle else is mentioned, except the cruel treatment the Jews could expect to receive from their captors. Much more detail can be found in Jewish popular culture than in religious texts. Polish Jewish society did have knowledge of the captive experience and even wrote about it. This can be seen in a short Yiddish
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tale, published as a chapbook (a cheaply published pamphlet containing a short text aimed at the popular market) at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It tells the story of a young Jewish girl who fled the Cossack invasion of the town of Nemyriv in Ukraine before being captured by a Tatar, sent to Istanbul, sold into slavery, and finally ransomed by the local Jewish community. Called Mayseh ha-godl (The Great Story), it refers not to the invasion of 1648 but to that of 1706, during the Great Northern War— though it does look back to the ransoming efforts of the earlier period.31 The text is replete with stories about the experience of flight and conditions on the Istanbul slave market. Though a work of literature, it contains enough verifiable detail to suggest that the author had at least some knowledge about the captive experience.32 Clearly it cannot be taken as a fully accurate description, but it certainly sheds a g reat deal of light on the refugees’ sufferings as well as giving us a picture of how contemporary Jewish society understood them. This story itself is divided into four sections: an introduction to set the scene and describe the massacre in Nemyriv; a section describing the girl’s flight across Ukraine and eventual capture; the story of the complex negotiations in Istanbul around her ransoming; and, finally, a brief description of the process of ransoming in the period immediately after 1648. Here we will look at the second of these—the story of the girl’s flight and capture. As far as anyone heard, only two w omen escaped the town [i.e., Nemyriv], one had three children, the other two, and there was an orphan girl about fifteen years old called Rachel. She was very beautiful and pious—as we will see later in the story. [They] fled in distress and in terror, reaching a forest where they walked two miles. When even a single tree bent in the wind, they fell into a panic believing that they were being pursued. In the end, the c hildren, who could not walk anymore, sat down on the ground and started to cry. The mothers wanted to go on on their own and leave their c hildren sitting t here. [But] Rachel, the young girl, said, “Perhaps we will survive on account of the little children.” She picked up one of the children and carried it with her. Then the two women turned back and each took one child on her back and dragged the other a further half a mile. [They went on] u ntil they reached a g reat river called the Dniepr. This is the river that divides the countries one from another. On one side of the river is Poland and on the other Turkey and Tatary. When the eight souls reached the river, they fell to the ground exhausted and
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remained lying t here all night without eating or drinking anything until the next day. They found a little boat t here that was empty and got into it. The wind carried it along and they reached the other side, Turkey. They got out of the boat and walked some more [until they] came to another forest where they found wild apples to satisfy their hunger. A little later, a Tatar peasant came to the forest to cut wood and found the eight. It is the custom in Turkey that if a Turk or a Tatar finds a foreign Jew or a non-Jew without a residence permit, he may take him captive, tie him up, and then e ither keep him as a slave, or sell him, or simply just kill him. . . . The Tatar captured the eight, tied them up, put them on his peasant’s cart and took them home. The next day he took them on a journey of ten days to sell them in Constantinople.33
Though this is clearly a literary text, much of what it says strikes a true note, particularly with regard to refugee experience: fear, exhaustion, hunger, and even hopelessness dominate the narrative. The breakdown of family ties when p eople are desperate to save themselves also rings true, as does their exposure to danger. This last was, as much as anything, a result of their legal status, which is accurately described in the text. The Jews’ right to remain unhindered in the Ottoman Empire was based on their protected status as dhimmi, to receive which they had to pay a special poll tax. If it was not paid, as in the case with refugees, they remained without protection and could, as the text correctly says, be captured, sold, or even killed with impunity.34 On a more concrete level, the text seems accurate too. The Dniepr river did serve as a border between the Commonwealth and the Crimean Khanate (which was a semi-vassal state of the Ottoman Empire) in its lowest reaches, in the present-day Kherson region. Having said that, the sense of distance in the story seems distorted. The text talks of walking two and a half miles, while the distance from Nemyriv to the Kherson region is actually about 250 miles. Another detail that seems accurate is the amount of time it took to be transported from Crimea to Istanbul. The majority of slaves were shipped out of Feodosia, making the shortest possible crossing of the Black Sea to the port of Sinop on its southern shore, and from there to Istanbul. The journey seems to have taken in total about ten days, precisely the period given in the Yiddish text.35
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Ransoming Captives t he r el igious, cu lt u r a l , a n d socioeconomic b ackgrou n d
once the jewish captives were put up for sale in the slave market of Istanbul, their fate was determined by the ability of the Jewish community to raise the money necessary to ransom them. This was not just a local endeavor but formed part of a much broader economic system, encompassing Jews and non-Jews, which covered most of the Mediterranean basin: the ransoming of people captured by pirates. Piracy itself was also economic in nature. Although extremely widespread in the early modern Mediterranean, stretching from the Barbary corsairs in the west to the Christian and Muslim pirates in the east, and often seen as an extension of the geopolitical and religious tensions that plagued Mediterranean life in this period, the connection between the pirates and the great powers (Spain, Venice, and the Ottoman Empire) was often tenuous. The lust for profit was a stronger motivator and piracy was fairly atomized, mostly a matter of each man for himself. Ransoming Christians captured in the pirate attacks could be quite organized: t here w ere Christian groups across Europe, such as the Trinitarian and Mercedarian orders, who made it their specialty.1 And in the early modern period, the Christian states themselves began to take a more institutionalized interest.2 The Muslim states had no such systems in place but did their best to use captive exchange agreements as a means of freeing their slaves.3 Jews, of course, could not benefit from t hose strategies. Neither the states nor the religious o rders in the Christian world w ere interested in helping them, and their l egal and political status in the Muslim world meant that they w ere unable to achieve the kind of reciprocity [ 116 ]
R a nsoming Ca pti v es [ 117 ]
needed for captive exchange. Jewish captives had to be ransomed with money raised by the Jewish communities themselves and paid by them to the captors. Despite the difficulties involved, this was a challenge Jewish society proved able to meet. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it succeeded in creating a broad transregional economic network whose goal was to ransom its members being held captive to be sold as slaves. By the eighteenth century, these fundraising efforts extended from London to Vilnius, from Fez to Istanbul, and from Hamburg to Alexandria.4 Largely centered in Venice, from where much of the fundraising was organized, the Jewish ransoming network had other important hubs, particularly in Istanbul and Livorno. This network had grown and developed in the decades before 1648, but it was the flood of eastern European Jewish captives that r eally put it to the test and tightened the connections between its various components. The ransoming crisis also led to tensions with a second Jewish transregional economic network that was active in the Mediterranean: one tasked with raising funds to support Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.5 This philanthropic network existed alongside (or to be more accurate, overlapped) the one whose goal was ransoming captives, and during the g reat fundraising effort following 1648, the two found themselves in competition. Without ransom funds, Jewish captives would have been sold into slavery and vanished from the pages of history. Instead, many managed to regain their freedom and reconstruct their lives. So, in order fully to understand the fate of the eastern European captives brought to Istanbul, we must consider not only their experiences but also the p eople who worked to free them. We will thus be able to trace the development and activity of the ransoming network, look at the individuals and groups who made it work, and assess its successes and failures. First, though, t here is an underlying question to be answered. Why was ransoming captives so important for the Jews of the early modern world?
Pidyon Shevuyim: The Ransom of Captives in Jewish Law and Jewish Culture On the most fundamental level, the ransoming of captives (in Hebrew, pidyon shevuyim) was a religious imperative laid down in Jewish law. Its roots go back at least to the first centuries of the Common Era. The Mishnah contains a discussion of how to react to captive situations:
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prisoners should not be encouraged to escape since this might bring reprisals, and ransoms should be capped to prevent spiraling prices.6 In the Babylonian Talmud, ransoming captives is defined as one of the most important commandments (mitzvah rabbah) and forms part of a section dealing with charitable giving in general, both inside the community and more widely.7 It is not treated just in abstract terms. The Talmudic text devotes space to the question of the resources needed to ransom captives and their relative importance vis-à-vis other communal needs. That ruling can be found in a consideration of the need to ensure that a new synagogue is built before an old one is demolished so that regular prayers are not interrupted and that no community remains without a synagogue: Ravina8 asked R. Ashi:9 “Suppose money for a synagogue has been collected and is ready for use, is t here still a risk [that the new synagogue will not be built and so the community will remain without a synagogue]?” He replied: “They may be called upon to redeem captives and use the money for that purpose.” [Ravina asked further]: “Suppose the bricks are already piled up, the lathes [for the roof] trimmed, and the beams ready, what are we to say [then]?”—He [R. Ashi] replied: “It can happen that money is suddenly required for the redemption of captives, and they may sell the material for that purpose.”10
Clearly, then, according to Rav Ashi at least, the need to ransom captives trumped even some of the most important communal needs such as building a new h ouse of prayer. This line was followed by Maimonides (1138–1204), who had been heavily involved in organizing captive ransom as a young man.11 In his Mishneh Torah, he held that ransoming captives was even more impor tant than giving charity to the communal needy and that those who failed to do so were breaking no less than seven commandments.12 In practice, this set up an economic tension in Jewish life b ecause there was another basic halakhic determination in prioritizing philanthropic resources: the local needy should be helped before t hose elsewhere (the Hebrew maxim is: “ʾaniyei ʾirkha kodmim”).13 Though Maimonides and the authorities who followed him were quite clear that ransoming was more important, the practicalities of life were such that local problems w ere usually much more pressing and often pushed ransoming to one side. Yosef Karo (1488–1575), the g reat early modern codifier of Jewish law, further complicated the issue in his authoritative codex, Shulḥan ʾarukh. Though he followed Maimonides as far as the importance of
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pidyon shevuyim was concerned, he gave another philanthropic need great prominence by ruling that support for the Jews in the Land of Israel was second in importance only to giving charity locally.14 In strictly l egal terms, this meant that the philanthropic hierarchy was: first ransoming captives, then giving local charity, and then supporting Jewish settlement (often characterized inaccurately as supporting “poor Jews”) in the Land of Israel. However, since practically speaking supporting the local poor was always a more pressing need, ransoming captives was often displaced from its primary role and found itself in competition for the second spot with supporting the Land of Israel. This tension had significant consequences on the ground in the struggle for philanthropic resources following 1648. Outside the realm of halakhah, Jewish culture imparted great significance to issues of ransoming. In his chronicle Sefer ha-kabbalah, Avraham ibn Daud (1110–1180) from Cordoba included what seems to have been a founding myth of Spain and the Maghreb as independent centers of Torah study.15 Known as the Story of the Four Captives, this legend tells how four rabbis from the then dominant Babylonian yeshivot w ere captured by pirates during a fundraising mission. Eventually, the first, Rabbi Shemariah, was brought to Alexandria in Egypt where he was ransomed. He became head of the yeshiva in Fustat, Cairo. The second, Rabbi Ḥushi’el, was brought to Kairawan in Tunisia, where he was ransomed and became head of the local yeshiva, one of the most important in North Africa. The third, Rabbi Moshe, was taken to Cordoba where he was ransomed and was soon invited to run the yeshiva t here.16 The story continues: The community then assigned him [i.e., Rabbi Moshe] a large stipend and honored him with costly garments and a carriage. The [pirate] commander wanted to retract his sale [and demand a greater ransom]. However, the king would not permit him to do so, for he was delighted by fact that the Jews of his domain no longer had need of people of Babylonia.17
It is significant that this “coming-of-age” story of the major Jewish communities of the Mediterranean world used the imagery of captivity and ransom.18 It seemed to show that the rise to prominence of these communities was actually attributable to their ransoming of captives held by pirates. The legend and the message it contained continued to circulate in the Sephardi world into the early modern period and was included by David Conforte from Salonica and Cairo (c. 1618–c. 1685) in his chronicle Kore’ ha-dorot.19
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Pidyon Shevuyim in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Socioeconomic Factors For the social organization of philanthropy, the Talmud mandated two communal institutions to support the local needy—the tamḥui or soup kitchen and the kupah or charity box—but none for pidyon shevuyim.20 In a c ouple of places in the Talmudic text, ransom money is described as being kept in an arnka or purse, but this form of organization was never institutionalized. In late antiquity, ransom money was generally given by wealthy individuals on an ad hoc basis.21 This organizational gap continued into the Middle Ages. By that time, support for pidyon shevuyim had been recognized as a communal rather than an individual duty. However, while most communities seemed to have their own kupah, they still collected ransom funds from their economic elite only when necessary.22 This was true even in medieval Cairo, which, as the Genizah documents show, was deeply involved in ransoming Jews captured by pirates.23 It was the early modern period that saw the creation of permanent and stable mechanisms to collect money for pidyon shevuyim. There were a number of reasons for this. Primary among them was the increasing organizational sophistication of the Jewish community. Much of the work previously done by individuals was now devolved onto organized bodies, permanently established under the aegis of the community and run by annually elected officials. This was a significant development for pidyon shevuyim. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Jewish communities, particularly t hose in the pirate-ridden Mediterranean world, began to establish their own ransoming funds, whose resources were collected and allocated by special officers.24 A second factor that encouraged the growing institutionalization of pidyon shevuyim can be found in the changing patterns of trade in early modern Europe and the new roles Jews played in them. The period was marked by increasing mobility—due in no small measure to developments in means of transport, particularly in the realm of maritime technology.25 Of course, the growing ease of travel meant that regional and transregional trade burgeoned too. This opened up new opportunities for Jewish businessmen. Following the exodus of Jews from Spain and Portugal, and the continuing migration of New Christians from the Iberian Peninsula over the sixteenth c entury, an extensive ethnoreligious network of these former Iberian subjects
R a nsoming Ca pti v es [ 121 ]
developed, stretching from Goa in the east to Recife and the interior of the New World in the west. In the age of mercantilism, this “Sephardi” network was able to carve a niche for itself in the realm of long-range trade, providing an economic service that the mercantilist states of Europe prized highly. Jonathan Israel has called that network a “diaspora within a diaspora” and its heart was the Mediterranean basin.26 Trade in the Mediterranean during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was more than just business; it was also an extension of the rampant hostility between the regional powers: Spain, Venice, and the Ottoman Empire. Jews, who had been expelled from Spain and welcomed into the Ottoman Empire, were soon very active among the ranks of its merchants, particularly in maritime trade. As a result, they were eventually allowed to settle and trade in Venice too, b ecause the Serene Republic needed them to help regulate its mercantile relations with the Ottoman Empire. Jews were therefore heavily engaged in the Mediterranean trade as investors, merchants, and even shipowners and thus were highly exposed to the dangers that lurked on the sea routes.27 Piracy had been an integral part of Mediterranean life stretching back to antiquity, but the mercantile explosion of the sixteenth century gave it a significant boost as the possibilities for profit grew exponentially. Moreover, the great powers encouraged piracy against their enemies as a means of weakening them. The first major group to develop in the early decades of the sixteenth c entury were the so-called Barbary corsairs, who used their bases in the Maghreb to attack Spanish shipping in the western Mediterranean.28 In addition, there were two Christian orders that engaged in piracy: the Knights of St. John based in Malta and the Order of St. Stephen based in Livorno. The first targeted Ottoman shipping—though due to the multiethnic and multifaith nature of the Ottoman Empire the victims of the latter attacks w ere by no means entirely Muslim. The Order of St. Stephen was a new order, established in Livorno in 1561, as part of the Medici anti-Ottoman policy.29 As a result, though personal gain was always the pirates’ major motivation, disrupting enemy trade effectively turned them from outlaws into unofficial privateers.30 With all these forces—as well as others of somewhat less significance—at work in the Mediterranean, the danger of merchants being captured was always a serious one. Jews suffered at the hands of all the pirates, though their importance in the trade between the Ottoman Empire and Venice left them particularly open to attacks from the Knights of St. John. Malta
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thus became a major site of ransoming for Mediterranean Jewry. The contemporary Hebrew chronicle ʾEmek ha-bakha’ had this to say: The priests from Malta treated the Jews terribly and the Turks no better. They would sail the Italian sea pillaging and plundering, and as they went, they would capture all t hose traveling by ship and sell them as slaves and maidservants if they could not pay the ransom. They would even pillage the lands of the east [i.e., the Ottoman Empire] reaching the small [coastal] towns and destroying all they found.31
There was a third f actor that increased the Jews’ exposure to the danger of capture. That was the rapid growth in the Jewish population of the Land of Israel following the Ottoman conquest in 1517. Within a short time, communities such as t hose in Jerusalem and Tzfat grew rapidly, and o thers developed. The wave of immigration meant more travelers crossing the Mediterranean in the direction of the Holy Land—and others g oing the other way because the immigrants retained their connections with their original homes. Since many of the migrants were poor, they were dependent for their survival on money sent by relatives as well as charitable donations, which not only meant that there were more travelers to the Land of Israel but made the potential profits from attacking them all the greater.32 With this huge increase of Jewish maritime activity on the Mediterranean, issues of pidyon shevuyim become very significant. The highly interconnected nature of the Sephardi diaspora meant that few families remained untouched in one way or another by the problems of piracy. Even if the captured Jews survived and w ere ransomed, their material losses to the pirates w ere huge: first, their goods, possessions, and money were taken from them, and then financing their ransom and return home could take another large sum of money. It was enough to deter anyone from venturing into maritime business. However, since that was a mainstay of the Jewish economy, something had to be done. As Eliʾezer Bashan has shown in his extensive study of Jewish ransoming in the early modern Mediterranean, pidyon shevuyim funds were set up in many Sephardi centers and money was collected on a regular basis. The Italian communities and particularly Venice, which was the major point of connection between the European and the Ottoman trading worlds, soon became the hub of the Jewish ransoming efforts, and funds for that purpose were sent there from across the Jewish world.33 There were then good religious and socioeconomic reasons for the Jews of Europe, Africa, and Asia, particularly around the Mediterranean
R a nsoming Ca pti v es [ 123 ]
basin, to devote much time, effort, and money to ransoming captives. The institutions they had created and the organizational arrangements they had developed were already in place before the waves of destitute captives from Ukraine and Poland flooded the slave markets of Istanbul. This was clearly to the benefit of those captives as it significantly improved their chances of being ransomed. As far as the pidyon shevuyim network itself was concerned, coming to grips with such huge numbers in such a short time would test it as never before.
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On the Istanbul Slave Market
Conditions of Sale Being sold as a slave in Istanbul (and, of course, not only there) was incredibly humiliating. This is how the Yiddish Mayseh ha-godl described it: “Slaves in Turkey are brought to the market to be sold like animals. Anyone who wants to buy them can take them completely naked to look them over and check that they are beautiful, healthy, and have no bodily defects.”1 This description, written by a Jewish author in the early eigh teenth century, tallies closely with one written nearly two centuries earlier by the French geographer Nicolas de Nicolay: “There they sell an infinite number of poor Christian slaves of all ages and of both sexes, in the same manner in which they sell h orses. For all t hose who wish to purchase a slave examine their eyes, their teeth, and all parts of their bodies. The slaves are displayed completely naked so that the purchaser may more easily determine their faults and imperfections. It is a pitiable and lamentable thing to observe.”2 The market where the most of the sales took place was called Esir Pazari and was situated near the large bedestan or covered market, the heart of the modern-day G rand Bazaar. A nineteenth-century visitor described it: It is entered by a large wooden gate . . . guarded by a Capiji . . . whose duty it is to give alarm should slaves attempt to escape. This is nearly impossible as the chambers or cells are locked up soon a fter [the end of business at] mid-day. . . . Its interior is an irregular quadrangle; its southern extremity is in ruins and serves as a receptacle for filth and rubbish. In the center is a detached building. Its upper portion contains lodgings for the slave dealers and underneath are cells for the [ 124 ]
On the Ista nbul Sl av e M a r k et [ 125 ]
apprentice slave dealers. Attached to it is a coffeehouse and near it is a half-ruined mosque. Around the three habitable sides of the court runs an open colonnade . . . under [which] are platforms . . . on [which] dealers and customers may be seen during business hours smoking and discussing prices. Behind these platforms are ranges of small chambers, divided into two compartments. . . . The rest serves as a passage and cooking space. The front portion is generally tenanted by black, and the back by white slaves. In the chambers are found only females.3
The text goes on at length, describing the desperate living conditions in which each group of captives, soon to be slaves, found itself. It was not only the accommodation that was divided along racial lines; the sales themselves w ere determined by the racial background of the captives. A number of sixteenth-century handbooks for those purchasing slaves in the Ottoman Empire have survived that distinguish between the different groups on the basis of their racial or ethnic background, though unfortunately there are none from the mid-seventeenth c entury so we do not know how the Jewish captives from eastern Europe w ere rated by prospective buyers.4 The slave sales in the market itself were controlled by a merchants’ guild. In his memoirs, Evliya Çelebi claimed that all the guild’s members were Jewish, but Alan Fisher has checked the list of names of the official merchants in the mid-seventeenth century and found that, in fact, none of them w ere Jews. They w ere Muslims.5 This situation seems to have developed at the turn of the seventeenth c entury. T here are signs that previously Jews had in fact been official slave traders but that as time went on they were driven out of the guild, which meant that they could not do business in the bedestan. The competition in slave trading seems to have been quite fierce. The Muslim merchants wanted a monopoly not only on sales but on purchases too, trying to enforce the rule that no non-Muslim could own slaves. This proved impossible, perhaps b ecause both Jews and Christians were willing to pay a special tax for permission to own slaves, so despite the merchants’ demands, the two groups remained slaveholders (and thus slave purchasers) throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.6 The guild merchants w ere equally unsuccessful in excluding Jews from the slave trade itself. Despite their best efforts, there were always plenty of opportunities for non-guild merchants, prominent among them Jews, to act as unofficial traders or to broker various deals. Jews thus remained prominent figures in the business.7
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Organizing Ransom All this meant that when it came to ransoming the captives, t here w ere people in the Istanbul Jewish community with a g reat deal of experience in buying and selling slaves. Nonetheless, it was not they who led the campaign. That role seems to have fallen to the rabbinic leadership, who took their responsibilities in the field of pidyon shevuyim very seriously. Once again, the Mayseh ha-godl gave the best description of this when it recounted the sale of Rachel and her companions in early eighteenth- century Istanbul: There were two community rabbis who went to the market every day to check whether there were Jewish captives who needed to be bought [i.e., ransomed] and they found the eight Jews [Rachel and her companions] among the non-Jewish captives. The news reached the [Istanbul] community that eight Jewish captives had arrived, so they sent the gabbais to where the Jews w ere being held, and they told them that they were from Poland.8
The gabbais were the treasurers of the charity funds, so the picture given here is of the local rabbis spearheading a communal effort to ransom Jewish captives from Poland. Other sources confirm that this was the case in 1648, too. Writing in the second half of the seventeenth century, Eliyahu ben Avraham ha-Kohen of Izmir described how his father, a communal rabbi, would take direct responsibility for ransoming captives, even at great personal cost.9 And Yaʾakov Koppel Margolis, whose autobiographical vignette opened part 2, gave particular credit for his ransom in Istanbul to “those [local] scholars who study Torah day and night and take care of the Jews held by cruel masters.” The Yiddish text also raised another issue important for the ransomers, that of identification. This would become a serious issue in every place where the Polish Jewish refugees found themselves as they struggled for acceptance and help from local communities.10 In the story of Rachel, it was important that she be identified not just as a Jew but as a Polish Jew. That was b ecause, in the context of the early eighteenth c entury, her ransomers tried to use the international agreements between the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a basis for demanding her release without payment.11 In the mid-seventeenth century, when t here such enormous numbers on the market, the problem was much broader: simply identifying the Jews among the huge mass of captives.
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In the conditions of captivity many of the traditional markers of Jewish identity, such as dress, foodways, and daily lifestyle, had to be abandoned and so could not be used for identification purposes.12 So, in order to ensure that precious communal funds w ere being used to ransom Jews, and not other enterprising captives eager to exploit the generosity of Istanbul Jewry, some means of identification had to be found. The Mayseh ha- godl described the solution to the dilemma: In the days of Ezra, people knew that anyone who did not have a written family tree13 was not a Jew. However, no-one has such a family tree t oday and so [it is impossible] to prove w hether one is a Jew or one of the masses [of non-Jews]. That is, unless one exhibits one of three qualities that mark a man out as Jewish. T hese are: being modest, ashamed to sin; being merciful and taking pity on one’s fellows; and dealing kindly and charitably with o thers. And even if he can learn Torah and recite the psalms every day, if he is not merciful towards the poor and does not behave decently, he is not a proper Jew.14
This then was the bottom line. Though the text piously insisted that personal ethics were crucial, it was basic Jewish education that did the trick. The text raises another issue. Though the story it tells concerns w omen captives, the only means of identification it mentions deals with men. Here is yet another indication that Jewish society, though it did not abandon w omen captives to their fate, took them for granted, overlooking their special characteristics and needs. It would presumably have been possible to identify Jewish women by their ability to recite the blessing over the Sabbath candles, but the need to mention it does not seem to have been felt even in a narrative dealing exclusively with w omen’s experience. Once the captives had been identified as Jews, the ransomers had two major issues to address, both financial in nature: negotiating a price and raising the money.15 In the case of the enormous stream of Polish Jewish captives that reached the Istanbul market beginning in the summer of 1648, t hese w ere determined by their sheer numbers. No sources have survived that allow us to reach a precise determination of how many Jews were put up for sale at this time, but contemporary correspondence does permit at least an estimate. Yaʾakov and Yosef Aboab, who, together with their brother Shmu’el, played a key role in organizing pidyon shevuyim in Venice, wrote in a letter to the Jewish community of Frankfurt a.M. dated June 23, 1651 (4 Tammuz, 4011), that 1,500 of the Jewish captives from Poland had already been ransomed in Istanbul—but that there were still many more arriving all the time.16 The next year, a letter detailing
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the donation of the Jews of Senigallia to the ransoming effort noted that by then some 3,000 had been ransomed.17 Both letters were written for fundraising purposes, so the figures were probably exaggerated. Still, numbers continued to grow in the period from the second letter of 1652 to the end of the first wave of wars in eastern Europe in 1654, and further captives were brought for sale in Istanbul during the Russian invasion of Lithuania, which started in that year and lasted for over a decade.18 A total of 4,000–6,000 Polish Jewish captives ransomed in Istanbul during the whole period does not seem unlikely. As we have seen, these very large numbers caused a glut on the market and drove down prices both at the point of capture and in Crimea. However, the Istanbul slave market was used to handling large quantities of captives, and so the prices t here do not seem to have fallen much. This meant that ransoming costs remained high. In their letter, Yaʾakov and Yosef Aboab noted that the 1,500 captives ransomed by the summer of 1651 had cost a total of 150,000 reals—about 275,000 Venetian ducats.19 In comparison with ransom figures calculated by Davis in his study of Christian slaves in Muslim North Africa in these years, 100 reals per captive is about average. So, even if the figures given by the Aboabs w ere exaggerated for fundraising purposes, prices clearly had not dropped significantly. To get some idea of the amounts involved, it is worth remembering that the daily wage of a master carpenter in Venice in the 1640s was only about 7 ducats.20 Istanbul Jewry was not entirely unprepared for the challenge of ransoming t hese p eople. Jewish captives from Poland-Lithuania had begun to reach the slave markets there in the decades before 1648 as the Jewish population of Ukraine had begun to grow and more Jews w ere caught up in Tatar raids. By the second decade of the seventeenth c entury, the numbers had become significant enough that a special source of income needed to be found to cover the ransoming costs. A new form of the consumption tax, called gabilla,21 was therefore imposed on foreign Jews trading in the city. Writing t oward the end of his life, Yosef Trani from Tzfat (1568–1639), who served as Chief Rabbi in Istanbul, described what was done and why: It is now 23 years since the gabilla was imposed on all t hose non- residents of Istanbul who brought goods in from outside [to trade in them]. It was done [to cover the costs of] pidyon shevuyim. Various scholars wanted to block it, but [were met with] the following arguments. First, the captives in need of ransom were coming on a daily
On the Ista nbul Sl av e M a r k et [ 129 ]
basis from Russia22 and it was everyone’s responsibility to [help] ransom them. This is b ecause a new source [of captives] had recently opened up across the Black Sea and they were bringing groups of them every day, putting g reat stress on the community.23
The new tax seems to have answered the communities’ needs at the time—and, in fact, it was imposed by other Ottoman communities engaged in pidyon shevuyim, most prominently Salonica and Alexandria.24 The extent of the Black Sea ransoming did not decrease in the following decades, and its spiraling costs must have added a further burden to the fundraising efforts of the Jewish Mediterranean ransoming network. By 1640 the situation was such that the Venice and Istanbul Jewish communities seem to have felt the need for a kind of semiformal division of labor. In that year, the Venetian Jewish organizations engaged in captive ransom issued the following statement in a printed circular: Those in charge of pidyon shevuyim in the Levantine and Talmud Torah25 communities in Venice take it upon themselves to ransom any captives that might be taken from time to time, except captives from the Black Sea and beyond. There should be no more ransoming delegations.26
nder this agreement, ransoming in the eastern Mediterranean, particuU larly in Malta, fell to Venice, while ransoming the Jewish captives brought across the Black Sea was done by Istanbul. Other communities w ere expected to send their contributions to one of the two major centers. As a result, it was hoped, t here would no longer be any need for various ransoming delegations to bother the communities with individual demands for money, thus making it much easier to keep a central control on the collection and distribution of funds.27 The formal organization of pidyon shevuyim had moved up a gear.
The Challenge of Raising the Money It did not take long, however, for the Jews of Istanbul to realize that the influx of Jewish refugees in the summer of 1648 was of a magnitude that they had never seen before and that the fundraising mechanisms they had in place w ere not enough. Worse, the agreement with Venice meant that they could expect no help from that major (and very wealthy) Mediterranean ransoming center. The first step they took to address what was rapidly becoming a major crisis was to focus as many communal resources
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as possible on ransoming—a policy that would continue throughout the 1650s. E very aspect of life was affected, even the worlds of publishing and learning. When Menaḥem ben Yitzḥak Yoffe ran into financial difficulties during the reprint of his grandfather’s book, Sefer yefat to’ar, in 1656, he found it extremely difficult to raise the extra money he needed b ecause all spare funds were being used for pidyon shevuyim.28 The Jewish women of Istanbul seem to have played a major role in the effort to raise the huge sums. A letter by the Sabbathean Raphael Sofino from Livorno in the 1660s related how they had contributed significantly by selling their jewelry (he mentions rings and earrings) in a charitable drive.29 This clearly made an impression in the Jewish world of the day because the contemporary Hebrew chronicle of the uprising, Tzaʾar bat rabim, recounted: “The w omen [of Istanbul] too removed the bands from their waists to pay for the ransom and took them [i.e., the ransomed slaves] into their homes, where they supported them for a long time.”30 The story was still in circulation a half c entury later and was retold in the Mayseh ha-godl: “the righteous women, rich and poor [alike], took off their jewelry, decorations, pearls and precious stones. Each one brought her own gift to give to the poor Jewish captives and f ree them.”31 This reveals another aspect of the key roles played by women during the crisis. In addition to the refugee w omen themselves who contributed actively to their family’s survival, Jewish women were willing to make significant sacrifices to help in the cause of ransoming captives. In this case, their contribution was both financial and sentimental and was significant enough to attract the attention of the otherwise less than attentive men. It also suggests that t here must have been other cases of w omen contributing to the ransoming effort that were not deemed important enough to note by the men in charge of the fundraising. Despite the efforts of the Jewish women, the Jews of Istanbul failed to raise the money they needed. A search for new sources led to the local Karaite community. While we do not have evidence of a formal request for help, we do know that it was given. The first donation for which records survive comes from 1650. In that year, a financial agreement between the Karaite community and one of its members was backed by the promise of both sides “to give 300 gold parḥi [Venetian ducats] for the pidyon shevuyim of our Rabbanite b rothers.”32 Another obvious group to appeal to for financial aid was the Jews of eastern Europe themselves. A fter all, it was their family, friends, and acquaintances that needed help. Much of Poland, and particularly Ukraine, was in chaos and thus the Jews t here w ere not in a position to
On the Ista nbul Sl av e M a r k et [ 131 ]
give anything. However, there are signs that Istanbul Jewry contacted Poznań, the largest Jewish community in northwestern Poland, far distant from the war zone. Perhaps as a result, in 1650, the Poznań community appointed special treasurers to collect “funds for Istanbul.”33 Another region of eastern Europe whose Jews could be dunned for money was Lithuania, which was, in the early 1650s, still relatively stable and largely unaffected by the fighting. In 1651, Istanbul’s leading rabbis wrote a long letter to the Lithuanian Jewish Council explaining the situation in their city. They had, they said, already spent “tens of thousands” on pidyon shevuyim for the eastern European Jewish captives and asked for “substantial assistance” because there were still many captives awaiting ransom.34 The council organized two special collections for pidyon shevuyim in all the Lithuanian communities and agreed to add a certain amount from their own budget. Unfortunately, it took the edge off this very generous gesture by capping the amount to be sent to Istanbul at 1,000 thaler, the equivalent of a little over 275 reals—not enough to ransom even three captives.35 Though obviously welcome, sums of that size w ere not much help in the face of a ransoming bill that might have reached as much as 150,000 reals by the summer of 1651. Clearly, if serious money was to be raised, it would be necessary to enlist the entire Sephardi ransoming network that spanned the Mediterranean and reached deep into Europe, too. Unfortunately for Istanbul Jewry, at its center sat the Jews of Venice, who, according to the 1640 agreement, could use the money it raised to meet their own ransoming goals, which did not include Black Sea ransoming. Faced with this problem, the Istanbul leadership came to a strategic decision. Sometime t oward the end of 1649 or in early 1650, they decided to abandon the agreement with Venice and appoint their own representative, whose mission would be to visit the major Sephardi communities of Europe in person and raise the funds needed to ransom the captives from eastern Europe. The person they chose was a young rabbinic scholar, David ben Natan’el Carcassoni. We know next to nothing about the man himself or why he was selected.36 The brief correspondence that has survived allows us to do little more than track some of the places he visited and see how much he raised in each one.37 What it does show quite clearly, however, is that the success of his mission was entirely dependent on the support he received from those responsible for pidyon shevuyim in Venice, the heart of the Jewish Mediterranean ransoming network.
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David Carcassoni’s Mission to Europe t he seph a r di phil a n t hropic n et wor k
david carcassoni’s mission plunged him into the complex world of Mediterranean Jewish philanthropy that raised money for a number of different purposes, which formally did not include the needs of the Istanbul Jewish community. In order to succeed, Carcassoni needed to access the general pidyon shevuyim funds collected by most communities and ensure that as much as possible was sent back home to help the ransoming effort. He faced two major problems. First, he was by no means the only person traveling around the Jewish communities asking for money to help relieve the suffering of the Polish Jews. Second, the Jewish communities of Venice w ere the controlling force of the Jewish Mediterranean philanthropic network; they were the clearinghouse to which most funds w ere sent, and one of their roles was to determine where the money was most needed and to send it t here. Without Venetian support, Carcassoni would find it very difficult to raise the sums he needed.
The Ransoming Network in Italy and Northern Europe Initially, at least, Venetian support seemed to be forthcoming. The emissary from Istanbul was greeted warmly in Venice and was assured of help for his mission. This was good news because the Venetian philanthropic network was extensive. It had developed over the previous decades, [ 132 ]
Dav id Ca rca ssoni’s Mission to Eur ope [ 133 ]
largely, as we have seen, in response to the spread of piracy in the Mediterranean. This was a scourge that had grown dramatically during the sixteenth c entury as an extension of the geopolitical tensions between Venice and the Ottoman Empire and posed an enormous threat to the republic as a whole b ecause maritime trade was its very lifeblood. In fact, the problem posed by piracy was twofold. Beyond the obvious losses in men, goods, ships, and thus profits, the decline in security on the shipping routes deterred Venetian merchants from even undertaking trips, further reducing the volume of trade. In order to overcome this, Venice began to take a serious interest in the issue of ransoming captives.1 It was not the first Italian city to do so—Naples had founded its Real Cassa Santa delle Redention de’ Cattivi as early as 1548. Rome set up a ransoming fund in 1581, Bologna did so in 1584, Palermo in 1596, and Genoa in 1597. Venice made its move in 1586, when the Senate, faced with an offer from the Ottoman sultan to redeem prisoners of war, instructed the organ ization responsible for the city’s charitable foundations to begin collecting money for ransom. Special charity boxes marked “For the Recovery of the Poor Slaves” w ere set up in all the city’s churches. This was clearly not sufficient, so within a year, the order was given to begin collecting in Venice’s northern Italian lands.2 Venice’s commitment was not just to the citizens of the city itself but to any subjects of the republic and even non-subjects in its service who had been captured. As a result, t here were so many captives awaiting ransom by Venice that the sums it raised were simply not enough. So, in 1619 a separate confraternity dedicated solely to ransoming captives was established. In addition, money for ransoming was collected from the republic’s overseas holdings in the eastern Adriatic. Supervisors w ere appointed, notaries w ere instructed to pressure those making wills to leave money for ransoming, and even some of the income from the public lottery was earmarked for that purpose. Together, t hese measures increased the ransoming budget to a reasonable (though never fully satisfactory) level.3 Jewish merchants w ere particularly exposed to attack by pirates. T hose who were Venetian subjects or shipping goods on Venetian ships were targeted by the Barbary corsairs, while t hose who w ere Ottoman subjects or sailing on Ottoman vessels were prey for the Knights of St. John on Malta.4 Since they were excluded from the republic’s ransoming efforts, the Jews of Venice clearly needed their own system of captive ransom. There is evidence of Venetian Jewish participation in an organized attempt to ransom Jewish captives dating back to 1589, but the first extant document showing the Venice communities running a ransoming effort
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in the Mediterranean is from 1608.5 On September 25, 1609, the Venetian maʾamad, the ruling council of three of its communities, the Sephardi Portuguese, the Levantine, and the Ashkenazi (which also represented the Italian community), agreed that together they would collect 500 ducats annually to cover ransoming costs.6 By 1615, they had also instituted a special business tax to cover costs.7 At some stage in the following years, the Ashkenazi community withdrew to organize its own organization for pidyon shevuyim, leaving the other two to work together. As Daniel Carpi, who studied Venetian Jewry’s transregional philanthropic institutions in depth, has shown, the maʾamad of t hese Sephardi communities set up a special ransoming fund and appointed deputies to run it. Like their non- Jewish counterparts, these officials soon felt the need to raise money outside the city itself and began to turn to other Italian communities, such as Padua and Mantua.8 The sources for Jewish ransoming activity in Venice during the first half of the seventeenth c entury are sparse, but during that period the deputies began to solicit money from farther afield. Unlike the Christian ransoming organization that turned to the more distant parts of the Venetian empire, the pidyon shevuyim fund preferred to approach the wealthy Sephardi communities first of Italy and then of northwestern Europe, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. The first record of money sent from Amsterdam to Venice for ransoming slaves is from 1636 and from Hamburg about a decade later. These w ere not regular payments but one-off donations.9 With a Europe-wide network for raising money beginning to coalesce, the Venetian Sephardim decided to institutionalize the ransoming effort a step further. As we have seen, in 1640 the deputies issued an order reorga nizing the collection process in which, as well as creating a geographical division for fundraising, it determined that there were to be no more ransoming delegations. Its goal was to put an end to the custom of giving out ransom money on a first-come, first-served basis, paying e very Jew who came along with a sad story of personal tragedy. Instead the deputies in Venice would decide which causes were most worthy and would approach communities with requests for payment in an institutional rather than a personal manner. The deputies presumably saw this as an important step toward the institutionalization of transregional philanthropy and so had the order printed up to be sent to as many communities as possible.10 The events of 1648 and the following years would put this development under great pressure and eventually overwhelm it. The very appearance of Carcassoni in Venice was an indication of this. Not only was he collecting
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for Black Sea ransoming in Venice’s sphere of influence, he had come, in person, as an emissary—precisely what the 1640 order had tried to stop. It was not the most auspicious start to his mission.
The Venetian Connection: Shmu’el Aboab and Moshe Zacuto By mid-February 1650, Carcassoni was already in Italy collecting money. On February 19,11 the Verona community council, having heard his personal account and read the letters he brought with him from Istanbul, decided to award him 100 ducats.12 The next we hear of his fundraising activity was in the late summer, by which time he was in Venice. There he made contact with the two figures whose help was crucial for his mission: Shmu’el Aboab and Moshe Zacuto. Their importance for him was not so much that they sat on the board of the pidyon shevuyim fund, though both did from time to time, but that they acted as unofficial fundraisers and stood at the head of the network of communities that contributed to philanthropic causes. These fell into two major groups: there were Italian communities, such as Verona, Mantua, Padua, Livorno, Fer rara, Ancona, Rome, Trieste, Modena, and Casale, and there were Sephardi communities farther afield, such as Hamburg, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bayonne, and Bordeaux, as well as Sofia and Damascus.13 With the help of Aboab and Zacuto, Carcassoni hoped to be able to raise significant sums of money from across Europe, and he carried letters from the rabbis of Istanbul to the two Venetian Jews asking them to do all they could to help him.14 Aboab seems to have been the senior of the two. He was a scion of a leading Sephardi family from before the expulsion, some of whose members had lived as New Christians following the forced conversions in Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century, though many returned to Judaism at the first opportunity. One such was Shmu’el’s father, Avraham Aboab, who lived as a Jew in Hamburg at the turn of the seventeenth century. In 1610, Shmu’el was born. At age thirteen, he was sent to the most important European center of Sephardi Jews, Venice, in order to study in the yeshiva there.15 A brilliant student, Shmu’el was eventually given the hand of the rabbi’s daughter in marriage. His scholarship was such that in 1638, he was invited to serve as rabbi in the newly forming Verona Sephardi community and was consulted on halakhic matters by colleagues not only from all the major Italian communities but from across the Sephardi diaspora.
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In 1650, he was invited to return to Venice to take up the post of rabbi of the Talmud Torah community and head of the Yeshivah Klalit, the council of Venetian rabbis. Despite a number of personal crises, he remained a central figure in Venetian Jewish life until his death in 1694.16 Independently wealthy (until his bankruptcy in 1660), Aboab was enthusiastic in his support for Jewish c auses. He established a yeshiva in the Holy Community of Tzfat in the Land of Israel, which he financed himself, and also gave generously (and collected widely) to help Jewish settlement in the Holy Land.17 In addition, he worked assiduously on issues of pidyon shevuyim. Once he had rejoined Venice’s Talmud Torah community in 1650, he was clearly the right man to spearhead its ransoming efforts. His partner in that effort was another Sephardi Jew who did not originally hail from Venice. Moshe Zacuto was born in Amsterdam in about 1620. There he was educated by Sha’ul Levi Morteira in his yeshiva, also learning Latin and studying secular subjects. While still a young man, he traveled to Poland to study there too, particularly in the leading community of Poznań. Sometime after that, he settled in Italy, first in Verona, and then in 1645 in Venice, where he was an active preacher. He was soon recognized as a leading rabbinic authority and became a member of the Yeshivah Klalit.18 He was best known as a kabbalist and became a central figure in Italy’s widespread network of mystical thinkers. His correspondence on mystical matters was also widespread, across both Italy and the Sephardi world.19 His interests, however, ranged well beyond the pure study of kabbalah. He worked as an editor/proofreader in Venice’s very active Hebrew publishing trade and was also a talented and prolific poet.20 He died in 1697. Zacuto took a special interest in the sufferings of Polish Jewry, presumably as a result of his experiences as a student in Poland. He had friendly relationships with various Polish Jewish refugees who turned up in Venice and was generous in his support for them. He wrote a poem dealing with the Polish Jewish martyrs that he appended to the chronicle Tzaʾar bat rabim by Avraham ben Shmu’el Ashkenazy and, even after the worst of the crisis had passed in the early 1670s, he gave special help and support to two fundraising emissaries from Poznań, going as far as to engage the rabbi there in a correspondence on the matter.21 There was perhaps, then, good reason for Carcassoni to hope that both Aboab and Zacuto would be sympathetic to his mission even though it overstepped the strict bounds of Venice’s commitment to pidyon shevuyim.
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Carcassoni’s Mission to Europe This they w ere, determining that his next major fundraising stop a fter Venice would be in Amsterdam, the largest and wealthiest Jewish community in northwestern Europe. Once t here, the emissary would show the community a letter from the rabbis of Constantinople describing their distress and tell the story himself in order to open both hearts and pockets. That letter has not survived, but before Carcassoni set out, Zacuto provided him with two additional ones to help him on his way. The first, written before September 26, 1650,22 was called “an endorsement” (in Hebrew, ḥatimah), and its subject was the fate of Polish Jewry, particularly those taken captive and sent to Istanbul. Having recounted what had befallen them during the Cossack uprising and the heroic martyrdom of many, it went on to describe the fate of the captives and how the Jews of Istanbul had ransomed wave a fter wave, u ntil the huge amounts of money involved had forced them to send an emissary to raise more. Interestingly, though the letter mentioned that his name was David, it had l ittle to say about the man himself or any of his qualities that would persuade the communities to entrust their funds to him.23 Zacuto’s second letter for Carcassoni, dated October 27, 1650, was one of introduction addressed directly to his former teacher, Sha’ul Levi Morteira, rabbi of Amsterdam.24 Zacuto asked Morteira to take the young emissary under his wing and give him all the advice and help he needed to succeed in his mission. Once again, not much was said in the body of the letter about either Carcassoni himself or the ransoming crisis in Istanbul. The issue was framed solely around the problem of redeeming Polish Jewry from captivity. Morteira was requested to press his community to contribute generously to that cause—and to do so with all speed b ecause any delay would cause additional suffering to the captives (and so, presumably, expose them to the danger of conversion). Unlike the first letter, the descriptions h ere of the Jews’ sufferings w ere rather abstract. Perhaps for that reason, Zacuto added a graphic postscript: [Though] we were upset by the first reports, things have now got worse as we have learned from writings brought to us by [Venetian] merchants returning by ship from Istanbul. [The Jews of Istanbul] speak of their distress and complain bitterly about the heavy economic burden they have to carry. It is getting worse from day to day; the huge number of captives is growing constantly and the [financial] problems are much worse than they were at the beginning.25
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Armed with t hese letters, Carcassoni set out for Amsterdam. Within a short time, he seems to have run into some kind of trouble on the road, from which he managed to extract himself only with the help of good- hearted Jews he met along the way. Of course, help and hospitality did not come cheap and his mounting expenses began to eat into the contributions he was receiving. He expressed his concerns in a letter he sent to Aboab in Venice, asking that his outlay be covered from there. Aboab wrote back, politely but firmly rejecting Carcassoni’s request for extra funds. On the other hand, he did promise to send out a number of new letters for the emissary to give him an entrée to the communities of Hamburg and Rotterdam. He was less sanguine about his ability to help with the major community of Frankfurt a.M., presumably because it was not Sephardi and would not recognize his authority.26 Things seem to have improved for the emissary from Istanbul once he finally reached the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, he was welcomed as a scholar and even met the famous rabbi, scholar, and publisher Menasheh ben Yisra’el, who was engaged in writing his book Nishmat ḥayim, on the reincarnation of the soul.27 The two discussed kabbalah, and the young Carcassoni promised, on his return home, to send his senior colleague some manuscripts written by the great Yitzḥak Luria himself.28 Morteira, too, seems to have taken Carcassoni under his wing and done what he could to help him raise money. As a result, on March 23, 1651,29 the pidyon shevuyim society in Amsterdam recorded a donation of 3,009 florins and 12 plakas for the redemption “of the captives taken to Istanbul by the Tatars.” A few months later, in mid-August, Carcassoni himself was given the sum of 125 florins to help cover his expenses.30 There is no evidence that he visited Hamburg, Frankfurt, or even Rotterdam while he was in northwestern Europe. Instead, in the fall of 1651 he returned to Italy to begin fundraising there. We are able to trace his path because his fundraising record from this period has survived. It was known as a Collection Document (in Hebrew, kibutz), and the representative of each community that gave him money added a short identifying paragraph to it, sometimes including details such as the reasons for the donation and the amount given. Carcassoni’s kibutz records donations from the following Italian communities: Pesaro, Senigallia, Urbino, Ancona, and Venice (the Levantine and Ashkenazi communities), all dated to 5412 after the Creation (September 16, 1651–September 2, 1652).31 These w ere not all the communities he visited: the records of the community in Mantua record a donation to Carcassoni on December 23, 1651, that does not appear on the kibutz. It is very unlikely that he would not have gone to Padua, too.32
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The problem was that though a number of communities did give Carcassoni donations, the amounts they gave w ere very small. Pesaro gave just 30 scudi, Senigallia 25 ducats, Urbino 25 ducats, Ancona 30 ducats, Venice (the Levantine community) 310 ducats, (the Ashkenazi community) 200 ducats, and Mantua 100 ducats. The donors were aware that these were not impressive gifts and tried to give explanations in the paragraphs they added to the kibutz. Two main reasons were given. The first was that the communities’ outlays on taxes and other issues w ere so g reat that it was hard to find any extra money.33 The other reason was that the communities had already been approached by various emissaries, apparently from Poland itself, and had given money to them, leaving little for Carcassoni. Whate ver the reasons might have been, the total of Carcassoni’s recorded collections in Italy during 1651–52 amounted to a little over 700 ducats. To this should be added the amount he had previously raised in Amsterdam, which when converted to Venetian currency was worth about 1,800 ducats, as well as the 100 ducats from Verona, making a total of 2,600 ducats. This was the ransom price of about 17 captives. Since we can assume that Carcassoni visited other communities that do not appear in the surviving records, he must have raised more than that. However, even if he raised three times the amount that we know of, his two-year mission would have helped cover the costs of ransoming only about 50 of the 2,000 or so captives that had reached the slave market by that point. In fact, so embarrassing was the amount raised that Moshe Zacuto felt obliged to write a letter of apology to the rabbis of Istanbul. Insisting that he and Aboab had done everything they could to help Carcassoni both in Italy and further abroad, he blamed the disappointing results on both the poor financial state of the Italian communities and the expenses the emissary himself had incurred on his travels.34 The Istanbul leadership was less than impressed. In a letter of 1656, written to the Jewish community of Mantua at the beginning of a new fundraising mission to Italy, it wrote in bitter and scathing terms: You Gentlemen obviously know about the great disaster that befell our brothers in Ukraine, which was why we sent a special emissary to Italy a little while back. The efforts he invested w ere huge, the results tiny. We had expected that our Italian b rothers would [act] honorably and make a significant contribution—one worthy of the problem, which was extremely serious. What they actually gave was no more than a drop in the ocean.35
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So what went wrong? The contemporary texts suggest three reasons. The first is that given by Zacuto: Carcassoni’s expenses were too great. This probably reflects less on the man himself than on the planning and goals of his trip. The Istanbul community had never organized such a mission before and thus did not expect that the overheads would be so large. In addition, the dimensions of the ransoming crisis of the 1650s were so huge as to be quite unheard of, a fact that raised the expectations for Carcassoni’s mission to unreasonably high levels and thus made its failure more likely. The second reason for Carcassoni’s disappointing results had to do with competition over resources. The sheer numbers of Polish Jews needing to be ransomed as well as the humanitarian tragedy that had struck Polish Jewry at home put enormous pressure on Jewish philanthropic systems across Europe. Though the Venetian community had, in the 1640s, tried to move to a more centralized approach in which it would be responsible for both collecting and disbursing funds for pidyon shevuyim, the chaos following 1648 had effectively put that idea on hold. Without a rational policy to allocate these philanthropic resources, the situation became one of first-come, first-served. Representatives of Polish communities, as well as individual Polish Jews looking for help for themselves or family members who had been captured, began arriving in Italy and being given money. Istanbul Jewry could hardly complain about this, since Carcassoni was acting as its representative in exactly the same way. Still, by the time he reached many Italian communities, they had already donated significant amounts to assist Polish Jews and had little left for him. The third explanation the Jews of Italy gave for their meager donations was that Italian Jewry’s circumstances w ere difficult in t hese years and there was little or no money to spare for philanthropic c auses. Though things were not easy for Italian Jewry in the 1650s, there were no special problems they had to face, which suggests that it was just an excuse—and, in fact, it was one commonly used by communities that did not want to open their coffers to strangers. This, then, raises the question as to why helping Istanbul Jewry in its terrible struggle to ransom Polish Jewish captives was not an attractive proposition for the Jews of Italy. The surviving sources do not provide an answer, but it seems likely that Carcassoni did not r eally present an engaging figure to many of the communities he visited. The cause he was espousing was an Ashkenazi rather than a Sephardi or Italian one, and while the Jews of Italy w ere certainly willing to help their Ashkenazi brethren, this was presumably not their highest priority.36 In addition, Carcassoni was not a Polish Jew
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himself and so could not recount the kind of heartrending stories that might persuade the local Jews to be generous. In fact, the money he was asking for, though it was for the benefit of the Polish Jewish captives, was really meant to help the Jews of Istanbul fulfill the religious imperative of ransoming them, and the Jews of Italy may simply have felt that that was not their responsibility. If such was indeed the case, then we need to look again at the stance of Aboab and Zacuto t oward Carcassoni and his mission. Despite Zacuto’s protestations to the rabbis of Istanbul that he and his colleague had done everything in their power to help the emissary, was that indeed the case? They certainly did provide him with letters to Amsterdam, which proved effective, but the relatively well-preserved archives of Mantua and Padua contain no record of a similar correspondence.37 In terms of the broader Sephardi network, the Venetian philanthropists did try to make connections for him in Hamburg and Rotterdam, though he seems, for one reason or another, not to have been able to exploit them. The support that Aboab and Zacuto gave him was mostly in the form of advice and Zacuto’s endorsement letter. What was lacking was the kind of intensive letter writing to all the communities in the philanthropic network that would have put Venice’s support solidly b ehind Carcassoni and the Jews of Istanbul. Instead, the letters cast him as just another emissary looking for money, and so he was treated as such. Had Carcassoni’s mission been the only time the Mediterranean and Sephardi philanthropic network acted on behalf of Polish Jews, we would be justified in thinking that it was not greatly moved by their plight. That was not the case. T hose who stood at the network’s head, as well the communities that formed it, found themselves giving money and other kinds of help to Polish Jewry on many different occasions.
ch a p t er fou rt ee n
The Role of Italian Jewry
in june 1656, the jews of Venice held a special day of fasting and mourning for the Jews of Poland then suffering a second round of wars and massacres. Special prayers were recited and a collection taken in all the Venetian synagogues. As his personal contribution to this solemn day, Yaʾakov bar Moshe ha-Levi, a prominent Venetian scholar and poet, composed a new elegy, mourning the death and destruction visited on Polish Jewry. Written in elegant Hebrew, the lament consisted of thirteen verses in the ottava rima format: Every city is put to shame, each town disgraced.1 And now the very glory of the globe,2 Home to Torah Study and God’s resting place,3 Is filled with misery and chants of woe. Our songs of joy and gladness are replaced with By the Rivers of Babylon4 from long ago. The joy of my heart5 is in exile with all that’s fine, Is there any agony like unto mine?6
Venice was not the only Italian community to exert itself for Polish Jewry at that time; Mantua had a special fundraising drive, and requests to take similar action were sent out to other Jewish centers.7 Clearly, then, the sufferings of the east European Ashkenazi Jews had deeply touched their Sephardi coreligionists in Italy, reaching not only their hearts but their pockets too. This Italian response was all the more impressive because the problem of ransoming the thousands of Polish Jewish captives in Istanbul had been on the philanthropic agenda for years; the Jews of Italy might have been expected to be a little blasé about it. Beyond that, there was also a range of other, sometimes more urgent, calls on [ 142 ]
The Role of Ita li a n Jew ry [ 143 ]
their available funds. In fact, many Jewish communities faced a difficult dilemma in deciding where to put the resources they earmarked for ransoming captives.8
Ransoming Jewish Captives on Malta In truth, the most important use for the pidyon shevuyim money as far as Italian Jewry was concerned had nothing to do with Polish Jews and their problems. Instead, ransom money was used primarily to redeem Jewish maritime merchants and travelers who were preyed on by pirates, particularly the Knights of St. John on Malta. Jews were captured regularly and brought to the island for sale or to be condemned to the galleys.9 Ransoming those Jews was a complex business, since the Knights knew that Jewish culture put a high value on redeeming captives. They therefore treated Jewish prisoners as a special commodity. In the words of a contemporary visitor to Malta: This place being an island, and difficult to escape out of, they [the captives] wear only an iron ring or foot-lock . . . Jews, Moors, and Turks are made slaves h ere, and are publickly sold in the market. A stout fellow may be bought (if he be an inferior person) for 120 or 160 scudi of Malta. The Jews are distinguish’d from the rest by a little piece of yellow cloth on their hats or caps, e tc. We saw a rich Jew who was taken about a year before, who was sold in the market that morning we visited the prison for 400 scudi.10
In that situation, some kind of Jewish organization that would be able to negotiate with the Knights was vital if prices were not to spiral out of control. This need was presumably another f actor fueling the drive to centralize pidyon shevuyim in Venetian hands. And indeed, once the Venice fund was responsible for ransoming all the Jewish prisoners on Malta, it employed an agent on the island to represent its interests in the best way possible. The choice fell upon a local Italian merchant, Ottaviano Bandinelli, presumably since the Jews of Venice felt that a non-Jew would be better able to negotiate lower ransom prices.11 It was Bandinelli’s responsibility to identify Jews among the captives brought to Malta, give them immediate assistance, negotiate a ransom price with the Knights’ council, and then organize payment from Venice. He maintained a lively correspondence with the leaders of the fund, informing them of developments and receiving their instructions on the prices to be paid, though he did have
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carte blanche to spend up to 100 reals per captive on the slave market. The most common way of getting the money to him was through a bill of exchange (lettera di cambio). Typically, it was drawn on a Venetian merchant, Pietro Castelli, with whom the Venetian fund had deposited the requisite amount. Castelli passed the bill to one of his clients, Giovanni Battista van den Broecke, the Dutch consul on Sicily, who did business on Malta, and so was able to give Bandinelli the funds to ransom the captives. This system obviated the risk of sending cash long distances but was expensive as each member of the chain, including Bandinelli himself, had to be paid a percentage.12 The Venetian fund raised the money to cover the ransoming costs from across Italy and from the transregional Sephardi network of communities, which included not only Hamburg and Amsterdam (and later London) but also Ragusa, Sofia, and Belgrade.13 Though things did not always run smoothly—the Venetians sometimes complained, for example, that the money was being diverted to a rival ransoming fund in Livorno—on the whole, the various Sephardi communities did prove quite willing to pay Venice their share.14 Clearly, this was an issue not just of the religious imperative to ransom captives but of enlightened self-interest. Cecil Roth has gone so far as to claim that these payments actually formed a kind of maritime or mercantile insurance.15 The sums involved in ransoming could be quite substantial. Unfortunately, the accounts of the Venetian ransoming fund have not survived, but an examination of its letter book by Daniel Carpi does allow at least an estimate of how much was paid to ransom Jewish slaves on Malta in the 1650s and 1660s: in the period from 1654 (when the letter book began)16 until 1660, the fund ransomed approximately 65 Jewish captives on Malta for a price of a little over 10,000 reals. Of course, this was not the total cost to the fund. To it should be added the percentages that needed to be paid to Castelli, van den Broecke, and Bandinelli. We do not know what they were, but in his study of ransoming in the western Mediterranean, Daniel Hershenzon found that agents could charge fees of 10 percent or more.17 However, even that was not all. Captives were ransomed in other locations, and as well as paying money into the Venetian fund, the various Italian communities continued to support individual Jews who w ere traveling around collecting money to ransom their loved ones. In the nature of things, it is impossible even to estimate the amounts involved, but they were surely not negligible.18 Thus even before a single request was made to support the Polish Jews, Italian Jewry was heavily committed to paying out for pidyon shevuyim
The Role of Ita li a n Jew ry [ 145 ]
and was doing so in a cause—rescuing Sephardi merchants and rabbis— that touched them quite closely. It is perhaps little surprise, then, that the body responsible for organizing these payments, the pidyon shevuyim fund in Venice, sometimes viewed the demands of the Jews from eastern Europe simply as an irritation. In a letter to the Jewish community of Rome, dated October 9, 1654, the heads of the Venetian fund complained that their income from Flanders (which, for the Jews of this period, could include the w hole of the Netherlands) had dropped due to the huge number of captives that had reached there from Poland.19 On other occasions, they were even more direct. On March 22, 1657, the fund’s leaders wrote to the Amsterdam community, noting the help it was giving to the Jewish refugees from Poland and Lithuania, and then continuing: “However, that is not the most important act of charity. We are asking you to help with the ransoming of thirteen captives on Malta, for each of whom we need the sum of 130 reals.” Similar letters w ere sent on June 8 to the communities in both Hamburg and Livorno.20 This desire to prioritize the needs of the captives on Malta did not mean, however, that Venice totally ignored all other causes. Moreover, the Italian communities in general, though they seem to have understood the benefits of having Venice manage the ransoming on Malta, were not willing entirely to give up their autonomy in how they used their philanthropic funds. This was good news for Polish Jews because it improved their chances of receiving financial support from Italian Jewry. Their requests for that can be divided into two main groups. The first were made by individuals, asking for help with their personal issues. These largely had to do with ransoming family members, though individual refugees did sometimes turn up looking for shelter, food, and money. The second w ere requests for larger groups, most often communities in Poland- Lithuania that were struggling with the costs of recovering from the war or communities outside eastern Europe that were dealing with an influx of Polish Jewish refugees. Such requests w ere sometimes made by letter, but the personal touch was often seen as crucial, so communal representatives would actually travel from place to place raising funds. We w ill now examine each group in turn.
Helping Polish Jews 1: Individual Requests for Support The news of the disaster that had overtaken the Jews in Ukraine, and with it requests for financial aid, reached Italy very quickly. On September 1, 1648,21 that is, while the first phase of the uprising was still at its height,
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the Jewish council of Padua and the surrounding communities pledged over 40 ducats to the Jews of Poland from its general budget, with a promise of more to come from the pidyon shevuyim fund.22 Three weeks later, on the evening of September 23,23 the community council of Casale Monferato also met in order to discuss its response. It reported that letters had arrived detailing the massive destruction and the huge number of Jews taken into captivity, and decided to contribute 150 Spanish crozone24 to the relief efforts.25 We do not know precisely how soon after this type of emergency aid was given that individual Polish Jews began to arrive in Italy asking for money, but within a c ouple of years their number had grown so g reat that communal philanthropy began to creak under the pressure. Sometime before 1652, the Venetian fund, facing a ransom bill on Malta of nearly 5,000 ducats, wrote an angry letter to the community in Ancona, accusing it of duplicity. Not only, claimed the heads of the fund, had Ancona stopped sending money to them, but when individuals turned up in Ancona itself asking for support, the community refused them too, saying that all its ransoming funds had already been sent to Venice.26 The rabbi of Ancona, Mehalalel Halelujah, did not take such an accusation lying down. He fired off an indignant reply to Venice, rebutting its claim: You Gentlemen know that over the last two years many people have come here asking for help to deal with the terrible problems of our brothers in Poland. We have given them the benefit of the benefits that God has given us, and, apart from what there is in the pidyon shevuyim fund, every single member of the communities has done whatever he can to ease their broken hearts and set the captives free. . . . The truth is with us when we say that no traveler that has come to our town asking for this kind of help has been sent away empty-handed.27
He added that the refugees were not trustworthy in what they said about their treatment in Ancona, since they w ere desperate enough to make up any story that might bring them more money. The bottom line was, he concluded, that at that time Ancona had no money left to give either to the Jews coming from Poland or to the Venetian fund for the captives on Malta. All they could do for the latter was to pray that God would help the fund find the amount it needed from a different source!28 What ever truth there might have been in these claims and counterclaims, the tension between Venice and Ancona over the use of philanthropic funds was quite palpable.
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The picture that Halelujah painted, though probably exaggerated for effect, was one of a constant stream of Polish Jews turning up in Ancona asking for money. Other communities, too, such as Senigallia and Urbin0, said much the same t hing.29 We know very little about t hese individuals, though we do have a few details in one case from a few years later. A Jewish doctor and rabbinical scholar by the name of Ḥayim Katzenellenbogen was witness to the great massacre of the Jews in Lublin in October 1655 but managed to escape. His m other and six siblings also survived but eventually found themselves trapped in the nearby town of Zamość, awaiting ransom. Ḥayim took upon himself the task of finding the money. He had lost his private wealth during the fighting in Lublin and so took to the road to raise the funds he needed. His first stop was in Lviv, presumably b ecause he wanted to get a letter of introduction from the rabbi of Lublin, who was taking refuge t here. He received it at the end of February 1656. By the last week in June, he was in Verona. A c ouple of weeks later he was in Mantua, and in late July in Modena. His final stop (that we are aware of ) was in Venice, where Moshe Zacuto took him under his wing.30 Unfortunately, that is all we know of his mission. It seems likely that, as a rabbinical scholar and doctor, as well as a member of the Katzenellenbogen family, one of the leading Polish rabbinical dynasties—and one with Italian roots—he would have been treated well.31 What that would have meant in practice, however, is unclear. Perhaps all that can be said is that, even had he returned to Poland straight after his stay in Venice, Katzenellenbogen would have been on the road for the best part of a year. His kibutz does not record the amounts he managed to collect, but it is unlikely they were very large. The small community of Senigallia gave to all the Polish Jews who visited it from 1648 to 1652, including rabbis and scholars, a grand total of just 40 ducats.32 It must have been very dispiriting for those coming in need of help. In some cases, like that of Yaʾakov Koppel Margolis, the traveler decided that he could not rely just on philanthropy and tried to make the money he needed as an entrepreneur, publishing a book in the hope of turning some kind of profit. Just how helpful that was can be seen by the fact that, four years later, Margolis was still in Italy collecting for his children.33 With money so tight, fundraising journeys must have been very long, tiring, and difficult experiences.34 Our knowledge of the refugees from eastern Europe who came to Italy looking for a place of safety is no less fragmented. The most common route seems to have been overland from Poland via Vienna. In addition, quite a number of refugees seem to have wound up in Amsterdam
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before reaching Italy. The route these refugees took from the Netherlands is unclear. They may have traveled along the Rhine to Mainz and nearby Frankfurt and from t here to Vienna and then Italy, or it is possible that they traveled by ship from Amsterdam to Livorno. There is not enough evidence to determine. Polish Jews had a number of good reasons to choose Italy as a refuge. It was known to be a wealthy Jewish center, and more importantly had avoided the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War, which had only just come to an end. News of the crucial role that Italian Jewry, and in particular the Jews of Venice, was playing in ransoming the Polish Jewish captives also became known in the early 1650s.35 Beyond that, t here had been significant cultural ties between Polish and Italian Jewry since at least the mid-sixteenth century, so perhaps Italy was, in some senses, a known quantity.36 The most notorious of the refugees to reach Italy was a Jewish w oman called Sarah bat Me’ir. She and her family, perhaps from Polnoye in Ukraine, had been caught up in the uprising in 1648. She was rescued by some nuns who raised her as a Christian in their convent, while her brother Shmu’el fled westward to Amsterdam. Sarah eventually escaped, returned to Judaism, and made her way to her b rother in Amsterdam. Like many refugees, she then decided to continue on to Italy, traveling to Livorno, where she seems to have lived on the margins of society as a kind of fortune-teller and w oman of ill-repute. We would probably not know anything about her were it not for the fact that Shabtai Zvi, just over a year before he staked his claim to be the Messiah, heard of her and decided that she would be a fitting consort. He brought her to Cairo where he was living at the time, and on March 31, 1664,37 made her his wife. Once he had declared his divinity, Sarah took on the mystical appellation “Matrona” or “Matronita,” one of the common kabbalistic names for the Shekhinah, the female aspect of the Godhead, and, in some Sabbathean circles, was viewed as a prophet. Though it is unclear how much she influenced her husband’s path, this Polish Jewish refugee does, at the very least, seem to have been a visible part of the Sabbathean movement in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. She died in 1674.38 Our knowledge of other Jewish refugees in Italy is based largely on a few brief autobiographical accounts embedded in the introductions to books. This means that they refer solely to educated men—and to only a few of t hose—so they clearly do not make up a representative group. We will look at just three. The first is Nathan Hanover, author of the historical
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chronicle Yavein metsulah. After fleeing his hometown of Izyaslav in 1648, he took his family out of Poland and across the German lands to Amsterdam. Once there, he seems to have completed his studies, interrupted by the uprising, and then in 1652 tried his hand at publishing.39 His stated intention in d oing so was to raise enough money to publish his magnum opus, Netaʾ ne’eman, a book of sermons on the Torah. However, even though l ater in life he succeeded in making enough money to publish other books, he never got around to putting out his volume of sermons. So perhaps that was not the real intention of his entrepreneurial venture in Amsterdam. Maybe he, like other refugees, simply wanted to raise enough money to continue supporting himself and his family, and just did not want to admit it in print.40 Hanover soon decided to move on to Italy. In 1653, he seems to have been in Venice, where he published Yavein metsulah. His fortunes then took a dramatic turn for the better: I came to Livorno, a city full of scholars and writers, situated on the seashore and they appointed me rabbi . . . I came to teach and ended up learning during my stay there, which lasted for the whole of 1653/4. [I was in] the study house of the pious and generous, learned and wise, David Valensin. . . . He was extremely generous to me. . . . Later, Nathan Shapira, a holy man . . . scholar, and kabbalist from Jerusalem . . . came to visit and I went with him to . . . Venice. . . . There I was appointed by the leaders of the Talmud Torah community to be a member of the Yeshivah Gedolah,41 and enjoyed much generosity. I should like to mention the wealthy and honorable brothers, Daniel and Abraham Monian. . . . They were like b rothers to me, opening me the doors of their home and their study h ouse . . . There was also the wise, pious, and modest rabbi Shmu’el Aboab . . . as well as my close friend and colleague, the kabbalistic scholar, Moshe Zacuto . . . who [together] control all the money,42 and denied me nothing.43
This, then, was the five-star refugee experience reserved for leading scholars. Hanover was showered with generosity, given a job and a position of honor, and then allowed to study and write under the patronage of one of the community’s leading families. His status also allowed him eventually to settle down into a new and comfortable life: in 1662, he was appointed rabbi of Iaşi in Walachia, a c areer he pursued both t here and later in Uherský Brod in Moravia until his death in 1683.44 His experience was exceptional even for the scholarly refugees. Another such individual, whose path actually crossed that of Hanover at
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least once, was Yaʾakov ben Naftali from Gniezno in G reat Poland. That region was unaffected by the uprising and only really came under attack during the Swedish invasion of 1655. Yaʾakov, too, survived the events of 1648 unharmed, but a year or two later he was hit by a different kind of tragedy: his h ouse burned down, taking with it some pawns he held as a moneylender. Faced with bankruptcy, he decided to join the stream of refugees heading west and make for Amsterdam. In 1652, like Hanover, who was in Amsterdam at exactly the same time, he tried his hand at publishing a book, with the stated intent of relieving his poverty as a refugee and allowing him to return home and repay his debts.45 He does not seem to have been successful b ecause not only did he not return to Poland, he actually continued on the refugee trail to Venice. There he earned some money from publishing, not as an entrepreneur but as editor/proofreader of Hanover’s chronicle Yavein metsulah, to which he appended a colophon with a personal note and a poem containing his name in an acrostic.46 The book came out in 1653 but following that Yaʾakov seems to have decided on a different survival strategy. He began to present himself as a representative of Polish Jewry, whose goal was to persuade the pope in Rome to issue a bull against the blood libel, which he said was then rampant in Poland. That may have been his intention, but t here is no evidence that Yaʾakov ben Naftali was ever officially appointed a representative of anyone, nor were the Jews of Poland really troubled by ritual murder accusations in the early 1650s.47 Nonetheless, he does seem to have persuaded Moshe Zacuto of his credentials b ecause, on June 26, 1654, the Venetian leader wrote him an enthusiastic letter of support. By early October, Yaʾakov had still not yet left Venice so Zacuto wrote another letter on his behalf, this time asking for help in covering his costs, since his plans were taking longer than expected. A little later, Zacuto wrote a third note for him, no longer describing him as any kind of emissary but simply as a poor man in need of support.48 Had Yaʾakov ben Naftali invented the story of being a representative of Polish Jewry as a fundraising ploy? We hear no more of him after 1654, so we w ill never know.49 The third case is much less complex, though considerably more tragic. Yaʾakov ben Shimʾon had lived in Nemyriv before the uprising. When the town fell on June 10, 1648, his wife and three daughters were killed in the huge massacre that followed. He himself survived, fled, and, a fter a period as a refugee in Poland, settled in the town of Tomaszów Lubelski. There he remarried and started a new f amily. However, when the Swedish army took Tomaszów on March 12, 1656, he, his new wife, and their young daughter were taken captive. He managed to escape and fled Poland, ending up in Venice in 1667, once again alone. Like Hanover and Yaʾakov
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ben Naftali, he decided to publish one of his sermons in order to raise money, writing in the introduction that God had saved him the second time because he had taken an oath to travel to the Holy Land and that he needed the money for that purpose. Nothing more is known of him.50 It is hard to generalize from t hese individual cases. We see that three of the four were in Amsterdam before they came to Italy. The struggle for survival as refugees in Italy seems to have been difficult—Hanover, too, had to resort to putting out a book before he was recognized as an outstanding scholar and given support. For educated refugees, the publishing business looks to have been one way of supplementing a meager income. Finally, for all four Italy was not their final destination. Even Yaʾakov ben Naftali wanted to raise enough money so he could return home. One final point to be clarified here as far as possible is that of numbers. Is there any way to determine just how many Polish Jews came to Italy? In the very nature of refugee movements, it is extremely difficult to reach satisfactory figures. Nonetheless, in his history of the Jews in Italy, Attilio Milano noted, on the basis of a hitherto unknown census from 1655, that the Jewish population of Venice had grown from 1,043 in 1593 to 4,870 in 1655. Much of this he attributed to the influx of refugees from Poland following 1648.51 Unfortunately, no sources have been found to back up his claim, though it does seem quite possible that a temporary community of refugees might have developed in Venice, living “under the radar.” We started this discussion with the question of how much financial support the Italian communities gave to individual Polish Jews. Though the source base is too fragmentary to provide a solid answer, we can draw some tentative conclusions. The materials seem to suggest that there was a constant flow of Polish Jews traveling around the communities asking for, and generally receiving, money. The amounts given to each individual were mostly small, but, as far as the communities were concerned, the outlay over time must have been considerable. To that should also be added the sums given in acts of personal generosity as well as the drain on communal poor funds caused by helping indigent refugees who were living on the margins of society in various places. In all, it must have been a significant amount.
Philanthropy’s Dark Side Before we examine how money was raised for various Jewish communities, we should first consider how unscrupulous Jews exploited the philanthropic efforts of Italian Jewry to take the money for themselves. We have already seen in the case of Yaʾakov ben Naftali just how easy it could be in
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the chaotic situation of the 1650s and 1660s to persuade the well-meaning to support individuals without the proper credentials. A major problem was the kibutz document, which was used to establish the good name of the person asking for money by means of a series of references. However, if the first entry—say, that of a rabbi in far distant Poland—was forged, only one Italian rabbi had to be taken in and add his own paragraph to give the document the veneer of respectability necessary to persuade many more to do so. Such forgeries were not uncommon, and those who could did their best to check the signatures that appeared. That was not always possible as can be seen in the following regulation issued by the community of Fez in Morocco, a fter the end of the refugee crisis: a week does not pass without six or seven paupers coming h ere from the Maghreb, but more even than them are the men from Ashkenaz and Poland, most of whom have signed letters [of recommendation]. They come from their country to ransom captives but then their wickedness comes to light; they have forged the letters and taken the money by force.52
It was not only t hose collecting for pidyon shevuyim who engaged in embezzlement of this kind. In the 1660s, the Lithuanian Jewish Council castigated emissaries from the Land of Israel who collected money for the Jews in the Holy Land but kept it for themselves. Clearly there were Jews willing to exploit networks of Jewish solidarity for their own personal gain.53 The publishing trade, often a means of providing refugees with money to survive, was not immune to this kind of dishonest behavior. In 1656, an enterprising Polish Jew named Yehoshuʾa ben David of Lviv, sensing a market for stories about the atrocities in Poland, decided to bring out a new (third) edition of the chronicle Tzok ha-ʾitim. Written by Me’ir of Szczebrzeszyn, the book had first been published in 1650 in Kraków and then was reissued in Salonica in 1652. For his edition, Yehoshuʾa added a new title page and introduction, taking the opportunity to pass himself off as the author of the work.54 This act of plagiarism probably did not bring Yehoshuʾa extra income (in the absence of Me’ir of Szczebrzeszyn, he would have made the same amount by having the book printed and selling the copies himself ). Perhaps this was rather the strategy of a Polish Jewish refugee who, in the confusion of the war years, wanted to gain some benefit for himself by taking on a new identity as an author worthy of respect.
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Helping Polish Jews 2: Emissaries on Behalf of Others If it was only a matter of weeks before the first reports of the disasters in Poland reached Italy in the late summer of 1648, it was not until February 1650 that the first actual emissary turned up asking for money. That was David Carcassoni, collecting for Istanbul Jewry. More than another year would pass before a representative of a Polish community would appear in Italy. In the summer of 1651, two representatives of the major community of Lviv in t oday’s western Ukraine began to tour the Italian communities in search of relief funds for their home community.55 They were Gershon Ashkenazy and his colleague Moshe Ashkenazy, and they seem to have been successful in receiving pledges from a number of communities, including even from Ragusa in Dalmatia.56 For example, on June 8, 1651, Mantua promised them the generous sum of 50 ducats.57 At that point, however, they ran into a problem that would plague many such missions. It was much easier for the communities to pledge funds than actually to hand them over. This was a significant issue, because every day the emissaries had to stay in Italy waiting for the money to arrive increased their expenses and ate into what they could take back home. So, Moshe Zacuto, writing in the name of the Venetian Yeshivah Klalit, sent a circular letter to the Italian communities urging them to redeem their pledges to Lviv at the first possible opportunity.58 A little while later, Shmu’el Aboab wrote to his colleague Moshe Alteras, perhaps in Ferrara, asking him to tell the local Levantine community to “delay no longer [sending] the money that . . . they pledged to this mission a few months back. The emissaries set out from here on their way home before it kept its word . . . as all the other Italian communities had managed to do.”59 Fortunately, the emissaries’ journey back to Lviv seems to have included fundraising stops on the way, such as in Hamburg in early October 1652, which provided ample opportunities for forwarding them the remaining money from Venice.60 The emissaries from Lviv left Italy just as Carcassoni was on his way back from Amsterdam to begin fundraising there himself. That poor timing cannot have helped his efforts, which were made even more difficult early in 1652 by the appearance of an emissary from the Ukrainian community of Ostroh. His name was Efraim ben Avraham, and in February of that year he was in Mantua where he received a pledge of 50 scudi.61 Other communities in which he raised money included Casale (63 ducats, 18 groszy), Alessandria (12 reals, 2 lira), and Nizza (20 reals).62 He also
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seems to have visited Genoa, Turin, and, of course, Venice, though there is no record of what he was pledged t here. By the beginning of the summer, he was already on his way home. On June 21 (15 Tammuz, 5412), Shmu’el Aboab sent a letter to him in Innsbruck, promising to have a bill of exchange on the amount still owed him drawn up and taken posthaste to Vienna for him to collect t here.63 The issue of high overheads seems to have deterred some communities from sending an emissary at all.64 Letters were continually being sent to the Italian communities on behalf of “the Jews of Poland” from places whose names the Italian scribes did not see fit to mention. Mantua sent a contribution of 100 ducats under this rubric in 1651, Padua 30 litrin in 1654.65 Possibly the greatest success of the letter-writing strategy came in 1656 following the terrible massacres perpetrated by the Polish general Czarniecki in Great Poland. A flood of refugees had reached Vienna, whose Jews w ere unable to give much more help either to them or to the devastated communities in Poland. The community there wrote to Venice asking for its help. In response Venetian Jewry held the special day of fasting and mourning with which we opened this chapter. They described it in a letter to the Jews of Mantua: In our community, the Esteemed Rabbis ordered a public fast day, with the recitation of penitential and supplicatory prayers in the morning. Following that, in the [afternoon] minḥah service, Our Father, Our King was recited and then the . . . awful66 letter [describing the tragedy] was read aloud. Without delay, a collection was made from each individual and each synagogue of any standing in order to help those poor oppressed [Jews].67
To the amounts raised in Venice, Mantua added 200 ducats and the Ashkenazi community of Padua a further 50. More must have come in from other communities too. This might indeed be viewed as the high point of Italian Jewry’s campaigns on behalf of Polish Jewry.68 The Jews of Istanbul also seem to have been thinking about strategies to reduce expenses when they planned a second mission to Europe in 1656. After all, its high overheads had been one of the reasons that David Carcassoni’s mission had failed. In the end, Istanbul settled on a compromise plan. A member of a leading rabbinic family, Yaʾakov Benvenisti, would be sent to Venice, but only there. Once he was in place, he would write letters to all the communities asking for money—and take responsibility for dealing with the amounts raised.69 We do not know the results of this mission,
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but once again the timing was not good since it overlapped with the very successful 1656 drive for Polish Jewry in Venice and other communities. Only two years passed before Istanbul Jewry sent out another emissary, though this time they tried a different tack entirely. They chose a scholar who seems to have wanted to travel to Venice anyway to get a book published and so could combine the fundraising mission with his personal journey.70 More importantly, however, they chose an Ashkenazi Jew from Poland to represent them—a man who had lost his wife and his five sons during the fighting t here—rather than a member of the Sephardi community.71 It is tempting to speculate that this reflected their disillusionment with the Sephardi ransoming network, to which they had addressed themselves as fellow Sephardi Jews and been largely rebuffed. The new emissary, Zvi Hirsh ben Shimshon Tokhfirer from Kraków, would be able to present himself as a Polish Jewish survivor and so ask potential contributors for help in relieving the suffering of his own people—a much easier sell in philanthropic terms. He set out in 1658, and in August of that year he was in the community of Larissa in Greece obtaining a rabbinic approbation for his book, Naḥalat Tzvi.72 The next we hear of him is in Mantua on October 5, 1659. His success might be measured by the fact that while his trip also overlapped with the arrival of a representative from Poland itself—Avraham Berech bar Yo’el, who was collecting for the Lublin community—this does not seem to have caused him significant problems.73 In Mantua, Tokhfirer received 30 ducats for the Jews of Istanbul as well as the expenses for the next leg of his trip to Verona.74 He was still in Venice, collecting money, when his book came out there on February 13, 1660.75 The last record of his mission is from December 1664, in the Polish town of Poznań, where he persuaded the local community council to institute a special tax to help cover the costs of ransoming the Jewish captives in Istanbul—yet another benefit of choosing a Polish Jew to raise funds.76 In 1661 a completely new kind of emissary arrived in Italy: one representing the Lithuanian Jews captured by the Russian army and then sold into slavery in Iran. The first mission of this sort that we know of reached Padua on January 2. There the pidyon shevuyim fund made an immediate donation of 15 reals, insisting that the money be handed to the emissaries on the spot so that they would not be kept in Italy any longer than was absolutely necessary.77 At around the same time, a second emissary of Jewish captives in Iran came to Europe, this time to Poland. His name was Shlomo Zalman ben Yaʾakov Ephraim Menaḥem, and he was originally from Lithuania.
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He and his two sons had been captured by the Russian army in 1654 or 1655 and had been sold on to Iran together with a large group of other Jews. Some then converted in order to save themselves, but many did not. Shlomo Zalman not only managed to escape but succeeded in raising enough money to ransom his sons. At that point, however, he decided that it was his responsibility to ransom not just his own boys but the whole group of forty-two Jews. So, leaving his sons as surety, he traveled west in order to raise the money he needed. In Poland, the Council of the Four Lands proved very sympathetic and instituted a country-wide tax to raise money, as well as a compulsory monthly donation to be made by e very adult Jew. It also appointed three treasurers to make sure that all the money collected would be brought to the great fair in Lublin. From t here, it was then to be sent to the Istanbul community, who would forward it to Iran.78 Another emissary from Iran reached Italy in 1661, coming to Padua in early November. This time, the size of the group to be ransomed was much larger—500 captives all told. The emissary’s name was Yaʾakov Yisra’el ben Yehonatan, and his story was backed up not only by the letters he carried but by o thers sent to Padua perhaps from Iran, as well as from Venice. In its meeting of November 5, the community was prepared to be generous, but it was Yaʾakov Yisra’el’s bad luck that at just the same time came news of thirteen Jewish captives in Algiers and eight on Malta that needed to be ransomed too. So, of the 50 ducats that Padua was prepared to give, only 30 went to the prisoners in Iran, while 12 went to t hose in Algiers and 8 to those on Malta.79 Sadly, this was not the end of the story, because Padua did not make its payment promptly and in July 1662 received an angry letter from Venice demanding that the money for the captives in Iran be sent without delay.80 Fin ally, on December 9, 1663, an emissary called Avraham ben Elimelekh, another prisoner from Iran, came to the Ashkenazi ransoming society in Venice with a list of a little over 40 captives to be ransomed. The society agreed to support him to the tune of 76 ducats.81 Though no more emissaries from Iran came to Italy, a number from Poland and Istanbul continued to arrive over the next decade. The last of t hese reached Venice from Poznań in 1672. Each seems to have been received with dignity and to have been given a certain amount of money (though not always immediately).82 In addition, 1664 saw a second day of fasting, mourning, and donation held in Venice, Mantua, and Padua, for Polish Jews, particularly in Kraków, following a renewed outburst of local violence in eastern Europe.83
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It would be interesting to know in precise terms just how much help the Jews of Italy gave to their coreligionists suffering in eastern Europe all told, but the data are simply too fragmentary to come anywhere near a reconstruction. And even if we could make one, it would still be impossible to assess the real significance of this financial aid for e ither the Jews of Italy who gave it or the Jews of Poland who received it. The best that can be said is that Polish Jews and their problems never r eally left the philanthropic agenda of the Italian Jewish communities for a period of almost twenty-five years a fter 1648. That, in itself, is no small thing.
The Question of Motivation Our discussion until now has followed the fate of the Polish Jews captured by Tatars and then put up for sale in Istanbul. From their point of view, and even more from that of Istanbul Jewry, which was struggling to raise the huge sums necessary to ransom so many people at one time, the response of the Italian communities must have been deeply disappointing. It was not that the Jews of Italy refused to provide support. Quite the reverse. Each time an emissary turned up in one Italian community or another, he seems to have been treated well and in the vast majority of cases was given some money t oward his mission. The problem was with the amounts involved. Istanbul Jewry needed to raise money in the hundreds of thousands of ducats; the Italian communities w ere giving in the tens or, at best, the hundreds. The reasons for this disparity w ere complex but did not reflect a lack of concern for Polish Jewry and their problems. The issue seems to have been more that each system treated the captives in a different way. In the Black Sea slave trade, as far as Jews were concerned, the captives from eastern Europe w ere the major, if not the only, problem, and the community of Istanbul and its needs w ere of key importance. However, as soon as Istanbul Jewry tried to finance the help for the Polish Jews with donations from the west, it found itself in a quite different system, in which it was marginal at best. Organizing the ransom of Jewish merchants from the region was an issue of enormous importance for the Jews of Italy not just on religious grounds but in economic terms, too. In that situation, the needs of the Polish Jewish captives w ere bound to be of secondary importance (if that) and the demands of Istanbul Jewry seen as a distraction from, if not actually a threat to, the primary ransoming effort. Nonetheless, the Jews of Italy did prove willing to help Polish Jewry and continued to do so for many years. Though the amounts they gave
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on each individual occasion w ere usually small, they w ere prepared to put their hands in their pockets time after time. They found money for emissaries not only from the Polish communities but from Istanbul and Iran too, as well as for Jewish individuals raising money to ransom family members and Jewish refugees looking for shelter, not to mention written requests for help from Poland itself or from Vienna. Looked at in those terms, this was an astonishing, quarter-of-a-century-long display of enormous generosity. Finding an explanation for it is not s imple. Pidyon shevuyim had been a religious imperative in Jewish society from Talmudic times, and the Jews of Italy had been engaged in ransoming captives long before the Polish Jewish captives came along. They would have been quite justified in saying that they were already fulfilling their religious obligations by ransoming Sephardi captives and that the problems of Polish Jewry were an Ashkenazi matter and had nothing to do with them. This they did not do, so something deeper must have been at work. Israeli historiography, following Yisra’el Halperin, has tended to characterize the fundraising for Polish Jewry as a spontaneous expression of Jewish solidarity.84 Underlying it, they see the Jews of the seventeenth century responding to the concept of “Klal Yisra’el” (perhaps best translated as “the Jewish collectivity”), which meant that Jews everywhere understood themselves to be a single, interconnected body.85 The significance of the term is that it was (and still is) commonly used to explain the development of modern Jewish nationalism since the French Revolution.86 These historians are thus reading back that later development into the early modern period. This argument is problematic in a number of ways. First, the giving, though it clearly responded to the needs of the moment, actually formed part of a philanthropic routine g oing back centuries. Even the transregional organization of collection from across Italy and the Sephardi diaspora was not new in 1648 but had been developing since the early seventeenth century. Second, neither the concept of “Klal Yisra’el” nor the term itself appears in the classical Jewish sources or plays a significant role in seventeenth- century rhetoric. To explain premodern Jewish solidarity, other concepts are much more useful. Two of the most important are kedushah (holiness) and beḥirah (election), often used in the descriptions of the Jews as goy kadosh (holy people) and am nivḥar (chosen people).87 The ubiquity of these terms in premodern Jewish culture gives them great significance in understanding the mind-set of the time. Their importance lies particularly
The Role of Ita li a n Jew ry [ 159 ]
in their designation of the connection between Jews as both God-given and religious, derived from the Torah. Without that, the connection between the Sephardi Jews of the Mediterranean world and the Ashkenazi Jews of eastern Europe would have been tenuous: a fter all, they spoke different languages, practiced different rituals and customs, had different historical experiences (from at least the tenth century), and understood their place in the world in different ways. It was their understanding of belonging to a single, religiously defined people, chosen by God and forged by the experience at Mount Sinai, that allowed the Jews of the seventeenth c entury to feel connected with each other over g reat distances. This was a premodern phenomenon, and t here is no need to read back concepts from a l ater period in order to understand it. Moreover, rather than simply expressing Jewish solidarity, the refugee crisis actually affected it. While in e arlier times the sense of transregional connection had, owing to the difficulties of travel and communication, been rather abstract, the events following 1648 suddenly made it a practical issue of burning importance that demanded an immediate response. Undoubtedly the new conditions of the seventeenth century encouraged the growth of the transregional Jewish ransoming network and allowed the Polish Jewish ransoming effort to reach the proportions it did. However, it was the Jews’ religious self-perception as a single, holy people that motivated the Jews of Italy (not to mention t hose of Istanbul, the Sephardi network, and communities such as Vienna) to connect the two by including the Polish Jews in their already wide-ranging philanthropic efforts.
ch a p t er f if t ee n
The Jews in the Land of Israel and the Spread of Sabbatheanism
it is perhaps inevitable that refugee crises and, even more, the events that set them in motion have effects that are felt far beyond the immediate humanitarian problems. In our case, the wars in eastern Europe that caused the waves of refugees and captives whose fate we have looked at until now also had an enormous impact on the Jewish world in other ways. One group very hard hit was the Jews living in the Land of Israel, particularly in Jerusalem. A graphic account of their problems was written by an English divine in 1658: The state of the Jews at Jerusalem of late was such, that they could not live and subsist t here, without some yearly supply and contribution from their brethren abroad. . . . Therefore, the Jews of Poland, of Lithuania . . . where great multitudes of that nation were seated, were wont in former time to send to the German Jews,1 dwelling at Jerusalem, yearly about 30,000 imperiall dollars . . .2 by which means they subsisted in some tolerable manner. . . . But since the desolation, brought by war upon Poland . . . they have been in g reat extremity of want; insomuch, that in the year one thousand six hundred fifty five, four hundred of their widows were famished to death, and the taxes laid upon them by the Turks, being rigorously exacted, they w ere haled into prison, their synagogues w ere shut up, their Rabbis and elders beaten and cruelly used. So that to find relief . . . they sent two of the chief Rabbis to their brethren in Europe, to acquaint them with their state, and to desire some help from them.3 [ 160 ]
The L a nd of Isr a el [ 161 ]
This text, much of which can be verified from other sources, not only recounts some of the transregional consequences of the eastern Euro pean wars beyond ransoming issues but also reminds us that alongside the pidyon shevuyim network, there existed another economic and religious system covering the entire Jewish world that was focused on the eastern Mediterranean. This was the philanthropic network dedicated to supporting Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. Though its goals were different, it overlapped with the pidyon shevuyim network: most communities collected money for both causes, sometimes even combining them into a single fund. The two systems thus acted in parallel, always in tension, and sometimes even in competition with each other. To understand this phenomenon and its broad significance for the Jewish world in both philanthropic and religious terms, we must now look in some detail at the issue of raising money for the Jews in the early modern Land of Israel.
Emissaries from the Land of Israel Collecting money for Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel was certainly nothing new in the mid-seventeenth century. In fact, the dispatching of fundraising emissaries from the Land of Israel was a venerable custom with roots in antiquity.4 In the Middle Ages, however, the practice seems largely to have disappeared, probably as a result of the difficulties of communication between different Jewish centers.5 This did not mean that supporting Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel disappeared from the communities’ philanthropic agenda. Wealthy individuals in both the Sephardi and Ashkenazi worlds continued to make it one of the causes to which they would donate sometimes significant sums.6 The turning point came following the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and even more the conquest of the Land of Israel and its inclusion in the Ottoman Empire in 1517. The Ottomans’ more welcoming attitude to Jewish settlement meant that the Jewish population in the Land of Israel began to grow rapidly, particularly in the town of Tzfat, which became a major center of textile production.7 Until well into the second half of the sixteenth century, local wealth in Jewish hands as well as donations sent from abroad meant that little need was felt to send emissaries, the so- called Shluḥei de-Rabbanan or Shadarim, to the diaspora.8 This was true even of Jerusalem, whose Jewish population traditionally lived largely off philanthropic funds since the possibilities for productive work t here were very limited.9
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As the boom of the first half of the c entury dissipated, the economic situation of the Jews began to worsen, with Tzfat hit hard by the decline of the Ottoman textile industry.10 In the last decades of the sixteenth century, emissaries began to be sent much more regularly from the more important Jewish communities, such as Tzfat and Jerusalem, as well as Hebron and even Tiberias. In fact, it was in this period, very possibly as a fundrais ing ploy, that t hese communities began to be known as “The Four Holy Cities.”11 By the time the sixteenth c entury drew to a close, Tzfat had lost its place to Jerusalem as the major Jewish community in the Land of Israel. This was a significant development in a number of ways, not least b ecause Tzfat was dominated by its Sephardi population, while in Jerusalem there was a relatively strong Ashkenazi community. This last had its own communal organization and institutions, including a rabbi, a rabbinical court, and a yeshiva, and jealously maintained its independence.12 Nonetheless, the Muslim authorities held the Sephardi community of Jerusalem responsible for paying taxes for all the Jews in the town, including the Ashkenazim. How much the Ashkenazim owed the Sephardim for this and how the payments were to be made remained a source of contention between the two groups throughout the seventeenth century and made the process of fundraising considerably more difficult.13 The complicating f actor was that the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim did not cooperate in raising money in the diaspora. Each group sent its own missions, with Sephardi emissaries focusing mostly on Sephardi communities, Ashkenazi emissaries mostly on Ashkenazi ones. This continued throughout the seventeenth century, as can be seen in a letter addressed to Avraham ben Mordechai ha-Levi, rabbi in Cairo, in the 1690s: From time immemorial, the general custom has been that Sephardim across the world send their pledges and their donations to the Sephardi communities in the Land of Israel, who never gave their Ashkenazi neighbors anything, not even the smallest amount. In the same way, the towns [in the] Ashkenazi [lands] send their pledges and donations to their Ashkenazi brethren in the Land of Israel, and they do not give anything to the Sephardim.14
Even though this division was never strictly kept, the Sephardim, who generally seem to have felt short-changed by the Ashkenazim on the question of taxes, w ere not always satisfied with the arrangement, feeling that it allowed the Ashkenazim to continue avoiding their tax dues.
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The Ashkenazim, on the other hand, who for most of the first half of the seventeenth century w ere supported by very generous contributions from the flourishing Jewish center in Poland-Lithuania, do not seem to have been too upset. It was when that money dried up as a result of the wars in eastern Europe that the situation began to change.15
The Collapse of Ashkenazi Fundraising in the 1650s The only figure we have for the amount of support the Jews of eastern Europe gave the Jews of Jerusalem before 1648 is that provided by the Puritan divine mentioned above: 30,000 reichsthalers. T here is no way to verify it. On the other hand, it does seem entirely reasonable to assume that large amounts of money w ere indeed sent to Jerusalem from Poland- Lithuania, which was, after all, one of the largest and wealthiest Jewish centers of the early seventeenth century. Polish-Lithuanian Jews seem to have raised money for the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem in two main ways, though it is sometimes hard to distinguish one from the other. The first was institutional. Various Jewish bodies such as communities or regional and supraregional councils made support for the needy Jews in the Land of Israel a part of their regular philanthropic collections. For example, in its budget of 1637–38, the community of Poznań set aside 303 zlotys and 20 groszy for “the poor in the Land of Israel and the relatives of Y.K.”16 This was obviously an annual commitment b ecause precisely the same entry appears in the budget of 1645–46 (the only other one from this period to have survived).17 The line in the Poznań community budget also helps us understand the second way in which money was collected for the Land of Israel. When individual Jews decided to move there, usually toward the end of their life (the pious often wanted to die in the Holy Land), they or their relatives would sometimes invest a sum of money with a community or a council, on the understanding that the interest from it would be sent to the Land of Israel each year to support them.18 So, in the spring of 1648, before the Ukrainian uprising really got under way, a widow by the name of Freidel invested 940 zlotys with the Lithuanian Jewish Council before she left for the Holy Land. The Council committed itself to send her 150 zlotys each year until she died, at which time the money would be passed on to vari ous members of her f amily.19 It was not only local Jews who a dopted this kind of arrangement. Just a few days after Freidel had signed her agreement with the Lithuanian Jewish Council, a Jew from Prague, Yoḥanan ben Moshe Weil, did exactly the same t hing, investing 1,002 zlotys for an
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annual return of 200.20 In 1647–48, the Kraków community concluded no less than three such deals.21 The ways in which the money was collected may be seen in a ruling made by the Lithuanian Jewish Council in 1623. It ordered two major calls for donation to be made by each community every year, the first in the fall, during the High Holidays, and the second in the spring at the Passover holiday. In addition, at the beginning of e very month, a small collection was to be made in all synagogues. All the money from the communities, including the interest owed on various loans, would be gathered in one of Lithuanian Jewry’s three regional centers and then sent to the great international fair in Lublin, where the Polish Jewish Council of Four Lands met.22 There, it would be added to the money from the Polish communities and handed over to a special officer: the Treasurer for the Land of Israel, based in Lviv. It was his responsibility to see the money transferred to the Jews of Istanbul, who would then forward it to the communities in the Holy Land.23 The amounts collected soon mounted up. In its first semiannual collection of 1627, the Council of Four Lands alone amassed 12,000 zlotys for the Land of Israel.24 However, with the outbreak of the Khmelnytsky uprising in 1648 this well-organized system began to break down. T here w ere a number of reasons for this. Communities destroyed or abandoned in the fighting could no longer pay anything. Other communities, including Lviv, found themselves in terrible financial straits and had to reduce, if not stop, their payments. Even as far away as Lithuania, the communities wrote to the Council in 1652, asking to be relieved of the burden of collecting for the Jews in the Holy Land. The Council was unsympathetic and decreed that the collections w ere to continue; how effective this ruling was is by no means clear.25 Finally, of course, the wartime conditions meant that sending money from place to place (even as a bill of exchange) was extremely hazardous. When the second wave of wars broke out in 1654 and engulfed many of the communities that had not been touched by the violence in Ukraine, the money from eastern Europe seems to have dried up entirely. Simply in order to survive, the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem began to borrow and soon found itself in debt to its Muslim neighbors to the tune of 15,000 reichsthalers. With no end of the wars in sight and no way of repaying their debt, the Ashkenazim saw their synagogue closed, their valuables confiscated, and their leaders imprisoned. They w ere given some reprieve by the governor of the Jerusalem sanjak (administrative region), who purchased the debt and agreed to reduce it to 7,000 reichsthalers, provided
The L a nd of Isr a el [ 165 ]
it was repaid within two years. Failure to do so would bring the severest penalties.26 Unfortunately, the Ashkenazim were no more able to find 7,000 reichsthalers than 15,000. Their economic situation continued to deteriorate, and, as we saw in the text with which this chapter opened, famine ensued. The only way to escape this disastrous situation was to send emissaries to Europe with the urgent mission of raiding funds. This the Ashkenazi community did. At that point, the Ashkenazi women of Jerusalem, particularly the widows who had been hardest hit by the famine, decided to take m atters into their own hands and engage an emissary of their own. They w ere not concerned with repaying debts to the Muslim authorities but simply with having enough money to buy food to eat. To achieve that, they told their emissary, Shmu’el Levi from Frankfurt, to approach only the Ashkenazi women of Europe and engage their help in sending money to the Land of Israel as women to w omen.27 The poor widows explained their needs in a special letter, written in Yiddish and addressed to the Jewish women of Germany and Poland, which they gave their emissary and which he had printed in order to circulate it as widely as possible.28 One copy has survived, and it is a highly valuable document, giving, as it does, a w oman’s view of seventeenth- century Ashkenazi Jewish life. It also provides a number of insights into the problems of raising money for the Land of Israel at a time when so much of the philanthropic funds w ere being used to help the Jews of Poland. To persuade the Ashkenazi w omen of Europe to donate generously, the letter explained that the leaders of the Jerusalem community had fallen into such debt that everyone was undergoing great suffering. The w omen who wrote the letter added on a personal note: “We are very tired of suffering . . . in fact, we cannot provide even half the food we need; our skin is burning up like an oven, shriveled from hunger and thirst.”29 They went on to ask the Ashkenazi w omen of Europe to appoint their own treasurers to collect money for the poor women of Jerusalem in the synagogues twice during the week as well as on Sabbaths and holidays. They particularly asked that collections be taken from pregnant w omen just before they gave birth. In return, they promised to pray for their benefactors, not just in Jerusalem but in the Cave of Makhpelah in Hebron, “where our pious mothers lie, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Le’ah, as well as other male and female saints, pious men and w omen. [We] w ill pray with tears in our eyes that God, Blessed Be He, fulfill your hearts’ desires.”30
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The w omen of Jerusalem then emphasized that though the money collected by the Ashkenazi Jewish w omen of Europe had to be handed to the male Treasurer for the Land of Israel, it should be clearly marked as meant for the poor women of Jerusalem.31 They insisted that it should not be mixed with the other contributions being sent to the men of Jerusalem because they wanted to be sure that the money would get to them. This was presumably because they thought that, unless ordered not to do so, the men of their community would take the money for communal purposes and leave them to starve. The letter was signed by twenty-eight Jewish women from the Holy City.32 The women’s idea seems to have been to try to turn themselves into a separate group within the Jews of Jerusalem, parallel to the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim. Driven to despair by the inability (perhaps even the refusal) of the men to provide them with even the basic necessities of life, they also tried to organize the Ashkenazi w omen of the diaspora into a separate source of funds that they alone could tap. The plan was not, in itself, far-fetched. Women did play a role in fundraising in the early modern Ashkenazi community and even had their own treasurers, called gabbayot or gabbetes.33 However, its success was completely dependent on the men in patriarchal, early modern Jewish society giving the women the kind of freedom they needed to make this a completely separate organ ization. As far as can be judged, that did not happen. The sources tell us nothing of any money raised by European women for the women of Jerusalem, and this initiative seems to have been a one-off. Nonetheless, it is another example of how the experiences of poverty and famine, like those of violence and flight, were gendered in seventeenth-century Jewish society. Its male-run philanthropic organ izations, both local and transregional, not only failed to recognize women’s specific needs but could treat them with enormous cruelty. The w omen for their part, in this case at least, did not take this state of affairs lying down but took an imaginative and innovative step to create their own organ ization. The failure of their initiative also shows just how difficult it was to bring about change in women’s status. By the time the poor w omen of Jerusalem sent out their emissary, the wars in Poland had been g oing on for some six years. Huge efforts w ere still being made to help Polish Jewry in its hour of need. In order to raise money for themselves, the w omen had to find a good reason to persuade donors that theirs was as worthy a cause as Polish Jewry, if not more so. It was not an easy message to get across and not one that could really be stated openly. They therefore made their point subtly and in stages. First,
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they asked rhetorically, “What greater a redemption of captives [pidyon shevuyim] can t here be than [helping the Jews of Jerusalem like] this?” Of course, they did not want to appear unconcerned about the fate of Polish Jewry, so when describing their prayers at the Western Wall, they were careful to say that they also prayed t here for the victims of the wars in Poland. Finally, though, they pointed out that while giving money might relieve the sufferings of Polish Jews in this world, “whoever has money here [in Jerusalem], can buy [a piece of] the World to Come.”34 This, then, seems to have been their real selling point. By sending their money to the poor w omen of Jerusalem rather than to Poland, the w omen of the diaspora would be ensuring themselves not only prayers for their welfare at the Western Wall and the Cave of Makhpelah but also a place in heaven itself. That would surely make them think carefully about whom to support. This is not the only source that hints at a kind of underlying, even unstated, competition between the emissaries for Polish Jewry and those from the Land of Israel over what w ere limited resources. It can perhaps also be seen in the regulations of the Moroccan community of Fez from 1678. The leaders t here, worried that not enough of their charity money was going to help the local poor, explained that “we have not managed to give them what they ought to have because of all the needy people coming here . . . particularly the emissaries from the Land of Israel and the Ashkenazim35 ransoming captives, who come one after the other . . . and when we try to keep back some of the money for the poor of [our] town, they do not agree and take it all.”36 What this complaint seems to suggest is that there was stiff competition over local philanthropic funds, with the various emissaries each trying to milk as much out of the community as they could, even at the expense of other charitable needs.
An Unexpected Solution: Nathan Shapira in Amsterdam The men of the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem may well have been conscious of these problems, because when they were looking for an emissary in 1654, they chose a Polish Jew, Nathan Shapira ben Re’uven David Teyvel, dayyan in Kraków.37 In terms of cultural background, then, he was little different from the emissaries from the Polish communities, and this would have helped him persuade his audience that giving to Jerusalem was no less important than giving to Poland. However, Shapira was more than just a s imple Polish Jew. He was also a distinguished scholar,
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particularly in the realm of kabbalah, which meant his voice would have had added authority in the diaspora.38 He was sent on his mission with a second emissary, whom he seems to have overshadowed completely—to such an extent that the colleague is barely even mentioned in the surviving documentation.39 Shapira himself first appears in the sources in 1654, when he visited Livorno and befriended the Polish Jewish refugee Nathan Hanover, a rabbi in the town.40 From t here, with Hanover in tow, he went to Venice, where he struck up a warm relationship with Moshe Zacuto, who seems to have had something of a soft spot for Polish Jews. Enjoying the patronage of the Monian brothers, Daniel and Abraham, as well as Shlomo Ḥai Saraval, Shapira used his time in Venice to have a book published.41 His goal in d oing so seems to have been different from that of the refugees who published books to supplement their income. Shapira’s text was called Tuv ha-aretz (The Bounty of the Land), and it dealt with the sanctity of life in Eretz Yisrael on the basis of kabbalistic thought. Shapira seems to have meant it to bolster his fundraising mission and defined his goal in writing it as “to stop up the mouth of those who tell lies to defame the Land [of Israel].”42 He was referring to those Sephardim newly returned to Judaism who had little interest in supporting causes outside their own community, especially in the Land of Israel.43 He ended the book with a series of penitential prayers, suffused with kabbalistic meaning, that were to be recited at midnight on different occasions during the Jewish year.44 With Jerusalem’s economic situation as desperate as it was, Shapira did not limit himself to approaching just the Ashkenazi communities of Europe. By the summer of 1655, he was in Amsterdam, where he asked the wealthy Sephardi community for support. He met one of its rabbis, Menasheh ben Yisra’el, and discussed the situation in Jerusalem with him, showing him letters he had brought describing the problem. Ben Yisra’el took the m atter very seriously and had the letters copied so that he could use them on his upcoming mission to E ngland to have the Jews readmitted there. It seems likely that the two also discussed the problems of Polish Jewry, b ecause ben Yisra’el raised them, too, in his discussions in London.45 The connection between the situation in Poland and that in Jerusalem was also emphasized in the English capital. A description of one of the sessions of the Whitehall Conference on the readmission of the Jews during December 4–18, 1655, written by another Puritan divine, Henry Jessey, says, among other things:
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Especially respect is to be had to the Jews. . . . Because many Jews are now in very great streighs [sic] in many places; multitudes in Polonia, Lituania, and Prussia, by the late wars by the Swedish, Cossacks, and others, being driven away from thence. Hence their yearly alms to the poor Jews (of the German synagogue) at Jerusalem hath ceased; and of the 700 w idows and poor Jews t here, about four hundred have been famished, as a letter from Jerusalem to their friends relates.46
The nature of the letter from Jerusalem is clarified later in the text, which mentions: “their letters thence [i.e., from Jerusalem] desiring relief from other Jews in Germany and Holland e tc. sent thither by the hand of R. Natan Stephira47 their messenger.”48 In Amsterdam, the maʾamad of the Sephardi community was not impressed with Shapira and turned down his request for money.49 However, as Richard Popkin has shown, his connection with Menasheh bore fruit in a different way.50 While he was in Amsterdam, Shapira was approached by a group of millenarian Protestants, who were in regular contact with the Dutch rabbi and shared much of his chiliastic vision. By their calculations, the next year, 1656, was to be the messianic year and so they were very interested to hear news from the Holy Land, particularly concerning the Jews t here, whose conversion to Christianity, they felt, was to herald the Second Coming. They therefore met with the rabbi from Jerusalem and learned from him of the terrible situation t here.51 Sometime after that, Shapira left Amsterdam. Without the support of the local Sephardim, he had to raise the money he needed from other communities in northwestern Europe. In the winter of 1655, he was in Hamburg where he approached the Sephardi community, which proved sympathetic. Its records read: “He [i.e., Shapira] presented letters which describe the g reat distress [in Jerusalem] due to the lack of financial support from Poland. The decision was to pay him 100 Reichsthaler in Venice.”52 He then seems to have traveled quite widely around the region, perhaps visiting the places Carcassoni had missed, and to have had some success.53 However, his greatest surprise came when he returned to Amsterdam on his way back to the Land of Israel. In his absence, his radical Protestant interlocutors, moved by the story from Jerusalem, had made their own collection and raised the equivalent of 395 ducats for him. This Shapira added to the rest of the money and went home.54 Accepting funds from Christians was a controversial move on Shapira’s part, and one questioned on his return by the rabbinical establishment in Jerusalem. According to the dry letter of Jewish law, it is forbidden to take
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philanthropy from non-Jews. The reasons given for this are first a general prohibition on contacts with idolaters and second the fact that non-Jews might be using their charity to prove their superiority over Jews. That would be both blasphemous and act to delay the coming of the Messiah.55 Nathan Shapira, who was strongly opposed to breaking down the barriers between Jews and Christians, must have known of t hese principles.56 He would also, however, have known the ruling of the Shulḥan ʾarukh, the authoritative codex of Jewish Law, which permits accepting non- Jewish charity u nder certain circumstances. One is when the charity given by Jews is not sufficient. In that case, it is permissible to accept money from non-Jews. Another is when the king (or other ruler) who gave it might be offended by having his generosity refused. In such a case, rules the Shulḥan ʾarukh, it is best to take the money and then dispose of it quietly by giving it to the non-Jewish poor.57 Shapira could certainly have justified taking the Protestant donation by claiming that the refusal of the Amsterdam Sephardim to support him meant that the ruling of the Shulḥan ʾarukh could come into play. And indeed, when the question was discussed in Jerusalem, that argument seems to have been made. Another line of defense was that Shapira had not solicited the money for philanthropic purposes; it had been a gift freely given.58 Perhaps influenced by their fear of what would happen if the debt to the governor was not repaid, the rabbis were persuaded and the money from the Dutch Christians was handed over, along with the rest. It was enough to cover the interest on the debt but not the principal, so in the spring of 1657 Shapira was sent back to Europe.59 Among the papers he was given was a letter of thanks from the rabbis of Jerusalem to their Christian benefactors in Amsterdam written presumably in Hebrew.60 Not surprisingly, then, he returned to the Netherlands early in his trip and renewed his contact with the millenarian Protestants. Once again, he discussed with them the distress in Jerusalem but also emphasized the terrible situation of the Jews in eastern Europe, having perhaps grasped, as Menasheh ben Yisra’el had done before him, that the Christians to whom he was speaking saw the sufferings of the Jews in any place as one of the signs of the Messiah’s imminent return. That, however, was not the end of the matter. Shapira’s discussions with the group began to touch on religious m atters, as a letter from one of its leaders, Peter Serrarius, shows. According to Serrarius, when given the text of the Sermon on the Mount to read in Hebrew translation, Shapira found in it “the ground and fountain of all wisdom,” saying that
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“whosoever should keep t hose Commandments would be more just than he [i.e., Shapira] or his people [the Jews].” The rabbi was careful, however, to point out too “some t hings [in the sermon] which he thought w ere taken out of the most pure and ancient Rabbins.”61 Even more startling than that for the Christians, Shapira also discussed with them Isaiah 53:4–5, the famous “suffering servant” text. They, of course, read it in Christological terms, a reading that has often been denied by Jews very strenuously indeed. Shapira, however, did not refute their point of view, drawing instead on a different Jewish tradition that saw the text as a messianic prophecy just as they did. In fact, he presented them with the view that the Messiah had existed before Adam, so when Adam was cursed and had to leave Eden, “he [i.e., the Messiah] was moved with a most inward compassion and coming down from Heaven, he took the whole weight of that condemnation which neither Adam nor the w hole generation of mankind could have born [sic] upon himself.”62 Both these ideas—that the Messiah had existed before Adam and that it was his role to take on himself the sins of mankind—had firm roots in the Talmud and later Jewish writings, including the Zohar, the most important kabbalistic text (with which Shapira must have been intimately familiar).63 It is therefore unclear w hether the Jewish mystic was giving his Christian interlocutors his own view of the verse from Isaiah or whether he was making a strategic choice of interpretation as a way of engaging them and opening their pockets. Serrarius became very excited, writing to his fellow Protestants, particularly those in E ngland, to tell the story of the Jewish rabbi from Jerusalem who held views very close to their own.64 They responded with great enthusiasm, particularly Henry Jessey, John Dury, and their group in London, who decided that they too should raise money for the suffering Jews. Two collections were held in England, which raised the impressive sum of 212 pounds sterling, some of which Jessey held back in order to support the beleaguered Jewish community of Vilnius.65 Though he may have sympathized with the Jews, whose suffering he saw as a harbinger of the Second Coming, Jessey certainly did not trust them. He refused to send the funds he had raised for the Jews of Jerusalem u ntil he had received assurances that two respected Jewish merchants from Frankfurt a.M. would stand as surety for it.66 Beyond that, in 1659, he wrote a letter to the Jews of Jerusalem, translated presumably into Hebrew, to make crystal clear both his feelings toward them and his motivation for helping them:
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To the dispersed of Judah in Jerusalem of the German Synagogue, some of the Disciples of Christ in London daily praying for your conversion . . . send greeting as follows: Having heard of your late famishing case since God called the sword of the Swedes against the Polonians, as if he rul’d over you with fury powred out . . . thoroughly to h umble your hard uncircumcised hearts;67 although you are enemies to us for the Gospel sake, yet a remnant of you being beloved for your Father’s sake, and being by Christ taught to love our enemies . . . we desire you to accept of what herewith from London we have sent you. . . . And we believe . . . also that your mourning shall be turned into joy to you and all that have mourned with and for you.68 And as your fall was our rise, so your return s hall be as life from the dead to all . . . and the Redeemer s hall come to Zion.69
It is not hard to imagine the anger that the receipt of such a letter caused the Jews of Jerusalem, particularly as the money had already been paid to the governor of the sanjak and could not be returned. Perhaps as a result, Rabbi Yaʾakov Ḥagiz, the town’s leading rabbi and Head of Yeshiva, was asked to rule on the legitimacy of taking the donation from England. He was in a position to adopt an independent stance on the matter because he had settled in Jerusalem in 1658, well a fter the first ruling on taking money from millenarian Protestants.70 The arguments put before him supporting the legitimacy of accepting the donation stressed the danger facing the Ashkenazi community if it did not pay its debts. Two other reasons w ere given: first, it was suggested that the radical Protestants, who rejected the use of any kind of imagery in their churches, did not fit into the category of idolaters, such that the prohibition might not apply;71 and second, the speculation was raised that these Judaizing Christians might be descendants of the Jews of the medieval Anglo-Jewish community from before the expulsion of 1290, who had been forced to convert to Christianity. In that case, they might even be, halakhically speaking, Jews, from whom accepting charity was permitted. In his very laconic and undated ruling, Ḥagiz agreed that in a situation of danger it was permissible to accept the money, particularly because contemporary non-Jews were not to be considered idolaters. He was not impressed, however, with the argument based on the possible Jewish ancestry of the millenarians. He pointed out that if they r eally were descendants of medieval Anglo-Jews, they might have to be considered voluntary converts, which would make accepting charity from them even more problematic. Still, when it came to ruling on the case itself, Ḥagiz
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found room for leniency. He took the reassuring line that since the money had already been taken and since it had been paid not to Jews but to Muslims, t here was nothing to be concerned about.72 Sadly, however, even with these two contributions from Christian groups, the economic situation of the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem did not improve. Despite a sharp increase in the number of emissaries in the second half of the seventeenth c entury, the combination of decreased income from eastern Europe and the burden of debt to local Muslims proved too much. The Ashkenazi community never managed to solve its economic problems, which turned into a crisis once more at the beginning of the eighteenth century.73 Shapira himself does not seem to have gone back to the Land of Israel. Once his fundraising efforts had come to an end, he returned to Italy and made his home in Reggio until his death in 1664.74 This story of the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem and its economic problems in the 1650s demonstrates well the extensive r ipple effect caused by the suffering of the Jews in the wars of eastern Europe. The consequences w ere not just demographic, affecting Jewish settlement in Jerusalem and England, but began to reshape Jewish-Christian relations in early modern Europe. Millenarian Protestants were persuaded, for what seems to have been the very first time, to back up their vision of the end of days with financial support for the Jews in the Holy Land.75 That then forced the leaders of Ashkenazi Jewry to reconsider their relations with the non-Jewish world of their day. Jewish w omen, too, though less concerned about relations with non-Jews, were also forced to begin a process of reconsideration, in their case of their place in a patriarchal society. The effects of the crisis did not end t here, however, and continued to reverberate well into the next decade and beyond.
The Ransoming Crisis and the Messiah: The Sabbathean Connection In fact, the 1660s w ere witness to an enormous transregional upheaval of the Jewish world, even greater than that caused by the wars in eastern Europe. This was the huge movement of religious enthusiasm among Jews aroused by the supposed appearance in 1665 of the Messiah in the form of Shabtai Zvi. Within a year, that was replaced by disappointment and b itter religious polemic following Shabtai Zvi’s conversion to Islam, forced upon him by the Ottoman sultan in Edirne in 1666. The story is well enough known, so we will here focus only on the vexed question of the possible
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relationship between the wars of eastern Europe, which began in 1648, and the massive spread of Sabbatheanism less than two decades l ater.76 Perhaps the most magisterial statement of that connection was made by Gershom Scholem in his biography of Shabtai Zvi. He focused on the Sabbathean movement’s extensive and rapid growth into a transregional movement, arguing that only a f actor that could be traced to all the places where Sabbatheanism took place could serve as an explanation for it. While he examined the fate of the Jews in the wars beginning in 1648 as a possible cause, he eventually dismissed it as a local factor of limited importance. Instead, he saw the spread of Lurianic kabbalah to every corner of the Jewish world as preparing the ground for the rapid acceptance of Shabtai’s messianic claims, which were deeply rooted in that kabbalistic system.77 Since then, Scholem’s view has been put to the test by other scholars and found wanting in a number of ways. First and foremost, the spread of Lurianic kabbalah in the pre-1648 Jewish world has been called into question. It was by no means as widespread or as deep-rooted as Scholem wanted to see it, so its utility as the major, not to say the only, cause of the spread of Sabbatheanism is doubtful.78 From the other side, the idea that the east European wars should be viewed as only a local phenomenon has been rejected too. In fact, Yisra’el Halperin wrote his groundbreaking article on the capture and ransom of east European Jewry in the mid-seventeenth c entury as a direct, if deferential, polemic with Scholem on this point.79 Since his time, scholars such as Yaʾakov Barnai and Ada Rapoport-Albert have revisited the issue and found a range of connections between the two phenomena.80 The main thrust of their argument runs as follows. Shabtai Zvi and his prophet, Nathan of Gaza, must have been fully aware of the terrible massacres from reports the thousands of captives and refugees to the Ottoman Empire brought with them. Not only that, but t here is direct evidence that both saw in the sufferings of Polish Jewry a sign that the end of days was approaching—“ the footprints of the Messiah,” in Jewish parlance. Among the evidence marshaled to support this case are the following: 1. S habtai Zvi first proclaimed his Messiah-hood in 1648, and though nothing came of it at the time, he would later be reported as saying that since that year the crown had been placed on his head. 2. When asked about the messianic figure who was supposed to prefigure his arrival (the so-called Messiah son of Joseph), Shabtai claimed that he had been a Polish Jew who had died unrecognized in the massacres.
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3. Shabtai chose as his third wife Sarah, a Polish Jewish refugee from eastern Europe. 4. Shabtai told emissaries from Poland who visited him in Edirne that he knew all about the massacres, as he was constantly reading the Hebrew chronicle Tzok ha-ʾitim. He also promised them vengeance for their suffering at the hands of non-Jews. 5. Among the prophecies of Nathan of Gaza were visions of Shabtai Zvi, first usurping the Ottoman sultan and then, together with him, conquering the world. This, said Nathan, would largely be without bloodshed, and “he [i.e., Shabtai Zvi] will wreak vengeance only on the towns of Poland, for the blood of our brethren which was shed in those provinces.”81 What is prominent in this argumentation is the search for ways in which the experiences of east European Jewry played into the messianic vision of Shabtai himself or his prophet, Nathan. Much less emphasis is placed on how the fate of eastern European Jews might have affected the spread of the movement. Barnai did consider the issue to a certain extent, pointing to the widespread publication of the Hebrew chronicles as spreading news of the events across the Jewish world, thus changing them from a local to the kind of general phenomenon that Scholem had sought. He also picked up Halperin’s research, concluding that “the geographi cally widespread reverberations of the pogroms in Poland . . . allow the pogroms to be seen as a cause of the pan-Jewish messianic explosion.”82 It seems to me, however, that the effects of the wars in eastern Europe were also a f actor in the development of the channels of communication across the Jewish world that allowed the Sabbathean movement to spread so widely so quickly.83 To understand this, we need to focus on the figure who was, perhaps more than anyone e lse, responsible for the dissemination of Sabbatheanism, Avraham Nathan ben Elishaʾ Ḥayim Ashkenazi, better known as Nathan of Gaza.84 His role in the growth of the movement is not entirely clear. Scholem, who saw in Shabtai Zvi little more than a mentally disturbed simpleton, claimed that Nathan was more or less singlehandedly responsible for the development of Sabbathean ideology. Scholars since then have questioned that, seeing in Shabtai Zvi an important mystical thinker in his own right. No one, however, questions that Nathan’s indefatigable work in traveling and writing letters to a w hole range of Jewish communities, both before and a fter Shabtai’s conversion, was of key importance in ensuring the spread of his ideas.
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Nathan was born to an Ashkenazi family in Jerusalem in 1643 or 1644. When the wars in eastern Europe broke out, he would have been at most five years old, so he lived his w hole life in their shadow. During his childhood, he saw his community sink into poverty and, eventually, when he was ten or eleven, into starvation as a result of the drying up of donations from eastern Europe. He also became aware of the interconnected Jewish world at an early age when, in 1650, his father was one of the first members of the Ashkenazi community chosen to go on a fundraising mission to help cover the gap in income caused by the wars in Poland. Elishaʾ Ḥayim Ashkenazi went to North Africa, presumably because there was little chance of raising money in Poland, returning to Venice in 1654 with a not-inconsiderable sum. His fellow emissary’s conversion to Christian ity at that point meant that all t hose funds w ere lost, so Elishaʾ decided to continue his mission, trying his luck this time in the German lands and Poland-Lithuania. He did not return home u ntil 1666. Nathan, then, grew up without a father as a result of the Jews’ suffering caused by the wars of eastern Europe.85 His father’s experience was not his only window into the transregional aspects of mid-seventeenth-century Jewish life. When the first donation from the Dutch millenarian Protestants reached Jerusalem, Nathan would have been about bar mitzvah age, and as a very bright young man, he must have been aware of the scandal. When the second donation, this time from the English Protestants, arrived together with the conversionary and messianic letters in the late 1650s, he was already the star student in Yaʾakov Ḥagiz’s yeshiva in Jerusalem.86 While it is impossible to determine whether he played any role in helping Ḥagiz draw up his published ruling, it is absolutely certain that, as David Katz has argued, the donation and its various implications would have been discussed in the yeshiva.87 We know too that Nathan had read Shapira’s book Tuv ha-aretz because he quoted it in one of his letters.88 In many ways, then, Nathan of Gaza, the Prophet of Shabtai Zvi, was a child of the post-1648 world. His familiarity with the expanded world of communication that had developed in order to relieve the suffering of Polish Jews gave him precisely the tools he needed to ensure the spread of his messianic ideology. Like the emissaries, he traveled around from community to community spreading the word and winning adherents; in 1668, he even found his way to Venice where he tried to win over Shmu’el Aboab, Moshe Zacuto, and Shlomo Ḥai Saraval, though with no success.89 In common with many of the fundraisers, he also understood the value of letters for motivating people and wrote widely to various Jewish centers
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to build support for his cause. He even, like many a refugee or emissary, exploited the power of the press, composing special penitential prayers and popular ethical guides in a kabbalistic vein that could be printed cheaply and circulated broadly.90 It was by recognizing the importance of each of t hese means of communication and exploiting them in tandem that Nathan was able to stir up such an intense reaction across the Jewish world.
Conclusion The pidyon shevuyim network, which struggled to deal with the ransom of so many Jewish captives from eastern Europe, was not the only large Jewish philanthropic network in the Jewish world in the seventeenth century. The collection and disbursement of money to support Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel was done by means of a network that was very much parallel with it. The Jews’ suffering during the wars in eastern Europe had significant effects on these systems. The sudden appearance of thousands of captives needing ransom forced one network to raise huge sums of money on very short notice while the drying up of donations from eastern Europe caused widespread poverty among the Ashkenazim in the Land of Israel, which the other needed to relieve a few years l ater. The result was the same. Both needed to exploit their fundraising channels much more intensively. This increased activity had a number of different effects, helping strengthen the connections among distant communities and making communication between them, and even cooperation, a much more routine matter. It also affected efforts to further institutionalize transregional fundraising, though these were different in each case. Venice’s efforts to take control of Mediterranean pidyon shevuyim in the 1640s and make itself the clearinghouse for all funds raised and the final arbiter on how they w ere disbursed were completely overwhelmed. Even when the crisis was over, no further effort was made to centralize pidyon shevuyim. In the world of fundraising for the Land of Israel, the opposite occurred. The difficulties in balancing the budget of the Ashkenazim, which began in the 1650s, continued well into the eighteenth century and eventually led to the creation of a central body, the Vaʾad pekidei ‘Eretz Yisra’el be-Kushta’ (The Council of the Officials for the Land of Israel in Istanbul), responsible for all fundraising efforts.91 The economic pressures within the Jewish world caused by the wars also led to some rethinking of the very shape of Jewish society. In the realm
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of pidyon shevuyim, the barriers between Ashkenazim and Sephardim weakened. While research into the trading patterns of the “Nation”—the converso (or ex-converso) merchants of Jewish origin with an Iberian background—has emphasized their internal cohesion as a group, when it came to pidyon shevuyim, they proved willing to help Ashkenazi Jews.92 This was not the case in the fundraising for the Land of Israel. Though the division between Sephardim and Ashkenazim in that realm was never hermetic, the basic separation of the two remained potent well into the eighteenth century. The fundraising efforts for the Ashkenazim of the Holy Land in the 1650s had different effects on Jewish society. Ashkenazi women in Jerusalem, desperate and starving, tried to turn themselves into a social force by establishing a separate female fundraising system. Though that initiative came to nothing, the other change that occurred was hugely significant. Radical millenarian Protestant groups began to see in the fate of the Jews in eastern Europe and, even more so, in the effects that this had on Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel signs of the impending return of the Messiah. They were even willing to back up their vision with donations to the Ashkenazi Jews of Jerusalem. In turn, this caused the Jews t here, who desperately needed the money, to rethink their attitudes toward the non-Jewish world. Sabbatheanism, which exploded into the Jewish world in 1665, was in many ways shaped by this post-1648 world. There is evidence that the fate of the Jews themselves in eastern Europe played some kind of role in the messianic vision of both Shabtai Zvi and Nathan of Gaza. However, equally as important is the fact that the movement as a whole was shaped by the intensive transregional connection that had developed. It was by using not only the same lines of communication but also many of the same strategies of the pidyon shevuyim and Land of Israel networks that Sabbatheanism turned itself into a worldwide movement. It was also perhaps not a coincidence that the Sabbathean worldview embraced the very changes encouraged by the philanthropic efforts of the 1650s: it appealed to Jews across the Sephardi-Ashkenazi divide, it reshaped relations between Jews and the non-Jewish world (both Christian and Muslim), and it even promised a different role for w omen, independent of male control.93 Thus w hether or not the fate of the Jews in the eastern European wars played a direct role in the appearance of Sabbatheanism, the new transregional reality those wars created in the Jewish world deeply influenced its development. Of course, in its turn, the Sabbathean movement further deepened this new reality. It, too, spurred more intensive exploitation of the channels
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of contact between communities. Like the philanthropic networks that preceded it, it did not create those channels but used them for its own ends and in so doing strengthened them. This suggests that the relationship between the fate of the Jews of eastern Europe and the appearance of Sabbatheanism may not just be one of cause and effect. In a slightly broader view, they can be seen as two sides of the same coin. Both acted to strengthen the connections between different Jewish centers—the philanthropic networks in the movement of people and money, Sabbatheanism in the transmission of new ideas. In that sense, the thirty years or so following 1648 can be seen as a transformative period in which first the refugee crisis and then Sabbatheanism intensified communications among the different Jewish centers in Europe, Africa, and Asia, making the Jewish world a much more interconnected place.94 The philanthropic networks and Sabbatheanism were not the only causes of this change. It can be seen clearly in the non-Jewish world, too. In fact, one of the characteristics of the early modern period as a w hole is the intensification of connections among different centers and regions.95 Still, it seems to me that the ways in which the post-1648 developments influenced the growth of a more tightly connected Jewish world might be seen as the means by which t hese broader shifts in communications w ere refracted into Jewish society.
ch a p t er si x t ee n
The Fate of the Ransomed
having traced the path of the Polish Jewish captives to the Istanbul slave markets and examined the fundraising efforts aimed at ransoming them, we w ill now look at what happened to them once they had been released. Before that, however, we must try to assess what proportion of the captives was actually freed by the Jewish community. This is extremely difficult because of the lack of sources. Any Jew sold to a Muslim in Istanbul would more or less drop out of the Jewish historical record, while the non-Jewish documentation of the contemporary slave markets in Istanbul that might have told us how many Jews w ere bought by Muslims has not survived. All we have is circumstantial evidence. In a letter to the Mantua community dated 1656, just as the second wave of Jewish captives from eastern Europe was beginning to arrive, the leaders of Istanbul Jewry stated with some pride: “With an enormous struggle, we set aside a huge amount of money, with which we ransomed more than two thousand Jewish souls.”1 Even accounting for authorial self-aggrandizement, this suggests that the vast majority of the Jews sent to Istanbul until then had been ransomed. Looking back from the vantage point of over sixty years, the Yiddish Mayseh ha-godl also assumed that all the captives—including those who had arrived a fter 1656—had been redeemed. So, whatever the truth might have been, the perception was that the Jewish captives had indeed been ransomed. This is backed up by a non-Jewish source, the memoirs of Edouard Sieur de la Croix, a French diplomat at the Sublime Porte. In his account of the Ottoman Empire, published in 1684, he had a great deal to say about the Jews, and in particular the Sabbathean movement. At the end of his
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text, he made some general comments about Ottoman Jewish society, including: Amongst themselves, the Jews are extremely charitable. They take great care of the poor, adding to the price of meat one sol2 per pound. By the end of the year, this makes a large sum, which is used for feeding and supporting the poor, as well as ransoming Jewish slaves, whom the Turks and the Tartars take in addition to the Poles. . . . As a result, there are no Jews in the Sultan’s galleys, apart from t hose convicted [of crimes].3
Though his observations were often far from accurate, de la Croix does seem to have had some reliable Jewish sources, which means that his evidence is significant and, like the Jewish sources, it creates an image of active and successful Jewish ransoming.4 What, then, was the fate of the Jewish captives? By no means did they all end up in Istanbul. From the 1650s, t here is evidence of redeemed Polish Jewish captives across the Ottoman Empire. Some seem to have been brought for sale to markets other than t hose in Istanbul and ransomed there, as was the case with the d aughter of Ḥanokh, the shoemaker from Pohrebyshche, who was ransomed in Gallipoli.5 Others w ere found in Cairo, which also seems to have been the site of a g reat deal of ransoming activity, though how they w ere brought t here is not explained in the sources. They may have been sold to Egyptian traders in Istanbul and then shipped to Cairo for resale or, as Bashan asserts in his study of Jewish ransoming in the early modern Mediterranean, they may have been captives who were ransomed in Istanbul but then reimprisoned by ships’ captains for failure to pay their passage as they tried to leave and taken to Cairo for resale.6 There also seems to have been movement of ransomed captives within the Ottoman Empire itself, whether as a result of their desire to start a new life there or their trying to travel home to eastern Europe. Jerusalem was certainly an attractive destination for some who wanted to settle, including at least one captive who had managed to escape from Iran.7 On the whole, however, we do not know why such people ended up where they did, just where that was. T hose places included, in addition to t hose already mentioned, Sofia, Vidin, Belgrade, Iaşi, Salonica, Yanina, Crimea, and even Malta.8 Across the Ottoman Empire, then, Jewish communities w ere dealing with all the problems associated with ransoming and refugees that we saw playing out in Istanbul and Venice, but on a smaller scale. However, the
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more personal nature of the effort meant that it could have significant— even life-threatening—consequences for the individual. For the captive, without the kind of social support that a large Jewish center such as Istanbul could provide, the pressure to convert would have been much greater.9 For the ransomer, too, the risks could be significant, as was the case with Yeshʾayahu ben Dani’el de Paz of Belgrade. Sometime in the mid-1650s, he managed to rescue a Polish Jewish captive from his Turkish captor and took care of him for the best part of a year before helping him return home to Kraków. The captor, however, had some kind of claim against de Paz concerning his actions in freeing the Polish Jew and began to search for him. Terrified that his life was at risk, de Paz fled Belgrade, ending up in the Sephardi community of Amsterdam where he worked for a while as teacher. He only returned to the Mediterranean region in about 1660.10
The Struggle to Return Home This story emphasizes another issue of crucial importance for the freed captives. Most sought to return home at the first opportunity. Without a patron like de Paz, this was not easy. The captives had been brutally snatched from their previous lives and so, once freed, had little or no resources on which to rely. The religious obligation of the local Jewish society toward them ended with their ransom, so once they had been freed they were largely on their own and had to make their own way home—an extremely difficult, often impossible, proposition. Avraham ben Mordechai ha-Levi, rabbi of Cairo, was well aware of the problem: “though they [i.e., the Polish Jews] are persecuted and oppressed with nowhere to rest and yearn to fly home like eagles, they are not able to do so; we should consider them part of our local [community].”11 For many Jews, staying was not an acceptable option, and they were determined to get home. The first step was to raise enough money to get started; the rest they could earn as they went. For those with family resources back home, or good connections where they found themselves, this did not necessarily take very long. For the less fortunate, however, things w ere different, as the experiences of one of the captives from Zhyvotiv in Ukraine, Yaʾakov ben ha-kadosh Avraham Ashkenazi, show. Presumably taken captive in June 1648, Yaʾakov was in Istanbul by the end of the year—a free man looking for work. He found it in the Franco publishing house, where, together with five other Polish Jews, he worked in the print shop as a typesetter and proofreader. This group—clearly refugees—were employed from 1648 to 1654, after which their names no longer appeared
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in the books, suggesting that they had earned enough to return home. It had taken them almost six years.12 There is no way to tell just what proportion of the ransomed captives managed to return home, though the desire to do so seems to have been fairly widespread. Still, as the rabbi from Cairo pointed out, there w ere those who simply could not manage it. The financial difficulties, the physical danger of long-distance travel, and the continuing threat of pirates in the Mediterranean must have deterred many, especially w omen, who often opted to stay and start new lives.
The Refugee Information Network Of course, remaining posed its own problems. As far as w omen w ere concerned, sorting out issues of personal status was crucial. In order to put down roots in their new homes they needed to remarry, and to do that they had to regularize their marital situation. This was not easy. In the vast majority of cases captive women were brought to the slave markets without their husbands, and so the fate of the missing partner was unknown. For men, who could divorce their wives in their absence, this was not a problem. For women, who needed either a valid bill of divorce given by the husband or clear proof of his death, it was a matter of vital importance. The key to resolving this problem was to ensure that as many husbandless wives as possible had verifiable knowledge of the fate of their partners. So, within a relatively short time, the Polish Jewish refugees began to develop ways of facilitating the flow of this kind of information from place to place. By the early 1650s, they seem to have put together a quite ramified informal network of news, able to pass details about missing individuals, mostly husbands, across the Ottoman Empire. Its sources w ere mostly the captives and refugees themselves, but it also brought information and documentation directly from eastern Europe. The parameters of the network seem to have been set by the requirements of Jewish Law for evidence used to determine the death of a missing husband. These were considerably less stringent than in most other legal matters and permitted the testimony of relatives, w omen, servants, and even, u nder certain circumstances, non-Jews. They also accepted hearsay evidence as well as testimony given in absentia, sometimes even ignoring the rule that the written deposition must be witnessed by two Jews.13 As a result, the refugee information network functioned on two basic levels. On the first, information was extracted from t hose who had it, mostly by
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means of conversation; on the second, information was recorded in the form of a witnessed deposition given by e ither the informant or the questioner. This was a process in which, according to the surviving documentation, women w ere extremely active. At the heart of the process was the natural desire of t hose brought so brutally to the Ottoman Empire to renew contact with old friends and acquaintances, to learn of the fates of their loved ones, and to hear about conditions back home. Shmu’el ben Shimʾon, a refugee from Poland who had the famous chronicle of the Khmelnytsky uprising, Tzok ha- ʾitim, reprinted in Salonica in 1652, suggested in his introduction to the volume that many such crucial contacts were made more or less at the time of sale: “When t hese great scholars, full of Torah and pious deeds, came to Constantinople they recognized one another. Mothers rejoiced in their children and each woman was reunited with her sister.”14 This was an over-romanticized view: Istanbul in the 1650s did not turn into any kind of center for Jewish f amily reunification. The process of gathering and sharing information from the old country was usually much more difficult. In the case of Mistress Tasharni in Sofia, for example, when someone from her hometown, Ternopil’, reached Sofia in 1654, she met and talked to him. By chance, their conversation revealed details about the death of the husband of another Jewish woman in the town, which Tasharni duly gave in a witnessed deposition on her behalf.15 Other cases w ere more complex, as the rabbinic court in Istanbul recorded in the summer of 1656: Aw oman called Miriam bat Avraham who was enquiring into the death of her husband, Kalman, appeared before us with a witness, Moshe ben Yeraḥmi’el the Martyr. . . . Once he had been properly cautioned, he stood and testified how in mid-Av [i.e., during the summer] of the previous year, there had been a Jewish captive here in Istanbul by the name of David ha-Kohen. He had been about to return home at that time, but before he had left he had said to him [i.e., to Moshe ben Yerahmi’el]. . . . “ You should know that Miriam bat Avraham’s husband, Kalman, was killed and buried in front of my eyes before the Tatars captured Miriam.”16
In this case, it was the agunah herself, Miriam, making her own inquiries into the fate of her husband. She turned up a witness, Moshe, with hearsay evidence given to him a year e arlier. Since the bearer of that evidence had long since left the Ottoman Empire, it was Moshe, who could only give it
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secondhand, who had to make the deposition for her. Even so, his testimony was enough to permit her to remarry. In other cases, more serious investigation was needed. Shmu’el Garmizan, the rabbi of Jerusalem, reported that he had received a letter from abroad (it is unclear what that meant) asking him to question all the women in his community to see if any of them had information about the fate of the husband of a particular Jewish w oman who needed further testimony to back up her claim that he was dead. Quite remarkably, one of the Ashkenazi women of Jerusalem, named Dvorah, was from the same town as the Jewish w oman seeking information and had been captured in the same campaign, and thus had testimony that helped substantiate her status as a widow.17 Testimony of this kind could travel long distances. A returning captive, passing through Crimea on his way home, heard from another captive settled t here details concerning the fate of the husband of one Mistress Dinah. The returnee put everything he had heard in a letter, had it witnessed, and sent it back to Dinah to help her establish her widowhood. In fact, the letter contained testimony about the massacre of a number of Jewish men from that community, Vyshnivets’ in Ukraine, and so the rabbi in Istanbul, Moshe Shilton, assessed its value for establishing the death of not only Dinah’s husband but the rest of the victims too.18 Even a fter returning to eastern Europe, redeemed captives might collect information for t hose left b ehind, as the following responsum by Moshe Benvenisti, rabbi of Istanbul, shows: David ben Avraham Ashkenazi from the community of Bar gave evidence that a fter he had left h ere, Istanbul, he reached the town of Mohyliv. When he arrived, many people gathered around him, welcomed him, and asked, “Where have you come from?” He answered them that he had come from Istanbul. Everyone asked him about their relatives or acquaintances [who had been captured]. A former Jew who had been forced to convert, whose name had used to be Yitzḥak, asked him . . . if he had known a w oman captive in Istanbul called Jizna, and another woman called Hannah whose face was pockmarked from virguela.19 He [David] asked him [Yitzḥak] why he was asking after t hese w omen, to which he replied that Jizna was his wife and that Hannah was the wife of Yehudah from Podivka [whose death he had witnessed].20
This testimony was given in person by David ben Avraham before a rabbinical court in Istanbul; the circumstances of his return to the Ottoman
[ 186 ] ch a pter sixteen
Empire are unknown. In other cases, depositions w ere made before rabbinical courts in eastern Europe and then sent to the w idows in question, presumably at their request.21 And in one case, the father of a Polish Jewish woman in Cairo called Beyle wrote her a letter in Yiddish in 1664 to inform her that her husband had, sometime previously, not only sent her a bill of divorce from Poland but then remarried, had two c hildren with his second wife, and died in the Ukrainian town of Khodorkiv in 1663. To ensure that this information was put to the use it was intended for, another Jewish refugee in Cairo, a friend of the family from the old country, took it upon himself to bring the letter to the local rabbinical court, translate it from Yiddish, and testify that the handwriting was indeed that of the f ather. With his help, Beyle was permitted to remarry.22 In fact, the flow of information was such that when another group of women refugees in Cairo heard that their husbands w ere still alive in eastern Europe, they were confident enough to hire an agent to procure them the bills of divorce they needed to begin new lives—another sign that Jewish women could be proactive in dealing with the often harsh treatment they received from male society. The agent traveled to Poland and, despite the wartime conditions, was able to find all the husbands in question, collect the requisite divorce documents from them, and send them back to Egypt. This truly astonishing achievement was marred only by a few procedural and textual problems with the documents themselves. These meant that the local rabbi, Mordechai ha-Levi, had to be called in to verify the papers, which he did. The women got their divorces and so could set about starting new families in their new home. The refugee information network r eally had proved its worth.23
Problems of Identification The intensive flow of information, people, and money caused by the influx and redemption of Jewish captives in the Ottoman Empire raised a whole series of issues related to identification, which presented early modern Jewish society with significant problems. Almost the only aspect of the issue for which solutions had already been devised was the formal identification of the dead, which had been of crucial importance in the process of freeing agunot for centuries.24 Outside those situations addressed by Jewish law, identification was considerably more difficult. As we have seen, even the simple issue of identifying Jews among the mass of captives on the Istanbul slave market was by no means obvious. Identifying specific individuals, w hether for ransom
The Fate of the R a nsomed [ 187 ]
or for information, could be much more difficult, and even when it came to ransoming a loved one, confusion could arise. That was what happened in the case of our old friend Yaʾakov Koppel Margolis, who, having been ransomed himself, spent the late 1650s and early 1660s traveling around Italy trying to raise money to ransom his children. In about 1661, he found himself in the Greek town of Yanina. What happened next is described in a letter that Shmu’el Aboab wrote to the leaders of the Yanina community on August 6, 1662. Its subject was “that miserable girl who had come [to Yanina] together with the Jews from Poland. While the scholar Yaʾakov Margolis was staying t here, the rumor spread that he had said she was his daughter and that, with a father’s love, he would soon come back to take her under his care.” However, not long a fter that he seems to have changed his mind: When that scholar [i.e., Margolis] came here [to Venice] . . . I immediately summoned him. . . . [He said that] he had never made a formal, legal declaration that the girl was his daughter, it was just that, at first, she had looked like her. However, when he thought about it rationally, and calculated how long his children had been in captivity and the age of his daughter at that time, it was impossible [that she was his d aughter] . . . and when he took a good look at her he could not find any identifying marks. [He added that] he did not have the resources to raise an orphan . . . who was not [his].25
The letter makes it clear that neither the Jewish leadership in Yanina nor Aboab himself believed Margolis, despite his denials, and that they wanted him to take the girl. For his part, the Polish Jew suggested that they w ere trying to solve their local refugee problem by palming off on him an unrelated orphan. What is remarkable in this story, which is quite reminiscent of that of Martin Guerre, is that a s imple conversation with the girl about her past should have resolved the m atter but that neither side seems to have thought to talk to her.26 It is fairly unlikely that Margolis, who had spent years trying to ransom his children, would have turned his back on one of them had he found her. On the other hand, refusing to believe a father’s evidence concerning the identity of his own child without a compelling reason to do so, as Aboab and the Yanina Jewish leadership did, is just as improbable. What was r eally g oing on remains a mystery. We do not know how the story ended, so it can only serve as another reminder of just how complex issues of identification could become for the Polish Jewish captives and refugees who found themselves stranded in the Ottoman Empire.27
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Cultural Contacts between the Ashkenazi Refugees and Sephardi Society The presence of so many Ashkenazi Jews in the major centers of the Ottoman Empire led to a range of cultural contacts between them and the local Sephardim. Examining the nature of these contacts will not only shed light on this important aspect of the refugee experience but may also help us understand how the crisis came to its end. One place in which we have already seen contacts of this sort is the print shop. The relatively high level of Jewish education among the refugees gave many of them the kind of linguistic and education skills that publishers prized among their staff. L ittle surprise, then, that a number of them w ere employed in the Franco publishing h ouse in Istanbul. The connections went deeper than that, however. In those years, Franco published a number of books composed by Ashkenazim. One of t hese was Minḥat Yehudah by Yehudah Leib Eilenburg, rabbi of the major Lithuanian community of Brest (today in Belarus), which was published in Istanbul in 1654.28 The introduction to the volume recounts that it was printed from a copy a refugee had brought with him to Istanbul and that the decision to print the work had been made by a local scholar who wanted a copy for himself. He asked one of the Polish refugees working in the print house to edit it for him and prepare it for publication.29 It would seem that the presence of so many refugees in Istanbul had stimulated interest in books by Ashkenazi authors among local scholars. A similar phenomenon occurred in Salonica, which saw a reflorescence of Hebrew publishing in the 1650s. That seems to have been connected with the appearance t here of a printer and convert to Judaism, Avraham ha-Ger, and ended with his death in 1656.30 Though there is no evidence that he employed Polish Jews in his print shop, he did aim at least two of his publications at the refugee market. In 1655, he published a holiday prayer book (Maḥzor) in the Ashkenazi rite.31 More significant, however, is the 1652 reprint of the chronicle of the Ukrainian massacres, Tzok ha- ʾitim, by Me’ir of Szczebrzeszyn, originally published in Kraków in 1650. A refugee from Poland, Shmu’el ben Shimʿon, who had lost his w hole f amily in the massacres and himself been captured and ransomed, came across a copy of the book while traveling to Jerusalem. When he reached Salonica, he decided to have it republished by Avraham ha-G er, adding his own introduction as well as an elegy he had composed.32 The popularity of the book extended into Sephardi society, and a copy even found its way into the hands of Shabtai Zvi.
The Fate of the R a nsomed [ 189 ]
Cultural contacts were also fostered when former refugees were appointed to rabbinical posts. In 1655, the community of Budapest in the Ottoman Empire invited a refugee from the Vilnius community, Efraim ha-Kohen, then in Vienna, to serve as its rabbi. Though the community itself was Ashkenazi, ha-Kohen maintained a wide range of connections with Sephardi rabbis as far distant as Sofia, Belgrade, Salonica, Istanbul, Izmir, and Jerusalem.33 A number of years later, Nathan Hanover, too, was appointed rabbi of Iaşi in Wallachia.34 As important as all these phenomena were, they hardly added up to a picture of intensive and influential cultural contacts between Sephardim and Ashkenazim in the wake of the captive crisis. Perhaps a truer understanding is revealed by the ruling of Avraham ben Mordechai ha-L evi, quoted earlier. He was discussing the fact that many of the Polish Jewish refugees were refusing to abandon the more stringent religious customs of Ashkenazi Jews concerning Passover in favor of the more lenient approach of local society. Ha-Levi took a pragmatic approach, suggesting that since returning home was impossible for many, they should be permitted to assimilate into the surrounding Jewish society and adopt its customs. It was not an uncontroversial stance. Ha-L evi’s colleague and eventual successor as rabbi of Cairo, Yosef ha-Levi Nazir, came out strongly against the idea and held that the Ashkenazi Jews remained bound by the religious traditions of their ancestors and should retain their strict approach.35 Similarly, the Ashkenazi rabbi Efraim ha-Kohen became involved in a bitter polemic with Rabbi Ḥayim Mevoraḥ of Sofia, who had tried to impose a Sephardi ruling dealing with marital status on the Ashkenazim of Budapest. Ha-Kohen vehemently rejected what he had done, writing: “[Rabbi Mevoraḥ] should not have interfered in this business. He should have left it to the Ashkenazi rabbis.”36 Looking beyond the halakhic issues involved in these debates, the exchanges seem to indicate that Ashkenazi society in the Ottoman Empire, even in one of the larger refugee centers such as Cairo, was culturally quite beleaguered. The pressure to assimilate into Sephardi society was so strong that the Ashkenazim found themselves struggling to preserve their religious and social cohesion. The kind of cultural strength and self-confidence that they would have needed to leave their mark on the local Jewish communities w ere notably lacking. Indeed, Leah Bornstein has argued that the absorption of the Ashkenazim into Sephardi society, which had been weak in the sixteenth c entury, picked up speed in the seventeenth.37
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In the absence of sources of direct relevance, this is the best evidence we have that the flood of captives from eastern Europe in the 1650s and 1660s did not remain in the Ottoman Empire. Had there been a significant growth in the size of the Ashkenazi communities a fter 1648, this kind of assimilation would not have been an issue. The case of Jerusalem, the only town in the empire for which we have reasonably firm data about the size of the Ashkenazi Jewish population, bears this out. Unlike the other towns of the Ottoman Empire at the time, the Holy City was a major magnet for Jewish settlement, and in the period of the seventeenth-century wars, many Polish Jews pledged to s ettle there in order to win God’s help in their struggles to survive. The Ashkenazi population of Jerusalem, then, did grow in the second half of the c entury. And, as we might have expected from such a situation, the social and cultural boundaries between Ashkenazi and Sephardi society in the town remained extremely strong.38 We can therefore conclude that the ransomed captives did not, for the most part, remain in the Ottoman Empire but returned home in what ever way they could. They did not leave as they came, in massive waves of people. Rather, they left in dribs and drabs, a few at a time, as and when they managed to put together the resources they needed for the long and arduous trip. As a result, the problem of the Polish Jewish captives that Ottoman Jewry had faced was not solved but simply faded away. Though the h andling of the crisis, for all its challenges, had been an achievement of which Jewish society, particularly in Istanbul, could have been extremely proud, it was in fact soon forgotten, completely overshadowed by the traumas caused by the false messiah, Shabtai Zvi. And, in paradoxical fashion, the Jews’ very success in freeing the captives so that they could return to eastern Europe meant that were few beneficiaries of the effort left in the Ottoman Empire to remember it.
ch a p t er se v e n t ee n
Transregional Contexts
the experiences of the eastern European Jews captured in Poland- Lithuania, brought to the Ottoman Empire, and there ransomed were truly transregional. They w ere swept up in two branches of early modern Europe’s extensive slave trade: first the capture and sale of p eople from eastern Europe in Istanbul, and then the capture and sale (or ransom) of people by pirates in the Mediterranean. Neither was geared specifically toward Jews, and it was really only in the decades after 1648 that they formed a noticeable part of the business. Though the experience of the Jews from eastern Europe in the mid- seventeenth c entury may have been of negligible importance in the history of the European slave trade, for them it was of g reat significance. First and foremost was the impact on the captives themselves. They w ere brutally snatched from their families and communities, often in fear of death and sometimes having witnessed the murder and destruction of all that they held dear. They w ere then sent on a cruel, monthlong journey to Istanbul and put up for sale t here as a commodity little better than animals. Though most seem to have been redeemed by the local Jewish community and set free, their suffering did not end there. Bereft of resources, they had to either undergo the arduous journey home or give up on their previous lives entirely and start afresh in new and strange surroundings. In the midst of all this horror, t here were perhaps one or two mitigating circumstances. The Jews of eastern Europe had not only been aware of the slave trade for decades but been in contact with the Jews of the Ottoman Empire too. Though not very intensive, t hese contacts meant that they knew they would find a Jewish community at the end of their journey (should they survive it), which, to judge from the historical chronicles, they believed would do whatever it could to ransom them. Hope of that sort can [ 191 ]
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be invaluable in the kind of struggle to survive that the forced marches and journeying involved. In addition, since hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews were taken at one time, the captives were able to band together to help each other. The sources are replete with such stories. This continued when they arrived in the Ottoman Empire, where they were helped by the local Jews, and even a fter they w ere freed, when they created their own systems of self-help, most particularly an information network. This resilient web of connections meant that the Jewish captives did not have to suffer the humiliation of that complete loss of identity and social standing, termed by Orlando Patterson “social death,” which so often accompanies capture and enslavement.1 Jewish w omen’s experience was, as we have already seen, often harsher and more difficult than that of men. In addition to the threats of rape and other violence at the hands of their captors, they had to face a male- dominated and often very unsympathetic Jewish society. Though there is no evidence that women were overlooked in the ransoming process, their plight does not seem to have been taken as seriously by t hose engaged in it as that of men. In the transregional philanthropic network tasked with supporting Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, this oversight became open cruelty, which resulted in the death of many women in Jerusalem from starvation. The women’s response seems to have been quite typical: they set out to organize a solution to their problem, on this occasion by trying to create their own transregional system of fundraising. The same proactive approach can be seen in how they confronted the problem of proving their status as widows or divorcees, which was crucial in allowing them to begin new lives. Sadly, impressive as all t hese efforts w ere, they proved unable to bring about any serious change in Jewish society, which meant that any relief they brought was r eally only on a case-by- case basis. The transregional aspects of the captive crisis gave it great significance for the rest of the Jewish world, too. The appearance on the slave markets of Istanbul of thousands of Jews, destitute and desperate, as well as the news coming in of the enormous destruction in Poland-Lithuania and the stream of emissaries and refugees traveling from town to town in search of help, forced Jewish communities across Europe to make a concerted effort to step up their charitable activity on their behalf. Here, too, women were extremely active. At the heart of all the activity was a transregional fundraising network run by the Jewish communities of Venice, the major Jewish center in the eastern Mediterranean. Consisting mostly of Sephardi communities in
Tr a nsr egiona l Con texts [ 193 ]
Italy, in the 1630s and 1640s the network began to stretch across Europe, reaching as far as the Jews in Amsterdam and Hamburg. Its function was twofold: it provided funds to support Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, and it was responsible for ransoming Jewish captives, particularly those held by the Knights of St. John on Malta. The Polish crisis put this system under great pressure. To begin with, the calls on it multiplied and came from a number of different directions: the Jews of Istanbul, faced with ransoming thousands of captives, w ere in desperate need of large sums; many Polish Jewish individuals whose loved ones were being in held in captivity traveled around in person raising money; and the Jewish communities in eastern Europe began fund raising campaigns to help with reconstruction at war’s end. Venetian Jewry, which had u ntil then been trying to centralize both collection and disbursement in its own hands, seems soon to have realized that it was likely to be swamped by t hese demands and to have decided that it would do better to focus its efforts on Malta. On the other hand, averse to turning away t hese needy Jews empty- handed, it adopted the policy it used for supporting the communities in the Land of Israel. As they arrived in Venice, those seeking help on behalf of eastern European Jews were greeted warmly, provided with letters of introduction to the other communities of the network, and then sent on their way to visit them in person. In the 1650s and 1660s, there seemed to be a steadily growing stream of different p eople traveling across Europe, raising money for the Jews of Poland-Lithuania. They w ere joined by an increasing number of emissaries from the Land of Israel, trying to compensate for the loss of income caused by the disappearance of the donations from eastern Europe that underwrote their budgets. Intercommunal communication intensified. The needs of the Polish Jewish captives challenged the fundraising network in other ways. For example, the fundraising crossed the cultural border within Jewish society, since Sephardi Jews w ere being called on to support Ashkenazim. Aboab and Zacuto seem to have understood this and done their best to exploit their contacts with Ashkenazi communities too, such as those in Vienna, Frankfurt a.M., and even Poznań, in order to broaden their philanthropic network. Nonetheless, most of the money raised by the Jews of Italy, not to mention those of Hamburg and Amsterdam, were, in fact, donations made by Sephardim for Ashkenazim. This kind of cross-cultural generosity was by no means common in the early modern Jewish world. It would not develop in the economic support systems for Jews in the Holy Land for many decades.2
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Even more striking, however, was the way the network positioned itself vis-à-vis the political borders of Europe and the Mediterranean world. The various communities of which it was composed were situated in differ ent polities—the Italian cities, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, the Ottoman Empire, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Many of t hese w ere in tension, not to say at war, with each other, but the money seemed to flow between them almost as if the political boundaries were irrelevant. The Jews w ere thus able to cooperate in achieving their own, transregional goals with little or no interference from the states in which they lived. These w ere, perhaps, the first steps t oward the development of an institutional Jewish world. Social and cultural connections between communities were, of course, nothing new. Jews had always traveled, whether for business, education, or migration, or as a result of displacement, but the connections forged as a result had generally been more personal than communal. Cultural connections between communities in different places also began to develop in the early modern period, particularly as a result of the invention of the printing press and the spread of books across the Jewish world. The Sabbathean movement, whose rapid spread may well have owed a great deal to the intensified social and cultural connections that developed following the Polish crisis, was another example of a successful Jewish transregional cultural/religious movement in the early modern world. Still, transregional institutional development, to the extent that it had occurred in early modern Jewish society, had r eally only taken place within individual polities, the best example being the Council of Four Lands in Poland. The increased levels of intercommunal cooperation that developed in the wake of the Polish crisis w ere thus a new phenomenon. The Polish crisis had presented Jewish communities in different countries with the desperate need to reach a common (what we would today call humanitarian) objective, pidyon shevuyim, as defined for them by the Jewish religious tradition. U nder the leadership of Venice, they cooperated in a transregional network tasked with achieving that objective. To reach its goals, the network drew on resources from across the Jewish world and worked within the international arena of its day. Though its central organization was weak, and the levels of cooperation among the different parts of the network patchy, its overall policy goals—the ransoming and resettling of as many captives as possible—do seem to have been achieved. Compared with the kind of international action undertaken by Jewish bodies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this was embryonic in
Tr a nsr egiona l Con texts [ 195 ]
terms of organizational sophistication. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, enormously significant advances were made in the realm of communications, as well as in the development of the political and cultural ideologies that underpinned colonialism. No less important was the secularization of how connections among Jews in different places were understood and their obligations to one another defined.3 Nonetheless, the conditions of the early modern period encouraged the development of an earlier form of Jewish “internationalism,” which, though rudimentary, was able, in its own way, to react to transregional developments affecting Jews, set policy goals, and achieve them.4 The sources do not allow us to draw a direct line of cause and effect between the two phenomena, the early modern and the modern. Still, it does seem reasonable to say that when the Jews of the nineteenth century, faced with challenges that crossed the national borders of their world, began to act and organize internationally, they had the experience of previous centuries on which to draw. And as we have seen, the first organized transregional effort of that sort was taken in response to the Polish Jewish captive and ransoming crisis we are examining h ere.
pa rt iii
Westward the refugees in the holy roman empire and beyond
ch a p t er eight ee n
Introduction
on august 1, 1656, a correspondent of the Hamburg paper Wöchentliche Zeitung filed the following story from the town of Elbląg (German, Elbing) on the Baltic coast: In addition to the Jews who have so far left Poland, a big Vistula barge full of [another] 400 has just arrived here t oday to go to Germany. They [i.e., the Jews] cannot bear to stay in Poland any longer on account of the hatred of the nobility which has been stirred up by their excessive privileges in Poland and their self-serving behavior in the towns.1
This short report, which the paper printed on the bottom of its back page, speaks for itself and is interesting in both what it says and what it does not. It tells us of the existence of a large group of Jews (though four hundred is probably an exaggeration) fleeing Poland westward in more- or-less organized fashion at the height of the second wave of Poland- Lithuania’s mid-seventeenth-century wars. It also reveals one of the routes that such refugees took—along the Vistula river to the Baltic coast and, thence, presumably by ship to Hamburg or Amsterdam.2 On the other hand, it tells us nothing of the p eople themselves: Was this a single group from one community or simply a large number of Jews from different places who had banded together to get to the coast? More than that, the report fails to mention the story’s humanitarian aspect. These were not migrants but refugees. They may have been fleeing the hatred of the nobility, as the story suggests, but only b ecause they w ere in danger of their lives on its account. It was precisely at this time that Polish forces under the noble Stefan Czarniecki, whose goal was to repel the Swedish invader, were making false accusations against the Jews of treachery and then using them as an excuse for perpetrating a series of massacres and [ 199 ]
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mass murders in communities across western Poland. Thousands of Jews were being butchered and many more were fleeing.3 Instead of reporting this, however, the story simply states that the Jews felt uncomfortable in Poland on account of noble hatred, for which, it emphasizes, they themselves were responsible. Why, then, did the correspondent feel that a story about a boatload of Jews leaving Poland was important enough to file? Though the con temporary German press reported on Poland-Lithuania’s wars on a regular basis, it barely mentioned the fate of the Jews.4 That being so, perhaps the goal of the report was primarily to let readers back in Hamburg know that Jews w ere still traveling west. This would have been of interest not just because the town was one of the major destinations for the Jewish refugees leaving Poland-Lithuania via the Baltic but because much of the local population viewed the arrival of foreign Jews negatively and wanted to stop them settling t here.5 The story was concerned, therefore, not so much with the fate of the Jews in the wars as with their migration to the Holy Roman Empire in general, and to Hamburg in particular— and its hostile attitude t oward them was just a reflection of opinion back at home. The short report in the Wöchentliche Zeitung is important here because it helps us understand one of the most basic characteristics of the Polish- Lithuanian Jews’ flight westward a fter 1648—and one that marked their experience out from that of all the other refugees. While the fate of t hose who fled within the Commonwealth and of the captives brought to the slave markets of the Ottoman Empire seems to have been of l ittle interest to the non-Jewish population in either place, the arrival of the Polish and Lithuanian Jews in the empire was an issue to which local Jews, and especially the authorities that administered their lives, paid attention. T hese were the years immediately after the Thirty Years’ War, and the empire’s various states were engaged in the difficult and complex process of reconstructing both society and economy. For some, Jews had a significant role to play in this development, while for o thers they constituted a problem to be dealt with. Either way, their appearance from eastern Europe in sizable numbers was a noteworthy issue that was hard to ignore. That, then, is the first focus of part 3, which w ill examine not only what the attitudes of the various non-Jewish populations and authorities in the empire w ere toward the Jews and how this was expressed in legislative terms but also how these attitudes helped shape the ways in which the refugees w ere able to overcome their traumatic experiences and build new lives for themselves.
In troduction to Pa rt III [ 201 ]
In fact, the Jewish refugees who reached the Holy Roman Empire found themselves in a rapidly changing environment. The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, the year in which the Khmelnytsky uprising broke out, had strengthened the regimes of the empire’s myriad constituent states, largely at the expense of the emperor. The change was first and foremost political—with the development in each of the states of absolutist regimes in which the monarch strengthened his personal control over both his lands and his subjects. This meant that various groups and vested interests that had been powerful in state administration in the past were now increasingly undercut in f avor of the central authority.6 Alongside this came a change in economic policy. The development of mercantilism (known in central Europe as cameralism) measured a country’s strength through its fiscal health. The major policy goal of any state, therefore, was amassing wealth however it could, and any individual or group that was viewed as contributing to this was looked upon favorably. All other considerations, social, cultural, and even religious, had to take second place, an idea that was called by contemporaries raison d’état, or in German, Staatsräson. In mercantilist thought, the economy was best run through the direct intervention of the central authority, which meant that the new ideology underpinned the emerging absolutist regimes.7 As far as Jews were concerned, these changes meant that the forces that had been most strongly opposed to their activity in medieval polities—the church and the merchant guilds—no longer held sway.8 The new absolutist rulers called the shots, developing an increasingly professional and powerful state administration to reach the goals they set. It was the monarchs’ responsibility to ensure good order in their societies, which they increasingly did by issuing regulations dealing with all aspects of life. These attempts at devising rational state policy allowed the rulers to reenvisage the nature of the state, including the role of Jews within it. In the mercantilistic age, Jewish economic skills often seemed helpful in meeting economic policy goals, which meant that the absolute rulers were willing to recruit them to help in one way or another in the rebuilding of the economy, which had emerged from the Thirty Years’ War in a dire state.9 Whole regions of the empire had suffered devastation, sometimes extensive, agricultural production had dropped alarmingly, and the markets w ere terribly depressed. In addition, in some areas at least, population losses w ere extremely high.10 The first order of the day was thus repopulation. Some of this was achieved when locals who had fled returned, but new settlers w ere also encouraged. To boost production, more effective forms of agricultural administration were needed, which
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led in more developed western regions to the monetization of serfdom. To the east of the Elbe river, in Prussia, Brandenburg, Silesia, Bohemia, and Moravia, however, a different path was taken: the upper nobility tightened its grip over its extensive estates, imposing on the peasants not monetary but labor dues and thus deepening their dependence in what is often called (wrongly) a second feudalism.11 In these regions, the nobility had enormous influence on the local and regional levels and, as happened in Poland-Lithuania, sometimes welcomed Jews as wealth creators despite the opposition of the non-Jewish population. Of course, it was the management of trade that most affected the Jews. On this question, cameralist policy went in two, seemingly opposite, directions. It was vitally interested in stimulating commerce, seeing in a positive balance of trade a key means for any country to amass wealth. On the other hand, it aimed at weakening, if not destroying, the urban monopolies (merchant and craft guilds) that had traditionally controlled the markets in f avor of direct central administration. This was not an easy task, and it took the absolutist regimes a long time to overcome the opposition of the towns, which left trade somewhat depressed in the second half of the seventeenth century. As a result, some states proved willing to welcome more Jewish merchants into their markets after 1648 and give them better conditions than previously in a bid to enliven trade.12 The arrival of the refugees in the empire brought them into immediate contact with the local Jewish communities. It was the latter that had to provide relief upon arrival and then help the newcomers begin new lives. The encounter of these two groups of Jews, fraught with what might be called creative tension, is the second focus of part 3. We will examine not only how the Jews in the empire helped the refugees and what tensions arose as a result but also what the longer-term consequences of that encounter were and how they s haped the future development of both groups. The Jews of Germany themselves moved into the post-1648 years in better shape than is often thought. Though they had suffered during the war years like everyone else, the violence had had no specifically anti- Jewish motivation, so they had not been special targets. In fact, in some ways, the war had opened up new economic opportunities for them: the presence of so many military forces on German lands had made issues of army supply crucially important—and this was a field in which Jewish merchants excelled. Their success in supplying all sides to the conflict also provided work for many Jews of much lower socioeconomic status. Still, while this development laid the groundwork for the later appearance of
In troduction to Pa rt III [ 203 ]
the small elite group of Court Jews and was undoubtedly a lifeline for large numbers of desperate Jewish families, it did not do much to relieve the poverty in which most had to live.13 German Jewry itself was a very small group in t hese years. J. Friedrich Battenberg has estimated that, in the early seventeenth c entury, there w ere no more than about 40,000 Jews in the German lands.14 Expulsions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had destroyed large numbers of the local Jewish communities, forcing the majority of German Jews to move east and find new homes in the then rapidly developing and more welcoming Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.15 Most of t hose who remained strug gled to eke out their living in the villages as single-or two-family groups, more or less cut off from the centers of Jewish religion and culture.16 One or two such centers continued to exist on the German lands, such as in the communities of Frankfurt a.M., Vienna, Worms, and Friedberg, though the heart of Jewish culture in northern Europe had moved to Poland-Lithuania. There are signs that the situation in the empire had begun to improve in the generation before the war, though the fragmentary state of the sources and the subsequent chaos of 1618–48 makes it difficult to understand the precise nature of this change.17 The recovery r eally seems to have started to take off a fter 1648. The Jewish population began to grow, boosted by immigration from Poland- Lithuania, initially in the form of refugees but l ater as economic migrants looking for a better life in the flourishing towns of the empire. Not only did the number of Jewish communities grow rapidly, the new cameralist policies also opened up markets to Jews in places that still refused to allow them to settle. Even the expulsion of the Jews from Vienna in 1670 did not put an end to this process, with the expellees finding new homes not only in the rapidly growing Jewish communities of Moravia and Silesia but also in new regions opening up for Jewish settlement, such as Brandenburg—which, characteristically, welcomed the richest of the refugees into the new community of Berlin.18 A Jewish mercantile urban middle class began to develop alongside the small group of Court Jews, who played an important role in encouraging community development in the states whose rulers they served. This was the situation in which the post-1648 refugees from eastern Europe found themselves. As we have seen, they came in two waves. A small number of those displaced from Ukraine in the late 1640s and early 1650s crossed the border from southwestern Poland into the Holy Roman Empire. A second, much larger, wave came following the second round of wars with Sweden and Russia, starting in 1655. Many of these came from
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reat Poland (in the northwest part of the Commonwealth), though some G were fleeing Little Poland (in the southwest). They were joined by refugees fleeing before the Russian and Cossack armies, largely in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. T hese last tended to flee north to the Baltic coast and take ship for Hamburg or Amsterdam. Battenberg estimates the total number of refugees in the empire at 10,000–15,000.19 The Polish-Lithuanian Jews’ meeting with German Jewry that was the inevitable outcome of their flight to the empire was of a very particular sort. First, they w ere fully-fledged refugees and not captives to be ransomed, so there was no religious imperative to support them. This made them just a burden on the communal (or personal) budget of those who helped them. Beyond that, though Polish-Lithuanian and German Jews shared a common religious and cultural heritage derived from medieval Germany and spoke more or less the same language—Judeo-German or Yiddish—the centuries for which they had lived apart had created a range of social and cultural differences between them. T hese w ere expressed not only in religious custom but also in dress and even foodways. Last, but not least, though both spoke the same language, each had its own distinctive dialect. This complex mixture of similarity and difference seems to have left each group somewhat uneasy in the face of the other and to have set up cultural tensions between them that could sometimes prove as difficult to overcome as those between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, if not more so.20 Of course, the fate of the refugees was determined in no small measure by the absolutist-cameralist policies of the non-Jewish authorities in at least some of the states they reached. However, it is important to remember that the refugees we are discussing h ere arrived only in the first decade or two a fter the Peace of Westphalia, while in some states it took at least that much time for the new policies to be adopted and even longer before their effects w ere felt. In the immediate postwar years, policies might still be fluid and groups whose power would eventually wane might still be strong. In order to understand the processes at work, close analysis of the fate of the refugees in each setting, often at a very local level, is needed. This part of the book will therefore examine the fate of the refugees in a number of specific localities within the Holy Roman Empire. We will begin with a discussion of the background to the experiences of the Polish-Lithuanian Jews in the empire by looking at the relationship that had developed between the two groups over the preceding c entury. Next we will focus on the small numbers of refugees that reached the empire immediately after 1648 before moving on to the refugee experience on the roads of the empire in general. Then we will take a close look at the fate of
In troduction to Pa rt III [ 205 ]
the refugees, particularly the large waves that arrived after 1655, in various settings: first in the empire’s eastern regions, such as Silesia and Moravia, and then in a number of different towns across the empire, such as Frankfurt a.M., Vienna, and Hamburg. A fter a chapter on one of the major refugee centers outside the empire, Amsterdam, the discussion w ill move on to the cultural aspects of the encounter between the refugees and the local Jews and how it affected the ability of the former to start new lives in their new homes. We will end with an examination of the ways in which the refugee crisis resolved itself in the late 1660s and early 1670s. Beyond this, t here are three major issues that underlie the discussion as a whole. First, the nature of Jewish solidarity in t hose years and the fate of the refugees outside Poland-Lithuania when the religious imperative to ransom captives was not a relevant issue. Second, the policies adopted by the states of the Holy Roman Empire toward the refugees and their impact on the refugees themselves as they tried to rebuild their lives on German lands. Third, the new social and cultural formations created by the encounter of “eastern” and “western” Ashkenazim in the wake of the refugee crisis and their consequences for the development of German Jewry in both the short and long term.
ch a p t er n i n et ee n
Background ger m a n j e ws a n d pol ish j e ws befor e 1648
polish jews w ere well aware that their ancestors had originated in the German lands and, long before the refugee crisis brought large numbers of them back t here, knew a g reat deal about Jewish society in the empire. Much of what they knew came from meetings with German Jews, often in pursuit of trade, or from the stories of those who had traveled the relatively short distance to the German lands. Though t here was much that separated them, both groups understood that they also had a g reat deal in common in cultural and religious terms. The meeting of Polish and German Jews in the mid-seventeenth century, for all its economic, social, and religious difficulties, was undoubtedly colored by this sense of kinship and belonging. To understand its significance, then, we must first look at the history of the connections between the two groups of Jews and the ways in which those connections were perceived by each side.
The Medieval Roots of the Relationship One of the legends Polish Jews told about the creation of their society and culture ran as follows: At the end of the ninth century, a Jewish delegation from Germany waited upon the Polish Prince Leshek to plead for the admission of Jews into Poland. The Prince subjected the delegates to a protracted cross-examination concerning the principles of the Jewish religion and Jewish morality, and finally complied with their request. Thereupon large numbers of German Jews began to arrive in Poland, and, [ 206 ]
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in 905, obtained special written privileges which . . . were subsequently lost.1
As with most such legends much of the detail seems quite unconnected with historical reality, reflecting more how Polish Jews understood themselves than what had actually happened to them. However, some elements do align with what we know of their history. For example, the majority of Polish Jewry did originate in Germany.2 For the most part, they did move east during the Middle Ages, though a few centuries later than the legend said, and settled in Poland on the basis of written privileges granted to them by local princes and kings. That migratory process seems to have been one of push and pull. On the push side, starting with the expulsion from E ngland in 1290, Jews had been forced to migrate across Europe from west to east throughout the later Middle Ages. In the fifteenth century Jews were expelled from, among other places, Austria in 1421, Bavaria in 1450, and Breslau in Silesia in 1453. The last of this wave of expulsions came in the mid-sixteenth century, with the expulsion of Jews from Bohemia in 1541.3 On the pull side, increasing numbers of t hese Jews found a welcome in the newly consolidating Polish state. The monarch, interested in strengthening the towns and the urban markets, not only a dopted patterns of urban development from the German lands to the west of Poland but also invited new settlers for t hese towns from the same region, giving them a distinctly German character. The Jews fleeing persecution and violence in central Europe were encouraged to join this general eastward migration, the so- called Ostsiedlung, b ecause the Polish monarchs, who wanted to exploit their economic skills, w ere willing to grant them generous terms to do so.4 The first privilege granted to the Jews of Kalisz, G reat Poland, in 1264, was subsequently expanded by King Kazimierz the G reat to cover all Polish Jewry in 1334, 1364, and 1367. A further improvement in terms was offered by King Kazimierz Jagiellończyk in 1453, though that privilege was repealed a year later under pressure from the nobility.5 Perhaps the most important outcome of this development as far as the Jews w ere concerned was that they w ere recognized in law (i.e., by privilege) as a second urban group alongside, or even in parallel with, the non- Jewish, largely German-speaking, burghers.6 Like their urban neighbors, the Jews kept a g reat deal of their previous culture alive in their new home. Most important, of course, was their language. The Jews in Germany had spoken their own form of German with a few Hebrew and Aramaic terms added in. They continued to speak this language after they settled in the
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Polish towns, many of whose non-Jewish inhabitants also spoke and used German throughout the medieval period.7 Of course, it was inevitable that living in Poland, a different cultural and linguistic environment from what they had previously known, would leave its mark on the Jews. Though they never abandoned Judeo-German, Polish Jews did begin to use various Slavic words and forms in their speech, making what was once just a Jewish dialect of German into a language of its own—Yiddish.8 In terms of religious custom, too, though they remained firmly within the Ashkenazi cultural realm, Polish Jews began to develop their own practices, which marked them out from the Jews of Germany.9
The Rise of Polish Jewry As the sixteenth century progressed, the social and economic status of the Jews in Poland improved dramatically, largely on the basis of the economic services they provided to the nobility, who were consolidating their position as the most powerful group in the country. Of course, serving the noble interests created many opportunities for Polish Jews to enrich themselves, which they eagerly took.10 And once the nobility understood that the Jews were extremely effective wealth creators for them, they began to protect them against attacks, particularly from the non-Jewish townspeople.11 This creation of a strong, wealthy, self-confident, and relatively secure Polish Jewry was taking place during the sixteenth century, at precisely the time when German Jewish society was at its lowest ebb. As a result, German Jews continued to move east in those years, helping, among other things, fuel the wave of Jewish colonization of Ukraine from 1569 to 1648.12 For their part, Polish Jews compared their situation very favorably with that of the Jews in the empire, which they visited often to do business, particularly in the fairs and markets.13 The leading rabbinical authority in Poland at the time, Moshe Isserles, expressed this sense of superiority in a letter he wrote to one of his students, who had decided to return to Poland rather than take up a rabbinic post in the empire: “Maybe it’s a better [idea] to [live on] a dry crust in peace14 in this country . . . because h ere, the hatred [of the non-Jews] doesn’t overwhelm us as it does in Ashkenaz.”15 Isserles was not alone in thinking this. Many central European rabbis made the move from the difficult conditions of the empire to the thriving Jewish society of Poland-Lithuania. One of the most prominent was Yaʾakov Pollack, who moved at the end of the fifteenth c entury from
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Regensburg to Kraków, where he not only ran Poland’s first major yeshiva (Talmudic academy) in which the new hermeneutical method called pilpul ḥilukim was developed but also, in 1503, received a privilege from the king appointing him Chief Rabbi of Poland.16 Another was Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, who moved to Poland from Prague in 1629, taking up the rabbinates of first Nemyriv and then Volodymyr-Volynsky in Ukraine before being appointed rabbi of Kraków in 1643.17 No less significant was the movement of Jewish students from the German lands to Poland-Lithuania. Though a number of yeshivot continued to exist in the empire, Poland was, without question, the powerhouse of Talmud study from the mid-sixteenth century on, attracting students not just from the empire but from further afield too: as we have seen, Moshe Zacuto from Venice had studied in the Poznań yeshiva in his youth. In many cases, the students seem to have come to Poland without any real intention of returning home. The prestige of being a student at a yeshiva (and presumably the wealth of their families that could afford to keep them there) meant that these young men had significant value on the marriage market and so were often offered brides in Poland and helped to settle there.18 Polish Jews were proud of this generosity and had no qualms about waving it in the faces of their German coreligionists. In a dispute that broke out in 1627 between the community of Frankfurt a.M. and the Council of Four Lands, the Polish Jewish body brought up the help given to German Jews in Poland as a means of attacking the Frankfurt community for its ungratefulness: What has happened to your memories? You should have given the matter some thought and remembered everything that has happened in the past. That way you could have seen us in a positive light and not, God Forbid, been ungrateful for all the good t hings we have always given German Jews, w hether as individuals or en masse.19 We have consistently given them of the benefits which God has given us, and helped them and their c hildren, who come [to Poland] in a continuous stream to live with us. We treat them as if they were our very own.20
They followed this up with a threat of retaliation if the Jews of Frankfurt did not do as they said: We will draw a clear line between us: you will have what is yours, and your c hildren a fter you too. Take care that they stop coming to s ettle with us: they will be rejected by the schools, one after another,21 and
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no-one w ill take them into their homes to give them a place to sleep, even for one night. And t hose of your offspring who are already h ere will feel the bitterness of our anger.22
That kind of brutal arrogance on the part of Polish Jewry must have been very galling for the Jews of Germany—the Jews of Frankfurt certainly rejected the Council’s threats—but in fact it was just the tip of the iceberg.23 The ascendancy of Polish Jews could be felt in the realm of Jewish law too: from the mid-sixteenth c entury, Polish Jewish custom began to determine Ashkenazi practice in keeping Jewish Law, while German Jewish, or for that matter French Jewish, custom was increasingly pushed to one side and ignored. This was due to the spread of the Shulḥan ʾarukh, the authoritative codex of Jewish Law. Written by Yosef Karo in Tzfat in the Land of Israel, the original work, published in 1565, reflected only Sephardi custom. It was not until Moshe Isserles of Kraków added a complete set of glosses to the text presenting the Ashkenazi custom in t hose places where it differed from the Sephardi that the work was accepted throughout the Jewish world.24 In his text, which was first added to the Shulḥan ʾarukh in the 1578 edition, Isserles explained that he was giving the custom as used “in these lands.” He, his students, and his publisher claimed that the phrase referred to the w hole of the Ashkenazi cultural realm—Poland, Russia (i.e., Ukraine), Lithuania, Bohemia, Moravia, and the German lands.25 However, rabbis in central Europe, both contemporaries of Isserles and later generations, noted quite bitterly that what the rabbi from Kraków had called the custom of all these places was, in fact, only Polish custom and that, in some circumstances, their local customs w ere quite different. However, in the age of print, once the Shulḥan ʾarukh had been recognized as standard, there was little they could do but nurture their resentment at being pressured to do t hings the Polish way.26 On the other hand, for most Ashkenazi Jews, the acceptance of the Shulḥan ʾarukh meant that a single religious custom came to be used across Europe, from Alsace- Lorraine in the west to Ukraine in the east, creating what Joseph Davis has termed “an Ashkenazic Jewish identity.”27
Contacts during the Thirty Years’ War The period from 1618 to 1648 did not put an end to the contacts between Polish and German Jews. In particular, trade continued, despite all the dangers and problems involved. Polish Jews continued to frequent the
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major Silesian fair in Breslau.28 Bilateral business connections between Kraków and Vienna also never ceased. In fact, many of Kraków’s richest merchants at this time also maintained familial connections with the Habsburg capital.29 Polish Jewish merchants also continued to trade with Bohemia, Brandenburg-Prussia, Nuremberg, and Frankfurt a.M., among other places.30 These contacts would prove important when the Polish Jews fled to the empire after 1648. Unlike those who were captured and sent to Istanbul, the Jews fleeing westward w ere not g oing to an unknown land but traveling familiar routes on their way to regions and communities about which they had heard, and in some cases even visited. In addition to trade, the war years, and particularly the 1630s and 1640s, saw an intensification of the population movement from the empire to the Commonwealth.31 Though it is impossible to estimate the numbers involved, the phenomenon was significant enough to attract the attention of the non-Jewish authorities. In 1637, Krzysztof Słupecki, secretary to the Polish king in Warsaw, wrote to his erstwhile teacher, the Dutch humanist Gerardus Vossius, in Amsterdam: “The Jewish race has spread so widely throughout the Kingdom of Poland and its provinces that they have settled in almost every large town, small town, and village, particularly in this tempestuous time of war in Germany our neighbor.”32 T here is evidence that, beginning in the 1630s, refugees reached Poland from, among other places, Hesse, Austria, Bohemia, and Silesia.33 For those last, the nearest border crossing was into Great Poland, and by the turn of the 1640s there were enough of them for the Jewish Regional Council there to feel the need to regulate how they should be treated. In its meeting of September 8, 1642, it ruled that anyone coming across such refugees, male or female, adult or child, had to feed them and find them stable lodging.34 The refugees obviously did not all stop in western Poland but, as Słupecki wrote, traveled the length and breadth of the Commonwealth. At the 1639 meeting of the Lithuanian Jewish Council, one of the first items on the agenda was what to do with refugee c hildren who had made it as far as Lithuania, “without clothes and without shoes, and with no-one to look after them.” The Council decided that it would take in seventy-five such children and divide them among the more important communities (i.e., those large enough to have their own rabbi). In addition to providing them with food, clothes, and shoes, each community was to take responsibility for the education of the boys it had taken in: the brighter ones were to be sent to school to receive a Jewish education; the less bright w ere to be put into service or taught a trade of some kind.35
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A little later, the Lithuanian Council added a second regulation concerning the German Jewish refugee c hildren. It ordered that each community appoint an official to ask the c hildren their names, the names of the fathers, and their family names, as well as the community they came from, and note the details in a special register. The purpose was to ensure that no incestuous marriages w ere made in f uture years.36 Problems of identification did not end with children, however. There w ere many wives among the refugees who had lost contact with their husbands. To help solve this problem, in 1635 the Council of Three Lands appointed an official by the name of Menaḥem bar Shlomo to travel to Germany and look for the men whose wives were in Poland or Lithuania. Apparently fully accredited by the Council, Menaḥem bar Shlomo was still hard at work four years later in 1639.37 Taken together, these sources provide the only hints we have as to the size of this refugee wave. They seem to suggest that though significant, it was not huge. If the Jews of Great Poland did not feel the need to address the refugee issue until 1642, the numbers arriving during the 1630s must have been quite small. The number of children taken in by the Lithuanian Council—seventy-five in all—suggests the same thing. Clearly, then, though both bodies felt that the wave of refugees from the empire posed a problem that had to be dealt with, it seemed to be one that could be overcome without too great an effort.
In the years a fter 1648, this history of the connection between German and Polish Jews seems to have created a range of expectations on the part not only of the refugees but also of those in the empire who were to take them in. The refugees arrived with the cultural memory of how well their society had treated the German Jews when they had been refugees there and so expected to be treated with the same generosity. Though Polish Jews knew that the conditions in the empire w ere different from those in Poland, the similarity of religious custom which, on the basis of the Shulḥan ʾarukh, they anticipated finding might very well have led to an expectation that, despite everything, they would feel at home. They might even have come with a feeling of superiority born of a century and a half of development of Jewish life in Poland while German Jewry declined.38 For their part, the German Jews, though they recognized the social and cultural importance of Polish Jewry, and presumably viewed very positively the ways in which German Jews had been welcomed into
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Polish Jewish society, might have found some satisfaction in the reversal of fortunes that had taken place. After all, they were the senior of the Jewish centers, and schadenfreude is a common human emotion, particularly when the victims have not endeared themselves due to their arrogance and air of superiority. They undoubtedly expected that the Polish Jews would express gratitude for all the help they received. They might also have expected to find in their Polish coreligionists significant levels of cultural and religious similarity owing to their common Jewish background. This was not the basis for an easy encounter. As far as can be judged, the Polish Jews never felt r eally at home in the empire, and the German Jews never accepted them fully into their society. Though there w ere indeed many cultural similarities between them, t here w ere also, as we have seen, significant differences. In addition, each group seems to have had rather a jaundiced view of the other, arising from feelings of superiority and resentment. The situation was exacerbated by the l imited practical possibilities for relief that German Jewry had at its disposal. The issues German Jews had to contend with in dealing with the Polish Jewish refugees were quite different from t hose the Polish Jews had faced when the German Jews had arrived there during the Thirty Years’ War. At that time, a small number of refugees from Germany came to Polish Jewish society when it was at its zenith. Numerous, wealthy, relatively secure, and with strong social and religious institutions, Polish Jewry was well placed to give generous help to those who turned up at its door. The situation of German Jewry following 1648 could not have been more different. The previous century and a half had left them severely depleted in numbers, with only a few organized communities and, on the whole, very poor. Beyond that, like the rest of German society, they w ere struggling to recover from the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War. The appearance in the empire of large numbers of refugees was thus a very serious problem for local Jewish society. This created another source of tension between the groups, with the Polish Jews b itter that they had not been treated as they felt they deserved, and the German Jews angry and resentful at the additional burden that the Polish Jewish refugees had placed upon them. Nevertheless, these tensions, troublesome as they were, played out in the broad setting of the help and support that German Jewry did manage to give the refugees from Poland. Despite all the limitations, the Jews of the empire actually did a g reat deal to help the Polish Jews who flooded into their country, and the support they gave them allowed the refugees
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not just to survive the immediate postwar years but to build new lives, whether in the empire or back in the Commonwealth. In the final analysis, the refugees’ experience was to a g reat extent determined by the interplay of that philanthropic effort and the cultural tensions it engendered, together with the effects of new state policies inside the empire after 1648. It is the different ways in which these f actors developed and reacted with each other that form the subjects of the chapters to follow.
ch a p t er t w e n t y
The Trickle before the Flood r ef ugees i n t he holy rom a n e mpir e , 1648–165 4
Early Legislation on the Refugee Issue Though the vast majority of the Jews fleeing the Khmelnytsky uprising preferred to remain within the Commonwealth, there is evidence of Polish Jewish refugees in the empire from as early as 1649.1 In that year, a Jew called Salomon Moises petitioned the Elector of Brandenburg for permission to settle in the town of Dinslaken on the northern Rhine in Westphalia. He begged the Elector to overlook the ban on Jewish settlement in Brandenburg, explaining that “he had been ruined by the terrible incursion of the Cossacks in the Kingdom of Poland [and] that he and his family lacked the means to live.”2 The second refugee we know about was a rabbi, Moshe Kohen, who had been serving in the community of Narol in Ukraine in 1648. He had managed to escape the town before the terrible massacre of its Jews and fled west. In 1649, the community of Metz in eastern France appointed him their rabbi, a post he held u ntil his death ten years later.3 Interestingly, both t hese cases took place in the far west—Westphalia was on the northwestern border of the empire, Metz just over it, some 350 kilometers to the south. Two other destinations in western Europe popular with Polish Jewish refugees were, as we have seen, Amsterdam and Italy, particularly Venice. The intrepid travelers who made it to t hese destinations, however, w ere not typical of the refugees as a whole. Those who fled the Commonwealth tended to remain in the eastern part of the empire, in the regions closest to the Polish border. Some traveled a little further, [ 215 ]
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reaching Vienna, but most did not get beyond Silesia, Bohemia, or Moravia, which were attractive not only due to their proximity but also because the socioeconomic structure t here was similar to what the refugees knew from home. These were some of the regions hardest hit in the Thirty Years’ War: the destruction of property had been huge as had the decrease in population. According to one estimate, Silesia’s population had fallen by 22 percent, Bohemia’s by 29 percent, and Moravia’s by 31 percent.4 The years following 1648 in this region w ere thus a period of reconstruction and repopulation, a process led to a great extent by the higher nobility— the great landowners. Though there are no relevant data concerning Jewish refugees in Silesia before 1654, it seems clear that Jewish refugees from Poland, together with displaced local Jews looking for a new home, were active in repopulating the towns in Bohemia and Moravia at that time. In fact, their importance was such that on April 2, 1650, the king of Bohemia (under whose rule Moravia fell too) ordered that a census of Jews be drawn up and compared to what the situation had been in 1618, just before the war. He explained his action by asking his noble Staatshalters (regional governors) to check out the widespread rumor that more and more Jews were coming to his kingdom e very day.5 In a second order dated May 10, 1650, he further explained that the Jews w ere hiring Christian servants and even leasing various customs, tolls, and other sources of income. This he wanted stopped. He also demanded to know on the basis of which privileges or laws the nobility was allowing Jews to live on its lands.6 That last demand, which reflects tension between the king and the nobles, suggests that there was more going on h ere than anti-Jewish legislation for its own sake. Since Jews had long been seen as important sources of income for their lords, t here had often been power struggles for control over them between the monarch and the nobility.7 That may well have been the case here, too. Even before the end of the Thirty Years’ War, in 1629, Ferdinand II had strengthened his claim over the Jews in Moravia by granting them a significant privilege, which, in return for an annual payment of 12,000 guldens, assured them of his protection against those forces that wanted to exclude them from the markets, not to say the towns in general.8 In the years after 1648, as the king’s central power continued to grow, the Bohemian nobility reacted by tightening their control over their estates in order to boost their revenues and retain as much as possible of their status at the local and regional levels.9 One aspect of this policy
The Tr ick le befor e the Flood [ 217 ]
appears to have been to encourage what was seen as the lucrative settlement of Jews. In his orders of 1650, then, the king may have been continuing his efforts to put a brake on the nobility by depriving it of one of its sources of income: Jews. For their part, the nobility seems to have been largely unmoved by the king’s demand. The census that it set in motion was not of all Bohemia and Moravia as the monarch had stipulated but only of the Royal Dowry Towns (in German, Leibgedingstädte), and the comparison date they set was not 1618 but 1646, which rendered the census almost useless as a means of assessing Jewish migration to their estates.10 It is not entirely clear if this was a conscious attempt to thwart the king’s plan, but whatever the case, the result was that the nobility’s freedom of action remained unimpaired.11 The same type of response can be seen in the ruling on the Jews made by the noble Landtag assembly of Bohemia in October 1650. It ordered compliance with the royal demand to limit Jewish settlement by requiring all Jews living in places in Bohemia and Moravia where Jews had not lived in 1618 to be expelled within four months. On the ground, however, nothing significant was done to implement the order, leaving the nobility free to act on the issue of Jewish settlement as it saw fit. To what extent did the Polish Jewish refugees form part of this noble- encouraged process of resettlement? A partial answer, at least, can be found in a letter dated November 16, 1651, sent by the king to the imperial administration, complaining about the influx of Jews to Prague. Having received trustworthy information that a large number of foreign Jews, many of them bearing disease, are coming from Poland and other places, not only to the various regions [of Bohemia] but to Prague, we have told the regional governors to make it well enough known that wherever these Jews are found, they are to be expelled.12
Accusations of bearing disease seem to have been a common justification for banning the entry of Jewish refugees—they w ere also used in Slutzk and in Königsberg—so this seems reliable evidence that Polish Jewish refugees w ere indeed flowing into Bohemia and Moravia. On the other hand, the statement that there w ere large numbers of them crossing the border is hard to take at face value. It is likely to have been an exaggeration meant to scare the administration into action. If that was indeed the case, it failed, for as will become clear, this order too had little effect on the flow of refugees, and their number, though in reality small, continued to grow throughout the 1650s.13
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Jewish Refugee Society and Local Jewish Society Once in Bohemia and Moravia, the refugees w ere beset with the kinds of problems they faced in the other centers where they ended up. First and foremost, they needed to find a place to stay and some way of supporting themselves. For some, particularly married w omen with missing husbands, they also needed to clarify their personal status.14 This was an issue that could affect men too, as a case in the Moravian Jewish community of Holešov shows. T here, in 1649, a young scholar called Yo’el, a refugee from Ukraine, was trying to begin a new life. He had previously been married but had lost contact with his wife when she was captured by the Tatars and shipped off to Istanbul. Assuming that Yo’el was a widower, a wealthy Jew from Holešov, delighted to bring a scholar into his family, offered him his daughter’s hand in marriage.15 This put the refugee in a quandary. Though he was interested in marrying into a wealthy f amily and settling in Moravia, he was, in fact, still a married man. According to Jewish law, in order to get a divorce, he had to have the relevant document drawn up and delivered to his wife in person for her to accept. He also needed to return her dowry to her. For obvious reasons, Yo’el had done neither of those things and so was not free to marry. Then m atters took a surprising turn. The refugee information network brought to Holešov the news that Yo’el’s wife was still alive in Tatar captivity but had been forced to convert to Islam. This offered him the possibility of solving his problem. If the news was found to be true, he could have her declared “a transgressor” (ʾoveret ʾal dat), that is, a woman who had converted voluntarily—in Judaism the halakhah rules that Jews should allow themselves to be killed rather than convert, so any conversion could be considered voluntary.16 Such a transgressor could be divorced by her husband in her absence and would lose her right to her dowry.17 In order to remarry and start his new life, then, Yo’el had to find a rabbi who would make the necessary determination about his wife. He turned to one of Poland’s leading rabbinic authorities, David ben Shmu’el, author of the major commentary on the Shulḥan ʾarukh called “Turei zahav,” himself a refugee. Ben Shmu’el, usually called the Taz, the acronym of his g reat work, had been rabbi of the Ukrainian community of Ostroh when the uprising began and had joined the flight westward, eventually reaching Holešov.18 There he heard Yo’el’s story and agreed to clarify the halakhic status of his wife. Perhaps feeling that t here was no way that she could return from captivity in Istanbul and pitying the young scholar, the Taz
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ruled that she was indeed a transgressor and that Yo’el was free to remarry. However, the exigencies of the time meant that the great rabbi made his determination without first consulting all the relevant legal texts, as he would usually have done, and without committing it to paper.19 Many local rabbis, headed by Menaḥem Mendel Krokhmal in Mikulov (Nikolsburg), were appalled by the precedent that would have been set if this ruling had stood unchallenged. It was particularly harsh since not only was it made without firm evidence that the wife had converted, but Jewish law usually stipulates that to be punished as a transgressor, a forced convert has to have been warned about the consequences of her actions before she converted. The halakhah also provides an alternative, lenient view by which if a forced conversion is followed by repentance at the first opportunity, the w oman should not be punished as a transgressor—and that, too, the Taz had ignored.20 Had his approach been widely adopted, every married woman captured during the war could have been deemed a transgressor, lost her rights, and become an outcast, a situation that would have devastated postwar Jewish society. The case thus soon became something of a cause célèbre, with Krokhmal going as far as to claim that the distinguished refugee rabbi could only have made such an egregious ruling because he had been on the road without his library.21 Remarkably enough, all the argument proved irrelevant, because this was a story with a happy ending. In his ruling Krokhmal had said that the fifteen months that had passed were not enough for the refugee information network to bring solid information on the case and so it was too early to adjudicate.22 In this he was vindicated, as he adds in a personal comment at the conclusion of his text: A little l ater, I received a letter from a man called Yehoshuʾa, the maternal uncle of the w oman [i.e., the wife], in which he wrote that she had been captured by the Tatars and ransomed in Istanbul and that she had preserved her righteousness and never converted. [He added that] she was on her way back, in the town of Iasi, with a small group of Jews who had been captured and ransomed with her. Not long a fter that, she reached the Lublin district [in Poland] and wrote to her husband h ere, [saying] that he should go back and reclaim what he had lost, which he did. He traveled to her and lovingly took her back [as his wife].23
Still, whatever the result in this particul ar case, the question of the extent to which other women, who did not enjoy the support of a figure like Krokhmal, suffered at the hands of uncaring, not to say misogynistic, rabbis in the mold of the Taz remains unanswered.24
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Though this brief case is almost all the evidence we have of refugee life in Moravia, the picture it presents is consistent with what we have seen in other places. The refugees seem to have been welcomed by local society, which did its best to help them—in this case by making an offer of marriage to the young man from Ukraine. The refugees themselves stayed in contact with each other, often displaying great solidarity—the agreement of the Taz to make a halakhic ruling in such an unorthodox manner was an expression of this. Finally, the refugees remained part of an unofficial, but very broad, information network and used it to help solve problems of personal status and, where possible, reunite families. It seems reasonable to conclude, then, that though the numbers may have been small, a refugee community of sorts did develop in Moravia in the years before 1654.25 Just how small it was can be gauged by the lack of legislation dealing with it in the regulations of the Moravian Jewish Council of 1650. That year marked a moment of renewal and reorganization for the Council, which seems to have been established sometime e arlier. In 1650, it issued a huge set of regulations, 311 in all, dealing with every aspect of Jewish life in the region. These formed the first regulations in its pinkas (record book), and not one of them mentioned the refugees from Poland directly—a clear sign of how small their impact had been on Moravian Jewish life at the time.26 A reference to Polish Jews appeared only once in the regulations, in number 284, which had to do with trading procedures. Its goal was to preserve the trading rights of local Jews against those coming from abroad—a common practice at the time. Significantly, when the regulation referred to merchants from outside Moravia, it consistently used the word “Polaken,” that is, Polish Jews, an indication that Polish Jews were being identified as merchants, not refugees. Though engaging in trade might have been a cover for some refugees who wanted to settle in the region, the regulation was focused solely on bona fide Polish Jewish merchants, of which t here were many in Moravia throughout the early modern period.27 In the eyes of the Council, then, the influx of refugees from Poland did not constitute a problem of any significance.
The Limits of Mercantilism: Polish Jews in Brandenburg What seems remarkable about the movement of Jews from eastern to central Europe in these early years is that it was concentrated not in the regions that w ere adopting the more modern absolutist and mercantilist
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policies, as would be the case later. It seems rather to have been in places, such as Bohemia and Moravia, where the social status of the nobility and its control over its estates continued strong. In fact, one of the most important absolutist monarchs of the period, Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg, the “Great Elector,” seemed to set his face against Jewish settlement even at a time when he was encouraging Jewish economic activity in his lands. In 1650, a deleg ation of Polish Jews, possibly sent by the Council of Four Lands, approached the Elector with a request that he renew the privileges that his predecessors had granted to Polish Jews in 1628 and 1635, guaranteeing them freedom of trade in the Mark for a period of seven years. In order to give their request more weight, the Jewish elders even brought letters of support from a number of Polish senators.28 The motivation of the Jewish elders, and perhaps also of the senators who wrote in their support, was probably to ensure for the Jews, and so for the Commonwealth, markets in the west at a time when the markets in the east were largely paralyzed by the Khmelnytsky uprising. The elders of the Four Lands might also have been interested in ensuring for Jewish refugees at the very least free passage across Brandenburg in the guise of merchants, if not the possibility of actually settling t here (Jews had been forbidden to live in Brandenburg since 1573).29 The Elector, true to his mercantilistic principles, granted the Jews’ request for trading rights, citing his concern “to promote the general [art of] negotiation, trade, and commerce in our lands, so that our subjects may thrive, prosper, and succeed,” though he probably was also looking to improve his own trade balance with Poland.30 So, for a period of seven years, he permitted the Polish Jews “to move freely, securely, and in safety, by water and on land, in our entire electorate and lands,” in order “to visit the annual free public fairs and the storehouses in every [town] and to do business with both our subjects and with foreigners.” These very generous terms w ere conditional on the Jews paying an annual tribute of 200 reichsthalers, as well as “comporting themselves peaceably, and demonstrating themselves worthy of safe passage.” They were forbidden to engage in sharp practices or “deal with our people in the usurious trade in money,” and, most importantly, they were not to “carry good coinage out of the country or . . . bring bad, unfit coinage in.” All these stipulations, too, were recognizably mercantilistic in nature. This could not, however, be said of the first condition on the Elector’s list, namely “that they [the Jews] do not, either de facto or by acquiring a house, settle or stay [in our lands].” So, though Friedrich Wilhelm might
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have thought that the Jews’ mercantile activities gave a boost to the economy, he still did not view them as welcome settlers in his country.31 Having said that, the importance of this privilege lay less in its continued prohibition of Jewish settlement than in its extremely positive view of Jewish economic activity. What was new and significant in its formulation was that the Jews were valued not because the wealth they created filled the monarch’s coffers but because the business they did stimulated the country’s economy to the benefit of society as a w hole. Given time, this positive shift in thinking about Jews would open the doors to Jewish settlement in the empire much more widely, though it came too late for the refugees from the Commonwealth—even those who arrived in the second wave of the 1650s.
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On the Road t he st rug g l e for su rv i va l
the refugee experience of the Polish Jews who w ere forced to leave their homes during the mid-seventeenth-century wars varied widely. Common to all, clearly, was the sense of being ripped out of one’s previous life, the fear of death, the loss of social support and possessions, and the uncertainty as to the future. Yet they not only found strikingly different conditions in the various places where they ended up, they also fled in very dif ferent ways. As we have seen, the panic-stricken mass flights from Ukraine in 1648 were by no means the same as the organized communal flights of the mid-1650s, and both of t hose were quite different from the experience of being captured by Tatars, brought to the slave markets, and t here redeemed. The discussion here will, to the extent that the sources allow, focus on the experience of flight from Poland to Germany and what it meant in real terms to be a refugee on the roads of central Europe. This is a crucial issue because that kind of forced travel is such a fundamental part of what refugees have to endure that unless it is examined, they themselves cannot be understood.1
Starting Out Though the whole refugee experience was fraught with danger and terror, the most difficult moments for many came right at the beginning, when the individuals or small groups of refugees had to evade the enemy troops from whom they w ere fleeing. Horror stories abound about t hose who did not manage to do so. In his memoirs, Rabbi Yaʾakov Emden told the story [ 223 ]
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of his great-grandfather, Yaʾakov, a rabbinic student in Vilnius, who fled the Russian invasion in 1655: In the haste to fly for his life from the [Russian] forces, he lost contact with his brother and his young wife. She stayed with her father, who took her, his wife and his son to another country to avoid all the trouble. Yaʾakov fell into the hands of the hooligans, who had killed many Jews. . . . And his captor ordered him to kneel down so he could chop off his head with his sword. . . . But while he was on his knees awaiting the fatal blow . . . God put mercy into the heart of the enemy soldier who . . . instead of using the sharp edge of the sword, gave him a contemptuous blow with the hilt and said, “Get up you dog . . . and go on your way,” . . . [Yaʾakov] hid among the corpses, so that no passerby would know that he was alive . . . and stayed that way for some eight days.2
Such experiences left their mark on the refugees. A sense of what that could mean can be felt in the following autobiographical vignette, written by one of the survivors of the Lublin massacre of 1655: I remained alone, languishing with a broken leg, lame and crippled when God destroyed the Polish and Lithuanian communities. . . . Everything I valued was taken from me . . . all my wealth and possessions, my family—two little girls murdered as martyrs . . . and the holy books I had written. . . . In fear, I thought:3 I have been cut off from the land of the living . . . for I had been tossed into the open road, defiled and filthy,4 rolling in the blood of the murdered martyrs who had given up their souls to die. I was starving and so thirsty that my tongue stuck to my palate.5 Naked [I was] and barefoot, [even] bare-buttocked,6 for they had stripped me of clothes and left me nothing but my undershirt. The enemy brought me to be killed many times and I stretched out my neck like a lamb to the slaughter,7 but God in his great mercy has kept me alive until today among the survivors.8
This searing text, written by Aharon Shmu’el Kaidonover as part of the introduction to his book, Sefer birkat ha-zevaḥ, which he published in 1669, nearly fifteen years after the events it describes, is a clear sign that the images of his traumatic experience lived on with him.9 It is all the more striking because, for all intents and purposes, his had been a very successful flight: at the time that his book was published, he was serving as rabbi of the major Jewish community in Frankfurt a.M. Yet the picture he painted of his suffering was as vivid as if it was fresh in his mind.
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Even if refugees managed to evade the hostile soldiers, their lives remained in danger from people acting out of hatred of Jews, simply wanting to rob them, or both. Nighttime was particularly dangerous, especially if Jews were staying at an inn run by a non-Jew. The results could be shocking, as the following terse autobiographical note by Shmu’el Oyerbach suggests: The Holy One Blessed Be He saved me from the massacre . . . in the Lublin community. . . . [He] treated me with great favor when I was on the road, staying at an inn in the town of Rydzyna close to the Leszno community with an important and pure man, Yeḥezk’el Katz from Pinsk. He was killed right beside me but God . . . saved me.10
Leszno was an important Jewish community situated very close to the Silesian border, suggesting that both Oyerbach and Katz were refugees on their way out of Poland when the tragedy overtook them—randomly, it would seem, consigning one to death, the other to life. Another refugee, the famous Nathan Hanover, has left us a further truly remarkable testimony of the refugee experience, providing insight into the kind of conversations refugees had as they traveled. It can be found in a book Hanover published in Prague in 1660. This was a volume that, like his chronicle Yavein metsulah, seems to have been aimed at the refugee market—that is, at the refugees themselves and t hose coming into contact with them. A quadrilingual dictionary called Safah berurah, it contained literally hundreds of words, giving their translations in Hebrew, German, Italian, and Latin, thus facilitating communication between the Polish Jewish refugees and the p eople they met in two of the major environments in which they found themselves: the Italian peninsula and the German lands.11 Hanover divided the book into twenty chapters, each of which addressed a different topic, such as the environment, animals and plants, peoples, dress, military terminology, and professions, as well as Torah, grammar, and math.12 Chapter sixteen he titled “Business, Storytelling, Trade, and Travel.” However, instead of giving a list of words and expressions as he did in the other chapters, he moved into phrasebook mode, breaking down entire conversations into small sections. It was clearly aimed at t hose actually on the road—refugees, merchants, and o thers— as it enabled them to converse with other travelers. Even if these were not precise records of a ctual conversations, Hanover, a well-traveled refugee himself, would have done his best to make them realistic and thus
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useful to his readers. As a result, his text gives the modern reader a unique insight into the kind of conversations that must have taken place as early modern Jews fled, or just traveled, from place to place.13 After a section on greetings (Hello, how are you? etc.), Hanover began a conversation in which he inserted himself (“Nathan Ashkenazy, your servant”). The setting was that of the road and Hanover was trying to establish w hether his traveling companion was Jewish. Though identifying the people one was traveling with was a serious issue, sometimes even a m atter of life and death, the author treated it lightly, almost tongue-in-cheek: Where are you from? From Prague. Do you know Hebrew?14 I don’t know/I do know. Are you Jewish? Yes. How can I tell? I am circumcised. Muslims are circumcised, too. Yes, but they d on’t do the “uncovering.” 15 Show me [then]! I am embarrassed to. It’s written in the Torah. What’s written in the Torah? Do not expose your nakedness!16
fter that humorous moment, Hanover moved on without a break to a A quite different conversation in which t hings took a very dark turn: Give me money. I haven’t got any. You’ve got dice. I haven’t got any. Give me flesh and blood. That’s impossible. If you d on’t want to give [it to] me voluntarily, I’ll cut off your head and take it against your will. Think what you are g oing to answer your Maker when you come to trial. The Lord God w ill avenge my blood of you. And if you ask, who will testify [against me]? “The bird of the heavens will give voice and the winged one will speak.”17
This very disturbing conversation between Hanover, the refugee, and a man who wanted to rob and even kill him was telling in a number of ways. Its sudden appearance in the text seemed to express the unexpected nature of dangers on the road, and its impassioned conclusion pointed out the essential helplessness of the refugee. When threatened with physical violence and murder, all Hanover had to fall back on upon w ere imprecations of divine vengeance—threats not guaranteed to move the kind of man who would consider murdering him for his money. Clearly, he had survived his own refugee experience, so if this was a verbatim record of an actual conversation he had had, his threats worked. It seems just as likely, however, that he was not reporting an a ctual event but recounting the trauma of being helpless and exposed to violence on the road, an experience that he, like most refugees, must have undergone.
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On the Road from Poland to Silesia: One Man’s Story Though flight must have always been a frightening, perhaps even terrifying, experience, full of dangers, it did not usually end up in brutal and murderous attacks. We can get at least a sense of what it must have been like in reality from the personal chronicle of Yuda ben Ephraim Ḥayim of Piła in Great Poland, who fled to Silesia during 1656 to avoid being attacked by the forces of Stefan Czarniecki. The text presents not only the route taken by Yuda and his f amily but also a little of what they went through on their travels. The chronicle opens with Yuda and his f amily living in the community of Wronki, a little over thirty-five miles south of his hometown, Piła. In fact, he was already a refugee of sorts, though not from an army. It seems that plague had broken out in Wronki, so he and his family had decamped to a village called Pożarowo, a few miles away.18 Then the plague broke out there too, so they had to move again, this time a c ouple of miles north to another village called Lubowo.19 Since it was on the edge of the forest, they did not actually stay in the village but lived out in the open. Despite the b itter cold, they did this for about six weeks u ntil things quieted down and they could return to Wronki.20 Though it doesn’t deal specifically with Yuda’s experience as a refugee from Czarniecki’s forces, this part of his story is important because it reminds us that Polish-Lithuanian Jews w ere a very mobile group. They would travel long distances in pursuit of business and, in times of crisis such as plagues, were quite used to leaving their homes and taking refuge elsewhere. Becoming a refugee was thus not something completely out of the ordinary for a man like Yuda. In late July or early August 1655, news reached Wronki that the Swedish king had invaded Poland and that the community t here would fall under his sphere of influence. Yuda decided that it was time to move on. He does not seem to have been contemplating leaving the country at that point but instead hired a teamster and traveled to Grodzisk Wielkopolski, where he had family, a journey of about thirty-five miles.21 There he found much of the community packed up and ready to leave for Silesia. He would have joined them but could not find a new teamster and so was forced to stay behind, able at least to live in his uncle’s house.22 Though Yuda and his f amily w ere, strictly speaking, refugees fleeing before the Swedish army, their flight was little different from other relocations that Polish Jews made in times of peace. In fact, that is what he
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seems to have thought at the time because he wrote that since Wronki was not his hometown, he felt he could just as easily stay in Grodzisk. This turns out to have been a sensible decision: after Sweden conquered most of western Poland, it imposed peace on the region, a development that convinced at least some of the refugees to return home.23 The change came in the spring of 1656, when Czarniecki’s forces began massacring Jews. That was when Yuda decided that it was time to leave Grodzisk. He had prepared a cart ahead of time and, despite some initial difficulty, left. He and his family journeyed all night, terrified that armed bands would attack them, and traveled southwest in the direction of Wolsztyn, where there was a Jewish community, a journey of about fifteen miles. According to his chronicle, they did not stop there but continued southwest in the direction of the Silesian border. However, they had barely traveled a further couple of miles when they ran into a serious problem: When we reached the village of Widzim,24 early in the morning, our cart broke. T here we were in the middle of the village where every one was hostile and we w ere completely overcome with terror. I stayed [with the cart] on my own and paid them [i.e., the villagers] to put the cart back on its wheels, which they did. It was a heaven-sent miracle for us because all the carts that traveled this way after us were attacked and robbed by t hose villagers, and the travelers beaten. T here was no-one to come to their aid and they were overcome with fear.25
Breaking down like that was a common occurrence in early modern Europe, a function of very bad roads and poorly made carts.26 However, what would have been just an inconvenience and an expense for other travelers was a potential disaster for Jewish refugees, who found themselves alone and vulnerable, not to say helpless, in the face of what might turn out to be hostile and violent locals. It was little wonder, then, that Yuda sent his f amily ahead out of the village, presumably with some of their valuables, and stayed by himself to get the cart fixed. His relief at surviving this experience unscathed is palpable in the text. Yuda and his f amily continued a further twenty miles to the Silesian border, crossing it just before the village of Lipiny. When he reached it, he found no less than twenty-five families from Grodzisk, presumably encamped just over the border waiting for the first opportunity to return home. By that time, he had run out of money and he and his f amily were on the brink of starvation. However, the remnants of the Grodzisk community gave him employment that allowed him to eke out a living as a teacher and slaughterer.
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His luck changed in the early summer, when a local nobleman, Georg von Schönaich, whose palace was in Siedlisko, some five miles distant, invited Yuda to work for him, manufacturing buttons.27 That job, which brought in a lot of money, lasted a little over a year, at which point he moved a little further south to the small town of Bytom on the Oder, where he lived, as he put it, “quietly, securely, peacefully, and calmly.”28 This lasted until 1659, when troop movements in the war with Sweden forced him and his f amily to make what turned out to be the last leg of their flight.29 They made for the major Silesian Jewish community in Głogów (in German, Glogau), a journey of some fifteen miles, which also became something of a nightmare, emphasizing again the essential helplessness of the refugee: “We had to take one of the soldiers from the town of Bytom with us as a guard. However, what was meant to protect us became our downfall. He attacked us, robbed us, and beat us the whole way.”30 Finally, Yuda reached Głogów, where, a fter a waiting period in a suburban settlement outside the walls, he and his f amily were accepted into the town and made welcome by the Jewish community. After four years living there, “in peace, relief, and deliverance,”31 he had only good things to say about the local Jews: “They are generous hosts32 and scholars of the Bible, the Mishnah, and the Legal Rulings. May God grant them long and pleasant lives, Amen.”33 Taken as a w hole, Yuda’s experience looks a relatively easy one, all the more so if compared with some of the horror stories of t hose years. However, that may be a false comparison. Even though he never found himself with a sword to his neck, Yuda did have to go through some terrible experiences: he had to face the possibility of a murderous attack in Widzim, was on the verge of starvation and unable to support his family in Lipiny, and was physically assaulted on the road to Głogów. Each of these is enough to leave a refugee feeling alone, helpless, and humiliated, experiences that can mark him for life; Yuda had to suffer all three.34 The language he uses of his time in Głogów, “relief and deliverance,” is drawn from the biblical Book of Esther, the archetypal story in the Jewish tradition of miraculously surviving a murderous threat. He was obviously well aware just how lucky he had been. Yuda’s story can also shed light on some other aspects of the refugee experience. First of all, it did not end at the Silesian border. Inside Silesia, the refugees continued to move from place to place for years in search of safe haven. Second, the flight itself was not a single huge hike but done in small, quite manageable stages. The furthest Yuda and his family traveled
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on any single leg of their journey was about thirty-five miles (the distance from Wronki to Grodzisk). Third, he found help and support at the various stops: he stayed in his uncle’s house in Grodzisk, the Jews in Lipiny gave him work, and he was welcomed into the Głogów community. Though it was probably not consciously planned, this was a smart way to flee, keeping the traumas of flight to a minimum. It could not eliminate them completely, however. Yuda’s story helps us understand that although the experience of flight might appear relatively “easy” from our perspective, it was deeply traumatic. We cannot know the effect this might have had on each individual refugee, but it was clearly a foundational experience that all refugees had to undergo in one form or another. It is thus a key issue in understanding the ways in which their history unfolded as they rebuilt their lives in the wake of their flight.
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Over the Border r ef ugee set t l e m e n t i n t he e mpir e’s e a st er n r egions
the swedish invasion of poland began during the first week of July 1655. Within a month, the northwestern province of G reat Poland had fallen, followed a few weeks later by the capital, Warsaw, and then Little Poland. Not surprisingly, this sparked a flight of refugees across the Commonwealth’s western border to the neighboring region of Silesia. More surprising, though, was that even before the Swedish army arrived, a group of Jews from G reat Poland wrote to the Holy Roman Emperor, the Habsburg Ferdinand III, asking permission to enter his territory. They did so because Jews from outside Silesia w ere officially forbidden to stay t here, except for short periods during each town’s annual fair. Unfortunately for them, however, the Swedish army got to them before Ferdinand’s response, so they were forced to cross into Silesia without permission.1 Once t here, they wrote a second letter to the emperor, dated August 19, 1655, in which they gave a moving description of their sufferings: We do not want to stop, particularly b ecause we find ourselves in uninhabited places, and cannot live with our poor wives, children, and child-minders in the open country u nder the open sky. Worse still, fall is coming on and the nights are already cold. . . . [Quite] helpless, we are terrified of the wicked who might attack us violently at night, take away our possessions, and rob us of everything.
The refugees explained that even though the Swedish forces were by then willing to grant them safe passage home, they w ere unable to take advantage of it, presumably because they feared reprisals from the non-Jewish [ 231 ]
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locals who had remained b ehind. Instead, they renewed their request to be allowed to travel through, and stay in, Silesia, adding a further appeal that the permission they sought should be extended to cover other Habsburg holdings, such as Bohemia (including Moravia) and Austria.2 On the basis of a favorable report prepared by the Silesian regional authority (the Oberamt) even before the refugees wrote their second petition, the emperor gave them the permission they wanted on August 22. However, clearly concerned that such an influx of Jews might cause unrest among the settled Christian population in his lands, he also ordered that some effort be made to collect statistical data concerning Jewish settlement and that care be taken to ensure that not too many Jews w ere allowed to s ettle in any single locality.3 These caveats notwithstanding, it was Ferdinand’s order that seems to have opened the floodgates to a great influx of Jews into the region following the Swedish invasion. These two documents—the Jews’ letter and the emperor’s response— deepen our understanding of the refugee experience in the mid-1650s in a number of ways. They show, for example, that the coordinated flight of Jewish communities from the Great Poland region was organized not just locally, within each community, but sometimes transregionally. In addition, the Jews’ letter suggests that even in cases where a central authority in the Commonwealth, such as the occupying army, was willing to allow the Jewish refugees to return, there w ere still hostile local forces trying to prevent them from doing so. Finally, the emperor’s response indicates that the refugees’ choice to make for Silesia, Bohemia, and Moravia as safe havens was a function not only of those regions’ geographical proximity to Poland but of the generous terms of travel and settlement that Jews were granted there.
The Refugees in Silesia The precise chronology of the movement of refugees into Silesia cannot be reconstructed. However, by October 1656, it was large enough to have worried the inhabitants of Głogów and the surrounding district. The town was already home to one of Silesia’s three major Jewish communities—the others were in Biała Prudnicka (Zülz) and Osoblaha (Hotzenplotz)—and its non-Jewish inhabitants w ere opposed to further Jewish settlement.4 They therefore approached the Oberamt asking that no more refugees be allowed to settle there. To back up their demand, they, like many others hostile to the refugees, raised the issue of public health and claimed that the newcomers brought with them sickness and plague. The Oberamt
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concurred and wrote to the emperor to support Głogów’s claims.5 Ferdinand, however, did not respond and refugees continued to flood not only into that district but into the region as a whole. In early 1657, the emperor gave his open protection to “the Jews who have fled from Poland to Silesia.” It had been brought to his attention, very possibly by the refugees themselves, that they were facing severe economic difficulties. Not only were t hose to whom they owed money back home coming to Silesia to collect the debts (which the refugees w ere, of course, unable to pay), but the imperial and local authorities w ere demanding extortionate sums for licenses to travel across or to stay in the region. All this the emperor wanted s topped. He ordered that any payments imposed on the refugees must be approved by his treasury and that creditors from Poland should have to pursue their claims in the Polish courts.6 Though Ferdinand never explained why he had decided to take the refugees under his protection, it seems most likely that he believed that they could, in the long run, boost the economy and thus enrich his treasury. He was therefore willing to support them in their efforts to get settled as a first stage in helping them create new sources of income. As a result, friction developed with the local nobility.7 The main bone of contention was the annual tax to be paid by the refugees to the Oberamt, whose officials seem to have taken a much more shortsighted view than the emperor, trying to squeeze from the refugees as much money as possible as quickly as possible. The negotiations over the level of taxes to be paid seem to have begun with a meeting of the refugees’ chosen representatives and t hose of the Oberamt on May 29, 1657. The discussions do not seem to have gone well for the Jews b ecause on June 23 the refugee delegates, Markus Magnus from Milicz (Militsch), Abraham Lazarus from Stráž pod Ralskem (Warttenberg), and Valten Löbell from Bytom (Oberbeutten), decided to write a letter to the Oberamt challenging an assessment they felt was exorbitant. They argued that the Jews who had been forced to become refugees w ere bankrupt and incapable of paying such a high sum, adding in what seems a sly aside aimed at the emperor that they could not even engage in trade as they had previously done in Poland due to the hostility of the local p eople. They proposed that the Jews pay an annual assessment of just 5,000 florins in monthly installments.8 The Oberamt was having none of that, and on July 29 confirmed a ruling from earlier that month that “the Jews who have fled to this land will have to pay . . . 1,000 florins monthly.” That was more than double what the Jews had offered, and, as if to add insult to injury, the Oberamt
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also decided that thirteen monthly payments should be made, presumably having decided to calculate according to the Jewish calendar (for the Jews that was a leap year in which an extra month was added).9 The refugees were seemingly left with no room to maneuver. That was not the case, however. Their representatives having failed to achieve what they wanted, the refugees tried a different tack entirely. On August 14, they sent a petition to the new emperor, Leopold I, signed not by the delegates but by the whole “poor and ruined Jewish community which has fled Poland and now lives in Silesia.”10 Expanding on their terrible position as victims of the war in Poland, they explained that although their representatives had agreed on monthly payments of 1,000 florins, they themselves were actually incapable of making them. They added that, in fact, there were no more than 900 Polish Jewish refugees in Silesia, most of whom w ere destitute. By their estimate, no more than 200 w ere able to make the necessary contributions, and could not possibly raise more than 500 florins a month.11 This was a much more successful strategy and the emperor responded positively. He wrote a curt note to the governor and the Oberamt on August 27, in which he criticized their intransigence and instructed them to negotiate with the refugees a sum that they actually could pay, adding that he did not want to be bothered with the matter again.12 After that, the refugees were able to reduce their tax bill significantly. For the first few months, they seem to have paid a compromise amount of 750 florins, but by the end of the year that had fallen to just 550. It is not clear precisely what happened a fter that but in April 1658, the refugee community, together with its representatives, wrote to the governor asking for a further reduction in their tax assessment. Their argument was that there were very few refugees left in Silesia: all t hose in Upper Silesia had left to go back to Poland, while only a quarter of those in Lower Silesia remained, and they were living in extreme poverty.13 Whatever the truth of all that might have been, in the first quarter of the next year, the refugees seem to have paid a total of only 200 reichsthalers, which amounted to a monthly payment of just 100 florins.14 In April 1659, the Jews of Lower Silesia wrote to the governor, reiterating the argument of the letter from the previous year, adding that though there were Jews to be found in Silesia, these were in reality merchants from Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine who w ere not resident and thus should not have to pay the tax.15 An Oberamt report of January 1660 noted an additional fall in tax revenue from the refugees to just 50 florins a month, though it did mention that it was to be raised to 100 in the new
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year.16 However, it was the issue of the visiting merchants that became pressing. The Oberamt viewed these Jews, too, as subjects for taxation and were quite prepared to punish them for nonpayment—an action the local Jews opposed strenuously.17 This flurry of correspondence over taxation contains a g reat deal of important information about the settlement of the Polish Jewish refugees in Silesia. First of all, it provides almost the only demographic data we have. In their letter of August 14, 1657, the refugees in Silesia claimed that they numbered no more than 900.18 This figure cannot be taken at face value, however. It was given in response to a tax assessment and thus was likely to be an undercount, possibly a very significant one. In addition, it dealt with those assessed to pay taxes, and so presumably covered only adult men, not women or children (except widows who engaged in economic activity). Taking all this into account, a reasonable estimate of the number of refugees might stand at 3,000–4,000, though if the undercount was more significant, it might have been as many as 5,000 or even more. The references to different centers of refugee settlement found scattered among the documentation also permit us to assess its geographical spread. The places mentioned are Biała Prudnicka, Byczyna (Pitschen), Bytom Odrzański, Chobienia (Köben), Głogów, Lubin (Lüben), Milicz, Nowa Cerekwia (Neukirch), Nysa (Neisse), Pyckowice (Peiskretscham), Rudna (Raudten), Rychtal (Reichthal), Ścinawa (Steinau), Ujazd (Ujest), Vartemberk, Woźniki (Woischnik), and Wrocław (Breslau).19 We also know of refugees in Lipiny and Osoblaha, as well as in various villages. This seems to suggest that though their settlement covered Silesia from north to south, those fleeing from G reat Poland tended to stay reasonably close to the border. Other sources state that, in some towns at least, parties of refugees settled together, making small communities of their own. Such was the case in Lipiny and Osoblaha, whose refugee communities contained 25 and 40 families, respectively.20 Finally, though some refugees went to the major communities of Głogów, Biała Prudnicka, and Osoblaha, relatively few found their way to the regional capital, Wrocław. There, the hostility of the strong municipal council made Jewish settlement very difficult. While a few refugees did make their home in Wrocław, the development of a Jewish community in the town was connected more with the arrival of large numbers of Jewish merchants from Poland-Lithuania in succeeding decades.21 Perhaps the most striking aspect of the story of the refugees in Silesia is the high degree of self-organization they achieved. As early as May 25, 1657, the refugee community in Milicz elected a representative, Markus
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Magnus, originally from the Polish community of Krotoszyn, to negotiate with the Oberamt on the question of taxes. In parallel, the refugees in Vartemberk elected Abraham Lazarus and those in Bytom, Valten Löbell, to represent them in the same negotiations.22 There was little unusual about the creation of such a body: the need to negotiate over taxation of Jews had led to the foundation of many Jewish representative bodies over the previous century and a half, including the regional councils and the Council of Four Lands in the Commonwealth, with which the refugees were undoubtedly familiar. What was remarkable h ere was the speed with which the refugees were able to organize: for the most part, they had been in Silesia for less than two years. The reasons for their success should perhaps be sought in the relatively organized nature of the Jews’ flight in the mid-1650s, in which the settlement of groups from individual Polish communities in single towns and settlements in Silesia made cooperation much easier. The documentation also provides important data concerning the refugees’ return home. If it is to be believed, the vast majority returned to Poland in the eight months between August 1657 and April 1658. This is by no means impossible, especially bearing in mind that, having come to Silesia in groups, the refugees w ere likely to have left it in groups, too. On the other hand, it is not entirely clear why they would have felt safe to return at that time specifically. Though the worst of Czarniecki’s attacks were over, anti-Jewish violence continued.23 To add to that uncertainty, many Polish Jewish merchants seem to have appeared in Silesia at much the same time that the refugees left. In fact, the two phenomena can be seen as related: Bernard Weinryb has argued that once the refugees returned home, they put their knowledge of Silesia to good use in developing new trading links with the region.24 This was not, however, the whole story. Some of the refugees who left Silesia did not return to Poland but continued on, e ither to Bohemia or Moravia or westward across the empire. Beyond that, in minimizing their numbers in their correspondence with the authorities to reduce their tax assessment, those remaining may have exaggerated the numbers of t hose who had left. Another device was to suggest that the number of Polish Jewish merchants visiting Silesia to trade was very large, thus allowing refugees visiting the markets and fairs to claim that they were from Poland and thus void their tax assessment. Of course, adopting such a strategy would, by its very nature, have remained undocumented, so it is impossible to determine conclusively whether or not it was common.
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The Refugees in Moravia The policy on Jewish issues in Moravia a dopted by the emperor in his role as king of Bohemia in the years following 1657 had a great deal in common with that in Silesia. In both places, he was interested in encouraging Jewish trade and stopping the local forces—in the case of Moravia, the towns—who wanted to limit it. This was particularly striking in Moravia because it marked a change in policy since the immediate post-1648 years. At that time, the nobility had been trying to leverage Jewish settlement to its own advantage and thus had aroused the emperor’s opposition. By the mid-1650s the emperor himself seems to have recognized the importance of Jewish settlement for his own income and had begun to support it. There was, however, a major difference between the situation in Moravia and that in Silesia. In Silesia the refugees from Poland w ere recognized as a special group, while in Moravia legislation dealt with Jews in general and did not mention the refugees specifically. On March 17, 1657, Ferdinand III renewed the major privilege granted to the Jews of Moravia by his father in 1629, taking the opportunity to emphasize the Jews’ rights not just to enjoy free trade in the royal towns during the annual fair but to engage in crafts, too.25 The townspeople’s response was to adopt administrative means to stop Jewish trade. To that end, they began to impose new taxes on Jewish merchants visiting the fairs in their towns. Their success was at best only partial; in 1659, the new emperor, Leopold, renewed the Jews’ trading rights, adding, just as his father had done in Silesia two years e arlier, that they should not be burdened with exorbitant taxes as they traded in the royal towns.26 The royal towns w ere unwilling to accept this ruling and responded with a long letter, questioning the rights that Leopold was giving to the Jews, whom they viewed as harmful to urban life. They expanded on this theme at great length in two further documents. With the towns’ incomes still low, they argued, it made more sense to expel the Jews fully rather than give them improved privileges. In that regard, they quoted a privilege they had received in 1454 that had allowed them to expel the Jews.27 The emperor not only did not accept the towns’ arguments but rejected the very basis on which they were made. In an order issued in 1661, whose language seems much stronger than the previous ones, he reiterated the Jews’ right to free trade during market times and stressed that they should enjoy it just as Christian merchants did (“gleich andern Christlichen Handelsleüthen”).28 The key here was the emperor’s insistence that
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the ultimate power over the Jews was his alone because they formed part of his regalia. For this reason, he thundered, the towns had no right to interfere in his policy. H ere was yet another indication that the fate of the Jewish merchants in Moravia was not determined just by attitudes t oward Jews as such but by the desire of the emperor to strengthen his control over the region during the chaotic postwar years.29 Finally, in 1662, the emperor issued a further order to the royal towns concerning Jewish trade. In harsh, even threatening, tones, he not only reiterated the towns’ legal obligation to permit Jewish economic activity during the fairs but reminded them that, in his interpretation of the law, they were obligated to permit Jewish settlement in general. The basis for this seems to have been the fact that although the towns had received a privilege in 1454 that allowed them to expel the Jews, the Jews also held older privileges, not necessarily superseded by the later legislation, that actually permitted their settlement. By threatening to use the older privileges to force the towns’ hands in this way, the emperor was asserting his authority in no uncertain terms.30 With that level of support, Polish Jews continued to settle in Moravia, though there is no demographic data to reconstruct their numbers and settlement patterns. The legislation of the Moravian Jewish Council from the second half of the 1650s is also unhelpful in this regard. It has nothing specific to say about Jews from Poland and refers by inference at best to the problems of dealing with refugees. In its meeting of late 1658, it established a number of special collections to be made in all the communities, “because the numbers of the poor are increasing from day to day, and there is not enough money [to support] them.”31 Though complaints about the rising numbers of poor were commonplace, the extent of the collections mandated by the Council, which included taking money from communal taxes and the charity given in the synagogues as well as from special door-to-door campaigns, was not. Thus we can reasonably assume that a genuine and pressing issue was being addressed. So, while it seems likely that the Polish refugees w ere among the causes—if not the major cause—of the problem that the Council was dealing with, they were not identified as a group. It is unlikely that they w ere too few to be identified as a special group within society given what is known about the exodus of Jews from Little Poland in the mid-1650s and the steady growth in the numbers of Moravian Jews in the second half of the seventeenth c entury.32 What seems more plausible is that the refugees who reached Moravia were not as cohesive a body as t hose who settled in Silesia, and so w ere not able to organize
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in order to negotiate special rights. A key f actor h ere may have been the geography of the region. While Silesia bordered the Commonwealth for most of its length, Moravia did not. Simply reaching it involved more travel. Since one of the features of the organized flights of this period was that the group did not travel long distances together but preferred to wait just on the other side of the border, more distant Moravia was a much less attractive destination. In fact, t here is no evidence of any such organized group of Jewish refugees from the Commonwealth in Moravia in these years. In that situation, the best course of action for the refugees in Moravia was probably not to try to negotiate separate rights for themselves as a group. It made much more sense for them to disappear into the background and try to be considered as part of the local Jewish community, particularly as the locals themselves were having some success in negotiating more favorable trade conditions. Thus surviving the refugee experience seems h ere to have involved a certain fluidity of identity: in one set of circumstances, the refugees might present themselves as the refugees they were, in another they might wish to be identified as merchants from Poland, and in yet a third they might try to blur their Polish background altogether and blend in with the local community. Their identity had become contingent on their situation.
Passing Through Moravia often seems to have been an initial stopping-off point for the refugees rather than their final destination—a phenomenon most clearly in evidence in the experiences of various leading rabbinic figures who fled there.33 This can first be seen in the post-1648 wave of refugees that included a number of major rabbinic figures, including David ben Shmu’el of Lviv (the Taz) and Gershon (Ulif ) Ashkenazi of Kraków. The Taz did not remain in Moravia for long, returning to Lviv in about 1652.34 Ashkenazi seems to have settled for a l ittle longer, accepting the post of rabbi of Prostějov (Prossnitz) in the same year. However, in 1657 he left the region for Hesse to become rabbi in the Hanau community not far from Frankfurt a.M. He returned briefly to Moravia to become rabbi of Mikulov in 1663 before leaving again, first for Vienna and then to become rabbi in Metz.35 A similar sense of impermanence can be seen in the paths of the g reat rabbis who fled to Moravia in the mid-1650s. Three of the most impor tant came originally from Vilnius: Shabtai ha-Kohen, whose status as the
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leading rabbi of the generation was paralleled only by that of the Taz, was appointed rabbi of the Holešov community, where he remained until his death in 1662. Aharon Shmu’el Kaidonover fled Vilnius for Lublin, where he was caught up in the great massacre of 1655. He fled again, this time to Moravia, where for a while he found himself in Mikulov, before he moved on to become rabbi in first Fürth in Bavaria, and then Frankfurt a.M. He was later appointed rabbi of a number of other communities, including Głogów in Silesia, before ending up in Kraków. He died in 1676. The third rabbinical figure from Vilnius was Ephraim ha-Kohen, known popularly by the title of his book, Shaʾar Ephraim. Following the Russian invasion, he fled with most of his family to Moravia. T here, he became rabbi of Třebíč and then Uherský Brod before he too left the region to become rabbi of Buda in 1666.36 The fourth rabbi was Yehoshuʾa ben Yaʾakov Heshel. He had been appointed rabbi of Kraków in 1654 but fled before Czarniecki’s troops two years later. He retained his post in Kraków but spent time as a refugee in Mikulov and then moved on to Vienna before returning to Poland when the situation had quieted down.37 The arrival of such a panoply of rabbinic stars in the mid-1650s must have given the impression, for a while at least, that Moravia was going to become the most important center of Torah study in Europe.38 That was not to be, however. Within a year or two almost all the refugee scholars (including Gershon Ashkenazi) had moved on. Only the towering figure of Shabtai ha-Kohen remained as rabbi of Holešov for the last few years of his life. The most likely reason that so many left was that Moravia remained a somewhat underdeveloped region in central Europe and its Jewish communities were rather poor. Prestigious rabbis such as these were soon offered much more attractive and lucrative contracts elsewhere. It was not only the g reat rabbis that chose to leave Moravia. Lesser rabbis, too, would often move on. Such was the case of Shalom ben Moshe, a refugee rabbi in Moravia, as a letter he wrote to his b rother Yehudah Leib from Prague in the early 1660s demonstrates.39 The background to the letter was the fate of three b rothers, Shalom, Yehudah Leib, and Yisra’el, who, together with their f ather, Moshe, had been forced to leave the f amily home somewhere in the Commonwealth during the mid-1650s and had lost contact with each other on the road. Moshe ended up as scribe and judge in the Moravian community of Ivančice, Yisra’el settled in one of the Jewish communities in Bohemia, and Yehudah Leib found his way to Prague, where he had a son, Ber—later to be known as the Jewish scholar Ber Perlhefter, who worked closely with the Christian Hebraist Johann Cristoph Wagenseil from Altdorf.40 The
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author of the letter, Shalom, left destitute by the wars, made his way to Moravia, where he began to earn his living as a preacher, wandering from community to community, not just in Moravia but in Austria too. Eventually he found a position as rabbi of the Moravian community Loštice. Having scrimped and saved as best he could, he married off one of his daughters there (and a few years later similarly provided for a second). At some point, Shalom’s stepdaughter Pearl arrived from Poland and suggested that he return home to reclaim the property that had been left behind when the f amily fled. At his wife’s insistence, he left his post in Loštice and set out for Poland. He found the traveling very challenging, as he explained to his b rother: “It is difficult for me to travel to my hometown41 with my wife. Where will I find the money to hire a cart on each leg [of the journey]? And worse still, [I am afraid that] I w ill not be able to make the journey at all due to all the disturbances and disruptions of the war.”42 In fact, he almost gave up in Silesia: When I came to the Osoblaha community in Silesia, not far from Biała Prudnicka, t here w ere t here about forty wealthy, respectable, and learned Jewish householders. They were all from Poland and had decided to s ettle [in the town]. I preached a sermon on the Sabbath, and as soon as it [i.e., the Sabbath] was over they appointed me their rabbi. I stayed there two and a half years.43
During that time, Pearl married a Jew from the Moravian community of Hranice (Weisskirchen) and moved back to live with her husband. Following the Ottoman invasion of 1663, not only did Shalom and his family have to flee the town and survive in the nearby forest for a month and a half, Osoblaha was hit by very high inflation, which ate up all his savings and earnings, leaving him and his f amily once again on the brink of starvation.44 He was saved only by the offer of a rabbinical post in the Polish town of Leszno, which he took up with alacrity. Once t here, he had to put his plans to travel on to his hometown on hold again because his wife became very ill. When she finally recovered, two years later, Shalom was left in a quandary, unsure w hether to journey on to his hometown and resume his life there, to journey on but to sell his property and return with the money to his daughters in Moravia, or to give up on the difficult journey to his hometown altogether and instead travel directly to the empire to join his brother. It was at that point that he wrote Yehudah Leib for advice: “So, my dear b rother, as you love me, give me sound advice. I know that you are a wise man. Should I turn to the right or to the left?”45 We do not know which he chose.
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Such a peripatetic existence, with the threat of indigence always on the horizon, was by no means uncommon for the refugees and makes them hard to categorize: Shalom could be called at one and the same time a refugee in Moravia, a refugee in Silesia, and a refugee who returned home to the Commonwealth. Beyond that, his letter shows that though legislation in each of the places where Jews settled could shape Jewish experience there, the Jews themselves—and especially the refugees—could easily evade it. As a mobile group, they always had the possibility of moving away to other places they found more welcoming. Of course, this meant they had to be able to adapt quite rapidly to new conditions, a skill they certainly seem to have mastered. As far as Shalom’s decision to leave Moravia was concerned, though he did so as a rabbi, his a ctual motivation for leaving was not rabbinical in nature. He was torn between the choice of returning to live in the Commonwealth or settling in the empire with e ither his daughters or his brother. None of these had any connection with his status as rabbi—and could just as easily have faced a refugee merchant or craftsman. Shalom’s case also reminds us that, even in the case of a refugee leaving a particular region, the net balance of migration was not necessarily negative. Though Shalom himself might have moved away, he left two d aughters and a stepdaughter, all married, in Moravian communities.46 In addition, not all the refugees who left a given region, such as Moravia or Silesia, did so in order to return to the Commonwealth. Very many, and by no means all of them rabbinic figures, moved away to other parts of the empire, where conditions were somewhat different.
ch a p t er t w e n t y-t hr ee
Polish Jews Meet German Jews t he r ef ugees el se w her e i n t he e m pir e
sometime in the second half of the seventeenth century, a chapbook, a form of cheaply printed popular literature, was published in Prague and provided a satirical look at the interaction of the Polish Jewish refugees with the German Jews they met on their travels in the empire. Consisting of eight pages in rhymed Yiddish and titled Di bashraybung fun Ashkenaz un Polak (The Description of a German and a Polish Jew),1 it was, like all such chapbooks, aimed at the mass market of the day.2 The author, who did not reveal his name or anything about himself, wrote at the beginning: I take the quill in my hand And begin to write of Ashkenaz, the German land. I can recount a tale quite true Of Ashkenaz flooded with the Polish Jew.
He also expressed the pious hope: Then God will soon send us the Messiah To reconcile German and Polish Jew with each other.3
This set up the content of the poem, which was cast in the form of a quasi- humorous argument or discussion between a representative of the indigent Polish Jewish refugees and a representative of the unhelpful German Jews to whom they had come for shelter and assistance. Through witty descriptions of each other’s behavior, a kind of satirical slanging match developed, with each complaining of the other’s terrible qualities.
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The text is remarkable in that it gives insight into the social and cultural attitudes prevalent outside the rabbinic elite of Jewish society in seventeenth-century Europe, focusing particularly on the tensions between various subgroups of Ashkenazi Jewry.4 It is of g reat importance here because it sheds light on the refugee experience of the Polish Jews in the Holy Roman Empire. However, like all such texts, it cannot be taken at face value, for the picture it gives, though based to some extent on the realities of the time, must have been exaggerated for humorous effect. We must therefore submit the poem to a close reading: much of its humor derives from its use of what seem to be the broad generalizations of each group held by the other, and it is t hese which, if read with care, w ill help us understand some of the reality behind the satire. Subsequently, other sources will reveal the way such meetings played out on the ground in various communities in the empire. Having compared what we have learned from the poem with what the other sources have to tell us, we w ill be able to understand in some detail not only what the Jews of the empire did to help the refugees but how each group understood what was being done and reacted to it. This exercise should reveal in some depth the cross- cultural encounter of the refugees from the Commonwealth and the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire.
Social Tensions: Di bashraybung fun Ashkenaz un Polak fter a brief introduction, the satirical poem presents what it has to say A about the Polish and the German Jews in two large blocks: the first gives the point of view of the Polish Jew and his complaints about his reception in the empire; the second brings the perspective of the German Jew and his opinions of the indigent refugees with whom he is faced.5 The setting in which this quasi-conversation is supposed to take place is the meeting between the Polish Jewish refugee, traveling the roads of the empire, and the settled German Jew. The refugee says openly: “We would not willingly have come to Ashkenaz and to shame / if war had not come to our home. Alas, we w ere driven away and burned out / so e very man fled and took his own route. . . . Don’t take it badly that we came to you / bad luck touches the poor and the rich, too.”6 The sense of distrust between the two groups is palpable: “When a Polish Jew comes to a German’s h ouse / he plays with him like a cat with a mouse.”7 As far as the refugee is concerned, his German Jewish host is
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a terrible miser, initially unwilling to give him a bed to sleep in or food to eat. When finally prevailed upon to do the right thing, the German Jew is only prepared to give the poor refugee a pot of groats and some wormy cheese before sending him up to sleep in a cold room u nder the eaves, which he locks from the outside.8 “The German Jew thinks: ‘Why do I have anything to do with this Pole / who comes running round to my house and home?’ The German is never happier and without a care / than when the Pole has gone and is no longer t here.”9 After a section in which he complains about the German’s Sabbath meal, the “shalet” (better known as cholent), the Polish Jew moves on to mock his hosts’ piety.10 This first t hing to come u nder attack is their beards—at least those of the wealthier Jews living in the urban communities: “He [the German Jew] cleans it away like before Passover he removes the bread / and leaves just a snippet low on his head.”11 The basis for this was the fact that for the Polish Jews, the religious injunction against shaving was interpreted to mean growing a full beard, while in the empire, the German Jews, while still growing beards, adopted the custom of their non-Jewish neighbors by reducing them to the barest minimum.12 The next target of the critique is the German Jew’s behavior in the synagogue during prayers. This time the Polish Jew aims his harsh words at the village Jews, whom he claims are reluctant to go to pray at all and, when they do, sit around and discuss their business during the prayers, even at the most solemn moments. “Is t here any more for me to recite? / They often go to shul and break out in a fight.”13 Finally, and most importantly, the Polish Jew accuses his German cousin not only of ignorance but of sneering at Jewish learning and scholars, particularly t hose from the Commonwealth. “In Torah learning you would be deaf and dumb / without the teachers from Poland who to Germany come.”14 Underlying all the critique, however, lies a sense of resentment at the unfairness of the way the Polish Jewish refugees w ere being treated, especially bearing in mind the excellent way in which the German Jewish refugees from the Thirty Years’ War had been received: “In times past, you Ashkenazim fled to Poland too / when the war in Germany came upon you. You were treated kindly with your funds and your lives / we gave you money and all the best wives.”15 While the feeling of bitterness is clearly being played up h ere to sharpen the poem’s satirical bite, the Polish Jews’ sense of entitlement is not invented. When the German Jew of the poem comes to answer t hese charges, he does so with his own diatribe against the Jewish refugees from Poland. His first target is the way they dress, which he views as primitive. He mocks
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their coats (perhaps some kind of the long jacket called in Polish, kontusz), with their wide sleeves and distinctive collars, as well as their sable hats. First and foremost, of course, he objects to their bushy and unkempt beards, which for him w ere a sign not of piety but of barbarism.16 However, the vast bulk of the German Jew’s response deals with the unscrupulous, not to say criminal, tendencies of the refugee: First of all, he learns small things to steal Just a plate or a pot in which to make a meal. But when he grows up, that is not enough He is now a rascal, a real ganev.17 Unscrupulous, he does not miss an opportunity To rob Jews and bring them to poverty. He breaks into gentile homes whenever he can And often needs saving from the hangman.18
As far as the German Jew of the poem is concerned, the refugee has no scruples about using any kind of sob story to get money out of his hosts, be it his wife’s pregnancy, his being robbed on the road, or just his having lost all his money. He is also particularly light-fingered and w ill steal anything he can from those who take him in: “They [the refugees] talk a lot with p eople on the way / but keep their evil intent hidden for another day.”19 The Polish merchants who began to form part of the refugee wave at the turn of the 1660s also come in for some criticism in the poem, notably on the charge that they take goods on spec and fail to pay for them on their return. Even worse than that, however, in the eyes of the German Jew, are their family values: You leave your wives sitting at home, suffering in pain Many are un-divorced and so “enchained.” At times the husband has no rest And so takes another [wife] to his breast. He has no intention of returning home Until the letters of excommunication come.20
Interestingly enough, in his section, the Polish Jew himself admits that some of his fellow Jews have less than pure reasons to flee to Germany. It was the fear not of Czarniecki (or even of their wives) but of l egal proceedings that had sent them on their way: “Anyone in Poland who is afraid to be tried before the court / w ill flee to Germany to hide and not be caught.”21 Clearly t here was more than one reason for Polish Jews to
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travel west starting in the 1650s, and among the refugees w ere to be found unscrupulous Jews and even criminals. Underlying the German Jew’s critique seems to have been a feeling of resentment at the Polish Jews’ arrogance. According to the German Jew, when his Polish cousin arrives in the country, he begins to act “like the Rabbi of Kraków” and “believes that us Germans he can fool / and still get his bag stuffed full.” “Just to listen to you Poles boast / it seems t here is no- one like you from coast to coast.” “They behave in such a haughty manner / you cannot give them enough honor.”22 All in all, then, the self-important Polish Jews do not seem to have been welcome guests in the empire— according to the poem, at least. Much of the humor in this text is based on what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.” This refers to the discomfort caused during the meeting of similar individuals or groups by the small differences between them. Freud noted that the tensions that can develop in such situations often are greater than t hose that arise between two much more dissimilar groups.23 In this case, the Polish Jews and the German Jews, both of Ashkenazi religious and cultural heritage and both speaking a dialect of the Yiddish language, were portrayed as feeling that small differences in social, cultural, and religious mores drove a serious wedge between them. From the historian’s perspective, however, it seems more likely that while the differences did exist, as did the tensions they aroused, the consequent alienation was by no means as great as the poem makes out. The other major source of humor in the poem was its use of stereotypes— in particular, t hose of the stingy German Jew and the unscrupulous Polish refugee. H ere, too, t here was probably some basis in reality for t hese images (otherwise the poem would not have been funny). However, where it may be misleading is in its assumption that t hose were inherent qualities of the two groups. It seems much more likely that t here were more immediate causes. The low levels of enthusiasm expressed, and help given, by the German Jews to the refugees probably had less to do with some kind of ingrained meanness and more with the very real social and economic difficulties they themselves had to face before they could find the resources to help anyone e lse. For their part, the refugees w ere dealing with the incredible difficulties of surviving their flight and overcoming the sometimes life-and-death situations in which they could find themselves. For some, if not many, such desperation did not always leave room for observing the niceties of life, even with the local Jews. On the other hand, the poem does not suggest that the Jews of the empire were refusing to help the refugees. Quite the reverse. Though the
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Polish Jewish refugee has endless complaints about the poor quality of the support he is getting from his German cousin, he is moaning about help that he has actually received. And while the German Jew does not like, or even trust, the refugee from the Commonwealth, he does not turn him away completely empty-handed. Simply refusing to help the refugees was not an option for the Jews of the empire. So, the situation the poet was satirizing was in fact one of basic solidarity that was overlaid with what he saw as a humorous range of cross-cultural misunderstandings and tensions. To see the extent to which the chapbook was an accurate portrayal of the mid-seventeenth-century reality, we will now examine the meetings of the Polish Jewish refugees with the German Jews on the ground in the communities of the empire. The poem itself tells of refugees in the following places: Frankfurt a.M., Worms, Fürth, Bamberg, Halberstadt, Hamburg, Hildesheim, Minden, Friedberg, Hanau, Kassel, Witzenhausen, Eschwege, and Wanfried.24 In what follows, we w ill look at two of them, Frankfurt a.M. and Hamburg, as well as one the poem did not mention, Vienna, in order to get a better sense of how the encounter played out on the ground.25
The Jews in the German Communities frankfurt a.m. If t here was one Jewish community in the empire that seemed to exemplify the problems involved in the meeting between the refugees with the Jews of the empire, it was Frankfurt a.M. Frankfurt was one of the largest and wealthiest Jewish centers in the empire and also one of the few that had been continuously settled since the M iddle Ages (though its Jews had been briefly expelled from 1616 to 1618). Despite the fact that the community had enjoyed the support of the emperor, it still remained subject to the very hostile town council and its settlement was limited to a small gated-off section of the town. Having said that, overcrowding in the 1650s was by no means the terrible problem it would become a century later. Frankfurt Jewry also boasted one of the best-organized and stable Jewish communal administrations in central Europe. All in all, then, it was well placed to help the refugees from Poland. Nonetheless, it proved quite unwilling to do so.26 It first revived a regulation from the previous c entury forbidding Jews from outside town to s ettle in the Judengasse. Individual Jews might
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be permitted to stay provided they did not work in the credit market or engage in trade—even peddling—without a special license from the community council. Not surprisingly, such a cold reception persuaded the refugees not to stay and no licenses were requested.27 In fact, the community record book mentions only one refugee in Frankfurt. This was a wealthy Jew from Vilnius by the name of Leyzer, who seems to have arrived in the fall of 1657 and brought with him an ornamented curtain for the Holy Ark (parokhet) together with other decorations from the synagogue in his hometown. Short of money, he offered to sell them to the local community for use in their own synagogues. On October 1, the community agreed, buying the curtain for 100 reichsthalers and the other ornaments for a further 52. It then added a special note. When the Vilnius community reconstituted itself, which the local Jews piously hoped would be very soon, it would not be allowed to repurchase the items. The sale was one-time and it was final.28 It is not entirely clear what stood behind this somewhat harsh decision, though it was probably not simply meanness. The Frankfurt community was active in collecting money to help ransom the Polish Jews in Istanbul, coordinating its efforts with Aboab and Zacuto in Venice. Rather, the ruling reflects a basic mistrust: the Frankfurt community seems to have been afraid that once the war was over the Jews of Vilnius would exert moral blackmail in order to purchase back the items at less than the original sale price. This may then be another sign of the lack of confidence that the Jews of the empire had in those of the Commonwealth.
vienna Frankfurt’s lack of generosity does not seem to have been typical. The situation in another of the empire’s major Jewish communities, Vienna, developed quite differently. Though it had only resumed existence in 1570 after its medieval expulsion, it had become one of the richest and most important Jewish centers in Europe. Like Frankfurt, it boasted a well- organized communal administration, which devoted much of its resources to philanthropy, an activity of which it was very proud.29 Although since 1626 the community had been restricted to just one part of the town (called “Unterer Werd”), its position vis-à-vis the urban authorities was not as weak as might be assumed. The Jews of Vienna remained the emperor’s subjects and so were largely protected from the depredations of the townspeople.30 As in Silesia, they were viewed as important creators of wealth and received a number of royal privileges that
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guaranteed their rights to do business and make their living (relatively) freely.31 This seems to have made the community something of a magnet for Jewish refugees fleeing the horrors of war. A large wave arrived in 1645, following the defeat of the imperial army by the Swedes at Jankov in Bohemia. O thers began to arrive from the Commonwealth a fter 1648.32 The Vienna community apparently allowed the refugees to s ettle in the Jewish quarter and make a living, much as happened in Slutzk a few years later. However, it did not take long for the number of refugees to grow and their economic activity to become increasingly visib le, which angered the non-Jewish urban authorities. Since they were not official residents of the community (and thus were called “foreign Jews”), the refugees were not covered by the privileges of the Vienna community and did not enjoy imperial protection. This left them open to reprisals from the town council, which did not take long to materialize. On June 9, 1650, the following order was proclaimed: Since it is daily apparent that foreign Jews . . . have crept in in large numbers, and now . . . choose to wheel and deal shamelessly . . . all those foreign Jews who have no special Royal privilege . . . shall within at most fourteen days from this date be well and truly driven out.33
This, however, did not put an end to the help that the Viennese Jews extended to the suffering Jews of the Commonwealth in the years immediately following 1648. We have seen that when the Jews of Kraków were hit by a terrible plague in 1652, the Vienna community was quick to send relief money. It also helped by acting as a clearinghouse for both the requests for help sent from Poland to Italy (it had the letters recopied and forwarded) and the funds sent in return, as well as acting as a linchpin in the European philanthropic network spearheaded by Venice.34 None of this seems to have overwhelmed the community and its resources, at least u ntil the mid-1650s. At that stage, however, the situation took a terrible turn for the worse following the second wave of wars in Poland. All of a sudden, the Vienna community found itself flooded with refugees in serious need of help at a time when it did not have the resources for it. In desperation, it wrote to the Jewish community of Mantua asking for money. In the letter, dated June 2, 1656, the Jews of Vienna spoke plaintively of the thousands of starving, sick, and wounded Jews fleeing Poland, and particularly of the many hundreds of refugees who had come to their town, adding, “We have done what we could [for the Polish Jewish refugees] for some time now, and would go on d oing so, but we do
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not have what we need to cover all their needs at the present, let alone in the future.”35 Unfortunately, we have no firm data on the numbers involved. All that can be said with some confidence is that since the Jewish population of Vienna at this time was 2,000–3,000, the appearance of just a few hundred people would have amounted to a huge population increase of 10–20 percent.36 To the authorities the local community justified the appearance of so many Jews by describing them as “servants,” that is, e ither h ouse servants or low-level employees.37 One such was Gavri’el Shussberg, whom we last saw as a young man watching the arrival of Jewish refugees in Rzeszów in 1648. In the following years, he had made a good c areer for himself in the Commonwealth, first composing a historical chronicle, Petaḥ teshuvah, and then acting as scribe to the Council of Four Lands. Eventually, however, he was forced to flee to Vienna, where he found himself in the early 1660s, making a living as a copyist and presumably also a scribe.38 Another sign of the growth of the Jewish population was the appearance of a number of rabbis from the Commonwealth, who set up temporary yeshivot in the town. Prominent among them were Ḥayim Bochner from Kraków and Yonah ben Yeshʾayah Te’omim from Pinsk; they were joined by other figures such as Yehoshuʾa ben Yaʾakov Heshel and Gershon (Ulif ) Ashkenazi, making Vienna a veritable powerhouse of Torah study.39 As the numbers of refugees continued to rise, the community outgrew the Jewish quarter and began to rent rooms and apartments in both the rest of the town and the suburbs outside the walls.40 The increased expenditure caused by the refugee issue seems to have become so g reat that the Jewish community applied to the emperor for a reduction in its tax assessment. This was an unfortunate move b ecause it led the new emperor, Leopold I, to look more closely at the situation of the Viennese Jews. On August 12, 1660, he ordered a census made of all the Jews’ property in the Jewish quarter, as well as their income, in order to determine whether a reduction in their taxes was justified.41 As if this was not bad enough, Leopold was also made aware of the refugee issue, which he did not view favorably, presumably because Jews living outside the Jewish quarter could much more easily evade paying taxes. He therefore issued the following order on February 23, 1661: We note that . . . the Jews have not only frequently crept in from Poland, Bohemia, and other places . . . but have also presumed, bit by bit, to gain entry into Our Royal Seat, the City of Vienna, and to seek
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lodging and habitation in Christians’ h ouses there, both inside the city and around it. . . . For this reason We order you [i.e., the Christian townspeople of Vienna] . . . not to give the Jews, native or foreign, any shelter or overnight lodging u nder any . . . pretext, but to drive them out immediately and expel them into the Jewish town.42
This order raises the question of why the foreign Jews were not simply expelled from Vienna altogether, as had happened in 1650. No explanation is given, though the emperor might have been motivated by the idea that keeping the refugees in Vienna would ensure an increase in his Jewish tax base. Following the outbreak of the war against the Ottoman Empire in 1663, the emperor, facing a Muslim enemy, began to turn to the Church, which made him more open to the claims of the non-Jewish townspeople. As its imperial protection declined, the pressure on the expanded Jewish community began to grow until, in the end, the emperor expelled them all from the town in 1670.43 While the issue of the foreign Jews was not a major contributory f actor, one of the preliminary commissions established to assess the planned expulsion did mention the appearance of foreign Jews in the town (referring specifically to t hose from Poland)—and the foreign Jews were among the groups driven out in 1669 as a prelude to the great expulsion of the following year.44 Overall, the Vienna community seems to have treated the refugees rather well, and that in addition to contributing money and other resources to relieving the suffering in the Commonwealth. In fact, the Jews of the town opened its gates to them and helped them make a living, even though doing so caused serious tensions first with their non-Jewish neighbors and then with the emperor. Not every community acted in this way. When faced with a similar situation, the Jews of Hamburg a dopted quite a different strategy.
hamburg The Jewish community of Hamburg was an unusual entity. For most of the seventeenth c entury it consisted of three separate communities, one in Hamburg proper, one in the nearby settlement of Altona, and a third in a small settlement called Wandsbek.45 The reasons for this were complex: Hamburg itself, a major port on the lower Elbe river serving the newly developing Atlantic trade, was a Free Imperial City within the Holy Roman Empire. In the sixteenth c entury it embraced mercantilism, which led it
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to encourage the settlement of groups whose economic activity it saw as beneficial. Among t hese w ere the so-called New Christians, who began to settle the town in the 1580s and then, in many cases, to profess Judaism, at first in secret and l ater more openly. Though it turned a blind eye to this phenomenon, the town senate was not willing to permit unlimited Jewish settlement, certainly not of the much less urbane Ashkenazi Jews.46 When the Jews of Hamburg wanted to buy a plot of land for a cemetery in 1611, they w ere not permitted to do so in the town and had to resort to nearby Altona, which soon became a magnet for Jews who could not settle in Hamburg for one reason or another. These were often Ashkenazim, refugees from the Thirty Years’ War, some of whom would travel each day to Hamburg to do business (though some Ashkenazim did manage to live undetected in Hamburg itself as servants to wealthy Sephardi families). Eventually a separate Ashkenazi community was set up in Altona. In 1640, the situation took another turn when Altona and Wandsbek came u nder Danish rule. The Danish king, who also claimed sovereignty over Hamburg, seems to have taken an interest in his Jewish subjects b ecause by protecting them, he could use them to help undercut the senate’s influence.47 In 1641, the Jews of Altona also received legal recognition in the form of a settlement privilege.48 In both Altona and Hamburg, however, anti- Jewish sentiment was common, often stirred up by the church. At the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the senate decided to expel the Ashkenazim from the town in 1649, perhaps as a preliminary to its renewing the Portuguese Jews’ terms of settlement on quite favorable terms the next year.49 It was against this background that the efforts to help the refugees from the Commonwealth played out in the mid-1650s. In the first part of the decade, there w ere no refugees in Hamburg and the community, which contributed regularly for the ransom of captives in the Mediterranean and the poor of the Land of Israel, limited itself to giving financial support to the emissaries from Lviv in late 1652.50 Interestingly enough, when emissaries sent by the Jews of Moravia appeared with requests for money in 1653 and 1654, they w ere turned down point-blank. The generosity of Hamburg Jewry clearly had its limits.51 The first sign that things were changing came on April 3, 1656. On that day, the Hamburg community ordered that all the “foreigners” then in the town would have to leave within three days of the upcoming Passover holiday.52 It would seem that the numbers of such foreigners (not all of whom were from eastern Europe) had grown and their visibility was beginning to be worrisome.
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In fact, the majority of the refugees from the Commonwealth did not go to Hamburg itself, preferring the Ashkenazi community in Altona. We do not know precisely from where they came. A great many seem to have been among those who fled Vilnius in 1655 for the Baltic coast and a ship to the west. O thers traveled from central Poland along the Vistula to the port in Gdańsk. The memoirist Glikl of Hameln, who was then a young girl living with her family in Altona, has left a description of the kind of welcome the refugees received there: After this, the Jews of Vilnius fled Poland and many of them came to Hamburg, suffering with contagious disease. At that time, t here was no hekdesh53 or any other houses in which to house the sick. At least ten of them were sent to rest in our attic and father had them looked after. Some of them recovered, o thers died. My s ister, Elkele, and I also contracted the disease. My pious Grandmother visited the sick and ensured that they had everything they needed. . . . She would visit them in the attic three or four times a day. Eventually, she also caught the disease and languished for ten days before she died.54
This is a revealing text in a number of ways. First of all, it shows that the danger the refugees could pose to public health, so often used as an excuse to keep them out, was not entirely invented. Not unnaturally, the terrible conditions of flight left them exposed to the threat of illness—and they could easily pass on any contagious disease they contracted to those looking after them. One imagines, too, that t hese cases did not endear the refugees to the German Jews who took them in: the loss of loved ones as a result of the arrival of the strangers might have ramped up the tensions between the two groups. This is also one of the few testimonies we have of the a ctual process of caring for the refugees. As Glikl describes it, it was done with unstinting generosity and at great personal risk. Beyond that, the text shows that though the decision to take in the refugees, and take responsibility for them, was made by the father, the actual care itself was provided by the women of the h ouse. If this was, as seems likely, a general phenomenon, it suggests that w omen had a key role in h andling the refugee crisis since they provided the hands-on help and care for the new arrivals, allowing them to recover to one degree or another from their sufferings. Finally, the fact that the sick refugees w ere housed in the attic of a private house was also significant. Though Glikl explained it by saying that the fledgling community in Altona still lacked the proper institutions to
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look after the transient and sick, that was by no means the whole story. Hiding the refugees in that way made it much more difficult for the non- Jewish authorities to learn of them. According to the 1641 privilege, the Altona community was forbidden to take in “foreign Jews,” so it was in its best interests to keep them out of sight.55 In fact, concern about how non-Jewish society would react to the arrival of these refugees seems to have been a key element in the way Hamburg Jewry handled the issue. On May 22, 1656, the community noted in its record book: The leaders of the Ashkenazi community in Altona have informed [us]: 130 of our brothers-in-faith from Poland have arrived in Lübeck in great distress. They w ill reach h ere by tomorrow. . . . It was decided to grant them twenty Reichsthaler to cover the cost of the journey [from Lübeck]. Once they get here, we will see how they can be helped further.56
Three days later, the community made a special announcement proclaiming an extraordinary fundraising drive, to include prayers in the synagogue, a special sermon by rabbi David Coen, and a collection: Since our poor brothers, who, for our sins, have been forced to leave Poland on account of the war and the atrocities are, unfortunately, increasingly exposed to suffering, persecution, and misery, we should extend them our compassionate assistance, as we have done on many occasions. The expense involved is more than our community can bear, so the Ma’amad has decided to hold a charitable meeting for us to help the many souls who have recently come h ere, hungry and naked—and may still be to come. It also proclaims that the financial resources of the Altona community are not enough even to feed these p eople. This [support of the refugees] is an act of pure kindness in which many religious commandments are involved, and it is our most fervent hope that our pious and open-hearted people will once again demonstrate their usual grace and great-heartedness.57
We do not know how much money was raised, but in the end the refugees were housed neither in Hamburg nor in Altona. Instead they were placed in what the sources call “a village, two miles distant.”58 The reason for this was most likely that both communities, Hamburg and Altona, knew that their non-Jewish neighbors would not tolerate the arrival of so many Jews. So, to avoid conflict, they h oused the refugees in a nearby village, whose peasant inhabitants w ere presumably easy to buy off.
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Unfortunately, this arrangement lasted for only a few months. On September 21, the Hamburg community was again approached by the Jews of Altona with another request for help and advice. It turned out that, for reasons unspecified, remaining in the village was no longer an option for the refugees. The only solution that the two communities were able to come up with was to get rid of the Polish Jews entirely: “It is therefore essential that we hire boats to take them someplace e lse.”59 It is not clear w hether the plan was to ship the unfortunate refugees upriver on the Elbe to towns such as Magdeburg, Dessau, Wittenberg, or Dresden or for the boats to take them down to the coast and on to Amsterdam. Whatever the case, the Jews of Hamburg and Altona w ere quite simply washing their hands of their now unwanted guests, though t here is evidence that some Polish Jews remained in Altona, and even in Hamburg itself.60 As far as the Hamburg Jews’ attitudes t oward the Polish Jews was concerned, t here are one or two hints in the sources. On March 30, 1659, the community dismissed two emissaries from Lublin, who had come to raise money for their community, with the following brusque comment: “Because the current financial difficulties of the community are attributable to the fact that it has so often intervened with help to relieve the problems in Poland, it decided against granting money for this purpose.”61 From that time on, only very small sums were distributed to needy refugees, mostly to those who wanted to return to the Commonwealth. The Jews of Hamburg, it would seem, had become tired of the constant demands for money from Polish Jewry.62 As to how they viewed the personal qualities of the refugees, a Yiddish poem published in Amsterdam in 1675 provides at least some insight. Titled “Ain sheyn naye lid vos tzu Hamburg iz geshehen” (“A beautiful new song about what happened in Hamburg”), it purported to tell the story of an event that had recently taken place in Hamburg. A certain Polish Jew called Yonah had been living for some time in the town, where he had taken a wife. It turned out that he was already married but had deserted his wife in Poland without divorcing her. When the agunah learned of this, she traveled to Amsterdam to consult with her b rother. Then the pair of them went to Hamburg and brought Yonah before a rabbinical court. He ignored its ruling, so his first wife appealed to the non-Jewish town council, which had him arrested. The story ended with the first wife taking pity on Yonah so that he could be released from Christian captivity. He was then expelled from Hamburg together with his second wife, who had borne him a child in the meantime but not before he gave his first wife a bill of divorce.63
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This story has left no traces in e ither the Jewish or the non-Jewish sources, which makes it likely that it was invented to form the basis for a song that would be popular enough to sell. On the other hand, much of the text’s detail dovetails with what we know of conditions in Hamburg, suggesting that its composer either came from there or was well acquainted with the town.64 Yonah himself also cuts a recognizable figure: the poor Jew who had fled eastern Europe in search of a better life in the empire. The song’s internal chronology suggests that he was supposed to have come to Hamburg during the 1660s, thus making him e ither a refugee from the wars themselves or one of those who had fled Poland in their wake in the guise of a merchant. At the song’s center was the scandalous behavior of the Polish Jew, and it was presumably that which gave it its appeal. The question of its historicity is thus not relevant for understanding contemporary social attitudes. The composer either chose or invented a story that presented a stereo typical image of a crooked Polish Jew. Had t here been no audience for such a thing, he would not have bothered. Moreover, the song’s content is strikingly similar to some of the descriptions found in Di bashraybung fun Ashkenaz un Polak. Just as in Di bashraybung, the “Ain sheyn naye lid” highlighted an unscrupulous Polish Jew who left his wife b ehind in Poland and started a new family in the empire. He was portrayed as a thoroughly dishonest figure, a chronic liar who, in pursuit of his own selfish ends, was willing not only to sacrifice his first wife but even to disregard the ruling of the rabbinical court. The correlation between these two popular poems suggests quite strongly that this was a stereotype common in the empire in general, and in Hamburg in particul ar. In all, then, the Hamburg community’s stance on the refugee issue was somewhere between the rather uncompromising attitude of Frankfurt a.M. and the more open generosity of Vienna. Interestingly, all three seemed to have been quite willing to help relieve the suffering of Polish Jews outside the empire, w hether in the Commonwealth itself or in the slave markets of Istanbul. Where they differed was in their attitude to the refugees who turned up on their doorstep. This suggests that t here was not some deep underlying trend among German Jewry determining the treatment of the refugees but that local conditions in each place w ere a major determining factor. Particularly important w ere relations with the non-Jewish authorities. Viennese Jewry, which enjoyed a significant degree of support from the emperor, felt reasonably free to help the refugees, while the Jews of Frankfurt, who w ere faced with a very hostile town council, simply refused
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to do so. The Jews of Hamburg and Altona, though they demonstrated willingness to give the refugees what help they could, w ere faced with a complex interplay of forces that limited their ability to act. As long as the numbers of refugees were small enough to be hidden from the non-Jewish authorities, Hamburg Jewry seems to have opened its doors to them. However, when the numbers—and so the danger of reprisals—grew, the doors w ere closed and the relief effort focused on moving the mass of the refugees on to other places. In all the communities the refugees reached, there was a price to be paid for helping them, whether in increased tension with non-Jewish neighbors, in problems balancing the communal budget, or in health issues (or in all three). Though this did not deter German Jews from providing relief, it may have further colored attitudes toward the Jews from Poland. Though German and Polish Jews had felt the differences between them before 1648, the larger number of meetings that took place between the refugees from the Commonwealth and the Jews of the empire, and the very real practical difficulties they involved, gave this feeling much more solid expression in Jewish popular culture. While mutual attitudes do not seem to have affected to any significant extent the actual relief given the refugees, the cultural stereotypes that they helped to disseminate, in particular the negative German Jewish view of the Jew from eastern Europe, proved very long-lived, surviving into the twentieth c entury. The seventeenth-century refugee crisis cast a very long shadow indeed.65
ch a p t er t w e n t y-f ou r
Amsterdam
though the majority of the refugees from the Commonwealth who traveled westward ended up in the empire, a significant number made for a place outside it: Amsterdam. The major city in the Seven Provinces, the part of the Netherlands that had broken f ree of Habsburg control in 1581, Amsterdam had become one of Europe’s major trading emporia and a bastion of mercantilism by the seventeenth century. The town’s wealth was based to a g reat extent on its far-flung maritime trading networks that extended from Southeast Asia to the New World. It was dominant, too, in the Baltic trade, shipping to western Europe, in the first half of the century, large amounts of grain exported from Poland-Lithuania, mostly via the port of Gdańsk.1 As the money flowed in, Amsterdam flourished, undergoing an astonishing cultural florescence in art and science, creating what is still known as the Dutch “Golden Age.” The cosmopolitan atmosphere of the port city also supported the development of more tolerant attitudes to strangers and non-Christians, while economic need and mercantilist ideology led the urban authorities to encourage the settlement of groups with wealth and economic skills, regardless of their background. This opened the way for Jews.2 Though it did not explicitly welcome Jewish settlement, Amsterdam’s willingness to tolerate not only the presence of Jews but also the creation of Jewish communal bodies and communal buildings made it something of a magnet for Jews. New Christians, many with roots in Portugal and Spain, began to settle there in about 1590 and soon felt able give their Jewish identity full, though not yet public, expression. The number of Spanish Portuguese Jewish settlers in the town continued to grow u ntil first one and then a second community w ere established. In 1612, the first [ 259 ]
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synagogue was built. Characteristically, though the Reformed Church pressured the urban authorities to forbid the Jews to use the building, the Jews managed, with the help of a member of the town council, to circumvent the ruling and pray t here.3 And while the Reformed Church continued to push for further restrictions, any Jew who could afford to could purchase a resident permit (the so-called poorterschap) to remain in the town. In addition, the urban authorities ensured that the Jews themselves remained protected and that their religious freedom was guaranteed. With this support and their own mercantile skills, many Spanish Portuguese Jews (or just Portuguese Jews for short) began to enrich themselves, some greatly.4 As the seventeenth c entury progressed, a third community was established. Each of those bodies collected taxes and managed its own budget, a significant proportion of which was spent on philanthropy. Alongside the wealthy, a significant number of poor Portuguese Jews had come to Amsterdam, many of them refugees from the Inquisition needing help and support. In fact, so large was this group of Portuguese poor that the communities developed a policy of shipping at least some of them out of the town. In 1639, the three Jewish communities of Amsterdam united into the Talmud Torah community to better coordinate and centralize the running of all communal issues, including philanthropy meant almost exclusively for its own poor.5 This was the environment that the Polish refugees found when they reached Amsterdam. They were not the first such group of Ashkenazi Jews to make Amsterdam their destination; German Jewish refugees from the Thirty Years’ War had preceded them. The arrival of the Ashkenazi refugees created a dilemma for the Portuguese Jews. Their community maintained very strong ethnic boundaries and basically saw itself responsible only for the Portuguese “nation,” as they called themselves.6 It was therefore not at all clear how they should respond to the indigent strangers. In the end, they recognized both the German and the Polish refugees as fellow Jews and supported them, even though they clearly did not belong to their society: they had a quite different cultural and religious background and spoke a different language. In particular, while the Portuguese Jews w ere cosmopolitan and versed in European culture, the refugees were an insular group, whose dress and behavior immediately marked them out as different. Moreover, a large proportion were destitute and thus joined the masses of the poor begging on the streets, which was officially forbidden in the town. This was an embarrassment to their hosts, who felt threatened by the conspicuous newcomers. After all, if the Ashkenazi Jewish refugees aroused the anger of the authorities, the price would
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ultimately have to be paid by the Portuguese, who stood to lose a great deal in terms of property, money, and a comfortable lifestyle.7 The tension between the Portuguese Jews’ drive to help the poor in their own town and their desire to be rid of the embarrassment, not to say danger, they caused is key here. The strength and centrality in Amsterdam Jewish society of the Portuguese Jews, who had their own very strong ethnic identity, also permits a closer examination of the significance of the Sephardi-Ashkenazi divide in the treatment of the refugees. Finally, Amsterdam’s unique development makes it an excellent setting in which to examine the importance for the treatment of the refugees of the new ideas of mercantilism and the tolerance it encouraged.
Before the Crisis: German and Polish Jews in Amsterdam Prior to 1656 The first evidence we have of Ashkenazi Jews in Amsterdam dates from before the Thirty Years’ War, but their numbers r eally only began to be significant with the arrival of refugees from the war at the end of the 1620s. The town’s Portuguese communities, who w ere still burdened with having to pay large sums of money to take care of their own poor, nevertheless took it upon themselves to help the German Jews, though they openly expressed their contempt for the Ashkenazi beggars they saw on the streets of the town. As the numbers continued to grow, the communities decided in 1633 to keep the population down by limiting the help given to the Ashkenazi Jews.8 This policy clearly failed because by 1635 there were enough Ashkenazim (mostly German and Bohemian Jews, though one or two from Poland) to start their own community. Tension soon developed with the Portuguese, who wanted to keep control of Jewish society in Amsterdam, particularly after the founding of the joint Talmud Torah community in 1639. The situation was not improved when the Ashkenazi community received formal legal recognition from the non-Jewish authorities in the same year. Relations further deteriorated in 1642 when the Ashkenazi community began to take steps t oward building their own synagogue and the Talmud Torah community barred Ashkenazim from being buried in its cemetery at Ouderkerk.9 Despite this discord, the Portuguese community retained its sense of responsibility for the Ashkenazi refugees flooding into the town.10 As was so often the case, their motivation combined fulfilling the commandment of caring for the Jewish poor with the urgent need to retain control of the situation on the ground. One of the ways it did this was by establishing
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the Abodat Ahesed society, which ran a kind of poorhouse for the Ashkenazi destitute.11 Another was by encouraging the refugees to move on. The community did this by making its help for the poor conditional on their leaving the town—a policy that had been used on indigent Portuguese Jews since 1622.12 Beginning in the late 1630s, Talmud Torah even hired boats to send the Ashkenazi poor on their way. In fact, their concern about the rising number of Jewish indigent was shared by the non-Jewish authorities, who actually helped fund the effort to ship them out. Many were sent back to the empire, but, before 1648, a considerable number were put on boats to Poland, joining the stream of refugees looking for safety there.13 According to Yosef Kaplan, whose extensive research on Jewish life in early modern Amsterdam includes a detailed study of the refugees from eastern Europe, over five hundred Ashkenazim were in the town in the 1640s, mostly German Jews.14 That number did not increase significantly with the outbreak of the Khmelnytsky uprising in Ukraine in 1648. As we have seen, in those years, Polish Jewish refugees came to Amsterdam only in small numbers, very often on their way elsewhere, and so w ere not much of an embarrassment to the Portuguese community. This did not mean that the Jews of Amsterdam w ere not concerned about the fate of Polish Jewry. Quite the opposite. News of events in Ukraine seems to have reached Amsterdam quite quickly and deeply touched its Jews, who reacted with remarkable generosity. On August 30, 1648, the members of the Talmud Torah community, which had received letters from the besieged Ukrainian community of Bar, made a special donation of 1,725 guilders 25 stuivers for “the poor Jews persecuted by the Cossacks and the rebels in Ukraine and Poland.” When the money was eventually sent on September 23, the community itself added a further 735 guilders from its pidyon shevuyim fund.15 In 1650, Talmud Torah sent additional money to help ransom captives in other Ukrainian communities: on November 14, 200 guilders w ere raised for the Jews of Ostroh, and on December 23 an additional 200 w ere given to the Jews of Lviv.16 At about the same time, David Carcassoni, the emissary from Istanbul, was in Amsterdam on his fundraising mission. It ended in March 1651, by which time he had put together the princely sum of 3,009 guilders 12 plakas. To this the community added a further 148 guilders to cover the costs of transferring the money to Venice and 125 guilders to help defray Carcassoni’s expenses. In addition, small amounts of money w ere given to individual refugees either for their personal needs or to pay for the ransom of relatives.17
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What is clear, then, is that the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam were deeply moved by the tragedy that had struck Polish Jewry and responded with great generosity—in fact, at a level unmatched by any other European community. Overall, despite its highly developed sense of itself as an exclusively Sephardi group, the Amsterdam Portuguese community displayed a genuine sense of responsibility for other Jews in distress, even when they were of a different background. This was, of course, tempered by the hostility caused by the differences between the groups in terms of both culture and socioeconomic status—differences that seemed to threaten the well-being of the community in place. This, perhaps, was why the Portuguese Jews found it easy to donate generously to the Polish Jews following the disasters of the Khmelnytsky uprising. A fter all, this was a problem that was to be solved a long way from their borders. That situation would change following the second wave of wars, when large numbers of Polish and Lithuanian refugees reached Amsterdam and again presented the local Jews with a series of serious social and economic problems.
The Refugees Reach Amsterdam: 1656 and After The vast majority of Jewish refugees from eastern Europe reached Amsterdam by ship. They were largely Lithuanian Jews who had found space on one of the boats sailing the Baltic route to western Europe. Their arrival in the Low Countries seems to have made a great impression, and not just on the local Jews. The Dutch news chronicle Hollantse Merkurius gave the following report for June 1656: Three ships came to Amsterdam with 300 Jews from Poland fleeing the war looking very miserable. The Jews of Amsterdam first put them up in two warehouses, where they refreshed [themselves] and recovered. Afterwards, some w ere provided with accommodation, while o thers were sent on to different places—a few went to E ngland—in the hope that they would be able to s ettle there.18
The background to their arrival was well known in Amsterdam and aroused strong feelings in both Jews and non-Jews. A sense of public opinion at the time can be found in a “Letter of Intelligence” sent from The Hague to Oliver Cromwell’s spymaster, John Thurloe, on June 17, 1656: “The Polanders have used the Jews very ill in Poland. The Jews of Amsterdam would have complained of it h ere, but Holland diverted it, to the end
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not to render the Polanders to be too much hated.”19 This suggests that not only the Jewish community but non-Jewish Amsterdam society, too, was shocked by the treatment of Polish Jewry. The regents who ran the Dutch Republic, presumably worried about preserving trading connections with the Commonwealth, w ere interested in playing down the outrage and so effectively prevented the local Jews from stirring t hings up. Still, the very fact that the news had reached the British agent and that he had found it significant enough to put in his report is a sign of just how deep feelings ran. We can also learn how the refugees themselves experienced coming to Amsterdam. Moshe Rivkes, the rabbi from Vilnius, the story of whose flight to the Baltic we read earlier, has left a brief description: When we arrived, the scholars and the wealthy were very compassionate to us and treated us with charity and kindness. They spent a g reat deal of money on providing each of us with much shelter, food, and clothing and even pressed a purse [full] of money into our hands. They did the same for the boats that came a fter [us].20
As Rivkes noted, the Talmud Torah responded to the refugees’ arrival with characteristic generosity. On June 7, 1656, it held a special collection that raised 3,375 guilders. To this w ere added personal donations, two of which w ere recorded in the communal records: 100 guilders on July 22 and 40 guilders on August 1. Even a donation by a Christian was noted— 72 guilders on July 27—a further sign that the plight of the refugees had made a significant impression on non-Jewish society in Amsterdam.21 It soon became clear that the resources of the Talmud Torah would not be enough to cover all the costs, so the community decided to return to the policy of shipping out the refugees. Moshe Rivkes explained: “Since [the Jews of] the great city [i.e., Amsterdam] could not afford to support us living there b ecause of the high costs of housing and food, they hired a number of ships in order to send [the refugees] to Frankfurt, giving them provisions [for the journey].”22 Although the records from Frankfurt do not support Rivkes’ version of events, the rest of his account is backed up by notarial copies of two contracts the community signed with Dutch boat captains to transport the refugees up the Rhine. The first was made with Captain Jan Goosens on July 12, 1656. Its terms were that 125–130 Polish Jewish refugees—men, w omen, and c hildren—were to be shipped to Mainz, more if his boat could carry them. For this, the community would pay him 550 guilders.23 The second contract was made a week later with Captain Aert Janssen Reulse. He was to ship forty Polish Jews of both
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sexes, half of them adults and half c hildren, to Deutz, a small town near Cologne.24 For that he would be paid five guilders per adult and two and a half per child. Infants w ere to be carried free of charge. The Portuguese Jews had not waited long before sending the refugees away. The boats carrying them from eastern Europe had arrived sometime in June 1656, and by mid-July arrangements had been made to ship a considerable number to Jewish communities on the banks of the Rhine. The first contract also helps explain the major inconsistency in Rivkes’ account. Mainz, where Captain Goosens was to take the refugees, is situated very close to Frankfurt, and that could very easily have been the source of Rivkes’ confusion. Though it was also possible to sail westward from Amsterdam to the New World, very few refugees seem to have done so. We know of only one who made his way to North America: Asher Levy ben Yehudah Leib from Vilnius, known to posterity as Asser Levy.25 It is hard to reconstruct his movements with any accuracy, but he seems to have been one of the few Lithuanian Jews to flee the country during the first wave of wars. He was in Amsterdam by the spring of 1654 at the latest, presumably as a refugee. His passage to the New World was aboard the Peartree, which reached New Amsterdam on August 22, 1654. As one of the few Jews in the colony, he was forced on a number of occasions to stand up to the anti-Semitic bullying of the governor, Peter Stuyvesant. Most famously when Stuyvesant called on all the colonists to form a local militia in 1657, he exempted the Jews from active service, imposing a special tax on them instead. Asser Levy, like many Lithuanian Jews back home, was quite willing to serve in the militia and appealed Stuyvesant’s ruling, which had in the meantime become a ban on Jews bearing arms. He was successful and it was eventually overturned. By the time of his death in 1682, Levy had become a successful merchant, kosher butcher, and even litigator, as well as a respected resident of New York City, where he was the first Jew to purchase real estate.26 Levy’s case was quite extraordinary. Most refugees just remained in Amsterdam d oing whatever possible to make a living. They had been reduced to poverty by their flight and had little or no knowledge of local conditions. They w ere thus, like the German Jewish refugees before them, reduced to begging. Others with a little more entrepreneurial spirit moved into peddling and street trading, particularly in old clothes, household goods, and cheap foodstuffs. Slightly above them in the social hierarchy were the refugees who came as craftsmen. Despite the opposition of the Christian guilds, many made their livings as tailors, leatherworkers, and
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shoemakers, and presumably also kosher butchers and bakers.27 Still, all these people would have needed financial help at some time during their stay—even those who had work might have needed additional help buying peat for heating during the winter or matzot for Passover. Though women’s economic activity was not uncommon in Ashkenazi Jewish society, the vicissitudes of refugee life meant that Jewish w omen often had to play a more prominent role in supporting their families than they had previously done. On a list of twenty-six families of Polish refugees returned to the Commonwealth by the Abodat Ahesed society, no less than ten were e ither headed by women or consisted of single women.28 Clearly an enormous of amount of relief money was required to meet the needs of all t hese p eople, more than the Talmud Torah’s Sedaca poor fund had at its disposal, particularly as it continued to devote most of its funds to the ever-present (and growing) number of Portuguese poor. Little surprise then that in 1656–57, having been in credit for the previous two years, it ran a huge deficit of nearly 7,000 guilders.29 To try to offset it, another special collection was held on March 1, 1657, in which 3,947 guilders were raised. A further 310 were donated by individuals in October of that year. However, the deficit continued to spiral, reaching just u nder 9,500 guilders in 1657–58—its highest level throughout the entire seventeenth century.30 Perhaps b ecause of this financial pressure Talmud Torah’s attitude toward refugee issues began to change. Having noted that some of those it had paid to have shipped out of Amsterdam had returned, it issued the following declaration on May 9, 1658: As everyone knows, [when] our brothers fled here following the wars in Poland, we helped them generously. However, a fter we had supported them and moved them on to Germany, t hese p eople, most of whom are dangerous, found that the beggar’s life suited them and came back here, becoming like the good-for-nothing German Jews.
The community’s response was harsh: “If they [i.e., the beggars] do not go back to their own countries, where, with the Grace of Blessed God, peace is spreading . . . they will be given no help at all.”31 This was the same hostile tone it had taken with the German Jewish refugees a couple of decades e arlier. Its patience with the indigent Polish Jews had run out, and it was prepared to send the refugees back to the Commonwealth on the pretext that the war was over, which was not the case. Talmud Torah made the logic behind the ruling quite clear:
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Their suffering [without relief money from the community] will cause the [indigent refugees] to make use of the help that we give to all those who want to return to their own countries. In that way, we w ill also prevent the arrival of more [refugees] from other places to live a life of shame [here in Amsterdam].
The community did indeed support those who wanted to return home. From 1658 to 1660, the community spent 539 guilders 7 stuivers on sending back poor Ashkenazim, mostly Poles but some Germans too. In 1664– 65, it devoted a further 600 guilders to that goal. In all, many hundreds of people must have been sent away, though it is impossible to tell how many to the Commonwealth and how many to the empire.32 Not all had to be forced to leave. Even Moshe Rivkes, who, as a leading rabbi, had received the five-star treatment in Amsterdam, missed his home and wanted to go back, though he knew he could not afford the journey. So when news reached him in 1667 that it was safe to return to Vilnius, he wrote to his patron, the wealthy Avraham de Pinto: Now, when a time of peace has come, I am not as young as I was and my soul wants to return to its home, the Jewish community of Vilnius. The problem is that I do not have the money to pay for it all: I have some debts which I owe h ere, over and above what I earn, and I w ill have many expenses on the journey, paying for ships and for carriages, and all the other things which are so expensive when one travels.33
We do not know how much de Pinto gave him, but the community added 20 guilders of its own, and Rivkes returned home after more than a decade away.34 By the second half of the 1660s, Talmud Torah had begun to reduce all its support for the Polish refugees—even for t hose who wanted to return home.35 Perhaps it felt that the local Ashkenazim were strong enough to deal with the issue themselves. The end point of this process was reached in 1670 when the Abodat Ahesed society changed its mission, becoming a philanthropic organization dealing exclusively with the Portuguese poor.36 When a unified Ashkenazi community was created in 1673, even the non-Jewish authorities insisted that the new body would “support its own poor week by week.”37 Yosef Kaplan has concluded that approximately 1,500 refugees reached Amsterdam from eastern Eur ope in the mid-s eventeenth century. Of these, he calculated, about 1,000 moved on, while some 500 remained in place and began new lives.38 This raises the intriguing
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question of how the appearance of so many new p eople helped shape Jewish life in the town.
The Refugees in Amsterdam: Social and Cultural Tensions Much of the tension that developed between the three Jewish groups in Amsterdam—the Portuguese, the German, and the Polish Jews—had as much to do with socioeconomic status as with ethnic differences, certainly as far as the Portuguese Jews w ere concerned. For example, the fact that the Ashkenazi Jews had a different cultural background clearly sharpened their distaste for them, but at the heart of the tension was the antipathy of the wealthy and settled toward the indigent stranger.39 One major difference between the refugees’ situation in the empire and in Amsterdam had to do with the Polish Jews’ sense of superiority. In the poorly developed communities of central Europe, Jews from the Commonwealth with even a basic education could find work as religious functionaries—teachers, cantors, or slaughterers—but this was by no means possible in Amsterdam. There, they found a strong, well-organized Portuguese community able to service its own needs. It also boasted an educational system second to none. In fact, when refugees from Poland, such as the rabbi Shabtai Sheftel Horowitz in the 1650s and the future publisher Shabtai Bass in the 1670s, saw the Portuguese community’s school, they were not only deeply impressed but jealous too. Horowitz wrote: “It made me weep. Why ever do we not [run schools] like this in our own land? If only this way [of educating children] would spread throughout the entire Diaspora!”40 For their part, Portuguese Jews viewed the Jewish teachers coming from Poland as ignorant and primitive.41 Thus if anyone felt superior in that relationship, it was the Portuguese, not the Polish, Jews. Another way to view the group tensions within Amsterdam Jewish society is through an institutional lens. As the earliest settlers in the town, the Portuguese Jews had set up their own community to run Jewish life there. Though it had split into three separate bodies during the first decades of the century, it did eventually reunite in 1639. When the German Jews began arriving as refugees from the Thirty Years’ War, they were expected to join that community, even though as non-Portuguese Jews their rights within it w ere restricted. Not surprisingly, tension grew. In 1635, the German Jews began to organize their own community, initially just for ritual purposes.42 However, in 1639, the non-Jewish authorities formally recognized it as an independent body.43 The new community
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became, therefore, a challenge to the Portuguese Jews’ control of Jewish life in the town. Bad feeling developed, which the Portuguese characterized thus: The German Jews . . . did not pay us back as we deserved. They totally betrayed us44 and turned their backs on us. . . .45 They ignored the fact that we had always helped them, supported their poor, clothed their naked and, thanks to God’s benevolence, watched over them the w hole time.46
The situation changed again when large numbers of eastern European Jews arrived in the later 1650s. In the nature of things, they w ere initially expected to join the Ashkenazi community. However, the “narcissism of small differences,” which we saw in the empire, came into play in Amsterdam too and led to severe tensions between the German and Polish Jews. So much so, in fact, that in 1660 the Polish Jews splintered off to create their own community, with its own synagogue and even cemetery.47 A few years later, perhaps under pressure from the Germans to reunite, the Polish Jews of Amsterdam contacted the Council of Four Lands in Poland requesting—and receiving—its support to remain an independent body.48 This new community was always called “Polish” even though, as its regulations made clear, it largely consisted of Jews from Lithuania. The regulations also emphasized the community’s rivalry with and hostility toward the German Jews rather than the Portuguese. For their part, the Portuguese Jews favored the Polish community over the German, a sign that they were cultivating the Polish Jews as a counterbalance to the Germans, their main rivals—all the more so as the Polish Jews w ere prepared to submit to Portuguese authority.49 The German Jews, however, wanted to bring the Polish Jews back under their control in order to both weaken the Portuguese community and broaden their own tax base. By 1673 they w ere able to achieve their goal. They approached the Council of Four Lands and persuaded it to put pressure on the Polish Jews in Amsterdam not to rely on the Portuguese community, particularly in legal matters. The Portuguese took this as a mortal insult and wrote angrily to the Council, but to no avail.50 Then the German community managed to convince the non-Jewish authorities that a separate Polish community would not best serve public order, so the Polish Jews were forced to rejoin the Germans in 1673.51 Still, as the stream of refugees had more or less dried up, both groups were able to find a stable modus vivendi within the single community, which helped it to grow to such an extent that it eclipsed the Portuguese within a few decades.52
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This is not to say that the Amsterdam Polish Jews lost their identity. Even after 1673, their voice was still significant, as can be seen in attitudes toward the Council of Four Lands. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the Council was consulted by the Jews of Amsterdam on multiple occasions, even though it had no formal authority outside Poland. For example, when the printer and publisher Uri Feivish ha-Levi planned a major new translation of the Bible into Yiddish, he requested its approbation as a means of breaking into the eastern European market.53 And in 1683, when a dispute broke out concerning the rabbinate of David Lida, the Council was consulted again.54 No other community in Europe had such close ties with it. It would seem, then, that in Amsterdam more than anywhere e lse, the Jewish refugees from eastern Europe w ere able to organize into a coherent community, which retained its character even a fter it lost its indepen dence in 1673. Though tensions between the different Jewish groups in Amsterdam were rife, they played out differently than in the empire due to the dominant position of the Portuguese Jews. The Polish Jews seem to have respected the Portuguese more than they did the German Jews, and the consequent alliance allowed the refugees to develop their own, fully organized, refugee community alongside the other two. The interplay of the different groups had developed into a creative force that was shaping Jewish society in new ways.
Conclusion Three basic factors seem to have been at work in Amsterdam, making the refugee experience there different from anywhere else in Europe. The first of these was the wealth of the community. Unlike most of the communities of the empire, which w ere e ither in the throes of re-creating themselves after a period of expulsion or struggling to overcome the depredations of the Thirty Years’ War, Amsterdam had a flourishing economy, in which the Portuguese Jews played an important role. This meant that the local Jews were able to devote significant sums to the relief effort, more than anywhere else. Amsterdam’s economic success played into the Jewish relief experience in another way, too. While most studies on the Jews of Amsterdam have emphasized the importance of its transatlantic trade and thus pointed to the important role of the Portuguese trading diaspora as the cause of the Jews’ wealth, the town’s revenues in the first half of the seventeenth century were based in no small degree on an entirely different
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transregional business. This was the Baltic trade, in which exported grain from the Commonwealth was shipped to Amsterdam for sale in central Europe, particularly the German lands. As a result, Amsterdam developed close mercantile connections with the two centers from which Ashkenazi refugees came: first the empire and then the Commonwealth. This trade also ensured that Amsterdam’s Jews w ere deeply embedded in a northern European economic network that not only facilitated the arrival of refugees in the town but also provided the local Jews with destinations where they could send all those they could not, or did not want to, help. The second f actor of fundamental significance for determining the fate of the refugees in Amsterdam was the attitude of the non-Jewish authorities. It was not monolithic: while mercantilist ideology led the regents to adopt a favorable attitude toward Jewish settlement, other urban groups, such as the guilds, as well as the Reformed Church, remained hostile. In addition, the regents’ stance was pragmatic. They wanted Jews to s ettle who would contribute to the town’s economy. This attitude was significant because it not only encouraged the development of the Portuguese community but also allowed the German and the Polish Jews to found their own, rival communities—at least to the degree that they could persuade the non-Jewish authorities of their value. In fact, the only real limitations on refugee settlement in Amsterdam were those imposed by the Portuguese Jews themselves. These were not specific to the German and Polish Jews; the Portuguese poor, too, w ere encouraged to leave. The community seems to have been concerned not just about the drain on its resources caused by the waves of refugees but also about the possible reaction of the non-Jewish authorities to a significant growth in the indigent Jewish population The third factor at play in Amsterdam was the triangular cultural tensions between the Portuguese, the German, and the Polish Jews. Though these could lead to serious expressions of anger, they do not seem to have led to a significant break in the relief efforts themselves. On the other hand, these tensions also acted as a driving force, pushing the refugees toward levels of institutional self-expression that they achieved nowhere else. In cultural terms, too, Amsterdam’s development into a major center of refugee settlement allowed the refugees to preserve their identities well after the flight from eastern Europe had ended. This question of how the refugees rebuilt their lives in their new homes is highly significant, and it is to that we now turn, focusing once again on the situation in the empire.
ch a p t er t w e n t y-f i v e
Starting New Lives
My father . . . died for our many sins on 11 September, 1654 in the town of Ołobok [Mühlbock], due to the wars in Poland. . . . With God’s help, we had escaped safe and sound to the Mark and t here he died. He gave an order . . . that once the land [i.e., Poland] was at peace, he should be buried in the Międzyrzecz community—the closest [to our previous home]. . . . After the shloshim1 my m other died, too. She had given the same order. With God’s mercy, the land quietened . . . and they were brought to Międzyrzecz three years later . . . I myself was not at the burial, though even if I had been, I would have been too young to understand what was going on.2
elyakim getz ben me’ir, rabbi of Hildesheim, included this personal story in his volume of responsa, Even ha-shoham, because he wanted to discuss w hether lime should have been put in his father’s final resting place together with the body. He admitted in the text that he had been bothered throughout his life as to the halakhic status of putting lime into graves, so he would seem to have been taking the opportunity to work on the issue and perhaps exorcize some demons that had troubled him since his youngest days.3 This, then, was another typical refugee story: war, flight, sudden death, an orphaned child with troubling questions on his mind, and a yearning—even in death—to return to a home that had been lost. Elyakim’s father was by no means the only refugee from Poland who felt a strong emotional bond to the land of his birth. T here are also records from Milicz about two Jews being taken across the Polish border to be buried in the cemetery of the Krotoszyn community.4 Obviously most people did not insist on being buried back in the Commonwealth, but many did continue to be called refugees from Poland until they breathed their last. [ 272 ]
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So, for example, when Shemaʾya ben Yehudah died in the community of Deutz, not far from Cologne, on July 21, 1655, it was recorded in the burial society’s pinkas that he was a generous donor to the community and that “he was known as Reb Shemaʾyah from the community of Pereiaslav in Ukraine. He was one of the pious refugees from Poland.”5 His refugee experience thus continued to define him even a fter he had settled down and was no longer a refugee in any real sense. In some cases, the identification was not with the country as a whole but with a single place. This was most pronounced with refugees from the Vilnius community, widely recognized as one of the most important centers of Talmud study. Aharon Shmu’el Kaidonover was just one of many who throughout their lives repeatedly mentioned that they were from Vilnius—evidence that the memory of their roots remained fresh in their minds for years, if not decades, after they had left.6 In fact, so potent was the memory that almost a c entury l ater, Yaʾakov Emden in Altona not only wrote proudly in his memoirs that his great-grandfather had been one of the refugees from Vilnius but named a number of other major rabbis who had had the same background.7 This phenomenon raises the interesting question of what the refugee experience meant both for the identity of the refugees and for their ability to find their place in their new homes. We will now therefore bring the focus back to the refugees themselves and explore how they dealt with the problems involved in starting their lives afresh in the empire—a dynamic and creative process whose effects w ere felt well beyond their immediate circle.
Finding a Place to Live A key issue the refugees faced in the empire was their feelings of strangeness and sometimes even alienation. Many retained warm feelings t oward their previous home, and the foreign environment in which they found themselves was hard to come to terms with. There were other reasons, too, why their identity as Polish Jews remained strong. In a letter to his brother, Shalom ben Moshe noted that being a foreigner in a strange land had very practical consequences. He wrote that he needed his wife and his daughter to manage his money: “because, unfortunately, appearances are everything, particularly for a foreigner living in a different country. If they [i.e., the non-Jewish authorities] see two pennies [in my hand], they will think that I have several hundred and I w ill have to pay taxes on that assessment.”8
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The refugees’ feeling of strangeness was also, of course, a result of cultural and religious difference within Jewish society. The introduction to the book Naḥalat shivʾah, by Shmu’el ben David ha-Levi, exemplified this very well. In it, the author relates how the Swedish wars interrupted his study at yeshiva and forced him to flee his hometown, Międzyrzecz. He went first to Halberstadt, where he stayed for three years, before being called, possibly to a rabbinical post, in a community where he had such a bad experience that he refused even to mention its name. He went on, “I was a stranger in a foreign land until I found a proper place [to live] and, with the grace of God on High, found f avor with the Jews of the Bamberg region, where I was accepted [as rabbi].”9 However, Shmu’el’s young and inquiring mind allowed him to use these feelings of strangeness in a particularly creative way: From the very beginning [of my time here in Germany], I have wanted to make a detailed study of the different customs in Germany and Poland concerning how to draw up shtarot10 and such like, b ecause when I first [arrived] I knew nothing about this country and found some of its customs quite strange. So, I have sifted through them . . . determined the [different] customs in use in Germany and Poland, and here presented them one beside the other.11
Naḥalat shivʾah quickly became, and still remains, one of the most impor tant sources for the composition of shtarot—yet another example of the long-term impact the mid-seventeenth-century refugee crisis has had on Jewish society and culture. A further aspect of Shmu’el’s experience helps us understand the complex feelings of the refugees toward the place where they found themselves. It took him quite some time, and no little angst, before he found the place where he would eventually settle. This was a common phenomenon among the refugees, as we have seen with Yuda ben Ephraim Ḥayim and Shalom ben Moshe in the eastern regions of the empire, and was often caused by extreme poverty. Thus, for example, Tuviyah Guttman, a well-educated refugee from Leszno, had been left very poor and so was forced to work as a wandering teacher, traveling from town to town looking for patrons to support him. In the end, like many refugees, he wound up in Amsterdam with a manuscript that he wanted to publish in order to improve his economic situation.12 For refugee rabbis, moving around was a professional m atter: they tended to be employed on three-year contracts, and if the local community did not want to reappoint them for any reason they had to find a new post
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somewhere e lse. Wealthy or well-educated refugees could rely on f amily and other networks to help them s ettle. Me’ir Tarnopoler, whose difficult return to Ternopil a fter 1648 we learned about e arlier, went on to become a yeshiva student in central Poland before the wars of the mid-1650s forced him to flee to the empire. T here he ended up as rabbi in Öttingen. He described his flight to the empire in these terms: At that time, the great rabbis and their pupils fled from Poland to Moravia, and I was among the refugees from Poland. However, God put an excellent match my way. [My bride was] the d aughter of a . . . fine man . . . the g reat singer, Zelig Ḥazan, who had previously been the cantor in the Lviv community . . . but was now a refugee. He is presently in Fürth . . . a community of pure and honest men, communal leaders and philanthropists. . . . They helped me too and I lived t here for seventeen years.13
So, as a young refugee scholar from Poland, Tarnopoler was supported by both other refugees who were better situated than he was and local philanthropists in the place where he settled. Nonetheless, he had moved at least twice before he ended up in Öttingen. Even when they did find a place to s ettle down in, the refugees did not always feel at home. Some did, of course. Tarnopoler had only good to say of Fürth, where he lived for nearly twenty years, and Yuda ben Ephraim Ḥayim sang the praises of the Głogów community, where he ended his long journey as a refugee. Others, however, were much more conflicted. David ben Shmu’el, for example, complained that even though Bamberg was a good place to settle in, he did not find it easy to live there. He put that down to intracommunal tensions, a common problem at the time. However, there may have been deeper issues at work. T here were those who ascribed their difficulties directly to their refugee experiences. Ḥanokh ben Avraham from Poznań, who had taught in a yeshiva before being forced to flee, described his feelings in this way: I was one of the refugees, wandering the land in terror. My home had been robbed, my sons and students w ere gone, and my books and property had been plundered. When I had had enough of traveling with the rejected, the lost, and the robbed, I decided to s ettle in the community of Öttingen, here in the Ries district. For all that, I was lonely, inactive, silent, and miserable.14 I said to myself, “I am on my own. Where are my friends and confidantes . . . with whom I would plumb the depths of halakhah . . . while the brightest students crowded around me?”15
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In order to stave off his depression, Ḥanokh decided to write down as much as he remembered of halakhic discussions from before the war in a book he called Re’shit bikkurim. Interestingly, both Me’ir Tarnopoler and Ḥanokh ben Avraham ended up in the same place: Öttingen. However, to judge from what they wrote, their experiences t here w ere quite different. Though Tarnopoler did not specifically mention his time in the town, the tone of his text was upbeat, suggesting satisfaction with how t hings had turned out. Ḥanokh ben Avraham, on the other hand, spoke of a deep and abiding depression caused by his inability to get over his losses. This reminds us how hard it is to generalize about the psychological consequences of being a refugee, since each person underwent different experiences and came to terms with them in their own way.
Making a Living Clearly, one of the best ways to become integrated in a new community was to find a stable and satisfactory source of income. This was not always easy; although there w ere some places in which the state authorities were interested in encouraging Jewish economic activity, competition on the ground was extremely tough. Most refugees seem to have found themselves in one of two professions: trade, often just peddling, or some form of religious occupation, from the lowly jobs of teachers or slaughterers to highly prestigious rabbinical posts.
trade At home, the Polish Jews had been a very mobile group, particularly active in regional trade, which involved a lot of traveling. It was quite natural for them to continue d oing this in their new homes especially since, according to the Bashraybung at least, German Jews w ere not yet used to this way of making a living.16 Engaging in regional trade brought Jews a number of advantages. First, it was precisely the kind of business the authorities wanted to encourage. Second, it was hard for local competitors to stamp out this kind of trade since the Jewish merchants who engaged in it w ere not u nder their jurisdiction and visited their towns only briefly at fair time. When Christian businessmen did try to do so, as happened in Moravia, they faced the vehement opposition of the state authorities, in that case the emperor himself.17 It is in the nature of the sources that t here is not much evidence concerning the success or otherwise of the masses of refugees engaging in this
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kind of trade. The situation is made all the more difficult because by the 1660s, significant numbers of Jewish merchants from the Commonwealth were traveling to the empire to do business, with some of them using the fact in order to disguise their intention to settle t here. Nonetheless, while we can assume that most refugee traders struggled to make a living, some did do very well. This was particularly true of refugees who had managed to flee to the west without losing their fortune. One such was Shimʾon Wolf, who had been one of the leaders of the Vilnius community before the Russian invasion. In 1655 he fled the town and made his way to Hamburg, where he settled and was reunited with two of his sons: Benjamin (who had been forced to convert during the war and reverted to Judaism in Germany) and Barukh. Shimʾon Wolf, a man of wealth and lineage, was already well-connected, having married off his daughter to the g reat rabbi Shabtai ha-Kohen before the war. Despite his flight, he had managed to preserve some of his wealth and in Hamburg soon reestablished himself and his f amily as leading figures in German Jewish society, founding a whole dynasty of Court Jews.18 His son Barukh, later known as Barukh Minden (and, in other circles, as Bernd Wulff ), moved to Berlin in 1672 where he became a Court Jew and purveyor to the court of Friedrich Wilhelm. He later moved to Halberstadt, Minden, and Halle, where he was Court Jew to the Duchess of Sachsen-Merseburg. Benjamin, though a respected member of the Berlin community, was not a successful businessman. However, he arranged the marriage of his son, Moses Benjamin Wulff, to his b rother’s d aughter, which put his branch of the f amily on track to become Court Jews, too. And indeed, Moses Benjamin eventually moved to Dessau, where he was appointed Court Jew to Prince Leopold. The two struck up a close relationship such that Moses soon found himself supplying the army and the court, collecting the Elbe toll, managing the mines and the salt works, and even reorganizing the postal system. His success also led to his further appointment as Court Jew to Augustus the Strong of Saxony. On such firm foundations, the descendants of the Wolf dynasty from Vilnius remained prominent Court Jews for most of the eighteenth century.19
religious functionaries A great many of the refugees exploited their education in order to find work in the religious sector. Due to the exigencies of the Thirty Years’ War, the communities of the empire had not developed a widespread network of yeshivot to educate their young men locally. Poland, on the other hand, could boast an extremely extensive education system. The upshot of this
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was twofold: first, many German communities could not supply for themselves the religious functionaries they needed; and second, any refugee who had even a quite rudimentary education would be better equipped to fulfill these functions than most locals, particularly in the smaller communities and rural areas. Within a short time many, if not the majority, of the teachers, kosher slaughterers, and scribes in those places were refugees from Poland—and if the local Jews could not afford to hire a rabbi, the refugee would act as replacement rabbi, too.20 This gave the religious life of the empire a Polish tinge b ecause the newcomers, as Shmu’el ben David ha-Levi noted, did not know the local customs and insisted on adopting Polish ways of doing things.21 Polish influences could take other forms, too, particularly in places, such as Moravia, where a large proportion of the general Jewish population was made up of refugees. When the newly developing Moravian communities began to build themselves synagogues, they adopted the architectural and decorative styles they had known back home. For example, four-columned synagogues of the type fashionable in the Commonwealth were built in Podivín (1661) and Kroměříž (1689–94). Synagogues were also decorated in the Polish manner, the walls covered with liturgical texts surrounded by floral patterns and other motifs. This style was used in the synagogues of Dolní Kounice (constructed between 1652 and 1656), Boskovice (1657–67), and the Třebíč rear synagogue (1669).22 In fact, one of the few artists who helped paint at least one of those synagogues seems himself to have been a refugee, Mordechai of Kraków, who signed his name on the decorations to the Boskovice synagogue.23 At base, however, the problem with the low-level religious functionaries from Poland was less that they retained their Polish customs than that they were very often not trained well enough to do their jobs adequately.24 This could have quite serious consequences, particularly in sensitive matters such as granting divorces. Since many couples had been separated during the wars, with one spouse ending up in the empire and the other remaining in the Commonwealth, the need to ensure that legal divorce documents were made and delivered to their addressees became pressing, with such papers regularly being sent across the borders in both directions.25 If a functionary drawing up a bill of divorce in the empire did not do his job properly, the rabbinical court in Poland would reject it and leave the wife an agunah. Since hiring a messenger to deliver the document was costly and traveling through a country in upheaval dangerous, sending a revised bill of divorce to Poland might prove impossible.26 It was important to get it right the first time.
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To forestall that kind of problem, Shmu’el ben David ha-Levi intended his Naḥalat shivʾah to be a handbook for drawing up documents such as bills of divorce. In fact, other people, too, began to publish handbooks to help low-level functionaries fulfill their roles more adequately. Tuviyah Guttman, mentioned e arlier, wrote such a book, Zivḥei Tuviyah, a handbook for ritual slaughterers (with a special appendix for teachers like himself ).27 Some of t hese books w ere even published in Yiddish, such as the Shkhites un bdikes meant for slaughterers and published in Amsterdam in 1667.28 A different kind of handbook was Masekhes derekh eretz by Shabtai Bass. This was no less than a Yiddish-language guide for regional and transregional Jewish merchants in central and western Europe. Bass, who had himself been a child refugee, having fled Kalisz in Great Poland in 1655 and seen his parents murdered, eventually turned to publishing in order to earn his living. A fter spending many years in Prague, he settled in Amsterdam in 1679, where he learned the printer’s trade.29 In 1680 he published Masekhes derekh eretz, a small book aimed at traveling merchants, many presumably former refugees. It was divided into three sections: the first included prayers for the traveler, the second contained conversion t ables for dozens of European currencies as well as the different weights and measures in use across the continent, and the third was a long series of extremely detailed descriptions of routes between many major and minor towns, giving the names of the villages and other stops along the way. This was everything a merchant from the Commonwealth needed in order to succeed in business in his new home.30 The book trade itself provided work for at least some of the refugees. Bass was unique in setting up a publishing h ouse, but another refugee, Yosef Proops from Poznań, did become a leading bookseller in Amsterdam; his son, Shlomo, would go on to set up one of the most successful Jewish presses in the eighteenth-century Jewish world.31 Quite a number of refugees found jobs as typesetters, proofreaders, and editors in the two major centers of Jewish publishing of the day, Amsterdam and Prague. Some, such as Ḥayim ben Yehudah, came with experience. He had worked as a typesetter in Kalonymus Yafe’s printshop in Lublin before fleeing the country. O thers, like Yaʾakov ben Naftali Hirsch from Vilnius, Yehudah ben Yitzḥak of Pinsk, and Eliʾezer ben Yosef from Liski, seem to have started working in the book trade only after their flight.32 Another such figure in Prague was a refugee named Avraham ben Aharon. In the colophon to a book he worked on, he noted that his f ather, Aharon, had been rabbi of the Uman community in Ukraine.33 That raises
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an intriguing question. Might he have been the b rother of Yisra’el ben Aharon, the young refugee from Ukraine sitting and weeping on a rooftop in Hlusk, whose father had also been called Aharon and been rabbi of Uman? If so, then perhaps we are here, symbolically at least, reuniting a refugee family split apart over three and a half centuries ago. No full tabulation has been made of the names of those working in the lower echelons of the publishing business in the early modern period. In fact most books do not contain details of those who worked on them. Still, from a survey of what we do know, it would seem that the number of refugee editors and typesetters was not huge and was easily matched by local workers from within the empire.34 This would suggest that while the refugees did play a role in stimulating Jewish publishing in Europe during the second half of the seventeenth c entury, they w ere not of decisive importance.
refugee rabbis A common way for well-educated refugees to make a living was to become a preacher and travel from community to community giving sermons for money. Perhaps the most famous of these was Nathan Hanover, who seems to have preached his way across the empire en route to Amsterdam.35 Much has been made in the historical literature about the role of these preachers in spreading new ideas—kabbalah, Sabbatheanism, and, in a later period, Hasidism—but for the most part they seem to have been just men making a living as best they could. They were not uniformly appreciated: in 1664, the Frankfurt community banned the employment of such wandering preachers.36 In fact, for many, traveling around giving sermons was not an end in itself but a first step toward attaining better work. Shalom ben Moshe, when newly arrived in Moravia, made his living as a traveling preacher before being appointed rabbi of Loštice.37 And in his book, Kesef nivḥar, after telling how he fled Great Poland during the wars of the 1650s, Zelig ben Yitzḥak added in an aside that he had worked as a traveling preacher before eventually being invited by the Court Jew Berendt Lehmann to join the klaus in Halberstadt.38 A klaus was a kind of cloistered community of scholars who were paid a stipend, in the empire usually by a Court Jew, in order to devote themselves entirely to religious study. Establishing and running such an institution was very much a status symbol for German Jewry’s economic elite, and though the klausen flourished long after the
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refugee crisis, they always provided excellent opportunities for scholars from Poland, who were much sought a fter.39 In fact, Polish rabbis were already in demand in the 1650s and 1660s. Many of the German communities, whether newly developing or well established, took advantage of the presence in the empire of top-class scholars to appoint rabbis whom otherwise they might not have been able to attract. Among the communities that did so w ere Bamberg, Dresden, Frankfurt a.M., Friedberg, Fürth, Halberstadt, Hildesheim, Öttingen, and Vienna. Outside the empire, the community in Metz also appointed a refugee to its rabbinate as, of course, did the Polish community in Amsterdam. This seems to have started a trend, b ecause for the rest of the seventeenth c entury and throughout the eighteenth, most of the communities of the empire regularly appointed scholars from Poland as their rabbis.40 As a result, what might be termed a transregional rabbinate grew in the second half of the seventeenth century. On the one hand, the idea of appointing Polish rabbis became more generally acceptable in the empire, while on the other, rabbis who had served in the empire would often travel east for work, particularly if they had roots in the Commonwealth. Thus, for example, the famous refugee rabbi Aharon Shmu’el Kaidonover was appointed rabbi of Fürth from 1660 to 1667 and then of Frankfurt a.M. (1667–74). At that point, however, he decided to return home, taking up the much less prestigious rabbinates of Głogów in Silesia and Rzeszów in Poland, before landing one of the top posts in the entire Jewish world, Chief Rabbi of Kraków.41 Within a short time, a constant circulation of rabbinic figures seems to have developed, criss-crossing the borders of early modern Europe. This phenomenon was not unknown before 1648 but became commonplace in its wake and seems to have had a significant cultural impact. Particularly important was the fact that the rabbi, despite his great learning, which was the reason for his appointment, came from a foreign cultural milieu with different religious customs, which must have been uncomfortable, if not alienating, for local Jewish society. It certainly seems further to have weakened the ability of the German communities to preserve their own customs in the face of the domination of the Shulḥan ʾarukh and its Polish orientation.42 In fact, the intensive development of the transregional Ashkenazi rabbinate a fter 1648 may perhaps be seen as a further stage in the process of Ashkenazi cultural homogenization started by the spread of the Shulḥan ʾarukh.
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Psychological Issues “I have been touched by God’s hand and am now bereaved and lonely without my wife and children.” This is how Avraham ben Yosef Moshe Kopserlish described himself twenty years after he had fled Ukraine in 1648, at a time when he was employed as a scribe and teacher in Kleve.43 He, then, was an example of a refugee who had struggled to come to terms with his fate and continued to suffer decades l ater. Unfortunately, it is in the nature of depression that such testimonies w ere not frequently penned, which makes it difficult to assess just how many p eople like Kopserlish t here were in the empire. A sense of the problem’s dimensions may perhaps be gleaned from the commentary on the Torah by David ben Shmu’el (the Taz), the refugee rabbi from Lviv who had wandered Moravia in the early 1650s.44 In his discussion of Deuteronomy 32:25, “The sword s hall deal death outside, as shall terror in the chambers,” he questioned why the terror is mentioned after the violence since fear usually precedes dangerous experiences. His explanation: The terror comes after the flight, when the chambers of the heart [really begin to] pound. This is what happened . . . in the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania . . . from 1648 on, when the evil of murderous violence [touched] almost e very Jew of the generation. Of t hose who managed to escape across the Vistula river a huge number died of the sickness that comes from the chambers of the heart.45
In the Jewish tradition, “the chambers of the heart” are the seat of the emotions, so what the rabbi seems here to be describing are the debilitating effects of terror experienced in the wake of a traumatic experience. If that is the case, then this is not only a rare early modern description of what we today call post-traumatic stress disorder but also evidence that it was a widespread problem.46 As we have seen, Jewish society has traditionally helped those suffering this way by creating different ceremonies of remembrance to allow them to integrate their difficult memories into the routine of their lives.47 This was done with some success in the mid-seventeenth-century Commonwealth, whose rabbis established a special day of prayer and fasting to commemorate the terrible events. The Jews of the empire, however, did not do something similar, perhaps b ecause the refugees formed only a relatively small part of a general population, which did not feel the tragedy so deeply.
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This is not to say that the refugees themselves did not want to remember their experiences. To judge from the amount of first-person narrative materials they have left, the memories of their flights and struggles for survival remained extremely vivid in their minds. The problem was finding public frameworks in which to work them through. One or two rabbis, including Shmu’el ben David, tried to use the eight-day winter holiday, Hanukkah, as a time for memory. They composed new verses to be added to the hymn “Maʾoz tzur,” which is sung on e very day of the festival. This hymn, thought to have been written in the thirteenth century, consists of six stanzas, which tell of various times at which the P eople of Israel have been delivered from their enemies. By adding verses dealing with the sufferings and redemption of their own day, t hese authors w ere clearly trying to create a fixed time for them to be remembered. They w ere not, however, successful, and “Maʾoz tzur” remained unchanged.48 It proved much easier to organize m atters on the local level. T here, time was already set aside in the liturgical calendar for memorial ceremonies. In many Ashkenazi communities, this was twice a year: once on the Sabbath before the Fast of the 9th of Av, on which the destruction of the T emple is remembered, and once on the Sabbath before the Shavuot festival. On t hose days, the local memorbuch, the book in which were inscribed the names of all those the community wanted to remember, was read aloud along with memorial prayers.49 The sufferings of east European Jewry and the names of various martyrs from the 1648 uprising and subsequent wars w ere generally entered into t hese books, often, as in Worms, on the o rders of the local rabbi.50 Some refugee rabbis, such as Moshe Kohen in Metz, added to these ceremonies themselves. Kohen wrote a special elegy for Polish Jewry to be recited on the two memorial Sabbaths, though he does not explain why he did not insist on adopting the special day of remembrance from Poland as he was certainly in a position to do.51 In Halberstadt, the local rabbi, who came from eastern Europe, ordered the inscription in the memorbuch of a detailed account of the massacres in his hometown.52
Conclusion: An Imperfect Integration Neither Ashkenazi society in the empire nor the refugees themselves managed to create an all-embracing framework within which to remember— and so work through—their sufferings. They were not ignored, however. Many local memorbuchs included them, which meant that they would be recalled at least twice every year. Nonetheless, such brief mentions were
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mostly not accompanied by the kind of social support systems developed in the Commonwealth to allow for a deep and meaningful consideration of the traumatic experiences. In one or two places in the empire groups from Poland did s ettle together and t here are signs that the refugees displayed solidarity with each other, but this never developed into the kind of full- blown community that was created in Amsterdam. The impression we are left with is that the refugees were mostly forced to confront their difficult memories and feelings about their lives on their own. This struggle, which must often have expressed itself as a b attle against depression, was not the only one the refugees faced. Just settling down in the empire was challenging for two main reasons. First, the refugees were not simply going from one Jewish center to another but had been forced to leave their homes in a religiously and culturally (and economically) rich and well-organized society to live as outsiders in a relatively poor and underdeveloped one. This experience of strangeness or even alienation surely caused feelings of depression, or was generated by them, or, more likely, was caught in a vicious circle of both. Second, finding a congenial place to settle in the empire raised another problem connected more with the locals than with the refugees. German Jewish society not only harbored prejudices against Polish Jewry, they also resented them for their poverty and for their religious difference. As more and more Jews began to work as low-level religious functionaries, this resentment can only have grown. In such a situation, it is perhaps not surprising that many refugees had to move from one place to another, sometimes a number of times, until they found somewhere welcoming enough put down new roots. This problem was rarely insurmountable, and the refugees who remained in the empire did manage, for the most part, to settle down and make new lives. Nonetheless, the weight of surviving sources does seem to suggest that they remained marked by their refugee experiences throughout their lives. That was, of course, a natural consequence of the kind of traumatic forced migration that they had had to undergo and meant that their attempts to build new lives and find a place in the Jewish society of the empire could never be entirely successful.53 Even so, this kind of partial integration and the tensions that surrounded it did not result in an entirely negative experience. The refugees’ struggles to make a go of their new lives became a highly creative force in a whole range of arenas. In social terms, the refugees’ appearance in the empire provided the local communities with the kind of religious functionaries they needed in order to develop as they began to grow
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demographically (itself a process to which the refugees made a significant contribution).54 Economically speaking, the Polish Jews’ entry into regional trade seems to have opened up this field for greater exploitation by German Jewry as a whole, significantly boosting the local Jewish economy. And as far as cultural and religious development was concerned, the refugees brought with them Polish forms that s haped German Jewish culture both tangibly, for example, through the adoption of synagogue architectural and decorative styles from the Commonwealth, and intangibly, through the growing dominance of Polish Jewish custom. Of course, the creative tensions of the refugee experience could last only one or, at most, two generations. After that, the descendants of the refugees became German Jews pure and s imple. That is why it is extremely difficult to assess the precise significance of the refugee influx for the overall development of German Jewish society and culture. To take just one example: To what extent can the success of the Wulff dynasty of Court Jews be ascribed to the success of its founder, Shimʾon Wolf, in dealing with the experience of flight and resettlement? Maybe all that can be said with confidence is that the influence of the refugees was quite significant in shaping Jewish life in the empire in the two or three decades immediately following 1648. As to the longer term, only speculation is possible. It is perhaps suggestive, however, that the most influential German Jew of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Moses Mendelssohn, was also a descendant of Shimʾon Wolf, the refugee from Vilnius.55
ch a p t er t w e n t y-s i x
The End of the Crisis
the leading israeli historian Shmu’el Ettinger argued in his influential survey of modern Jewish history that a general shift in European Jewish migratory patterns took place in the wake of the Khmelnytsky uprising. Before 1648, he claimed, the direction of Jewish migration across Europe had been from west to east, while after it, the direction was reversed. Since he understood that move westward as laying the foundations for the development of German, French, English, and eventually American Jewry, he held that the modern period of Jewish history was defined by the new migratory movement and thus should be considered as starting with the wave of Polish Jewish refugees from the Commonwealth to the empire that we are examining h ere.1 Today, Ettinger’s argument is largely discredited. T here are a number of reasons for this. First, Jewish migration did not switch direction as cleanly as he suggested: after 1648, there was still a very important west- east migration within the Commonwealth, as well as a southward movement of Jews into Hungary. Second, a range of other phenomena that took place during the sixteenth c entury—the flourishing of the new Jewish centers in the Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire, the development of more sophisticated social structures within Jewish society, the rise of the Sephardi diaspora, and the growing influence of print on Jewish culture, among others—are now seen as equally important as the migration westward of eastern European Jewry, if not more so. To clinch the argument, contemporary Jewish scholarship sees t hese e arlier phenomena aligning Jewish history with the regnant concept of an early modern period in European history that stretches from the late fifteenth to the late eigh teenth century. Since European history is now understood as a determining factor in its development rather than just its context, the existence of [ 286 ]
The End of the Cr isis [ 287 ]
a parallel between the periodizations of Jewish and non-Jewish history is extremely natural. And as 1648 is precisely the midpoint of t oday’s popular “early modern” periodization, contemporary historians are loath to consider it any kind of turning point. Ettinger’s argument remains important h ere, but less for its claim that 1648 was a major turning point in Jewish history than for its understanding that the influx of Polish Jewish refugees to the empire in the late 1640s and 1650s was not a discrete event. Whatever the weaknesses of his periodization, Ettinger was correct in his claim that the refugee wave sparked a whole migratory movement of Jews from eastern to central, and then western, Europe that continued for decades, if not centuries. As a result, it is hard to say when the influx of refugees to the empire from the mid-seventeenth-century wars in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth actually came to an end. In fact, as Ettinger noted, the movement of Polish Jews into the empire never really stopped. It just changed character. The large wave of refugees that began to appear around 1655 seems to have continued for about a decade, particularly if the internal migration of refugees within the empire is also taken into account. T hese Polish Jews were fleeing not only the violence itself but also its aftermath— poverty, disease, and intensified hostility on the part of their non-Jewish neighbors. However, at some point, perhaps in the later 1660s, the waves of refugees began to be replaced by a movement of economic migration. With their country at peace and processes of reconstruction u nder way, Polish Jews left the Commonwealth not under duress but in the hope of bettering themselves in the burgeoning economies of the empire.2 Identifying the moment of change from forced to economic migration is not at all easy. Alongside the refugees and migrants, an increasing number of Polish Jewish merchants were beginning to travel to the empire to do business. As we saw in Moravia, the boundaries between the refugees and the merchants were not always clear: some refugees claimed to be merchants in order to avoid taxes while some of the merchants never intended to return to the Commonwealth. Still, taking this into account as far as possible, it seems reasonable to assume that the refugee crisis played itself out during the 1660s and that the economic migration, though it began earlier, r eally took off in its wake. A number of f actors determined how the crisis came to its end, most importantly the attitude of the non-Jewish authorities to the refugees and the relations that developed between the refugees and local Jewish society. Examining t hese is complicated by the highly fragmented nature of the Holy Roman Empire, and the differences between its various component
[ 288 ] ch a pter t w en t y- s ix
states make generalizing about both non-Jewish and intra-Jewish attitudes toward the refugees extremely difficult. Policies pertaining to the refugees in each of the states, even in those that could boast powerful absolutist rulers in the 1650s and 1660s, were not determined by the central regime alone. In many states, t here was a still powerful nobility, influential church authorities, and urban groups, which, even if they could not shape policymaking on the state level, could influence the Jews’ living conditions on the ground. It was the interplay of these forces, as well as the Jews’ success in navigating them, that, to a very great extent, determined whether the Polish Jews could put their refugee experiences b ehind them and find a home in any given locality. In terms of the new ideologies of the age, mercantilism was not yet strong enough to be a major influence in the 1650s and 1660s, even though it encouraged population growth and transregional trade and would later become significant in stimulating the growth of German Jewry. It is no coincidence, however, that in places where mercantilism had become dominant, such as Amsterdam, the Jewish refugees were able to settle and even create their own community. In most of the empire, though, Jews were viewed, more traditionally, in two basic ways: as bearers and creators of wealth, over whom the different forces in any state (usually the ruler and the nobility) competed for control; and as a group harmful to Christian society that needed to be restricted if not outright expelled in accordance with traditional religious thinking. It was in the eastern part of the empire, particularly in Silesia, Moravia, and Bohemia, that the refugees found the most promising conditions for settlement. The new ideologies penetrated t hese regions very slowly, and their economies had a good deal in common with that of the Commonwealth. This made settlement t here attractive for the Jews, not just because they were coming to a setting that was quite familiar to them but also because the “late feudal” economic regime that dominated tended to view the Jews’ economic activity as beneficial and even worthy of encouragement.3 In those regions, tensions grew between the emperor, who argued that the exploitation of the Jews was his prerogative based on the medieval concept that they were his regalia, and the nobility, who tried to improve their own economic and political position by preventing him from doing so. In the 1650s and 1660s, Jewish settlement developed largely under imperial protection (though that would change in subsequent generations), a fact the Jews seem to have recognized. So comfortable was this situation in Silesia that w hole communities u nder threat in the Commonwealth
The End of the Cr isis [ 289 ]
sometimes moved there en masse. As a result of all of this, the refugees seem to have felt at home in t hese regions. In places where the urban authorities were strong, the local Jewish communities had to be cautious in dealing with refugee settlement. In fact, there were many places in the empire where hostility t oward the refugees deterred them from settling entirely. Frankfurt a.M., for example, simply did not open its gates to refugees from the Commonwealth. The Sephardi Jews of Hamburg—like those of Amsterdam—decided to solve the problem even before it arose, shipping them out to other destinations at the first opportunity. Though decisive, this action was not for the most part callous. The refugees were not unceremoniously driven out but were given transport and money to help them reach their new destinations. For the most part, however, refugees settling in the empire outside its eastern regions did not congregate in large numbers in any given community, thus avoiding extreme reactions on the part of the Christian townspeople and permitting, as far as possible, a painless transition to a new life. Making a new start in the empire was also, of course, dependent on the attitude of the local Jews. Most w ere usually willing to accept the refugees once they arrived, even if they did not always give them a very warm welcome. Tensions developed between the two groups, based to some extent on the cultural differences between them but probably more on the resentment of the German Jews for having to devote some of their meager resources to the refugees and the anger of the Polish Jews at what they saw as a miserly reception. Though these tensions could make the process of finding refuge in the empire challenging, Polish Jews w ere still given help and found ways to begin new lives there if they wanted to. Their success was based to no little extent on the efforts of Jewish women. German Jewish women seem to have played key roles in the practical aspects of receiving and resettling the newcomers while, among the refugees, women’s work contributed in no small degree to finding the money to support themselves and their families, whether or not their husbands were with them.4 Making a living was vital for escaping the refugee experience, and not just for those settling in the empire: even returning home to the Commonwealth was an expensive m atter that had to be saved for. For t hose who wanted to remain, the process of settling down in the empire was not an easy one. Far from it. Torn from their homes, the vast majority of the refugees had traveled g reat distances in foreign countries without adequate money or protection. Many of them had found themselves helpless and exposed to great, even mortal danger on more than one occasion
[ 290 ] ch a pter t w en t y- s ix
during their flight. That, in conjunction with their sufferings during the wars and massacres in the Commonwealth, must have marked them in one way or another. In order to start new lives, the emotional impact of t hese experiences had to be overcome. For many, the solution was to be found in integrating their past experiences and losses into their new existences, often through participating in memorial ceremonies. Still o thers did not find a satisfactory solution and struggled to deal with their memories. Their suffering was compounded by the fact that they did not form refugee communities of their own in the empire that could provide the kind of social support so crucial in recovery from traumatic experiences. Such p eople could fall prey to depression and even post-traumatic stress disorder, a problem identified by a contemporary rabbi. Here, as in the other regions we have explored, women faced challenges all their own in starting new lives. These were mostly concerned with questions of marital status. Women separated from their husbands either accidentally during the wars or the flight, or deliberately by the man himself wanting to abandon his old marriage, had to determine whether or not they were allowed to remarry. In addition, female refugees returning from captivity faced the further suspicion that they had converted and so were not to be readmitted to their previous families. In the face of an often callous and uncaring patriarchal society, it was an uphill struggle for these unfortunate women who, if they did not succeed in clarifying their status and clearing their names, faced a life of loneliness and destitution. Nonetheless, despite all the difficulties, the refugees in general do seem to have managed quite successfully to build new lives for themselves, though the process often involved further travel from community to community within the empire until they found a congenial place to settle. Assessing the significance of the refugee crisis for the long-term development of German Jewry is extremely difficult. Though it is possible to identify a number of ways in which the wave of refugees affected Jewish society in the empire during the 1650s and 1660s, their significance for future generations was s haped by continuing immigration from the east. This, together with the changing conditions in the empire (and later Germany), means that isolating the specific influence of the refugee crisis is not really possible. This problem can be seen in five major realms: demographic growth, economic development, both social and cultural change, and shifts in religious life. Demographically, the influx of over 10,000 refugees to a Jewish society in the empire that numbered only some 40,000 must have been hugely
The End of the Cr isis [ 291 ]
significant. However, it was only the start of a period of demographic expansion that would see the Jewish population grow by about a further 50 percent over the next century or so.5 In addition, the influence of the refugees on the development of Jewish communities in various regions was not the only force at work on the geographic spread of Jewish society in the empire. The growing popularity of mercantilist policy also encouraged the development of new Jewish communities—an opportunity seized upon by other refugees, such as the wealthy Jews expelled from Vienna, who settled in Berlin in 1671. In economic terms, the refugees undoubtedly gave a boost to Jewish involvement in regional and transregional trade in the empire and beyond. As more German Jews followed their lead, this branch of Jewish economic activity became increasingly important. In fact, the success of the enormously influential Court Jews, who served the many absolutist rulers of the empire from the later seventeenth century, was built in no small measure on their ability to exploit Jewish mercantile networks within the empire and outside it, particularly trading connections with eastern Europe.6 At the other end of the social scale, the poor refugees from the Commonwealth were deeply involved in low-level peddling, begging, and criminal activity, strengthening the Jewish underclass in the empire. This group, too, continued to expand and grow over the next century and a half, becoming known as Betteljuden (Jewish beggars). Some 10 percent of German Jewry were Betteljuden in the second half of the eighteenth century, making policy on the issue a major concern for both Jewish society and the states in which the Jews lived.7 Another issue connected with the arrival of the refugees from the Commonwealth was how German Jews perceived themselves. The meeting between the Jews of the empire and the Polish Jewish newcomers reinforced the sense of difference that German Jews felt vis-à-vis their Polish cousins. It also transformed the rather defensive attitude that the Jews of the empire had been forced to adopt in the years of their steep decline in the sixteenth c entury to a feeling of self-confidence. This sense of cultural superiority over, and even derision t oward, east European Jewry continued for centuries and greatly strengthened during the age of the Enlightenment. As the nineteenth c entury progressed, it became a major building block in the very identity of German Jewry. Finally, in terms of religious life, the needs of the newly developing communities of the empire for religious functionaries provided work for the refugees, who often had little or no interest in local tradition. From
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the latter part of the seventeenth century, German Jewish leaders began to express their dissatisfaction with the increasing dominance of Polish custom in the empire, though they w ere unable to do much about it in practical terms.8 The consequence of their failure was a growing alienation from much of Jewish practice on the part of German Jews, who felt little or nothing in common with religious functionaries from what they perceived as a foreign—and inferior—Jewish culture. This feeling became prominent among many enlightened Jews of the eighteenth c entury but r eally came into its own a fter that. In fact, the transformations of Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany, whether Reform, Positive-Historical, or neo-Orthodox, may perhaps be seen, as Carsten Wilke has argued, as attempts to create authentically German expressions of Judaism to replace the irrelevant Polish ones that had dominated until then.9 In each of t hese cases, the arrival of the refugees seems to have set in motion or intensified processes whose effects would become central to the development of German Jewish life. And yet, it is not possible to claim that the wave of refugees was the direct cause of t hese effects b ecause a w hole range of other issues, prominent among them the subsequent arrival of thousands of additional Jews from eastern Europe, also played crucial roles in shaping them. What we can perhaps say with some confidence is that many of the defining features of modern German Jewry can trace their roots to the highly significant mid-seventeenth-century encounter between the Jews of the empire and the refugees from Poland-Lithuania.
Conclusion
Interconnections Having examined the fate of the Polish Jewish refugees in each of the three major arenas in which they found themselves, the first question to be asked is whether this was really a single, interconnected crisis or whether there w ere, in fact, three different crises sparked by a common cause: the mid-seventeenth-century wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Clearly, conditions in each of the three regions w ere of crucial significance in determining both the experiences of the refugees and the ways in which they w ere treated t here. In addition, the mass flights of the internally displaced w ere of a different nature from the more organized movement of the refugees who fled to the Holy Roman Empire, and both of those were totally dissimilar to the fate of those trafficked as slaves to the Ottoman Empire. Equally, the transregional ransoming effort focused on Istanbul had little in common with the broad communal and regional arrangements put in place by Polish Jewry to deal with the refugees at home, and these were different from the sporadic and individual help given to the refugees in the empire. And yet underlying all of these were numerous commonalities. Perhaps most important was the sense of solidarity that induced Jews from Amsterdam to Istanbul, from Kraków to Cairo, to come to the aid of other Jews in distress. The term most commonly used at the time to describe this connection was “brotherhood.” Jews across the world had a sense of kinship with each other. This feeling was clearly attenuated by the cultural differences between Ashkenazim and Sephardim and even between Polish and German Jews, but, during the crisis at least, it proved stronger than all divisions. [ 293 ]
[ 294 ] Conclusion
The precise basis of this sense of kinship is not easy to tease out, particularly since contemporaries rarely discussed it. Previous generations of scholars, particularly t hose in Israel, have argued that it was an expression of the Jews’ innate nationhood, which they saw as the defining characteristic of Jewish existence over millennia.1 However, on its own, this is an unsatisfactory explanation because the far distant communities did not have in common many of the major factors necessary for the development of a sense of nationhood: they were separated by different historical experiences, cultural formations, rituals, and even vernaculars.2 On closer inspection, the Jews’ feeling of connection would seem to have been based less on any form of innate nationality than on a common religious tradition as expressed in a series of key texts. Most important among them w ere the Torah, the Jewish liturgy, and the Jews’ legal liter ature, especially the Mishnah, the Talmud, and the Shulḥan ʾarukh. The Torah and the liturgy provided Jews everywhere with the sense of belonging to God’s chosen p eople as well as a common biblical and early rabbinic history that transcended their local experience. The legal literature created a behavioral framework, both personal and communal, that, because it was felt to be divinely given, also transcended the boundaries of space and time and thus created a sense of kinship. This dual mechanism was at work during the refugee crisis. Jewish communities across the world felt a bond of religious kinship with the Polish-Lithuanian Jews in their hour of need and followed Jewish law in acting to help them. The halakhah determined that d oing charity was among the most important of the commandments given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, which meant that helping the refugees—even at some personal cost—was the right thing to do.3 In this sense, all of the relief efforts undertaken in all of the different settings were in fact part of a single socioreligious system accepted by Jewish communities everywhere. That, rather than any intrinsic sense of nationhood, was the key unifying factor. This system did, of course, have its limits. Tension between the sense of religious kinship and the feeling of alienation caused by the cultural differences between the various Jewish groups was one. In the case of the refugee crisis, it seems to have been the cruel persecutions of Polish Jewry and their subsequent sufferings that allowed the former to overcome the latter. In another instance—sending money to support the poor Jews in the Holy Land—the sufferings of the Ashkenazi Jews in Jerusalem w ere not enough to persuade the Sephardi communities to donate money to
Conclusion [ 295 ]
them en masse. Though some Sephardi communities did help the Jerusalem Ashkenazim, the principle that each group (i.e., Sephardim and Ashkenazim) supported only their own in the Holy Land persisted throughout the seventeenth c entury.4 There were other, more practical limitations to the expressions of solidarity t oward the Polish-Lithuanian refugees. One was the amount of money given t oward relief efforts. Though Jews in many communities were moved to donate to their suffering “brethren,” that did not mean that they gave very generously—and, of course, some refused to give at all. Then, a number of communities, concerned with possible reprisals from local authorities, refused to take in refugees when they arrived on their doorsteps. Though they did not always turn them away completely empty- handed, their refusal to take them left their indigent coreligionists still homeless and exposed to danger. Finally, there were those who saw in the wave of philanthropic activity the possibility for personal enrichment. Various scams w ere perpetrated, usually exploiting the difficulties in identifying individuals among the mass of refugees and emissaries of various kinds. Quite a common phenomenon seems to have been an unscrupulous Jew impersonating e ither one of the refugees or someone acting on their behalf in order to collect money under false pretenses. The state of the sources does not allow us to determine just how widespread t hese behaviors w ere, though their appearance in a whole range of different settings is suggestive. Feelings of solidarity, however attenuated, were not the only thing that connected distant Jewish communities during the mid-seventeenth- century refugee crisis. T here were also all kinds of more tangible ties, which meant that no Jewish center was ever acting in isolation and that events in each place affected what happened in the o thers. The most important of t hese was the movement of p eople. Many of the refugees from eastern Europe moved from one setting to another. T here were a number of recognizable routes: t hose trafficked from Ukraine to Istanbul would often return home via Moldavia and Wallachia; others might cross the Mediterranean to Italy, usually Venice, particularly if they had left behind family members whom they wanted to ransom, while others found their way to Jerusalem and even Cairo; refugees from the Commonwealth might take the Baltic route (via Königsberg or Gdańsk) to Amsterdam, and from there to Italy or the empire; Polish Jewish emissaries, collecting money for ransom, would travel overland to Venice and from there to the Ottoman Empire, usually Istanbul, though they also
[ 296 ] Conclusion
collected in North Africa, as far west as Fez; and finally, the routes from western Poland to Silesia and Moravia seem to have been very active in both directions. It was not only people that took these routes; letters and money traveled them too. The connections created this way were important not only for communities but for individuals. For communities this form of communication was key in identifying the kind of help and where it was needed, organizing it—sometimes over long distances—and making sure that it reached its goal. For individuals, letters transmitted information from one refugee center to another as family members did their best to help each other and reunite a fter the tragedy that had befallen them. They were also an essential means of helping w omen separated from their husbands since they enabled not only information about the fate of lost husbands but copies of relevant depositions and rulings of rabbinical courts to be sent to far distant places. Without these, many more women would have found themselves not only stranded far from home but also agunot unable to remarry.5 The existence of these multiple forms of connection between Jewish centers did not mean that the ties between them were, in modern terms, close. The distances to be traveled were extremely great and the social and cultural gaps to be bridged very wide. In addition, the Jewish communities had many other issues to deal with, which meant that in real terms the refugee-related contacts w ere far from continuous. Nonetheless, the forging and strengthening of the ties that took place in the wake of the refugee crisis do seem to have represented a drawing together of the Jewish world to a degree not known before. The place of this Jewish world within the broader non-Jewish world cannot easily be characterized. In some respects, it was deeply embedded: it was the wars in the Commonwealth that sparked the wave of refugees, while the Jews trafficked to Istanbul formed part of a much more extensive Black Sea slave trade. In other ways, however, the Jews seem to have acted in parallel with, or even unconnected from, the surrounding non- Jewish society: people and money seem to have crossed multiple political borders unhindered, and various communities, such as Kraków, Slutzk and Vienna, helped the refugees even in the face of open hostility from their non-Jewish neighbors. Jewish society was clearly well aware of the wider setting in which it lived and was certainly willing to petition the authorities when they thought it would help. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that the non-Jewish context was a significant factor in determining Jewish relief
Conclusion [ 297 ]
efforts. The communities treated the refugee problem as something internal to their own society and found solutions that had little or nothing to do with their non-Jewish surroundings. Being part of a non-Jewish world while retaining the ability to act with little or no reference to it was not specific to the mid-seventeenth-century crisis but was, in fact, characteristic of premodern Jewish life in general. The interconnectedness of the diff erent centers demonstrated another key feature of premodern Jewish life: it had no geographical focal point. In fact, the world of the refugees seems to have had four centers, none significantly more important than the o thers. The first was obviously the Commonwealth from which they came and to which many returned; the second was the Ottoman Empire, particularly Istanbul, which was the center of ransoming; the third was Italy, which seems to have been the major arena for fundraising; and the last was Amsterdam, which was a key staging post for those traveling by sea and a goal in itself for many. Refugees, emissaries, money, and information moved between the four without having to pass through a central hub. The image of seventeenth-century Jewish life that emerges, therefore, is not one of center and periphery—that is, the kind of world recognizable from more modern times—b ut rather one of circulation. Centers of equivalent importance interacted with each other on a more or less equal basis. In the seventeenth-century refugee crisis, then, the west did not dominate the east, nor the south the north.
Strategies The phenomena we have examined are indeed, therefore, aspects of a single refugee crisis. But how large was the problem and how well did Jewish society deal with its challenges? The number of refugees is very difficult to determine with any degree of precision. First, there is no way even to estimate the number of the internally displaced who fled from their homes but remained within the Commonwealth. The best that can be said is that it must have amounted to considerably more than 10,000. Slightly more can be said about the other two groups: the number of refugees fleeing westward to the empire has been calculated as 10,000–15,000, and the number of the trafficked to the Ottoman Empire for ransom was probably 4,000–6,000.6 At a conservative estimate, then, we are looking at a total of about 30,000 refugees of various sorts, though the real number might have been double that or even more.
[ 298 ] Conclusion
Assessing the success of the relief efforts is no less difficult, because there is no agreed-upon standard in dealing with refugees against which to measure the achievements of seventeenth-century Jewish society. One way to look at the issue is suggested in the work of Richard Mollica, founder and head of Harvard University’s Program in Refugee Trauma. His approach, focused on contemporary problems, holds that the difficulties faced by refugees in reconstructing their lives a fter the traumas they have undergone are best solved not by some outside body but rather by the mobilization of forces within each individual in a process he calls “self-healing.”7 Seventeenth-century Jewish communities, as we have seen, had no overarching way of dealing with refugees, so all they could r eally do was provide short-term relief and then help its recipients to rehabilitate themselves into society—a process remarkably akin to Mollica’s concept. Consequently, Mollica’s insights on how the self-healing process works and can be encouraged provide us with an important means of analysis. The idea of using a tool developed for late twentieth-and twenty-first- century conditions to study events in the seventeenth is not as strange as it might seem. Mollica insists throughout his study that t here is no single way of dealing with refugees but that each case is specific to itself and is determined by the cultural-religious character of the group being helped.8 Since we are here examining one specific group, Polish-Lithuanian Jews, and are doing so within the contexts of their social and religious experience, the problems of anachronistic thinking are mitigated, if not completely overcome. Mollica identified four major realms in which the process of self- healing should be encouraged—the social, the behavioral, the spiritual, and the psychological—arguing that d oing that is the best way to help refugees rebuild their lives. Here, then, is an analytic framework that will allow us to understand more deeply how the Jews coped with the challenges of the seventeenth-century crisis. In social terms, Mollica emphasized the role that community can play in helping refugees overcome their suffering. Here the seventeenth century provides a clear parallel. Perhaps the most prominent aspect of the way the refugee issue was treated was the Jews’ sense of community and communal institutions. As far as the refugees themselves w ere concerned, it meant that once the immediate shock over losing their homes and previous lives had subsided, they could reasonably expect to be taken in and helped by other Jews. Even the captives being transported to Istanbul for sale could entertain the hope that the Jewish community there would come to their aid. In other cases, the refugees created their
Conclusion [ 299 ]
own kind of organizations: some communities, such as t hose of Olkusz, Pinsk, and Grodzisk, fled as a group, retaining their internal cohesion; in another case, the refugees who had come to Silesia organized themselves into a council in order to negotiate better conditions from the local authorities. The communal aspect of providing relief was also quite prominent. It could take the form not just of donations from communal funds, which was very common, but also of community-wide fundraising drives, such as those held in Venice and Hamburg. In addition, local communal institutions, in places such as Kraków, Slutzk, and Vienna, would support refugee relief by relaxing its members’ strict monopoly on settling and working in town, a policy the local Jews themselves would back up by opening their homes to refugees. This policy also plays into the next of Mollica’s realms of self-healing, the behavioral, characterized, among other things, by the refugees’ altruistic activity and their strong desire to work. H ere Mollica emphasizes the importance of refugees retaining their own agency rather than becoming passive “victims.” Thus for him the idea of altruism does not refer to that of t hose providing relief but to altruistic acts by the refugees themselves.9 In the same way, he views finding work and supporting themselves as much more important for the refugees’ recovery than receiving aid. In this sense, the Jewish communities’ policy of allowing the refugees who came to town to work, though undoubtedly motivated by a lack of communal funds rather than an attempt at social engineering, seems to have proved effective. The refugees’ drive to work can be seen in other ways too: in the empire where many Jews took on the roles of religious functionaries, o thers began to publish various types of handbooks to give them the specialized knowledge they needed; and back in the Commonwealth, the strong drive to get back to work underlay the relatively rapid reconstruction of its communities. It is much harder to identify a significant element of altruistic behav ior among the refugees, though this may be a function of the fragmentary source base. What is at least suggestive is that one of the few full refugee narratives we have, the fictional Yiddish Mayseh ha-godl, has as its hero the young orphan girl Rachel, whose selfless behavior saved no less than five children in the flight from Nemyriv. Since the text presents her as an exemplar of piety, altruism does seem at least to have been recognized as a positive value in Jewish society in general and among Jewish refugees in particular.10
[ 300 ] Conclusion
The final two realms of self-healing, the spiritual and the psychological, are difficult to separate. Mollica argues that a spiritual approach, especially within the framework of the refugee community, enhances individuals’ ability to come to terms with, and control, the overwhelming emotions associated with undergoing a traumatic experience: “the emotions are contained by concrete rituals and practices, which give survivors a specific time and place where feelings can be expressed and understood.”11 This same process of emotional control is also the goal of one of the main therapeutic practices recommended by Mollica: having refugees tell their traumatic stories in order to construct a narrative that w ill allow them to integrate their terrible experiences into their life stories.12 Jewish society proved very a dept at providing this kind of spiritual and psychological support to the refugees. The traditional Jewish calendar provides set times for prayer, fasting, and ritual dealing with cataclysmic disasters. The Jews of the Commonwealth actually went one step further and instigated a special day devoted just to the suffering during the wars. These w ere moments for the refugees to revisit their horrific memories and talk about them, and to do so in the supportive social environment of their communities. The set times of these memorial days were also an important way of integrating the difficult memories of traumatic personal experience into normal life. The liturgy recited presented the disasters that had befallen Polish-Lithuanian Jewry not as a one-off event but as just another link in the chain of Jewish suffering stretching back to antiquity. This allowed the traumatized to assimilate their suffering into the accepted religious worldview and to feel not that it marked some kind of break in their relationship with the Divine but, quite the opposite, that it was an expression of a key aspect of the Jewish p eople’s covenant with God.13 Overall, then, seventeenth-century Jewish society seems, quite intuitively, to have developed a range of ways to help the refugees resume their lives that very much matched Mollica’s prescription. This, of course, raises the question of the results. How well did the refugees succeed in rebuilding their lives and moving on from their traumatic experiences? Once again t here are no sources to help us provide an authoritative answer, but a certain amount of circumstantial evidence can be marshalled. There is no sign that the refugees continued to form a problematic group in Jewish society once events had quieted down, indicating that they had mostly succeeded in developing new lives for themselves. Moreover, in the two major settings where the refugees ended up, the Commonwealth and the empire, the period following the crisis was one of rapid
Conclusion [ 301 ]
growth and development. That too suggests that t hose hit hardest by the experience of violence and flight had managed to put it b ehind them and moved on to better t hings.
Significance What, then, w ere the effects of the refugee crisis on Jewish society, both while it was happening and in the longer term, and what was the importance of the crisis for the course of early modern and modern Jewish history in general? The long-term demographic impact of the mass movement of tens of thousands of Polish-Jewish refugees was determined by the fact that return home soon became not just possible but desirable for the majority of the refugees. As the displaced from across the Commonwealth trickled back during the 1650s and 1660s, the Jewish communities of Ukraine w ere able to rebuild themselves relatively quickly. The vast majority of those ransomed in the Ottoman Empire seem to have returned home, too, while those who remained there (largely, it would seem, women, intimidated by the dangers of travel) were mostly assimilated into local society. The appearance of thousands of Jews from Poland-Lithuania also had a significant impact on the depleted Jewish population in the Holy Roman Empire, though it is difficult to isolate the proportion of refugees in the wave of migration that soon followed their flight. Another way in which the mass movement of refugees had an impor tant effect was in the realm of intercommunal communication. Though communities in far distant places had always been in contact in one form or another, the pressures of organizing relief for Polish-Lithuanian Jewry in general and the refugees in particular intensified t hose connections and made them much more purposeful. The effects of this process would be seen even while the crisis was drawing to a close. The spread of the Sabbathean movement into Europe in the mid-1660s was facilitated to no small degree by the improved channels of communication that had developed during the crisis. In fact, by the time the excitement aroused by Sabbatheanism had itself died down, the ties connecting the Jewish world were probably stronger than they had ever been. The economic impact of the crisis was, not unsurprisingly, highly significant. Not only did the refugees need relief, the communities they had fled needed it too, and Jewish society outside the Commonwealth felt responsible for both. Beyond even that, the devastation of Polish- Lithuanian Jewry led to the pauperization of the Ashkenazi Jews in the
[ 302 ] Conclusion
Holy Land, who had, until then, been supported by donations from eastern Europe. This further added to the burden borne by the communities outside the Commonwealth. The idea of donating money to suffering Jews outside the local community was nothing new: support for poor Jews in the Holy Land was already a venerable tradition; a transregional fund raising network for ransoming Jews captured by pirates in the Mediterranean had developed in the early seventeenth c entury and sending money to other communities in distress was also not unheard of. Still, following 1648, the demands on the philanthropic budget grew enormously. This in itself must have had an effect, particularly for the Jews of Istanbul who found themselves responsible for ransoming thousands of Jews. They boosted their budget with help from Jews across Europe, but the lion’s share of the ransom money seems to have come from them alone. Though such a drain on their income must have been felt in e very aspect of their life, there are unfortunately no sources from which to learn the long-term consequences. In other ways, the refugee crisis acted as something of a stimulus. For example, the refugees in the empire seem to have found their economic niche in regional trade, also encouraging local Jews to break into that field—a development that not only stimulated the German Jewish economy but also contributed to the success of the Court Jews. In the Commonwealth, Jewish society’s communal and dynamic approach to postwar rebuilding played a key role in its l ater economic success by strengthening the Jews’ place in the urban economy. As a result, the Jews were increasingly well positioned to grasp the economic opportunities that came their way from the magnate estate owners. In cultural terms, the interaction between the Polish-Lithuanian refugees and the Jews from other centers was also very significant. An impor tant arena in which it was felt was the world of publishing. Many refugees had high levels of education, which meant their skills were in demand in the printshops of Hebrew publishers. One outcome of this, in the Ottoman Empire at least, was the appearance of one or two books by and about Polish-Lithuanian Jews for a Sephardi audience whose curiosity seems to have been piqued by their sudden and massive appearance in their world. On a broader scale, the publishing business seems to have offered indigent refugees the possibilities of making some much-needed money. This they could do as editors, proofreaders, and typesetters but also as authors. Self-publishing, backed either with the author’s own money or by a local patron, allowed refugee authors to turn their hand to intellectual entrepreneurship as a means of survival. In cultural terms, this not
Conclusion [ 303 ]
only boosted the number of titles published but also widened the ranks of authors beyond the rabbinic elite, a process that had begun in the previous century.14 Nonetheless it was the encounter of Jews from different backgrounds, particularly the Polish-Lithuanian and German Jews, that had the greatest impact. Though they shared a religious and cultural heritage, their very different experiences in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had established them as two separate groups. That process had caused a degree of tension between them that had remained largely unstated while the German Jewish communities had been forced to rely on their flourishing coreligionists to the east. This seems to have changed following 1648. The tensions, not to say hostility, were brought to the surface by the enormous relief effort demanded of the German Jews, still recovering from the Thirty Years’ War, and the consequently often less than open-handed treatment they gave the refugees. Mutual negative stereotypes developed, which found expression in the popular literature of the day. These would probably have disappeared (or at least lessened in intensity) as the refugees e ither returned home or began to assimilate into local culture. However, the flood of Jews fleeing the Commonwealth did not end but soon turned into a stream of economic migrants looking for a better life in the empire. As a result, the hostile stereotype of the east European Jew took root and, with the passage of time, became a key element in modern German Jewish identity. The spiritual impact of the crisis was no less significant and long- lasting. As we have seen, the generation of 1648 itself was deeply engaged with trying to understand the meaning of the tragedy that had struck them, often caught between the need to see it as just another link in the continuum of suffering that was the lot of God’s Chosen People and a desire to emphasize its very personal meaning for them as Polish-Lithuanian Jews.15 Religious thinkers of all kinds put their minds to the question of why such a disaster had befallen the Jews of eastern Europe, and though their answers w ere far from uniform, they do seem to have had one t hing in common: they sought responsibility among the Jews themselves rather than pouring out their bitterness on God. Terrible though the events may have been, they were not understood as rupturing the basic framework of the Jewish people’s relationship with the Divine. The long-term spiritual impact of the crisis was thus rather more indirect. We have already seen how the strengthening of intercommunal communications encouraged the spread of Sabbatheanism from the Ottoman Empire to Europe. Beyond that, the need for higher levels of
[ 304 ] Conclusion
philanthropic income stimulated religious contacts between Jews and Christians, particularly millenarian Protestants. The problems of raising money for the Jews of Jerusalem, whose income had been hit both by the impoverishment of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry, which had previously bankrolled them, and by the diversion of funds to refugee relief, led rabbinic figures such as Menasheh ben Yisra’el and Nathan Shapira to seek money from sympathetic Christian circles. Protestant groups in both the Netherlands and England, seeing in the plight of the Jews signs of the Messiah’s impending return, were moved to collect money to support Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. This was the first time that millenarian Christians had given such concrete help to the Jews of the Holy Land, and it formed a precedent whose effects continue to be felt today. Within the Jewish world, the movement to the empire of Polish- Lithuanian Jews, many of whom made their living as religious functionaries of various kinds, formed another stage in the homogenization of Ashkenazi ritual life according to Polish custom, which had begun three- quarters of a c entury before.16 In turn, this seems to have caused a growing degree of alienation toward Jewish practice among German Jews, a process that may perhaps have culminated in the nineteenth c entury with the creation of new, specifically German forms of Judaism.17 Not all of the effects of the refugee crisis had such long-lasting influence. The struggle to survive the experience of flight and to rebuild a life in its wake, as well as the actual treatment of refugees once they had arrived in any community, w ere realms in which w omen played crucial roles. In all of t hese cases, however, Jewish w omen were continuing to act as they had done before—in early modern Ashkenazi society, women commonly worked to contribute to the f amily budget, ran the household, and looked after guests—it was just that the pressures of the crisis forced them to do so more extensively. On the other hand, Jewish women caught up in the violence and flight faced much greater challenges in rebuilding their lives than men did. The patriarchal nature of Jewish society made it significantly harder for single Jewish women (whether unmarried, divorced, widowed, or just separated from their husbands by events) to receive philanthropic assistance. In addition, married women returning from captivity had to face a great deal of suspicion. The often almost impossible burden of proving their innocence to the satisfaction of their husbands and the rabbinic courts meant that they faced the very real danger of having to live out the rest of their lives alone in a society whose treatment of them could be nothing short of callous.
Conclusion [ 305 ]
here are signs that some w T omen began to deal actively with t hese challenges. T hose separated from their husbands made extensive use of the information network not only to discover their fate but also to find potential witnesses to provide depositions before rabbinical courts. Should their husbands have remained alive in a distant country, some w omen traveled to them, while others hired agents to receive the necessary divorce papers. The Jewish w idows of Jerusalem, whose exclusion from philanthropic funds actually led to hundreds d ying of starvation, went further, not only hiring an agent to raise money for them in Europe but trying to establish a separate female fundraising system there. Nonetheless, though these efforts were in some cases successful, they did not lead to significant societal change. Gender relations within Jewish society emerged from the crisis looking very similar to prior to it. In fact, considering the Jewish world as a w hole, the changes that occurred as a result of the crisis were not radical but rather an amplification and reshaping of what was already t here—an intensification of preexisting trends rather than the appearance of new ones. Only the wave of migration to the empire was new a fter 1648, but a fter the initial influx of refugees it soon slowed, becoming a process whose effects would take decades to be properly felt. In other cases, there are clear lines of continuity with the past: the return of refugees to Ukraine in many ways continued the process of colonization from before 1648, as did the Jews’ renewed relationship with the magnates. In much the same way, the transregional philanthropic network, especially that focused on redeeming captives, was not created ex nihilo with the arrival of the Jews from eastern Europe but was rather a more intensive exploitation of a preexisting system. Even the support shown by Protestants for the Jews of Jerusalem did not appear out of thin air but was a consequence of a long period of theological development. All of this suggests that the common way of explaining change beloved by many historians—the concept of the “turning point”—is not applicable here. Though the massacres and captures of Jews and the floods of refugees that followed them were indeed a cataclysmic series of events, unparalleled in the eyes of contemporaries since the destruction of the Second Temple, the changes they engendered were not, strictly speaking, transformative. Rather than putting Jewish society on an entirely new track, the pressures unleashed by so many communities having to relieve so much suffering in such a short time acted to reinforce and reorient a whole series of preexisting trends. This did not so much transform as reshape the Jewish world, a process that unfolded slowly and gradually.
[ 306 ] Conclusion
It would seem, therefore, that the crisis was instead a defining moment, a concatenation of circumstances that brought to fruition changes that had already begun to take place. And in giving those changes their final shape it also laid the path for their future development. Thus the Polish Jewish refugee crisis of the seventeenth century, clearly one of the most significant events in early modern Jewish history, was also a key moment in the shaping of the interconnected Jewish world we recognize t oday.
a ppe n di x
The Question of Numbers
at least three types of refugees have figured prominently in this study: the internally displaced, who fled their homes but remained within the Commonwealth; the trafficked, who were captured by the Tatars and sent to the Ottoman Empire for sale there as slaves; and the refugees proper, most whom fled westward to the Holy Roman Empire and Amsterdam. It is impossible to quantify any of these groups with any degree of accuracy. There are a number of reasons for this. First, no individual or body made any attempt to record the numbers at the time so there are no contemporary statistics to examine. Second, these were not stable categories: for example, some of the internally displaced during the Khmelnytsky uprising left the Commonwealth entirely during the second round of wars in the mid-1650s; some of t hose redeemed in Istanbul made their way back not to the Commonwealth but to the empire; and within the empire itself, t here seems to have been a constant movement back and forth across the border with the Commonwealth, which makes identifying refugees per se extremely difficult. Having said that, it is possible to summarize what we do know to at least grasp the order of magnitude involved. The best-researched issue is the number of victims of the Khmelnytsky uprising (1648–54). To start with the number killed, Shaul Stampfer has calculated that some 18,000 Jews died in Ukraine in 1648–54.1 To t hese he added the number of Jewish refugees and captives who left, never to return. He concluded that 8,000 refugees left Ukraine during the uprising, the majority of whom, as we know, remained in the Commonwealth.2 However, this figure does not include the internally displaced within Ukraine. T here is ample evidence that many hundreds of Jews fled each community as hostile forces approached, looking for safety in nearby [ 307 ]
[ 308 ] a ppendix
towns. As the war continued, t hese numbers must have reached into the thousands, if not the tens of thousands. In addition, there were further massacres outside Ukraine (in Red Ruthenia, Lithuania, and parts of Poland) and in the second wave of wars, from which many more Jews fled as internally displaced persons. All in all, the existence of some 15,000 internally displaced during and after the Khmelnytsky uprising would seem a conservative estimate. Those trafficked to the slave markets of Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire formed the smallest group. According to Stampfer, some 3,000 Jews were captured by Tatar forces in Ukraine during the uprising. To these should be added those captured by Tatars in their campaigns outside Ukraine as well as those captured and trafficked in the second wave of wars, particularly in Lithuania. The various mentions of numbers in the correspondence connected with the ransoming effort seem to suggest that an estimated total of 4,000–6,000 for all t hose trafficked to Istanbul would be an acceptable minimum. There may have been many more since we do not know how many captives died on the journey from Ukraine or how many slipped through the ransoming net, w ere sold, and subsequently converted to Islam. The third group w ere the refugees from the second wave of wars, who made their way to Silesia, Moravia, and points west starting from the mid1650s. On the basis of his demographic research on the German Jewish communities of the period, J. Friedrich Battenberg has calculated the total number of Polish-Lithuanian Jewish refugees in the empire at 10,000– 15,000. However, since the refugees tended to move from place to place before they finally settled, some of t hese may have been counted multiple times.3 On the other hand, Battenberg’s figure does not include the 1,500 Polish-Lithuanian Jewish refugees that Kaplan calculated reached Amsterdam.4 Conflating these totals to reach an overall estimate of some 10,000 refugees leaving Poland-Lithuania for the empire might seem reasonable, if conservative. Putting t hese figures together leads to the conclusion that a total of some 30,000 Jews became refugees of various sorts in the wake of the mid-seventeenth-century wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Bearing in mind the nature of the data on which this figure is based, it should be stressed that it is little more than an educated guess and that the real number might have been considerably higher. Nonetheless, it does perhaps give a sense of the numbers involved.
no t es
Introduction 1. There is still no comprehensive study of the fate of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry during these wars: Joel Raba, Between Remembrance and Denial: The Fate of the Jews in the Wars of the Polish Commonwealth during the Mid-Seventeenth Century as Shown in Contemporary Writings and Historical Research (Boulder: East Euro pean Monographs, 1995). 2. Yisra’el Halperin, “Sheviyah u-pedut bi-gezeirot Ukra’ina ve-Lita’ she-mi- shenat ta”ḥ ve-ʾad shenat ta”kh,” Zion 25 (1960): 17–56. 3. Jerome Elie, “Histories of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies,” in E. Fiddian- Qasmiyeh, G. Loescher, K. Long, and N. Sigone, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 23–35. 4. Nicholas Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1–20. 5. David van der Linden, Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 39–78. 6. Jonathan S. Ray, After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 7. Being forced to flee should be understood as a response to e ither violence or the very real fear of it. 8. This is accepted practice in the treatment of trauma: Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 9. Chone Shmeruk, “Yiddish Literature and Collective Memory: The Case of the Chmielnicki Massacres,” Polin 5 (1990): 173–83. 10. In modern usage, philanthropy is distinguished from charity in that the latter is meant to relieve only individual suffering while the former is aimed at changing the conditions that lead to poverty and suffering. This distinction is problematic and is not always used in research. In addition, in the early modern context it has l ittle or no meaning. The terms w ill therefore be used here interchangeably. 11. Shaul Stampfer, “What Happened to the Jews of Ukraine in 1648?” Jewish History 17, no. 2 (2003): 207–27; idem, “Jewish Population Losses in the Course of the Khmelnytsky Uprising,” Judaica Ukrainica: Annual Journal of Jewish Studies 4 (2015): 36–52. 12. Ismar Schorsch, “The Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History,” in idem, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 276–388. 13. Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 40. The emphasis is mine.
[ 309 ]
[ 310 ] Notes to In troduction 14. David Engel, “Crisis and Lachrymosity: On Salo Baron, Neobaronianism, and the Study of Modern European Jewish History,” Jewish History 20 (2006): 243–64. 15. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 16. Ibid., 3–17. 17. Adam Teller, “Revisiting Baron’s ‘Lachrymose Conception’: The Meanings of Violence in Jewish History,” AJS Review 38, no. 2 (2014): 431–39. 18. Moses Shulvass, From East to West: The Westward Migration of Jews from Eastern Europe during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971), 25–50. 19. Yis’rael Halperin, “ʾEzrah ve-siyuʾa le-kehillot Polin be-ʾikvot gezeirot ta”ḥ ve- ta”t,” in Sh. Ettinger et al., eds., Sefer yovel le-Yitzḥak Ber (Jerusalem: Ha-ḥevrah ha- historit ha-yisra’elit, 1960), 338–50. It is republished in idem, Yehudim ve-yahadut be-mizraḥ Eiropah (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1969), 250–62. 20. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes t owards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997): 735–62. See also David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 220–26. 21. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 24–26. 22. Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 23. Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 24. Jonathan Israel, “The Sephardi Contribution to Economic Life and Colonization in Europe and the New World (16th–18th Centuries),” in Ḥayim Beinart, ed., Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992), 365–98. 25. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Zeraʾim, Hilkhot matnat ʾaniyim 8:10; Shulḥan ʾarukh, Yoreh Deʾah 251:3. 26. Gershon Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 234–35. 27. David Biale, “Preface: T oward a Cultural History of the Jews,” in idem, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History, 3 vols. (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), xviii. 28. Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007), 99–100. 29. Alexander Betts, Forced Migration and Global Politics (Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 2009), 1–17. 30. Wulf Kansteiner and Harald Weilnböck, “Against the Concept of Cultural Trauma or How I Learned to Love the Suffering of Others without the Help of Psychotherapy,” in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, eds., Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 229–40. 31. Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 178. 32. Nigel C. Hunt and Sue McHale, Making Sense of Trauma: How to Tell Your Story (London: Sheldon Press, 2012), 11–19. In addition, sufferers interpret their trauma using the cultural tools at their disposal, so their responses should be studied
Notes to In troduction [ 311 ] in cultural context: Richard F. Mollica M.D., Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World (New York: Harcourt, 2006), 34–61. 33. Nigel Hunt, Memory, War, and Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 8. 34. Though Mollica does not state this aspect of his approach explicitly, it underlies his discussion of the humiliation inherent in traumatic experience: Mollica, Healing Invisible Wounds, 62–81. 35. David Kaufmann, “David Carcassoni et le rachat par la communaute de Constantinople des Juifs faits prisonniers durant la persecution de Chmielnicky,” Revue des Etudes Juives 25 (1892): 202–16; Halperin, “Sheviyah”; idem, “ʾEzrah ve-siyuʾa,” 338–50; Yosef Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim me-Ashkenaz u-mi-Polin be-Amsterdam bi- yemei milḥemet shloshim ha-shanah u-bi-yemei ha-gezeirot she-bein 1648–1660,” in R. Bonfil, M. Ben-Sasson, and Y. Hacker, eds., Tarbut ve-ḥevrah be-toledot Yisraʾel bi-yemei ha-beinayim: Kovetz ma’amarim le-zikhro shel Ḥayim Hillel Ben-Sasson (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1989), 587–622; Daniel Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova le-maʾan yehudei Polin bi-yemei gezeirot 1648–1660 u-ve-ʾikvoteihen,” Galed 18 (2002): 41–72. 36. One chronicle is on microfilm at the National Library of Israel, F31652. A copy of the other is held by the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish P eople in Jerusalem, P127/399. 37. I consulted these texts in translation: Evliya Çelebi, Księga podróży Ewliji Czelebiego (wybór), trans. Z. Abrahamowicz et al. (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1969); Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrims, book 3 (London: William Stansby, 1625), 632–43. 38. Shimʾon Dubnow, ed., Pinkas Medinat Lita’ (Berlin: ʾAyannot, 1925); Yisra’el Halperin, ed., Pinkas vaʾad arbaʾ ha-aratzot (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1945); idem, ed., Takkanot medinat Mehrin, 1650–1748 (Jerusalem: Ḥevrat Mekitsei Nirdamim, 1952); Louis Lewin, Die Landessynode der grosspolnischen Judenschaft (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kaufmann, 1926). 39. The records from Slutzk are held in the Archiwum Radziwiłłów at the Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych we Warszawie, Poland. The other sources are published: Alfred F. Pribram, ed., Urkunden und Akten zur Geschichte der Juden in Wien, vol. 1 (Leipzig: K. K. Universitäts Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1918); Willibald Müller, Urkundliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der mähr. Judenschaft im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Olmütz: Otto Harassowitz, 1903); Fritz Bloch, Die Juden in Militsch: Ein Kapital aus der Geschichte der Niederlassung von Juden in Schlesien (Breslau: Schüler & Rottenberg, 1926), 40–67. 40. Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, HM 245. 41. Montefiore Library, London, Mss. 112, 257. The correspondence on settling the Land of Israel has been published: Me’ir Benayahu, ed., Dor eḥad ba-aretz: Iggerot Rabi Shmu’el Aboab ve-Rabi Moshe Zakhut ba-ʾinyanei Eretz Yisra’el, 1639–1666 (Jerusalem: Yad Ha-Rav Nissim, 1988). 42. Sara Zfatman, Ha-s iporet be-Yiddish mi-re’shitah ad “Shivḥei Ha-besht” (1504–1814) (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1985); Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, trans. J. Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 296–341.
[ 312 ] Notes to Ch a pter One
Chapter One: The Khmelnytsky Uprising and the Jews 1. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’, vol. 8: The Cossack Age, 1626– 1650, ed. F. Sysyn (Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Study, 2002), 193–249. 2. Natalia Jakowenko, Historia Ukrainy od czasów najdawniejszy do końca XVIII wieku (Lublin: Instytut Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej, 2000), 200–202. 3. Nathan Hanover, Yavein metsulah (Venice: Vendramina, 1653), 2b–3a; Carolus Koppi, ed., Historia belli Cosaco-Polonici authore Samuele Grondski de Grondi (Pest: Frantisek August Patzko, 1789), 52. 4. Adam Teller, “A Portrait in Ambivalence: The Case of Natan Hanover and His Chronicle, Yeven metsulah,” in Amelia Glaser, ed., Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 23–35, 232–35. 5. Henryk Litwin, “Catholicization amongst the Ruthenian Nobility and Assimilation Processes in the Ukraine during the Years 1569–1648,” Acta Poloniae Historica 55 (1987): 57–83. 6. Witold Kula, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System (New York: Verso, 1987). 7. Shmu’el Ettinger, “Ḥelkam shel ha-yehudim ba-kolonizatziyah shel Ukra’ina (1569–1648),” Zion 21 (1956): 107–42. 8. Henryk Litwin, Napływ szlachty polskiej na Ukrainę, 1569–1648 (Warsaw: Semper, 2000), 75–78. 9. Stampfer, “What Happened?” 211–15. 10. Jerzy Kłoczowski, A History of Polish Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 116–18. 11. Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 85–95. 12. Władysław Serczyk, Na płonącej Ukrainie: Dzieje Kozaczyzny, 1648–1651 (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1999), 7–33. 13. Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, The Crimean Khanate and Poland Lithuania: International Diplomacy on the European Periphery (15th–18th Century). A Study of Peace Treaties Followed by Annotated Documents (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 108–63. 14. Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Slave Hunting and Slave Redemption as a Business Enterprise: The Northern Black Sea Region in the Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries,” Oriente Moderno 25, no. 1 (2006): 149–59. 15. Robert Frost, The Northern Wars, 1558–1721 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), 148–63. 16. Janusz Kaczmarczyk, Bohdan Chmielnicki (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1988), 39–47. 17. Frank Sysyn, “The Khmel’nyts’kyi Uprising: A Characterization of the Ukrainian Revolt,” Jewish History 17 (2003): 115–39. 18. In Polish: czerwony złoty. A red zloty was worth about six regular zlotys at this time. 19. Mordechai Nadav, “The Jewish Community of Nemyriv in 1648: The Massacre and Loyalty Oath to the Cossacks,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8 (1984): 376–95; Ludwik Kubala, “Oblężenie Lwowa w r. 1648,” in idem, Szkice historyczne, tom 1 (Kraków: Geberthner, 1896), 81–110; Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’, 492–97.
Notes to Ch a pter T wo [ 313 ] 20. Karol Szajnocha, Dwa lata dziejów naszych, 1646–1648, vol. 2 (Warsaw: Gazeta Polska, 1900), 352. 21. On Kryvonis: Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’, 451–53. 22. This may refer to a settlement named Korytnytsia, some twenty miles northwest of Volodymyr-Volynsky. 23. This probably refers to a settlement called Komarhorod, which was owned by the Czetwertiński family, lords of Tul’chyn. It is ten to fifteen miles southwest of Tul’chyn. Słownik Geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego (Warsaw: Władisław Walecki, 1883), 4:298. 24. This is clearly a misspelling of Czetwertiński. 25. Avraham Rapoport, Sefer she’elot u-teshuvot eitan ha-ezraḥi (Ostroh, 1796), 21a–b, no. 22. 26. Cf. Edward Fram, “Creating a Tale of Martyrdom in Tulczyn, 1648,” in Elisheva Carlebach, John Efron, and David Meyers, eds., Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Haim Yerushalmi (Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 1998), 89–112. See also Samuel Twardowski, Woyna domowa z Kozaki i Tatary, Moskwa, Szwedami i z Węgry, przez lat dwanaście za panowania najjaśniejszego Jana Kazimierza tocząca się (Calissi: Wdowa Lukasza Kopisza, 1681), 13–14. 27. Ivan (Demian) Hanzha was Cossack commander of the Uman region. The Tatar army had, by then, returned home and so was not involved. 28. Aleksander Czołowski, “Relacya o oblężeniu miasta Lwowa przez Bohdana Chmielnickiego 1648 roku,” Kwartalnik Historyczny 7 (1892): 543–50. On Kushevich: Bronisława Glodtowa, “Samuel Kuszewicz: Życie i działalność kulturalna,” in Prace historyczne wydane ku uczczeniu 50-lecia akademickiego koła historyków Uniwersytetu Jana Kazimierza we Lwowie, 1878–1928 (Lwów: Koło Historyków we Lwowie, 1929), 281–94. 29. Mikhail Kizilov, “Slave Trade in the Early Modern Crimea from the Perspective of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources,” Journal of Early Modern History 11 (2007): 1–31. 30. Zygmunt Abrahamowicz, ed. and trans., Historia Chana Islam Gereja III (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1971). 31. June 9, 1648. 32. Abrahamowicz, Historia Chana, 109 (22r in the original Tatar text). 33. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 3b–4a. 34. Halperin, “Sheviyah,” reprinted in Yisra’el Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut be- mizraḥ Eiropah (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1969), 212–27.
Chapter Two: The Chaos of War: Violence and Flight 1. Serczyk, Na płonącej Ukrainie, 60–64. 2. Left-bank Ukraine refers to that part of Ukraine east of the Dniepr river. 3. Jakub Michałowski, Księga Pamiętnicza, ed. E. Helcel (Kraków: Drukarnia C. K. Uniwersytetu, 1864), 6, no. 4. 4. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 3b. 5. A village about twelve miles northeast of Lut’sk.
[ 314 ] Notes to Ch a pter T wo 6. This might refer to the village of Peresołowica, a little over a hundred miles east of Zviriv. Słownik Geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego, 8:6–7. 7. The testimony of Mistress Yoḥanah: Nathan Kahana, Sefer she’elot u-teshuvot divrei renanah (Brooklyn: Y. Hershkowitz, 1984), 274, no. 62. The events took place in the Volhyn region just after Yom Kippur 5409 (September 26, 1648). 8. Witold Biernacki, Żołte Wody-Korsuń, 1648 (Warsaw: Bellona, 2008). 9. King Władysław IV died on May 20, 1648, in Merkiné, Lithuania. 10. T hese dates are from Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’, 418–68. 11. For a survey of the sources: Raba, Between Remembrance and Denial, 71–120. 12. Mordechai Nadav, The Jews of Pinsk, 1506 to 1880, trans. M. Rosman and F. Tropper (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 146–48. 13. The Sabbath before the fast of 9th Av, commemorating the destruction of the Temple. In 1648, it fell on July 25. 14. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 6a–6b. The translation is based on Nathan Hannover, Abyss of Despair (Yeven Metsulah): The Famous 17th Century Chronicle Depicting Life in Russia and Poland during the Chmielnicki Massacres of 1648–1649, trans. A. Mesch (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1983), 64–69. 15. Bernard Weinryb, “The Hebrew Chronicles on Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi and the Cossack-Polish War,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 1 (1977): 153–77. 16. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 3b. The translation follows Abyss, 43. 17. Natalia Yakovenko, “The Events of 1648: Contemporary Reports and the Prob lem of Verification,” Jewish History 17 (2003): 165–78. 18. On ethnic cleansing: Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing (New York: St. Martin’s Friffin, 1996). 19. Moshe Shilton, She’elot u-teshuvot bnei Moshe (Istanbul: Yonah ben Yaʾakov, 1712), 113b, no. 59. The responsum is undated. 20. Shabtai ha-Kohen, rabbi of Vilnius, put g reat emphasis on the religious aspects of the violence in his short chronicle: Shabtai ha-Kohen, Megilat ʾeifah, in Seliḥot metukanot u-mesudarot ke-minhag kehilot kedoshot ba-medinat Lita (Amsterdam: Hirtz Levi Rofe’h ve-Koshman, 1806), 181b–183a. 21. Frank Sysyn, “A Curse on Both Their Houses: Catholic Attitudes toward the Jews and Eastern Orthodox during the Khmel’nyts’kyi Uprising in F ather Pawel Ruszel’s Fawor niebieski,” in Shmuel Almog et al., eds., Israel and the Nations: Essays Presented in Honor of Shmuel Ettinger (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1987), xi–xxiv. 22. Yaʾakov Katz, “Bein tatnu le-taḥ-tat,” in Sh. Ettinger et al., eds., Sefer yovel le- Yitzḥak Ber (Jerusalem: Ha-ḥevrah ha-historit ha-yisra’elit, 1960), 318–37. 23. For a detailed survey of the physical destruction in the Przemyśl district: Andrzej Gliwa, Kraina upartych niepogód: Zniszczenie wojenne na obszarze ziemi przemyskiej w XVII wieku (Przemyśl: Stara szuflada, 2013), 397–463. 24. Weinryb, “The Hebrew Chronicles.” 25. Me’ir ben Shmu’el of Szczebrzeszyn, Tzok ha-ʾitim (Kraków, 1650), 2a. 26. His u ncle was Rabbi Yehi’el Mikhel of Nemyriv: Yehi’el Mikhel, Shivrei luḥot (Warsaw: P. Baumritter, 1911), 18. 27. Stampfer, “Jewish Population Losses.”
Notes to Ch a pter Thr ee [ 315 ] 28. Stampfer, “What Happened?” 217. 29. Anna Michałowska-Mycielska, ed., Sejmy i sejmiki koronne wobec Żydów: Wybór tekstów źródłowych (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2006), 557, no. 1028. 30. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 3b. Cf. Alojzy Sajkowski, ed., Pamiętniki Samuela i Bogusława Kazimierza Maskiewiczów (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1961), 247, and Nadav, “The Jewish Community.”
Chapter Three: The Refugees outside Ukraine 1. Hlusk was a small community in Belarus about forty miles southeast of Slutzk. 2. Yisra’el ben Aharon, Sefer tif ’eret Yisra’el (Frankfurt a.O., 1774), 5b. Though his weeping and banging his head might have been simply an example of religious fervor, the fact that he wrote about them together with his refugee experience suggests that the two w ere connected in his mind. 3. See, e.g., Gavri’el Shussberg, Petaḥ teshuvah (Amsterdam: ‘Emanu’el Benvenisti, 1651), 8b. 4. Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’, 439–42. 5. Nadav, The Jews of Pinsk, 141–46. 6. Ibid., 146–56. 7. Anna Michałowska-Mycielska, Sejm Żydów Litewskich (1623–1764) (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Akademickie Dialog, 2014). 8. Shimʾon Dubnow, ed., Pinkas Medinat Lita’ (Berlin: ʾAyyanot, 1925), 98–99, nos. 451–55 (henceforth PML). 9. See, e.g., PML, 5, no. 9. 10. PML, 101–2, no. 460. 11. Michałowska-Mycielska, Sejmy i sejmiki, 70–77. 12. PML, 110–11, no. 484. 13. This assumes a Jewish population in Lithuania of some 100,000—a figure consistent with Baron’s estimation of a total Jewish population in the Commonwealth in 1648 of 450,000. Salo Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 16 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1976), 207. 14. PML, 113, no. 488. 15. PML, 110–11, no. 484. 16. PML, 113, no. 492. 17. PML, 111, no. 485. 18. PML, 118, no. 503. 19. PML, 121, no. 515. 20. PML, 119–29, no. 505. 21. PML, 122, no. 518. 22. Halperin, Pinkas vaʾad arbaʾ ha-aratzot, 80–81, no. 216. 23. Michałowska-Mycielska, Sejmy i sejmiki, 78, 83. 24. PML, 126–30, nos. 527–50. 25. Shussberg, Petaḥ teshuvah, 1b. 26. See note 3 in this chapter.
[ 316 ] Notes to Ch a pter Thr ee 27. National Library of Israel, Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, F31652, 14b. Many refugees seem to have preferred to travel at night in order to avoid trouble: Avraham ben Shmu’el Ashkenazy, Tzaʾar bat rabim, ed. Ḥayim Friedburg (Lviv: A. Salat, 1905), 14. 28. Genesis 2:24. 29. F31652, 14a. 30. Ibid., 1a. 31. Ibid., 14b. 32. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 9b–10a. 33. Ashkenazy, Tzaʾar bat rabim, 6. Cf. Halperin, Pinkas vaʾad arbaʾ ha-aratzot, 79, no. 209 and the literature cited there. 34. Avraham Horow itz, Sefer yesh noḥalin (Amsterdam: Emanu’el Attias, 1702), 43b. 35. F31652, 14b. 36. Majer Bałaban, Historja Żydów w Krakówie i na Kazimierzu, 1304–1368, tom 1 (Kraków: Nadzieja, 1931), 538–40. 37. Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 257. 38. Szymon Kazusek, Żydzi w handlu Krakowa w połowie XVII wieku (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Towarzystwa Naukowego “Societas Vistulana,” 2005), 315–18. 39. For a general description: Kubala, Szkice historyczne, serja 2, 157–69. 40. Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 256–60. 41. Literally, “me’ah sekhumot.” 42. Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 259. 43. According to a non-Jewish source, some 3,500 Jews died in the Jewish quarter in 1652, with another 3,000 in the suburb of Kleparz. Kubala, Szkice historyczne, serja 2, 165. 44. Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 256–58. 45. Ibid., 258. 46. Majer Balaban, “Das letzte Dokument der 1670 vertriebenen Wiener Judengemeinde,” Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 4 (1932): 1–5. 47. Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 257. 48. Bernard D. Weinryb, “Texts and Studies in the Communal History of Polish Jewry,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 19 (1950): 50, no. 124. 49. Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 258–60. 50. Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim,” 605. 51. Ibid.; Montefiore Library ms. 257–58, p. 40a. 52. Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 251–52. 53. Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim,” 607; Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 252–53. 54. Shlomo Simonson, History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua (Jerusalem: Kiryath Sefer, 1977), 471. 55. On the prominent rabbis that fled in this way, see chapter 22. 56. Ptaszków lies about two hundred miles west of Kraków. 57. F31652, 13b. 58. Shulvass, From East to West, 34–36.
Notes to Ch a pter Four [ 317 ]
Chapter Four: Facing the Refugee Experience 1. Following B.T. Baba Metsiʾa, 91a: “Like a paintbrush in its wallet.” 2. Feivel H. Wettstein, Kadmoniyot mi-pinkasa’ot yeshenim le-korot Yisrael be- Polin bikhlal u-ve-Kraka’ bi-frat (Kraków: Yosef Fischer, 1892), 38–40, no. 16. 3. I should like to thank Prof. Lewis Aron and Dr. Galit Atlas for this insight. 4. F31652, 1–3, 13–14. 5. The Yiddish term referring to the heated room at the heart of every apartment. 6. Genesis 28:17. 7. Genesis 8:9. 8. F31652, 14a. 9. Email from Lewis Aron, August 13, 2015. 10. Hunt, Memory, 81–96. 11. Yisra‘el ben Aharon, Sefer or Yisra’el (Frankfurt a.O: Michael Gottschalk, 1702), 6b. 12. Yitzḥak Mokhiaḥ, Hakdamah, in Yehi’el Mikhel, Shivrei luḥot, 9. 13. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 10b. 14. The sermon was delivered on July 6, 1648 (Parashat Balak). It is preserved in the Bodleian Library Oxford, Opp. 37 (Neubauer 939). 15. In the chronicles of the seventeenth century, the inhabitants of Ukraine are called “Greeks” (in Hebrew, Yeveinim). This is presumably because the Orthodox Christianity they practiced was identified by the Jews at that time as Greek Orthodoxy. In the Jewish popular memory, the Greeks are usually identified as t hose practicing Hellenistic culture who ruled the Land of Israel during the Seleucid period and acted as a strong—sometimes violent and murderous—assimilatory force on the Jews. This text, and many o thers of the time, telescoped t hese two concepts together. 16. For an English translation: Marc Saperstein, Jewish Preaching, 1200–1800: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 289–300. 17. Betsal’el ben Shlomo, Sefer korban shabbat (Dyrenfürth, 1691), 34b–37a. 18. Berakhiah Bereikh ben Yitzḥak, Zeraʾ bereikh, ḥelek sheni (Amsterdam, 1662). 19. In fact, pilpul ḥilukim had been taught in Poland for well over a century: Elḥanan Reiner, “Temurot be-yeshivot Polin ve-Aszkenaz ba-me’ot ha-16 ve-ha-17 ve- ha-vikuaḥ ʾal ha-pilpul,” in I. Bartal et al., eds., Ke-minhag Ashkenaz u-Polin: Sefer yovel le-Ḥone Shmeruk (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1993), 9–80. 20. Ḥayim Hillel Ben Sasson, “Takkanot issurei-shabbat shel Polin u-mashmaʾutan ha-ḥevratit ve-ha-kalkalit,” Zion 21 (1956): 183–206. 21. Berakhiah Bereikh ben Yitzḥak, Zeraʾ bereikh, Hakdamah, n.p. 22. Proverbs 3:12. 23. Ashkenazy, Tzaʾar bat rabim, 7. 24. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 10b. Also: Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 90–93. 25. See Halperin, Pinkas vaʾad arbaʾ ha-aratzot, 77–80. 26. For a discussion of what this legislation was likely to have contained, see Tamar Salmon-Mack, Tan-du: Al nisu’in u-mashbereihem be-yahadut Polin-Lita, 1650–1800 (Jerusalem: Amutat Hillel ben Ḥayim, 2012), 216–20.
[ 318 ] Notes to Ch a pter Four 27. Yaʾakov Katz, “Af ʾal pi she-ḥata’ Yisra’el hu’,” Tarbitz 27 (1958): 203–17. 28. Akty izdavaemie vilenskovo kommissieiu dlia razbora drevnikh aktov, tom 29 (Vilna, 1902), 8, no. 7. See also Nadav, “The Jewish Community,” 385–87, 393–95. 29. Another delegation may have been sent by the Council to the Court in Brandenburg to negotiate improved terms of trade for Jews there. See chapter 20. 30. Shabtai ha-Kohen, Megilat ʾeifah, 183. On the claim of the Polish rabbis: Ḥayim Yonah Gurland, Le-korot ha-gezeirot al Yisrael (Odessa: Abba Duchna, 1892), 6:55. 31. For a bibliography: Naḥum Wahrman, Mekorot le-toledot gezeirot ta”ḥ ve-ta”t: Tefilot u-seliḥot le-20 Sivan (Jerusalem: Bamberger et Wahrman, 1949), 10–12. 32. Wahrman, Mekorot, 15–21 (here 20–21). 33. The porphyrion was a white coat worn by God on which each drop of blood shed by a martyr left a mark, thus allowing Him to bring the Nations to account at the end of days. 34. Psalms 8:3. 35. Job 29:19. 36. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History, Jewish Memory (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 27–52. 37. Adam Teller, “The Jewish Literary Responses to the Events of 1648–1649 and the Creation of a Polish-Jewish Consciousness,” in B. Nathans and G. Safran, eds., Culture Front: Eastern European Jews and Their Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 17–45. 38. Gurland, Le-korot ha-gezeirot, 6:55–57. 39. Joseph Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller: Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Rabbi (Oxford: Littman Library, 2005), 209–10. 40. The text is in Gurland, Le-korot ha-gezeirot, 1:26–28. 41. This line refers to Israel (i.e., the Jewish people): Isaiah 43:7. 42. Isaiah 21:15. 43. Job 30:24–27. 44. Deuteronomy 28:61. 45. Ezekiel 28:7, Jeremiah 2:30. 46. Gurland, Le-korot ha-gezeirot, 1:28. 47. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 175. 48. Ibid., 3: “The fundamental stages of recovery [from trauma] are establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and restoring the connection between survivors and their community.” Cf. Hunt, Memory, 127–39. 49. This idea is discussed in Karen Burnett and Rachel Jones, “Public/Private Commemoration of the Falklands War: Mutually Exclusive or Joint Endeavours,” in M. Andrews et al., Lest We Forget: Remembrance and Commemoration (Stroud: History Press, 2011), chap. 4. 50. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 46–48. 51. Avraham Abele ha-L evi Gombiner, Magen Avraham (Dyrenfürth: Shabtai Bass, 1692), no. 520. 52. Shmeruk, “Yiddish Literature and Collective Memory.”
Notes to Ch a pter Fi v e [ 319 ]
Chapter Five: The Second Wave of Wars 1. Frost, The Northern Wars, 164–69. 2. Barbara Pendzich, “The Burghers of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the War of 1654–1667: Resilience and Cohesion in the Face of Russian Annexation” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 1998), 118–61. 3. Jakub Goldberg, Żydzi w społeczeństwie, gospodarce i kulturze Rzeczpospolitej Szlacheckie (Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 2012), 35–46. 4. On the war with Sweden: Robert Frost, After the Deluge: Poland-Lithuania and the Second Northern War, 1655–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 5. L. Lewin, “Die Judenverfolgungen im zweiten schwedisch-polnischen Kriege (1655–1659),” Zeitschrift der historischen Gesellschaft für die Provinz Posen 16 (1901): 79–101. 6. Leszek Podhorodecki, Hetman Stefan Czarniecki (Warsaw: Bellona, 2009), 105–18. 7. Majer Balaban, Die Judenstadt von Lublin (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1919), 44–49. 8. Frost, The Northern Wars, 173–83. 9. Janusz Kaczmarczyk, Rzeczpospolita Trojga Narodów: Mit czy rzeczywistość (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2007), 77–153. 10. Frost, The Northern Wars, 183–87. 11. Shulvass, From East to West, 25–50. 12. Shmu’el Ettinger, “Medinat Moskvah be-yaḥasah el ha-yehudim,” in idem, Bein Polin le-Rusiyah (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1994), 77–78. 13. Akty izdavaemye vilenskoiu kommissieiu dlia razbora drevnikh aktov, tom 5 (Vilna, 1871), 173–76; A. Kaźmierczyk, ed., Żydzi Polscy, 1648–1772: Źródła (Kraków: Uniwersytet Jagielloński, 2001), 117–18. 14. Mania Cieśla, “Żydzi w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim, 1632–1764: Situacja prawna, demografia, działalność gospodarcza” (PhD diss., Institute of History, Polish Academy of Science, 2010), 215. 15. Halperin, Pinkas vaʾad arbaʾ ha-aratzot, 95, no. 242. 16. Pendzich, The Burghers, 209–10, 217. 17. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 7a–7b. 18. Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Archiwum Radziwiłłów [hereafter AR] XXIII, 133, plik 1, p. 49. 19. Ibid., p. 51. 20. AR XXIII, 131, plik 1, p. 51. Cf. Michałowska-Mycielska, Sejmy i sejmiki, 385, no. 596. 21. A similar situation developed in the Ukrainian town of Bełz: Michałowska- Mycielska, Sejmy i sejmiki, 385, no. 594. 22. AR XXIII, 133, plik 1, p. 49. Cf. Nadav, The Jews of Pinsk, 188. 23. PML, 121, no. 516. 24. AR XXIII 131, plik 1, pp. 125–26. 25. AR XXIII 132, p. 5v. 26. Arkheograficheskiy svornik dokumentov otnosyashchuchsya k istorii sverozapadnoy Rusi (Vilna, 1870), 112–13, no. 85.
[ 320 ] Notes to Ch a pter Fi v e 27. AR V, 6865/II, n.p., 6/5/1659. 28. AR XXIII, 131, plik 1, p. 166. 29. AR XXIX, 4, p. 5. 30. Tefilin are phylacteries used for the morning prayer on weekdays. On the books of calendrical law: Elisheva Carlebach, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 31. Žemaitija (known to Jews as Zamot, and to Poles as Żmudź) is in northwestern Lithuania. Its largest town is Šiauliai (Shavl/Szawle). 32. Amos 8:19. 33. Moshe Rivkes, Hakdamah, in Yosef Karo, Shulḥan ʾarukh (Amsterdam: Yosef Atthias, 1661), n.p. The text is reprinted in Michael Hendel, ed., Gezeirot ta”ḥ-ta”t (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1950), 14–15. 34. Nadav, The Jews of Pinsk, 168–71. 35. David Frick, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 292–300. 36. “Kine al hagzeires deka”k Lite.” The text is republished in Jerold Frakes, ed., Yerusholayim d’lite: Di yidishe kultur in der Lite (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 36–41. 37. Heimann Jolowicz, Geschichte der Juden in Königsberg i Pr. (Posen: Joseph Jolowicz, 1867), 16–18. 38. Aharon Shmu’el Kaidonover, Sefer birkat ha-zevaḥ (Amsterdam: David de Castro Tartas, 1669), “Hakdamat ha-meḥaber.” 39. Yaʾakov ben Yeḥezki’el ha-Levi, Sefer shem Yaʾakov (Frankfurt a.O.: Michael Gottschalk, 1716), 26b. 40. Jonathan Israel, “Central European Jewry during the Thirty Years’ War,” Central European History 16 (1983): 3–30. 41. Zenon Guldon, “Stefan Czarniecki a mniejszości etniczne i wyznaniowe w Polsce,” in W. Kowalski, ed., Stefan Czarniecki: Żolnierz—Obywatel—Polityk (Kielce: Kieleckie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 1999), 87–110. 42. Lewin, “Die Judenverfolgungen,” 80. 43. Frost, After the Deluge, 48–52. 44. Avraham Berliner, “Sefer hazkarat ha-neshamot, Kehillat Vermaiza,” Kovetz ʾal yad 3 (1887): 32; Yehudah Levin, ed., “Hazkarot kedoshim mi-pinkasei medinat Polin Gadol,” Kovetz ʾal yad 19 (1903): 37–43; Gurland, Le-korot ha-gezeirot, 6:27–28. 45. Halperin, Pinkas vaʾad arbaʾ ha-aratzot, 93–93, no. 241. 46. Cf. Weinryb, “Texts and Studies,” 149–50, no. 327. 47. Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller had died in 1654. 48. Ḥayim Nathan Dembitzer, Kelilat yofi, vol. 2 (Kraków: Yosef Fischer, 1893), 45b–49a. 49. Lewin, “Die Judenverfolgungen,” 81. 50. Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim,” 610–11. 51. The last day of Passover in 1656 fell on Sunday, April 16. 52. I.e., Lippen—a village a mile or two north of the Silesian town of Siedlisko (Carolath). 53. On the chronicle: Louis Lewin, “Ein grosspolnischer Bericht aus der Zeit des ersten Schwedenkrieges,” Historische Monatsblätter für die Provinz Posen 5, no. 3
Notes to Ch a pter Six [ 321 ] (1904): 33–38. There is a photostat of the ms. in the Halperin collection in the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem [hereafter CAHJP], P127/399. The quotation is from pp. 76b–77b. 54. Mordechai Breuer, “The Early Modern Period,” in M. Meyer, ed., German- Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 98–99. 55. Danuta Molenda, “Ludność żydowska w Olkuszu w okresie przedrobiorowym,” Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 116 (1980): 3–23. 56. Majer Bałaban, “Sabataizm w Polsce,” in idem, ed., Księga Jubileuszowa ku czi Prof. Dr. Mojżesza Schorra (Warsaw: Nakład Tow. Krzewienia Nauk Judaistzcznyzch w Polsce, 1935), 57. 57. Kaźmierczyk, Żydzi Polscy, 111–14. 58. Molenda, “Ludność żydowska,” 17.
Chapter Six: Return and Reconstruction 1. Zenon Guldon and Waldemar Kowalski, “The Jewish Population of Polish Towns in the Second Half of the 17th Century,” in A. Teller, ed., Studies in the History of the Jews in Old Poland in Honor of Jacob Goldberg (Scripta Hierosolymitana 38) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1998), 67–81; Cieśla, “Żydzi,” 218–32. 2. Horowitz, Sefer yesh noḥalin, 43b. Cf. Ashkenazy, Tza’ar bat rabim, 8. 3. Halperin, Pinkas vaʾad arbaʾ ha-aratzot, 80. The ban mooted here referred to all Ukraine: Gurland, Le-korot ha-gezeirot, 3:31. 4. Menaḥem Mendel Krokhmal, She’elot u-teshuvot tzemaḥ tzedek (Amsterdam: David de Castro Tartas, 1675), 125b, no. 88. 5. Me’ir ben Yitzḥak, Sefer ma’or katon (Fürth: Yosef ben Shlomo Zalman Shne’ur, 1697), “Hakdamat ha-meḥaber.” 6. Frick, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors, 304. 7. Nadav, The Jews of Pinsk, 157; Moshe Rosman, “Dubno in the Wake of Khmel’nyts’kyi,” Jewish History 17 (2003): 239–55. 8. Nadav, The Jews of Pinsk, 171–72. 9. For a number of such cases: Kaźmierczyk, Żydzi Polscy, 155, no. 89 (Biała Podlaska); Henryk Gmiterek, ed., Materiały źródłowe do dziejów Żydów w księgach grodzkich lubelskich z doby panowania Władysława IV i Jana Kazimierza Wazów, 1633–1669 (Lublin: Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2006), 100, no. 557 (Ostroh), 123, no. 706 (Mogilev), 127, no. 731 (Kock); Rosman, “Dubno,” 248n33, 249n39 (Dubno); Frick, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors, 304n62 (Vilnius); Nadav, The Jews of Pinsk, 146–47. 10. Rosman, “Dubno.” 11. Ibid., 249n40. 12. Moshe Rosman, “The Role of the Non-Jewish Authorities in Resolving Conflicts within Jewish Communities in the Early Modern Period,” Jewish Political Studies Review 12 (2000): 61. 13. Though this might seem an idyllic situation for women, the reality seems to have been that widows found it very difficult to make a living on their own: Salmon- Mack, Tan-du, 163–214; Moshe Rosman, “Lihyot ‘ishah yehudiyah be-Polin-Lita’
[ 322 ] Notes to Ch a pter Six be-re’shit ha-ʾet ha-ḥadashah,” in I. Bartal and I. Gutman, eds., Kiyum ve-shever: Yehudei Polin le-dorotehem, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2001), 426–28. 14. Rosman, “Dubno,” 249n38. 15. Gmiterek, Materiały, 125, no. 718. 16. Noa Shashar, “ʾAgunot ve-gevarim neʾelamim ba-merḥav ha-ashkenazi, 1648– 1850” (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2012), 103–33. 17. Ibid., 130–33. 18. Salmon-Mack, Tan-du, 218–19. 19. Tamar Salmon-Mack, “Shevuyah be-ta”ḥ-ta”t: Ha-konflikt ha-dati, ha-minhagi ve-ha-enoshi,” in G. Bacon et al., eds., Meḥkarim be-toledot Yehudei Ashkenaz: Sefer yovel le-Yitzḥak (Eric) Zimmer (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2008), 265–76. 20. Shashar, “ʾAgunot,” 293–326. 21. Edward Fram, “Perception and Reception of Repentant Apostates in Medieval Ashkenaz and Premodern Poland,” AJS Review 21 (1996): 299–339. 22. Adam Kaźmierczyk, “The Rubinkowski Family: Converts in Kazimierz,” Polin 22 (2010): 193–214. 23. In Polish law, conversion to Judaism (even reconversion of apostates) was a capital crime. For a full discussion of the legal aspects of apostasy, see Adam Kaźmierczyk, Rodziłem się Żydem . . . Konwersje Żydów w Rzeczypospolitej XVII– XVIII wieku (Kraków: Ksęgarnia Akademicka, 2015), 165–76. See also Magda Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 64–65. 24. The precise ruling is that Jews may not convert to religions considered idolatry. 25. See Isserles’ gloss on Yosef Karo, Shulḥan ʾarukh, Yoreh deʾah 157/1. 26. Fram, “Perception and Reception,” 324. 27. Yitzḥak Hershkovich, ed., She’elot u-teshuvot hararei kedem (Brooklyn: Y. Hershkowitz, 1988), 407–8, no. 99. 28. Salmon-Mack, “Shevuyah,” 269. 29. See Isserles’ gloss on Yosef Karo, Shulḥan ʾarukh, ‘Even ha-ʾezer 7/11. 30. Gershon Ashkenazi, She’elot u-teshuvot ʾavodat ha-gershoni (Frankfurt a.M., 1709), 30a–31a, no. 36. 31. Salmon-Mack, “Shevuyah,” 266. 32. For examples of this, see the next section. 33. Raba, Between Remembrance and Denial, 72–74. 34. Mordechai Nadav, “Maʾasei alimut hadadiyim bein yehudim le-lo-yehudim ba-Lita’ lifnei 1648,” Gal-Ed 7–8 (1985): 41–45. 35. Krokhmal, Tzemaḥ tzedek, 167a, no. 111. 36. Nadav, “Maʾasei ‘alimut,” 42. 37. Phillip Bloch, Die General-privilegien der Polnischen Judenschaft (Posen: Joseph Jolowicz, 1892). 38. This idea is developed in Anat Vaturi, “Polin be-mivḥan ha-sovlanut: Yehudim u-Protestantim be-Krakov aḥarei ha-reformatziyah” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 2015), 92–98. 39. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 209. 40. See, e.g., Michałowska-Mycielska, Sejmy i sejmiki, 386, no. 599. 41. Nadav, The Jews of Pinsk, 171–73.
Notes to Ch a pter Eight [ 323 ] 42. E.g., Michałowska-Mycielska, Sejmy i sejmiki, 431, no. 716. 43. Gmiterek, Materiały, 125, no. 722. 44. Yisra’el Kloizner, Toledot he-kehillah ha-ʾivrit be-Vilna (Vilna: Ha-kehillah ha-Ivrit, 1935), 15–16. 45. Adam Teller, Money, Power, and Influence: The Jews on the Radziwiłł Estates in Eighteenth Century Lithuania (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 150. 46. Jakub Goldberg, ed., Jewish Privileges in the Polish Commonwealth: Charters of Rights Granted to Jewish Communities in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences, 1985), 70–71. 47. Zenon Guldon and Karol Krzystanek, Ludność żydowska w miastach lewobrzeżnej częsci województwa sandomierskiego w XVI–XVIII wieku (Kielce: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna im. Jana Kochanowskiego, 1990), 24–27. 48. Jadwiga Muszyńska, Żydzi w miastach województwa sandomierskiego i lubelskiego w XVIII wieku (Kielce: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna im. Jana Kochanowskiego, 1998), 76–77. 49. Goldberg, Charters of Rights, 1:36–39. 50. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century, 38–44. 51. Moshe Rosman, The Lords’ Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth during the 18th Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Gershon Hundert, The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatów in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Teller, Money, Power, and Influence; Adam Kaźmierczyk, Żydzi w dobrach prywatnych w świetle sądowniczej i administracyjnej praktyki dóbr magnackich w wiekach XVI–XVIII (Kraków: Uniwersytet Jagielloński, 2002).
Chapter Seven: Resolution 1. See the appendix. 2. Nadav, The Jews of Pinsk, 371–73. 3. Mirosław Nagielski, “Źródła dotyczące zniszczeń wojennych w połowie XVII w. w świetle regresu demograficznego Rzeczypospolitej po potopie,” in J. Wijaczka, Życie gospodarcze Rzeczypospolitej w XVI–XVIII wieku: Materiały konferencji naukowej (Toruń: Wydawn. Adam Marszałek, 2007), 113–32.
Chapter Eight: Introduction 1. Yaʾakov Koppel ben Zvi Margolis, Sefer kol Yaʾakov (Venice: Vendramina, 1658), Hakdamah. 2. Ibid. 3. Kołodziejczyk, “Slave Hunting and Slave Redemption.” 4. See, e.g., Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave- Macmillan, 2004); Molly Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Daniel Hershenzon, “Early Modern Spain and the Creation of the Mediterranean: Captivity, Commerce, and Knowledge” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2011).
[ 324 ] Notes to Ch a pter Nine 5. Eliʾezer Bashan, Shviyah u-pedut ba-ḥevrah ha-yehudit be-artzot ha-yam ha- tikhon (1391–1830) (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1980).
Chapter Nine: The Captives: From Ukraine to Crimea 1. Kizilov, “Slave Trade,” 2. 2. Kołodziejczyk, “Slave Hunting and Slave Redemption,” 152. 3. Alan W. Fisher, “Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 6, no. 4 (1972): 591. 4. Victor Ostapchuk, “The Human Landscape of the Ottoman Black Sea in the Face of the Cossack Naval Raids,” Oriente Moderno 20, no. 1 (2001): 23–95. 5. Ibid., 34; Alan Fisher, The Crimean Tatars (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 8–16. 6. Maurycy Horn, “Chronologia i zasięg najazdów tatarskich na ziemie Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej w latach 1600–1647,” Studia i Materiały do Historii Wojskowej 8, no. 1 (1962): 3–71. 7. Guillaume Le Vasseur, sieur de Beauplan, A Description of Ukraine, introduction, translation, and notes by Andrew B. Pernal and Dennis F. Essar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 50–51. 8. Ettinger, “Ḥelkam.” 9. Maurycy Horn, Powinności wojenne Żydów w Rzeczypospolitej w XVI i XVII wieku (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnicto Naukowe, 1978), 44–82. Also: Me’ir ben Gedaliah, Sefer she’elot u-teshuvot Maharam Lublin (Jerusalem, 1977), 18v–19r, no. 43. 10. Yo’el Sirkes, She’elot u-teshuvot ha-ba”ḥ ha-yeshanot (Frankfurt a.M.: Johann Wust, 1697), 53b–55a, no. 77; Me’ir ben Gedaliah, Sefer she’elot u-teshuvot Maharam Lublin, 66a–b, no. 89. 11. Yitzḥak Levin, “Teshuvat ha-ga’on reb Yekil, baʾal ‘Naḥalat Yaʾakov’ be-ʾinyan heter ḥerem de-rabeinu Gershom,” Sinai (1984): 165–74. 12. Ibid., 169. 13. Michałowski, Księga Pamiętnicza, 39. 14. O. Pritsak, “Das erste türkische-ukrainische Bündnis (1648),” Oriens 6 (1953): 266–98. 15. Kołodziejczyk, The Crimean Khanate and Poland Lithuania, 954–63. 16. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 3b. 17. Ashkenazy, Tzaʾar bat rabim, 10. 18. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 4a; Mayseh ha-godl ([Halle], 1711), 4a. On this text: Zfatman, Ha-siporet be-Yiddish, 100–102. 19. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 3b–4a. 20. Krokhmal, Tzemaḥ tzedek, 127a, no. 88. 21. Lamentations 1:18. 22. Psalms 44:13, though misquoted by Shussberg. 23. Shussberg, Petaḥ teshuvah, 7a. 24. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 3b; Shmu’el Garmizan, Sefer mishpetei tzedek (Jerusalem: Ḥayim ha-Kohen, 1945), 170–71, no. 107. 25. Abrahamowicz, Historia Chana, 116.
Notes to Ch a pter Ten [ 325 ] 26. But see Me’ir of Szczebrzeszyn, Tzok ha-ʾitim, 22. 27. Moshe Benvenisti, Sefer pnei Moshe: Ḥelek bet mi-she’elot u-teshuvot (Istanbul: Shlomo Franco, 1671), 215b, no. 112. 28. Garmizan, Sefer mishpetei tzedek, 170–71, no. 107. 29. Shilton, She’elot u-teshuvot bnei Moshe, 50a–b, no. 25. 30. The use h ere of the word “column” is not meant to describe how the captives were moved but to express the fact that they were taken in groups. 31. Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, vol. 7 (Istanbul, 1896–1938), 527, quoted in Abrahamowicz, Historia Chana, 64n192. The claim itself is, of course, exaggerated. 32. The Yiddish h ere is “zekser,” a translation of the Polish “szóstak,” a silver coin worth six groszy or one-fifth of a zloty. 33. Eliʾezer Lipman, Kine al gezeires hakehiles dekak Ukraineh (Prague, 1648), verse 56. 34. Albrycht S. Radziwiłł, Pamiętnik, ed. Adam Przyboś and Roman Żelewski, vol. 3 (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1980), 77. 35. Joachim Jerlicz, Latopisiec albo Kroniczka Joachima Jerlicza z rękopismu wydał K. Wł. Wojciczki, tom 1 (Warsaw: Wienhoeber, 1853), 98. 36. Olgierd Górka, “Nieznana kronika tatarska lat 1644–50,” Kwartalnik Historyczny 62 (1955): 107–24. 37. Fisher, “Muscovy,” 583. 38. Ibid.
Chapter Ten: From Crimea to Istanbul 1. The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations, of Captain John Smith, into Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, from Ann. Dom. 1593–1629 (London: For Awnsham and John Churchill, 1704), 388. 2. Except, of course, for his escape, which seems to have been quite remarkable. 3. Kizilov, “Slave Trade.” 4. Presumably the khan. 5. This text is an English version of a Polish translation of excerpts from Çelebi’s work, Księga podróży, 184. Çelebi’s story here refers not to Crimea but to Azov on the Don River. 6. See Kazimierz Chodynicki, “Broniowski, Marcin,” in Polski Słownik Biograficzny, tom 2 (Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 1936), 461–62. 7. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrims, 641. Early modern European descriptions of the Muslim world w ere often distorted by an anti-Muslim bias, though the overlap between what Broniovius described and Evliya Çelebi’s text suggests that this may not have been the case h ere. 8. Mikhail Kizilov, “Slaves, Money Lenders, and Prison Guards: The Jews and the Trade in Slaves and Captives in the Crimean Khanate,” Journal of Jewish Studies 58 (2007): 205. 9. Golda Akhiezer, “Ha-kara’im be-Polin-Lita’ ʾad sof ha-me’ah ha-17,” in Alexander Kulik, ed., Toledot yehudei Russiyah, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2010), 233–57.
[ 326 ] Notes to Ch a pter Ten 10. Frauke von Rohden, “Karäisches Gedenken der Khmelnytsky-Verfolgungen: Ein Piyut von 1650,” Judaica: Beiträge zum Verstehen des Judentums 60, no. 2 (2004): 159–69. 11. Fisher, “Muscovy,” 583–84n44. 12. Shilton, She’elot u-teshuvot bnei Moshe, 50a, no. 25. 13. Translated from Księga podróży, 308. The market referred to h ere was in Karasubazar (Belogorsk) near Ak Mescid (Simeferopol). 14. Hanna Zaremska, Żydzi w średniowiecznej Europie środkowej: W Czechach, Polsce i na Węgrzech (Poznań: Poznańskiej Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk, 2005), 23–27. 15. Golda Akhiezer, “The History of the Crimean Karaites during the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” in M. Polliach, ed., Karaite Judaism: A Guide to Its History and Literary Sources (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 729–57. 16. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrims, 642. If the agent was unable to secure their release, the captives were reduced to writing to relatives to beg for money. Even if it was forthcoming, t here would be significant problems completing the deal. Another possibility was for a group of captives to appoint one representative who would be set free to raise a ransom for all of them. This was a risky business for those who remained behind because they had to stand surety for their freed friend, and if he absconded the price of his ransom was added to their own: Maria Ivanics, “Enslavement, Slave Labour and the Treatment of Captives in the Crimean Khanate,” in G. David and P. Fodor, eds., Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders (early Fifteenth–Early Eigh teenth Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 213. 17. In Yavein metsulah, Hanover mentions the following places as active in ransoming: Istanbul (he called it Constantinople), Venice, Rome, Livorno, Salonica, Turkey, Egypt, and Barbary. 18. Yitzḥak Markon, “Sefer dvar sefatayim, ḥibro R’ David bar Eliʾezer Lekhno,” Dvir: Ma’asef ʾiti le-hokhmat Yisra’el 2 (1923): 244–73. 19. Michałowski, Księga Pamiętnicza, 210–11. 20. Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 228. 21. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 79. 22. Krokhmal, Tzemaḥ tzedek, 48a–b, no. 70. 23. Yankev Shatzky, “Historish-kritisher araynfir tsum ‘Yavein metsulah’ fun R. Nosn Note Hanover,” in Gzeyres Takh (Vilna: Bibliyotek fun YIVO, 1938), 121*–26*. 24. Conrad Jacob Hiltebrandt’s dreifache schwedische Gesandschaftsreise nach Siebenbürgen, der Ukraine und Constantinople (1655–1668), herausgegeben und erläutert von Franz Babinger (Leiden, 1937), 87. 25. The Travels of Macarius, Patriarch of Antioch, Written by his Attendant Archdeacon, Paul of Aleppo, in Arabic, trans. F. C. Belfour, vol. 1 (London: Oriental Translation Fund of Great-Britain and Ireland, 1836), 203. 26. The text of the poem is published in Gurland, Le-korot ha-gezeirot, 1:26–28. 27. Malachi 3:14; Psalms 120:5. 28. Deuteronomy 21:11; Jeremiah 48:46. The usage h ere is feminine and refers to female captives. 29. Deuteronomy 29:27. 30. Lamentations 3:1; Isaiah 1:6.
Notes to Ch a pter Elev en [ 327 ] 31. Mayseh ha-godl. On the four-leafed pamphlet: Zfatman, Ha-s iporet be- Yiddish, 100–102. 32. Sara Zfatman, “Ha-siporet be-Yiddish mi-re’shitah ʾad ‘Shivhei ha-Besht’ (1504–1814)” (PhD. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1983), 1:203–7. It is unlikely that the experience of captivity and flight had changed significantly since 1648. 33. Mayseh ha-godl, 2a–b. I would like to thank Noga Rubin for her help in translating the text. 34. Yaron ben-Naeh, Jews in the Realm of the Sultans (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 99–113. 35. Fisher, “Muscovy,” 584.
Chapter Eleven: Ransoming Captives: The Religious, Cultural, and Socioeconomic Background 1. Robert C. Davis, Holy War and H uman Bondage: Tales of Christian-Muslim Slavery in the Early-Modern Mediterranean (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2009), 263–91. 2. Daniel Hershenzon, “The Political Economy of Ransom in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” Past and Present 231 (2016): 61–95; Gillian Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 27–71. 3. Daniel Hershenzon, “ ‘[P]ara Que Me Saque Cabesea Por Cabesa . . .’: Exchanging Muslim and Christian Slaves across the Western Mediterranean,” African Economic History 42 (2014): 11–36. 4. Bashan, Shviyah u-pedut, 160–273. 5. Avraham Yaʾari, Shluḥei Eretz Yisra’el: Toledot ha-sheliḥut me-ha-‘aretz la- golah mi-ḥurban bayit sheni ʾad ha-me’ah ha-teshaʾ-ʾesreh (Jerusalem: Mossad Ha- rav Kook, 1997); Matthias Lehmann, Emissaries from the Holy Land: The Sephardic Diaspora and the Practice of Pan-Judaism in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 6. Mishnah, Gittin, 4:6. For a full discussion of the halakhic background to pidyon shevuyim: Ofer Ashwal, “Nituaḥ masa’ u-matan le-shiḥrur shevuyim yehudiim ba- tekufah ha-trom modernit” (PhD diss., Bar Ilan University, 2017), 85–104. 7. B.T. Baba’ Batra’, 8a–b. 8. A Talmudic sage who died in 421 C.E. 9. Head of the yeshiva in Sura, he lived from 352 to 427 C.E. Together with Ravina he is credited with beginning the process of editing the Babylonian Talmud. 10. B.T. Baba’ Batra’, 3b; http://www.come-and-hear.com/bababathra/bababathra _2.html#chapter_i. 11. Mark R. Cohen, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 115–16. 12. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Zeraʾim, Hilkhot matnat ʾaniyim 8:10. 13. B.T. Baba Metziʾa, 71a. 14. Shulḥan ʾarukh, Yoreh Deʾah 251:3. 15. Gerson Cohen: Abraham ibn Daud, A Critical Edition with a Translation and
[ 328 ] Notes to Ch a pter T w elv e Notes of the Book of Tradition (Sefer ha-qabbalah), trans. Gerson D. Cohen (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1967). 16. Ibn Daud includes no details concerning the fourth captive. 17. Gerson D. Cohen, “The Story of the Four Captives,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 29 (1960–61): 55–131, here 62. 18. Sara Zfatman, Ro’sh va-ri’shon: Yisud manhigut be-sifrut yisra’el (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2010), 111–20. 19. Cohen, “The Story,” 125–29. 20. B.T. Baba’ Batra’, 8b. 21. B.T. Baba’ Kama’, 117b; Baba’ Batra’, 8a. 22. Youval Rotman, “Captives and Redeeming Captives: The Law and the Community,” in Benjamin Isaac and Yuval Shahar, eds., Judaea-Palaestina, Babylon and Rome: Jews in Antiquity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 227–47. 23. Cohen, Poverty and Charity, 109–29. 24. Salo W. Baron, The Jewish Community, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1942), 333ff. 25. Carlo M. Cippolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400–1700 (New York: Pantheon, 1966). 26. Jonathan Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 27. See, e.g., Benjamin Arbel, Trading Nations: Jews and Venetians in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 1995). 28. Davis, Christian Slaves, 27–65; Hershenzon, “Early Modern Spain.” 29. Greene, Catholic Pirates, 78–109. 30. Ibid.; Hershenzon, “Early Modern Spain,” 10–16; Weiss, Captives and Corsairs, 7–15. 31. Yosef ben Avraham ha-Kohen, ʾEmek ha-bakha’ (Krakau: Faust’s Buchhandlung, 1895), 159–60. Bashan notes that this short text first appears in the 1605 edition, published more than forty years a fter ha-Kohen’s death, and so was presumably written by a l ater author: Bashan, Shviyah u-pedut, 110–11. 32. Abraham David, To Come to the Land: Immigration and Settlement in 16th Century Eretz-Israel (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 6–55. 33. Daniel Carpi, “ʾAl irgun ha-peʾulah le-maʾan pidyon shevuyim bein yehudei Venetziah ba-me’ah ha-17,” Zion 46 (1981): 155–58; idem, “ʾOd ʾal ha-peʾulah le-maʾan pidyon shevuyim bein yehudei Venetziah ba-me’ah ha-17,” Zion 51 (1986): 502–4; idem, “Peʾilut ha-memunim ʾal kupat pidyon shevuyim she-be-Venetziah ba-shanim 1654–1670,” Zion 68 (2003): 175–222.
Chapter Twelve: On the Istanbul Slave Market 1. Mayseh ha-godl, 2b. 2. Quoted in Alan W. Fisher, “The Sale of Slaves in the Ottoman Empire: Markets and State Taxes on Slave Sales, Some Preliminary Considerations,” Bogazici Universitesi Dergisi 6 (1978): 151. 3. Quoted in ibid., 153–54. 4. See Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (New York: Oxford
Notes to Ch a pter T w elv e [ 329 ] University Press, 1990), 43–49; Hans Müller, Die Kunst des Slavenkaufs nach arabischen, persischen und türkischen Ratgebern von 10. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Freiburg: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1980), 181–87. 5. Fisher, “The Sale of Slaves,” 157–58. 6. Yaron Ben-Naeh, “Blond, Tall, with Honey-Colored Eyes: Jewish Ownership of Slaves in the Ottoman Empire,” Jewish History 20 (2006): 315–32. 7. On the hierarchy of slave traders: Suraiya Faroqhi, “Quis Custodiet Custodes? Controlling Slave Identities and Slave Traders in Seventeenth-and Eighteenth- Century Istanbul,” in E. Andor and I. G. Toth, eds., Frontiers of Faith: Religious Exchange and the Constitution of Religious Identities, 1400–1750 (Budapest: Central European University, 2001), 121–36. 8. Mayseh ha-godl, 2b. 9. Eliyahu ben Avraham ha-Kohen, Midrash Eliyahu (Izmir, 1719), 13b. 10. On the issue of identification in early modern Europe, see Valentin Grobner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, trans. M. Kyburz and J. Peck (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 11. In the treaty of Karlowitz from January 26, 1699, which established relations between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire, the fourth article read, “No troops . . . especially the Tatars, should attack Polish subjects and transgress the Polish borders . . . nor should they drive away captives . . . or cause any other damage.” Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, ed., Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th–18th Century): An Annotated Edition of the ‘Ahdnames and Other Documents (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 595. 12. Interestingly, the issue of circumcision at least as a means of distinguishing the Jewish men from Christians is not mentioned. Of course, it would not have helped in identifying Jewish women, who formed a significant proportion of those on sale. It was also of little use in distinguishing Jewish from Muslim men as both w ere circumcised. 13. The Hebrew term is “sefer yiḥus.” In fact, such things w ere very rare in Jewish society, except among the rabbinic elite. 14. Mayseh ha-godl, 4b. 15. For a detailed analysis of this process during the w hole early modern period, see Ashwal, “Nituaḥ,” 110–235. 16. Kaufmann, “David Carcassoni,” 211. 17. Ibid. 18. Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 241–44. 19. Kaufmann, “David Carcassoni,” 211. 20. Davis, Christian Slaves, viii–xiii. 21. Bashan, Shviyah u-pedut, 191; ben-Naeh, Jews, 182–83. 22. I.e., Ukraine. 23. Yosef mi-Trani, She’elot u-teshuvot ha-maharit (Venice, 1645), part 3, Ḥoshen Mishpat, no. 13. The text is quoted in Bashan, Shviyah u-pedut, 191. 24. Bashan, Shviyah u-pedut, 179–80; Nissim Gabai, Sefer pe’at negev (Salonica: Mordechai Nahman, 1797), 99b, no. 32. 25. I.e., Ponentine. 26. Carpi, “ʾAl irgun,” 158.
[ 330 ] Notes to Ch a pter Thirteen 27. Daniel Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova le-maʾan yehudei Polin bi-yemei gezeirot 1648–1660 u-ve-ʾikvoteihen,” Galed 18 (2002): 44. 28. Shmu’el Yoffe Ashkenazi, Sefer yefat to’ar (Venice: Vendramina, 1656), 2a–b. 29. Quoted in Yaʾakov Sasportas, Sefer tsitsat novel Tzvi, ed. Y. Tishbi (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1954), 72. 30. Ashkenazy, Tzaʾar bat rabim, 15–16. 31. Mayseh ha-godl, 4b. Cf. Exodus 35:22. 32. Benvenisti, Sefer pnei Moshe: Ḥelek bet, 210a–13b, no. 110; 300 ducats were worth about 170 reals. 33. CAHJP, Pl/Po 1a, 85b. 34. PML, 111, no. 485. 35. I calculated the value of the currency following Frances Turner, “Money and Exchange Rates in 1632,” http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/RDavies/arian/current /howmuch.html. 36. Only one document written by him survives: Ḥayim Yosef David Azulai, Zeraʾ anashim, ed. D. Frankel (Munkacs: Dovevei Sefat Yeshanim Husiatyn, 1902), 54a–56b. 37. Kaufmann, “David Carcassoni,” 208–14.
Chapter Thirteen: David Carcassoni’s Mission to Europe: The Sephardi Philanthropic Network 1. This whole discussion is based on Robert C. Davis, “Slave Redemption in Venice, 1585–1797,” in J. Martin and D. Romano, eds., Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City State, 1297–1797 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 454–87. 2. Ibid., 456. 3. Ibid., 460. 4. Benjamin Ravid, “The Venetian Government and the Jews,” in R. Davis and B. Ravid, eds., The Jews of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 3–30; Benjamin Arbel, “Jews in International Trade: The Emergence of the Levantines and Ponentines,” in ibid., 73–96; Carpi, “Peʾilut ha-memunim.” 5. Carpi, “ʾAl irgun,” 156n10. 6. Carpi, “ʾOd ʾal ha-peʾulah,” 502–4. 7. Minna Rozen, The Mediterranean in the Seventeenth Century: Captives, Pirates, and Ransomers (Palermo: Mediterranea, 2016), 40; Carpi, “Peʾilut ha-memunim,” 181. 8. Carpi, “Peʾilut ha-memunim,” 184. 9. Rozen, The Mediterranean, 55–64. 10. Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova,” 44. 11. 18th Adar, 5410. 12. CAHJP, IT-IT 1302, 16b. 13. These places are drawn from Aboab’s correspondence in the years running up to 1650: Benayahu, Dor eḥad ba-aretz. Other communities, such as Salonica, Ragusa, and Smyrna, presumably also formed part of the network but did not appear in the correspondence. 14. Kaufmann, “David Carcassoni.”
Notes to Ch a pter Fourteen [ 331 ] 15. Leopold Löwenstein, “Die Familie Aboab,” Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 48 (1904): 661–702. 16. Benayahu, Dor eḥad ba-aretz, 28–31. 17. Ibid., passim. 18. Gershom Scholem, “Zacuto, Moses ben Mordecai,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., M. Berenbaum and F. Skolnik, eds. (New York: Macmillan, 2007), 21:434–39. 19. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (Prince ton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 501–3, 768–70. 20. A special edition of the journal Peʾamim was devoted to Zacuto: Peʾamim 96 (2003). 21. Ashkenazy, Tzaʾar bat rabim, 4; David Kaufmann, “Die Schuldennoth der gemeinde Posen während des Rabbinates R. Isak b. Abrahams (1668–1685),” Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 39 (1895): 39–46, 91–96. 22. The letter was dated 5410, and September 26, 1650, was the date on which 5411 began. 23. Kaufmann, “David Carcassoni,” 209–11. 24. Marc Saperstein, Exile in Amsterdam: Saul Levi Morteira’s Sermons to a Congregation of “New Jews” (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2005), 3–35. 25. Kaufmann, “David Carcassoni,” 209. 26. M. Weiss, Catalog hebräischer Handschriften von S.J. Halberstam in Bielitz (Vienna: Avraham Panto, 1890), 159–60. 27. Henry Méchoulan, “Menasseh ben Israel,” in Beinart, ed., Moreshet Sepharad, 315–35. 28. Menasheh ben Yisra’el, Nishmat ḥayim (Amsterdam: Shmu’el ‘Abarbanel Soeiro, 1652), 173b. 29. 1st Nissan, 5411. 30. Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim,” 608–9. The second sum was recorded on “Rosh Hodesh Ellul,” which fell on August 17 and 18. 31. Kaufman, “David Carcassoni,” 211–13. 32. Simonson, History of the Jews, 464. Though the records of the Paduan ransom fund for this period have survived, they do not cover the period from 1649 to 1653. Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova,” 47–48. 33. Kaufman, “David Carcassoni,” 211–13. 34. Ibid., 213–14. 35. Archive of the Mantuan community, filza 32, doc. 1, CAHJP, HM 245 (microfilm). Cf. Halperin, “Sheviyah,” 27. 36. Cf. Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 125–27. 37. Simonson, History of the Jews, 463–66; Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova,” 41–72.
Chapter Fourteen: The Role of Italian Jewry 1. Proverbs 18:3. 2. Following the piyut Yetzav ha-El by Yehudah Ha-levi, recited in the penitential prayers.
[ 332 ] Notes to Ch a pter Fourteen 3. This is the famous play on words with the Hebrew name of Poland, Polanyah. If split up into its three syllables, it reads Poh-lan-yah, which can be understood as: Here God rests (or lives). 4. Psalms 137:1. 5. Lamentations 5:15. 6. Lamentations 1:12. The elegy was added by Yaʾakov ha-Levi to a holiday prayer book (Maḥzor) of the Sephardi rite, which he edited in Venice in 1671. It was republished by Yitzḥak Barukh ha-Levi in Kovetz ʾal yad (o.s.) 4 (1888): 35–37. This is the third verse. 7. Simonson, History of the Jews, 465n468. 8. Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova,” 48. 9. On the Knights’ administration: Greene, Catholic Pirates, 110–200. 10. Quoted in Rozen, The Mediterranean, 32; see the reference t here. In this period, a Maltese scudo was worth a little less than a Spanish real. 11. This whole discussion is based on Carpi, “Peʾilut ha-memunim.” Jewish communities were by no means the only bodies to hire special agents to negotiate on their behalf. See Magnus Ressel, “Venice and the Redemption of Northern Euro pean Slaves (Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries),” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 87 (2013): 1–16. 12. Rozen, The Mediterranean, 43–46; Carpi, “Peʾilut ha-memunim,” 187. 13. Carpi, “Peʾilut ha-memunim,” 184, 207. 14. Ibid., 184. 15. Cecil Roth, “The Jews of Malta,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 12 (1928–31): 221. 16. In fact, some of the entries in the book refer to captives ransomed before 1654. 17. Hershenzon, “Early Modern Spain,” 161, 253. 18. The Venetian fund also ransomed Jewish captives in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli (in North Africa), Crete, Corfu, and even Naples. Carpi, “Peʾilut ha-memunim,” 212. 19. Ibid., 190. 20. Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova,” 50. 21. 14th Ellul, 5408. 22. Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova,” 45, 57, doc. no. 1. 23. 7th Tishrei, 5409. 24. This might refer to the Coronato, a coin minted at the end of the fifteenth century: Bashan, Shviyah u-pedut, 317. 25. Pinkas kahal Casale Monferato, 1589–1658, ed. Yitzḥak Yudlov (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2012), 443–44, no. 804. 26. Simon Bernstein, “The Letters of Rabbi Mehalalel Hallelujah of Ancona: A Chapter of the Cultural History of Italian Jewry in the Seventeenth Century,” Hebrew Union College Annual 7 (1930): 508–9, 521 (no. VIII). 27. Ibid., 522 (no. IX). 28. Ibid. 29. Kaufmann, “David Carcassoni,” 211–12. 30. David Kaufmann, “Chajjim b. Mose Katzenellenbogen und die zweite Judenschlacht von Lublin,” Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 39 (1894–95): 554–59.
Notes to Ch a pter Fourteen [ 333 ] 31. Reuven Michael, “Katzenellenbogen,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., M. Berenbaum and F. Skolnik, eds. (New York: Macmillan, 2007), vol. 12, c. 19. 32. Kaufmann, “David Carcassoni,” 212. 33. Yaʾakov Koppel ben Zvi Margolis, Sefer mizbeʾaḥ Yaʾakov (Venice: Vendramina, 1662), 20a. 34. Cf. Carpi, “Peʾilut ha-memunim,” 216. 35. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 4a, 11b. 36. Yaʾakov Elbaum, “Kishrei tarbut bein yehudei Polin ve-Ashkenaz le-vein yehudei Italiyah ba-me’ah ha-16,” Galed 7–8 (1985): 11–40. 37. 5th Nissan, 5424. 38. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 192–97; Ada Rapoport-Albert, Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666–1816 (Oxford: Littman Library, 2011), 175–78; Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 89–97. 39. Nathan Hanover, Sefer taʾamei sukkah (Amsterdam: Shmu’el bar Moshe ha- Levi and Re’uven bar Elyakum, 1652). 40. Ibid., 2b; Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 1b. 41. Presumably the Yeshivah Klalit. 42. Literally: “all the good of the land is in their hand.” Cf. Genesis 24:10. 43. Nathan Hanover, Shaʾarei Zion (Prague: Bak Brothers, 1671), 2b. 44. Y. Izraelson, “Nosn-Note Hanover: Zayn lebn un literarishe tetikayt,” Historishe shriften fun YIVO 1 (1929): 1–26. He was murdered by Ottoman troops during their retreat from the failed siege of Vienna. 45. Yaʾakov ben Naftali, Naḥalat Yaʾakov melitzot (Amsterdam, 1652), 2b–3a. 46. Hanover, Yavein metsulah, 12a. 47. On Yaʾakov ben Naftali’s status, see Halperin, Pinkas vaʾad ‘arbaʾ ha-aratzot, 72n9. There were no major trials between 1648 and 1654: Zenon Guldon and Jacek Wijaczka, Procesy o mordy rytualne w Polsce w XVI–XVIII wieku (Kielce: Wydawnictwo DCT, 1995), 37–38, 72, 98. 48. David Kaufmann, “Eine Blutbeschuldigung um 1654 in Grosspolen und Jakob b. Naftali aus Gnesen als Sendbote zum Papste nach Rom,” Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 38 (1894): 94–96. The letter adds that he had been to the Land of Israel, a reference that is unclear. 49. The Vatican did issue an order concerning the blood libel in Poland, but that was a full a decade later and there is nothing connecting it with Yaʾakov ben Naftali. 50. Yaʾakov ben ha-kadosh R. Shimʾon mi-toshavei k”k Tomashov, Sefer ohel Yaʾakov (Venice, 1667), 1b–2a. 51. Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia (Torino: Giulio Einaude editore, 1963), 312. The figures are from Richard Tilden Rapp, Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 176–77. 52. Shalom Bar Asher, Yehudei Sefarad u-Portugal ba-Moroco (1492–1753): Sefer takanot (Jerusalem: Akademon, 1991), 233. It is dated 1691. 53. PML, 133, no. 559. 54. Gurland, Le-korot ha-gezeirot, 2:3–6. 55. Ms. Montefiore 257, 38b.
[ 334 ] Notes to Ch a pter Fourteen 56. Benayahu, Dor eḥad ba-aretz, 331. The name Ashkenazy was generic, often given to Yiddish-speaking Jews visiting Italy. 57. Simonson, History of the Jews, 464n454. 58. Halperin, “ʾEzrah ve-siyuʾa,” 255–56. 59. Ibid., 252. 60. J. Cassuto, “Aus dem ältesten Protokollbuch der Portugiesich-Jüdischen Gemeinde in Hamburg,” Jahrbuch der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft [hereafter JJLG] 6 (1908): 20. 61. Simonson, History of the Jews, 464n455. 62. Presumably Nizza Monferrato. 63. Ms. Montefiore 257, 40a. 64. Halperin, “ʾEzrah ve-siyuʾa,” 260. 65. Simonson, History of the Jews, 464n454; Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova,” 58. 66. Literally, “tearful.” 67. Archive of the Mantuan community, filza 32, doc. 13, CAHJP, HM 245 (microfilm). 68. Ibid.; Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova,” 59. 69. Halperin, “Sheviyah,” 48. 70. This was common for those chosen as shadarim: Yaʾari, Shluḥei Eretz Yisra’el, 1:73. 71. Tzvi ben Shimshon Tokhfirer, Sefer naḥalat Tzvi (Venice: Bragadino, 1660), author’s introduction, 2a–b. 72. On the fourth unnumbered leaf at the beginning of the book. 73. Simonson, History of the Jews, 465; Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova,” 67. 74. Simonson, History of the Jews, 465n459. Simonson misreads the name of Tokhfirer’s destination as Viadana. The original clearly reads Verona. 75. The publication date is in the colophon: Tokhfirer, Sefer naḥalat Tzvi, 106a. 76. Halperin, “Sheviyah,” 53. 77. Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova,” 62–63. 78. Halperin, Pinkas vaʾad arbaʾ ha-aratzot, 94–96, no. 242. 79. Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova,” 64–65. 80. Ibid., 66. 81. 10 Kislev, 5424. See Nazione Israelita Tedesca, Uniono dela due Confraternite Misericordia i Rissoto Schiavi, CAHJP IT/Ve 80, n.p., HM 5959 (microfilm). The document is found on the penultimate page of the register. The precise number of captives is not clear. 82. Simonson, History of the Jews, 466; Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova,” 68–72; Moshe ben Mordechai Zacuto, Iggerot ha-remaz (Livorno: Castillo-Saʾadon, 1780), 35b–37b (letters 30 and 31). 83. Simonson, History of the Jews, 466; Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova,” 68–69. 84. Halperin, “Sheviyah”; idem, “ʾEzrah ve-siyuʾa”; Carpi, “Peʾulat kehillat Padova”; Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim.” 85. Halperin, “Sheviyah,” 56. 86. Yosef Gorni, “ ‘Klal Yisra’el’ be-mivḥan ha-historiyah,” ʾIyunim be-tekumat Yisra’el 12 (2002): 1–9. 87. See, inter alia, Exodus 19:6, Deuteronomy 14:2.
Notes to Ch a pter Fifteen [ 335 ]
Chapter Fifteen: The Jews in the Land of Israel and the Spread of Sabbatheanism 1. I.e., Ashkenazi. 2. I.e., reichsthalers. 3. [John Dury?], An Information Concerning the Present State of the Jewish Nation in Europe and Judea (London: Thomas Brewer, 1658), 4–5. On the attribution to John Dury: Richard H. Popkin, “Rabbi Nathan Shapira’s Visit to Amsterdam in 1657,” in J. Michman and T. Levie, eds., Dutch Jewish History (Jerusalem: Tel Aviv University, 1984), 189–92; Cecil Roth, “The Jews of Jerusalem in the Seventeenth Century: An English Account,” Miscellanies of the Jewish Historical Society of England (London, 1935), 2:99–104. 4. Yaʾari, Shluḥei Eretz Yisra’el, 1:189–208. 5. Ibid., 1:15–16. 6. Yisra’el Yuval, “Terumot mi-Nurenberg li-Yerushalayim (1375–1392),” Zion 46 (1981): 182–97; S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 137–38. 7. David, To Come to the Land, 1–47. 8. This is not to say that none were sent, just that their numbers were small. 9. Minna Rozen, Ha-kehillah ha-yehudit bi-Yerushalayim ba-me’ah ha-17 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, Ministry of Defence Publishing House, 1985), 1–20. 10. Benjamin Braude, “International Competition and Domestic Cloth in the Ottoman Empire: A Study in Underdevelopment,” Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economics, Historical Systems and Civilizations 2 (1979): 437–51. 11. “Holy Cities,” in G. Wigoder, F. Skolnik, and S. Himelstein, eds., The New Encyclopedia of Judaism, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2002), https:// search.credoreference.com/content/entry/nyupencyjud/holy_cities/0?institutionId =1019. 12. Rozen, Ha-kehillah ha-yehudit, 99–102. 13. Ibid., 103–8. Yaron Ben-Naeh, “ ‘Ve-ki lo’ aḥeihem anaḥnu?’ Yaḥasei ashkenazim u-sefaradim bi-Yerushalayim be-sof ha-me’ah ha-shevaʾ-ʾesreh,” Katedrah 103 (2002): 47–52. 14. Avraham ben Mordechai ha-Levi, Ginat veradim (Constantinople: Yonah ben Yaʾakov, 1716), 127a (Yoreh deʾah 3:9). 15. Lehmann, Emissaries, 170–79. 16. This referred to a previous community member, Yosef Kazi, some of whose relatives had settled in the Land of Israel. Halperin, Pinkas vaʾad arbaʾ ha-aratzot, 29, no. 88 and 60, no. 172. 17. Weinryb, “Texts and Studies,” 57–61 (Hebrew pagination), nos. 138, 139. 18. I benefited greatly from Elḥanan Reiner’s knowledge on this issue. 19. PML, 99, no. 456. 20. PML, 99–100, no. 457. 21. Feivel H. Wettstein, Kadmoniyot mi-pinkasa’ot yeshenim le-korot Yisrael be- Polin bikhlal u-ve-Kraka’ bi-frat (Kraków: Yosef Fischer, 1902), 37–38, no. 14; idem, “Mi-pinkasei ha-kahal be-Kraka,” in M. Brann and F. Rosenthal, eds., Gedenkbuch zur
[ 336 ] Notes to Ch a pter Fifteen Erinnerung an David Kaufmann (Breslau: Schles. Verlags-Anstalt v. S. Schottlaender, 1900), x–xi, no. 10 and xiii–xiv, no. 13. 22. PML, 11, no. 53. 23. Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 61–66. 24. Halperin, Pinkas vaʾad arbaʾ ha-aratzot, 53–54, no. 151. 25. PML, 113, no. 492. 26. Rozen, Ha-kehillah ha-yehudit, 100. 27. Avraham Yaʾari, “Shnei kuntresim me-Eretz Yisra’el,” Kiryat Sefer 23 (1947): 140–55. I would like to thank Rebecca Wolpe for her help in translating the text. 28. Ibid., 144–55. 29. Ibid., 145. 30. Ibid., 146–47. 31. Ibid., 146. 32. Ibid., 153. 33. Yemimah Ḥovav, ʾAlamot ahevukha: Ḥayei ha-dat ve-ha-ruaḥ shel nashim ba-ḥevrah ha-Ashkenazit be-re’ishit ha-ʾet ha-ḥadashah (Jerusalem: Carmel, Merkaz Dinur, 2009), 392–405. 34. Yaʾari, “Shnei kuntresim,” 148. 35. I.e., Polish-Lithuanian Jews. 36. Shalom Bar Asher, Yehudei Sefarad u-Portugal be-Maroco, 218–19. 37. Yaʾari, Shluḥei Eretz Yisra’el, 1:277–81. 38. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 72–77. 39. We know about his existence from [Dury?], An Information, 5. 40. Hanover, Shaʾarei Zion, 2b. 41. Nathan Shapira, Tuv ha-aretz (Venice: Vendramina, 1655), author’s and editor/ proofreader’s introductions. 42. Bracha Sack, “The Influence of Cordovero on Seventeenth-Century Jewish Thought,” in I. Twersky and B. Septimus, eds., Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 372–79. 43. Lehmann, Emissaries, 119–68. 44. Shapira, Tuv ha-aretz, 64b–76b. 45. He described the sufferings of Polish Jewry in his open letter to Cromwell: Menasheh ben Yisra’el, To His Highness the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The Humble Addresses of Menasseh ben Israel, a Divine and Doctor of Physick in behalf of the Jewish Nation (London, 1655), 7. David S. Katz, “English Charity and Jewish Qualms: The Rescue of the Ashkenazi Community of Seventeenth-Century Jerusalem,” in A. Rapoport-Albert and S. Zipperstein, Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky (London: Peter Halban, 1988), 248. 46. [Henry Jessey], A Narrative of the Late Proceeds at Whitehall Concerning the Jews who had Desir’s by R. Manasses, an Agent for them that they might Return to England . . . (London: Chapman, 1656), 3; David S. Katz, “Henry Jessey and Conservative Millenarianism in Seventeenth Century England and Holland,” Dutch Jewish History 2 (1986): 75–93. 47. This refers to Nathan Shapira. 48. [Jessey], A Narrative, 4.
Notes to Ch a pter Fifteen [ 337 ] 49. [Dury?], An Information, 5. 50. Popkin, “Rabbi Nathan Shapira,” 185–205. 51. [Dury?], An Information, 5. My reconstruction of events differs from that of Popkin. 52. Cassuto, “Aus dem ältesten Protokollbuch,” JJLG 7 (1909): 160; Bernard Brilling, “Die frühesten Beziehungen der Juden Hamburgs zu Palästina,” JJLG 21 (1930): 27. 53. [Dury?], An Information, 5. 54. Ibid. The amount given there was probably an exaggeration. 55. B.T. Baba’ Batra’, 10b; B.T. Sanhedrin, 26b. 56. Elliott Horowitz, “The Early Eighteenth Century Confronts the Beard: Kabbalah and Jewish Self-Fashioning,” Jewish History 8, no. 1–2 (1994): 101–2. 57. Shulḥan ʾarukh, Yoreh deʾah 254 a–b. 58. [Dury?] An Information, 6. Almost the only way that Dury could have heard about the discussions in Jerusalem would have been from Shapira himself on his return to Amsterdam. 59. Yaʾari, Shluḥei Eretz Yisra’el, 1:280. 60. [Dury?] An Information, 5–6. 61. Ibid., 13–14. On Serrarius, see Popkin, “Rabbi Nathan Shapira,” 189–91. 62. [Dury?] An Information, 12–13. 63. Yehuda Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, trans. A. Schwartz, S. Nakache, and P. Peli (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 191n209. 64. The letter is published in two versions: a longer one in [Dury?], An Information, 11–16, and a shorter one in Nathaniel Holmes, A Brief Chronology Concerning the Jews from the Year of Christ, 1650–1666, in Richard Burton Crouch, Two Journeys to Jerusalem (London, 1709), 119–20. Dury dates it to April 1657, Holmes to April 1658. The l ater date seems more likely. 65. E[dward] W[histon], The Life and Death of Mr. Henry Jessey, Late Preacher of the Gospel of Christ in London (1671), 71, 77. 66. Ibid., 71. 67. This follows Acts 7:51. 68. Jeremiah 31:13. 69. Romans 11:15; Isaiah 59: 20. The text of the letter is published in W[histon], The Life and Death, 75–77. 70. On Yaʾakov Ḥagiz: Elisheva Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 19–29. 71. Matt Goldish, Jewish Questions: Responsa on Sephardic Life in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 110. 72. Yaʾakov Ḥagiz, Sefer halakhot ketanot (Venice: Bragadino, 1704), 34a, part 2, no. 92. On Ḥagiz’s very laconic style, see Louis Jacobs, “The Rabbinic Riddle,” http:// louisjacobs.org/articles/the-rabbinic-riddle/. 73. Lehmann, Emissaries, 26–27. 74. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 93, 479. See also National Library of Israel, Manuscript Division, Heb. 8° 6590, p. 5. 75. On the later development of the relationship, see Yaʾakov S. Ariel, “An
[ 338 ] Notes to Ch a pter Sixteen Unexpected Alliance: Christian Zionism and Its Historical Significance,” Modern Judaism 26, no. 1 (2006): 74–100. 76. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi. On the social aspects of the Sabbathean movement, see Yaʾakov Barnai, Shabta’ut: heibetim ḥevratiyim (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2000). 77. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 1–93. 78. Moshe Idel, “ ‘One from a Town, Two from a Clan’: The Diffusion of Lurianic Kabbala and Sabbateanism: A Re-examination,” Jewish History 7, no. 2 (1993): 79–104. 79. Halperin, “Sheviyah,” 17–56. 80. Yaʾakov Barnai, “The Outbreak of Sabbateanism—The East European F actor,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 4 (1994): 171–83; idem, Shabta’ut, 51–61; Ada Rapoport-Albert, “A Reevaluation of the ‘Khmelnytsky Factor’: The Case of the Seventeenth-Century Sabbatean Movement,” in Amelia Glaser, ed., Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 47–59. 81. Barnai, “The Outbreak”; Rapoport-Albert, “A Reevaluation.” 82. Barnai, “The Outbreak,” 180. 83. Cf. Yaʾakov Barnai, “The Spread of the Sabbatean Movement in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in S. Menache, ed., Communication in the Jewish Diaspora: The Pre-Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 323–24. 84. Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets, 56–89. 85. Yaʾari, Shluḥei Eretz Yisra’el, 157–58, 281–82. 86. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 199–203. 87. Katz, “English Charity and Jewish Qualms,” 255–56. 88. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 365. 89. Ibid., 764–70. 90. Ze’ev Gries, Sifrut ha-hanhagot: Toledoteihah u-mekomah be-ḥayei ḥasidav shel ha-Besht (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1989), 91–93. 91. Lehmann, Emissaries, 22–40. 92. Yosef Kaplan, “The Self-Definition of the Sephardic Jews of Western Europe and Their Relation to the Alien and the Stranger,” in B. Gampel, ed., Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–1648 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 121–45. 93. Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets, 1–40; Rapoport-Albert, Women, 11–14 and passim. 94. On the importance of mobility in early modern Jewish history, see Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 23–55. 95. Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories.”
Chapter Sixteen: The Fate of the Ransomed 1. Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 237. 2. I.e., sou. 3. Edouard Sieur de la Croix, Mémoires du sieur de La Croix, cy-devant sécretaire de l’ambassade de Constantinople: Contenans diverses rélations très-curieuses de l’Empire Othoman, vol. 2 (Paris: La Veuve A. Cellier, 1684), 396.
Notes to Ch a pter Sixteen [ 339 ] 4. John-Paul Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–6; Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 375n100. 5. Benvenisti, Sefer pnei Moshe: Ḥelek bet, 215b–216a, no. 112. 6. Bashan, Shviyah u-pedut, 178. 7. Benvenisti, Sefer pnei Moshe: Ḥelek gimel, 17a, no. 13; Asher Yaʾakov Avraham Kalmankes Yoffe, Sefer ha-eshel (Lublin: Yoffe, 1678), author’s introduction. 8. Benvenisti, Sefer pnei Moshe: Ḥelek bet, 137b, no. 73; Kaufmann, “David Carcassoni,” 214–16; Garmizan, Sefer mishpetei tzedek, 170–71, no. 107; Shmu’el ben Ḥayim Vital, She’elot u-teshuvot be’er mayim ḥayim (Brooklyn: Vider-Hershkowitz, 1966), 171–75, no. 65; Carpi, “Peʾilut ha-memunim,” 203, 206, 220; Shilton, She’elot u-teshuvot bnei Moshe, 50a, no. 25; Kaufmann, “David Carcassoni,” 214–16; Krokhmal, Tzemaḥ tzedek, 48a–b, no. 70; Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 248n253. 9. Shilton, She’elot u-teshuvot bnei Moshe, 112a, no. 57. 10. Kaufmann, “David Carcassoni,” 214–16. 11. Avraham ben Mordechai ha-Levi, Ginat veradim, 124b, Yoreh deʾah 3:9. 12. Avraham Yaʾari, Ha-defus ha-ʾivri be-Kushta’ (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967), 36. 13. Shashar, “ʾAgunot,” 103–11. 14. Me’ir of Szczebrzeszyn, Tzok ha-ʾitim (Salonica, 1652), 9b; Jacob Barnai, “Contact and the Severance of Contact between the Rabbis of Turkey and Europe in the Seventeenth C entury,” in I. Twersky and J. Harris, eds., Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature III (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 285– 86. Barnai attributes the text to the work’s original author, but it does not appear in the first edition. 15. Benvenisti, Sefer pnei Moshe: Ḥelek bet, 137b, no. 73. 16. Ibid., 153b–154b, no. 79. 17. Garmizan, Sefer mishpetei tzedek, 170–71, no. 107. 18. Shilton, She’elot u-teshuvot bnei Moshe, 50a, no. 25. 19. This might refer to smallpox, called in Spanish, the language of the local Jews, viruela. 20. Benvenisti, Sefer pnei Moshe: Ḥelek gimel, 95a, no. 56. 21. Benvenisti, Sefer pnei Moshe: Ḥelek aleph, 172a, no. 71; Shilton, She’elot u-teshuvot bnei Moshe, 73, no. 33. 22. Shmu’el ben Ḥayim Vital, She’elot u-teshuvot be’er mayim ḥayim, 171–75, no. 65. 23. Mordechai ha-Levi, Sefer darkhei noʾam (Venice: Bragadino, 1697), 60b–62b, Even ha-ʾezer no. 5. 24. Shashar, “ʾAgunot,” 102–33. 25. Montefiore Library, London, Ms. 112, 66a. The text is published in Me’ir Benayahu, Ha-yeḥasim she-b ein Yehudei Yavan le-Yehudei Italiyah mi-gerush Sefarad ʾad tom ha-republicah ha-venetziyanit (Tel Aviv: University of Tel Aviv, 1980), 280–81. 26. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
[ 340 ] Notes to Ch a pter Eight een 27. Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, trans. M. Kyburz and J. Peck (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 151–70. 28. Yehudah Leib Eilenburg, Sefer minḥat Yehudah (Istanbul: Franco, 1654). The colophon includes the names of the Polish refugees who worked on the publication. 29. The introduction was written by the editor: Yekuti’el Zalman ben Katri’el from Sataniv. See ben-Naeh, Jews, 372–73. 30. Marvin Heller, Further Studies in the Making of the Early Hebrew Book (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 91–102; Avraham Yaʾari, Meḥkarei sefer: Perakim be-toldot ha- sefer ha-ʾivri (Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1958), 247–48. 31. Yeshʾayahu Vinograd, Otzar ha-sefer ha-ʾivri, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Ha-makhon le-bibliografiyah memuhshevet, 1994), 670, no. 194. 32. Yaʾari, Meḥkarei sefer, 16. 33. Barnai, “Contact,” 286–88. 34. Izraelson, “Nosn-Note Hanover,” 12. 35. Yosef ha-L evi Nazir, Sefer mateh Yosef: Ḥelek sheni (Istanbul: Yonah ben Yaʾakov, 1717), 17a–20b. 36. Efraim ben Yaʾakov ha-Kohen, Sefer shaʾar Efraim (Sulzbach: Moshe Bar Uri Shraga Bloch, 1688), 91a, no. 113. 37. Leah Bornstein, “Ha-Ashkenazim ba-imperiyah ha-ʾotma’nit ba-me’ot ha-16 ve-ha-17,” Mi-mizraḥ u-mi-maʾarav 1 (1974): 104. 38. Ben-Naeh, “ ‘Ve-ki lo’ aḥeihem anaḥnu?’ ” 43–47; Rozen, Ha-kehillah ha- yehudit, 99–108.
Chapter Seventeen: Transregional Contexts 1. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 35–76. 2. Lehmann, Emissaries, 169–214. 3. Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1–16. 4. For another example of this, see Francois Guesnet, “Textures of Intercession: Rescue Efforts for the Jews of Prague,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 4 (2005): 355–75.
Chapter Eighteen: Introduction 1. Wöchentliche Zeitung auß mehrerley örther: Ordinari Diengstag Zeitung, Hamburg, 33/1656, 4. See Raba, Between Remembrance and Denial, 166. 2. See also Shmu’el Feivish Kahana ben Yuspa Katz, Sefer leket Shmu’el (Venice: Vendramina, 1694), 1b, “Hakdamat ha-meḥaber.” Kahana’s account suggests that these might have been Jews fleeing the huge massacre in Lublin the previous year by Russian and Cossack forces. 3. Lewin, “Die Judenverfolgungen.” 4. Raba, Between Remembrance and Denial, 139–66.
Notes to Ch a pter Nineteen [ 341 ] 5. Jutta Braden, Hamburger Judenpolitik im Zeitalter lutherischer Orthodoxie (Hamburg: Christians Verlag, 2001), 203–18. 6. Michael Hughes, Early Modern Germany, 1477–1806 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 114–38. 7. Keith Tribe, “Cameralism and the Science of Government,” Journal of Modern History 56, no. 2 (1984): 263–84. 8. Shmu’el Ettinger, “The Beginnings of the Change in the Attitude of European Society towards the Jews,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 7 (1961): 193–219. 9. J. Friedrich Battenberg, “Fürstliche Ansiedlungspolitik und Landjudenschaft im 17./18. Jahrhundert: Merkantilistische Politik und Juden im Bereich von Sachsen- Anhalt,” Aschkenas—Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 11 (2000): 59–85. 10. Christopher R. Friedrichs, “The War and German Society,” in Geoffrey Parker, ed., The Thirty Years’ War (London: Routledge, 1997), 186–92. 11. Bernhard Stier and Wolfgang von Hippel, “War, Economy and Society,” in Sheilagh Ogilvie, ed., Germany: A New Social and Economic History, vol. 2 (London: Arnold, 1996), 233–62. 12. Rotraud Ries, “German Territorial Princes and the Jews,” in R. Po-chia Hsia and H. Lehmann, eds., In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute-Cambridge University Press, 1995), 218; J. Friedrich Battenberg, Die Juden in Deutschland vom 16. bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2001), 32–36. 13. Israel, “Central European Jewry during the Thirty Years’ War.” 14. Battenberg, Die Juden, 10–13. 15. Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750 (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1985), 4–28. 16. Michael Toch, “Aspects of Stratification of Early Modern German Jewry: Population History and Village Jews,” in Hsia and Lehmann, eds., In and Out of the Ghetto, 77–89. 17. Battenberg, Die Juden, 10–13. 18. David Kaufmann, Die letzte Vertreibung der Juden aus Wien und Niederösterreich: Ihre Vorgeschichte (1625–1670) und ihre Opfer (Vienna: Carl Konegen, 1889), 166–228. 19. Battenberg, Die Juden, 46. 20. Joseph Davis, “The Reception of the Shulhan ʾArukh and the Formation of Ashkenazic Jewish Identity,” AJS Review 26 (2002): 251–76; Elisheva Carlebach, “Early Modern Ashkenaz in the Writings of Jacob Katz,” in J. Harris, ed., The Pride of Jacob: Essays on Jacob Katz and His Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 69–74; Teller, “The Jewish Literary Responses.”
Chapter Nineteen: Background: German Jews and Polish Jews before 1648 1. This is how the legend is retold in S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Rus sia and Poland from the Earliest Times u ntil the Present Day, trans. I. Friedlander, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1916), 40. See also Haya
[ 342 ] Notes to Ch a pter Nineteen Bar-Itzhak, Jewish Poland—Legends of Origin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 49–75. 2. That region was called Ashkenaz by Jews, and that is why the Polish Jews continued to call themselves, among other things, Ashkenazim. 3. H. H. Ben-Sasson, ed., A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 561–73. 4. Zaremska, Żydzi w średniowiecznej Europie środkowej, 32–36. 5. Hanna Zaremska, Żydzi w średniowiecznej Polsce: Gmina krakowska (Warsaw: Instytut Historii PAN, 2011), 108–71. See also Adam Teller, “Telling the Difference: Some Comparative Perspectives on the Jews’ Legal Status in Poland and in the Holy Roman Empire,” Polin 22 (2010): 113–18. 6. Zaremska, Żydzi w średniowiecznej Polsce, 174–77. 7. Maria Bogucka and Henryk Samsonowicz, Dzieje miast i mieszczaństwa w Polsce przedrozbiorowej (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1986), 266–69. 8. Jean Baumgarten, Le Yiddish: Histoire d’une langue errante (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002), 33–52. 9. Davis, “The Reception.” 10. Adam Teller, “Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Economy (1453–1795),” in Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 7: The Early Modern World, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 583–84, 588–91. 11. Jacob Goldberg, “The Privileges Granted to Jewish Communities of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth as a Stabilizing Factor in Jewish Support,” in C. Abramsky, M. Jachimczyk, and A. Polonsky, eds., The Jews in Poland (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 31–54. 12. Ettinger, “Ḥelkam.” 13. Gershon D. Hundert, “The Role of the Jews in Commerce in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania,” Journal of European Economic History 16, no. 2 (1987): 245–75. 14. Proverbs 17:1. 15. Moshe Isserles, She’elot u-teshuvot ha-rem”a (Kraków: Menahen Nahum Meizlish, 1640), 201a, no. 95. 16. Elḥanan Reiner, “ Asher kol gedolei ha-aretz ha-zo’t hem talmidav’—R . Yaʾakov Polak, Ri’shon ve-ro’sh le-ḥakmei Krakov,” in idem, ed., Kraka-Kazimierz-Krakov: Meḥkarim be-toledot Yehudei Krakov (Tel Aviv: University of Tel Aviv, 2001), 43–68. 17. Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, 175–81. 18. Hone Shmeruk, “Baḥurim me-A shkenaz be-yeshivot Polin,” in idem, Ha- keriy’ah le-navi’: Meḥkarei historiyah ve-sifrut, ed. I. Bartal (Jerusalem: Hebrew University-Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1999), 3–17. 19. This seems to be a reference to groups of refugees from the Thirty Years’ War who had fled to Poland-Lithuania. 20. Yisra’el Halperin, “Maḥloket al bereirat ha-kahal be-Frankfurt de-Mayn ve- hedeyah be-Polin u-ve-Behm,” Zion 21 (1965): 81. 21. Literally, “from bad to worse.” 22. Halperin, “Maḥloket,” 84. 23. Moshe Rosman, “The Authority of the Council of Four Lands outside Poland,” Polin 22 (2010): 87–92.
Notes to Ch a pter T w en t y [ 343 ] 24. Elḥanan Reiner, “The Ashkenazi Elite at the Beginning of the Modern Era: Manuscript versus Printed Book,” Polin 10 (1997): 85–98. 25. Davis, “The Reception,” 262–64. 26. Ibid., 264. 27. Ibid., 274–76. 28. Bernard Brilling, Geschichte der Juden in Breslau von 1454 bis 1702 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960), 16–22. 29. Bałaban, Historja Żydów, 290–91. 30. Ignacy Schiper, Dzieje handlu żydowskiego na ziemiach polskich (Warsaw: Nakładem Centrali Związku Kupców w Warszawie, 1937), 71–85. 31. Much of the following discussion is based on Yisra’el Halperin, “Pelitim yehudiyim shel milḥemet-shloshim-ha-shanah be-mizraḥah shel Eiropah,” Zion 27 (1962): 199–215. 32. Gerardus Johannes Vossius et clarorum virorum ad eum epistolæ, Collectore P. Colomesio, vol. 2 (London: Laurence Kroniger, 1691), 183, letter 252. 33. Halperin, “Pelitim yehudiyim,” 200–207. 34. Lewin, Die Landessynode der grosspolnischen Judenschaft, 82–83. 35. PML, 73, no. 351. 36. PML, 74, no. 362. 37. Kahana, Sefer she’elot u-teshuvot divrei renanah, 186–94, no. 45. 38. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 234–35.
Chapter Twenty: The Trickle before the Flood: Refugees in the Holy Roman Empire, 1648–1654 1. The first news of the uprising reached the empire from Ukraine even earlier. On August 22, 1648, the Bingen community held a special day of prayer for the victims: Yehudah ben Shmu’el Reutlingen Miller, Shevut Yehuda’, Schocken Institute for Jewish Research, Jerusalem, Ms. 70057, 263a. 2. Fritz (Yitzḥak) Baer, Das Protokollbuch der Landjudenschaft des Herzogtums Kleve (Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke & Sohn, 1922), 62n23a. 3. Jay R. Berkovitz, Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 28–29. 4. Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War (Kindle: Allen Lane, 2009), loc. 14159. 5. Josef Hrásky, “Ein Beitrage zur Kenntnis der Judensiedlung in Böhmen in den Jahren 1650 und 1674,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der Čechoslavakischen Republik 9 (1938): 244. 6. Ibid., 244–45. 7. Teller, “Telling the Difference,” 111–18. 8. Müller, Urkundliche Beiträge, 19–22; Hugo Gold, ed., Die Juden und Judengemeinden Mährens in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Brünn: Jüdischer Buch-und Kunstverlag, 1929), 12–13. 9. Hugh Agnew, Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown (Washington, DC: Hoover Institute Press, 2004), 72–75. 10. Hrásky, “Ein Beitrage,” 245.
[ 344 ] Notes to Ch a pter T w en t y-One 11. Lenka Matusikova, “Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis der Judensiedlung in Böhmen in den Jahren 1650 und 1674 (Ergänzungen zur gleichnamigen Studie von J. Hrasky),” Judaica Bohemiae 35 (1999): 143. 12. Archiv Ministerstva Vnitra v Praze, Nova Manipulace, J/7/18. Cf. Josef Bergl, Judaica v archive ministerstva vitra v Praze (Prague: Ministerstvo Vnitra Republiky Ceskoslovenske, 1933), 43. For a photo of the document: CAHJP, P127/399. 13. Louis Lewin reports that a group of Jewish refugees from Leszno settled in Prague after 1656, though he does not say how many or whether they had fled as a group. Louis Lewin, Geschichte der Juden in Lissa (Pinne: N. Gundermann, 1904), 36. 14. See, e.g., Krokhmal, Tzemaḥ tzedek, 108b–110a, no. 78; 144b–146b, no. 101; 147b–150b, no. 103. 15. Ibid., 101b–102a, no. 70; Ashkenazi, ʾAvodat ha-gershoni, 30a–31a, no. 36. 16. The halakhah specifies that the conversion must be to an idolatrous religion. Though there were discussions as to whether Christianity was such a religion, at times of conflict such as this a stricter line was usually taken. 17. Salmon-Mack, “Shevuyah.” 18. Elijah Judah Schochet, “Taz,” Rabbi David Halevi (New York: Ktav, 1979), 14–15. 19. Ashkenazi, ʾAvodat ha-gershoni, 30b. 20. Salmon-Mack, “Shevuyah,” 271–73. 21. Ashkenazi, ʾAvodat ha-gershoni, 30b. In fact, the Taz himself, while he was a refugee, complained of the difficulty of ruling without his library: Yo’el Sirkes, She’elot u-teshuvot ha-ba”ḥ ha-ḥadashot (Korets: Anton Krieger, 1785), 51b, no. 78. 22. Krokhmal, Tzemaḥ tzedek, 102a. 23. Ibid. 24. Yeḥezk’el (Edward) Fram, “Takdim hilkhati she-eino ra’uy li-shemo,” in U. Erlich, H. Kreisel, and D. Lasker, eds., ʾAl pi ha-be’er: Meḥkarim be-hagut Yehudit mugashim le-Yaʾakov Blidshtein (Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2008), 411–12. 25. Markéta Pnina Younger, “Mobility of Jewish Captives between Moravia and the Ottoman Empire in the Second Half of the Seventeenth C entury, Judaica Olomucensia 3, no. 2 (2015): 10–16. 26. Halperin, Takkanot medinat Mehrin, 1–102. 27. Ibid., 94–96. 28. Selma Stern, Die Preussische Staat und die Juden, vol. 1, part 2 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1952), 1–3. 29. Israel, European Jewry, 10. 30. Stern, Die Preussische Staat, vol. 1, part 1, 51–52. 31. Ibid.
Chapter Twenty-One: On the Road: The Struggle for Survival 1. Michel Agier, On the Margins of the World: The Refugee Experience T oday, trans. D. Fernbach (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 23–29.
Notes to Ch a pter T w en t y-One [ 345 ] 2. Yaʾakov Yisra’el ben Zevi Ashkenazi Emden, Megillat sefer, ed. David Cahane (Warsaw: Shulderberg Brothers, 1897), 6. The victim’s f amily fled to Moravia, where he eventually joined them. 3. Psalms 31:23. 4. Lamentations 3:45. 5. Psalms 137:5. 6. Isaiah 20:4. 7. Isaiah 53:6. 8. Jeremiah 42:17. 9. Kaidonover, Sefer birkat ha-zevaḥ, “Hakdamat ha-meḥaber.” 10. Shmu’el Oyerbach ben David, Sefer ḥesed Shmuʾel (Amsterdam: Moshe be Avraham Mendes Coutinho, 1699), 2a. 11. Nathan Hanover, Sefer safah berurah (Prague: Bak B rothers, 1660). 12. Ibid., 1b–2a. 13. Ibid., 31b–39a. 14. Literally, “The Holy Tongue.” 15. The Hebrew term used is periyʾah, which is the removal of a secondary membrane under the foreskin. Practically speaking, it is difficult to distinguish the Jewish form of circumcision from the Muslim, which does not mandate the removal of the secondary membrane. 16. Hanover, Sefer safah berurah, 33b–34a. The last phrase follows Exodus 20:22 and Leviticus 18:6–20. 17. Ibid., 34a–35a. The verse follows Ecclesiastes 10:19. 18. For the identification of the village: Lewin, “Ein grosspolnischer Bericht,” 34. 19. In Yiddish: Lubowo. 20. CAHJP, P127/399, photostat, 76a. 21. The Jews called the town Griditz. In German: Grätz. The distances given here are all as the crow flies. 22. CAHJP, P127/399, photostat, 76b. 23. Ibid. 24. The Jews called the village Wirum. 25. CAHJP, P127/399, photostat, 77a. 26. Antoni Mączak, Travel in Early Modern Europe, trans. U. Phillips (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 6–7. 27. Lewin, “Ein grosspolnischer Bericht,” 37. The Jews called the town Carlat. In German: Carolath. 28. The Jews called the town Bayten. In German: Beuthen. 29. CAHJP, P127/399, photostat, 77b–78a; Lewin, “Ein grosspolnischer Bericht,” 37. 30. CAHJP, P127/399, photostat, 78a. The Jews called the town Gloga. In German: Glogau. 31. Following Esther 4:14. 32. Literally, “generous benefactors.” 33. CAHJP, P127/399, photostat, 78a. 34. On humiliation in the refugee experience, see Mollica, Healing Invisible Wounds, 62–87.
[ 346 ] Notes to Ch a pter T w en t y-T wo
Chapter Twenty-Two: Over the Border: Refugee Settlement in the Empire’s Eastern Regions 1. Bloch, Militsch, 4. 2. Ibid., 40–41, doc. 1. The quote is from p. 40. I would like to thank Andrew Sparling for his help in reading these texts. 3. Ibid., 41, doc. 2. 4. Robert Berndt, Geschichte der Juden in Gross-Glogau (Glogau: G. Müller, 1874), 30–31. 5. Bloch, Militsch, 44, doc. 3. 6. Ibid., 45, doc. 5. 7. Israel Rabin, Vom Rechtskampf der Juden in Schlesien (1582–1713) (Breslau: Th. Schatzky, 1927), 40–44. 8. Bloch, Militsch, 47, doc. 9. 9. Ibid., 51–52, doc. 16. 10. Ferdinand III died in April 1657 and was succeeded by his son, Leopold I, who initially continued his f ather’s policy toward the Jews. 11. Bloch, Militsch, 52–53, doc. 18. 12. Ibid., 54, doc. 21. 13. Ibid., 56–57, doc. 24. 14. Ibid., 57–58, doc. 25. 15. Ibid. 16. Bloch, Militsch, 58–59, doc. 26. 17. Ibid., 61–62, doc. 29. 18. Ibid., 52–53, doc. 18. 19. Ibid., 5. 20. Ibid. 21. Bernard (Dov) Weinryb, “Yehudei Polin ve-Lita’ ve-yaḥaseihem le-Breslau ba- me’ot 16–19 (Misḥar, hityashvut ve-tarbut),” in Meḥkarim u-mekorot le-toledot Yisra’el ba-et ha-ḥadashah (Jerusalem: Hotza’at Makor, 1976), 28–31. 22. Bloch, Militsch, 47, doc. 9. Unfortunately, the documentation contains no further details on Lazarus and Löbell. 23. Lewin, “Die Judenverfolgungen.” 24. Weinryb, “Yehudei Polin ve-Lita’ ve-yaḥaseihem le-Breslau,” 29. 25. Müller, Urkundliche Beiträge, 24–25. On the 1629 privilege, see ibid., 19–22; Gold, Die Juden und Judengemeinden Mährens, 12–13. 26. Müller, Urkundliche Beiträge, 25. 27. Ibid., 26–28; Michael Miller, Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 22. 28. This provision could also be found in the 1629 privilege. 29. Müller, Urkundliche Beiträge, 29–30. 30. Ibid., 29–31. 31. Halperin, Takkanot medinat Mehrin, 112–13, no. 337. 32. Miller, Rabbis and Revolution, 24. 33. Cf. Younger, “Mobility,” 27. 34. Ḥayim Nathan Dembitzer, Kelilat yofi, vol. 1 (Kraków, 1888), 57a.
Notes to Ch a pter T w en t y-Thr ee [ 347 ] 35. Me’ir Wunder, “Ashkenazi, Gershon,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Ashkenazi_Gershon. 36. Emden, Megillat sefer, 5–6. 37. Dembitzer, Kelilat yofi, 2:45b–49a. 38. Cf. Halperin, Takkanot medinat Mehrin, 106, no. 324 (dated 1656). 39. Leipzig University Library, Ms. B.H. qu. 34, fols. 53a–57a. See also Bernard D. Weinryb, “Historisches und Kulturhistorisches aus Wagenseils hebräischem Briefwechsel,” Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 83 (1939): 334–37. 40. Abraham David, “Johann Cristoph Wagenseil and His Relationship with Jewish Scholars in the Second Half of the Seventeenth C entury,” Judaica 72, no. 1 (2016): 85–117. 41. The word used means, literally, “estate” and refers to his property that remained in his hometown. 42. Leipzig University Library, Ms. B.H. qu. 34, fol. 55a; Weinryb, “Historisches,” 336. 43. Leipzig University Library, Ms. B.H. qu. 34, fol. 54a; Weinryb, “Historisches,” 335. 44. Leipzig University Library, Ms. B.H. qu. 34, fol. 54a; Weinryb, “Historisches,” 335. 45. Leipzig University Library, Ms. B.H. qu. 34, fols. 56a–b; Weinryb, “Historisches,” 336–37. 46. Cf. Alexander Marx, “A Seventeenth-Century Autobiography: A Picture of Jewish Life in Bohemia and Moravia,” in Studies in Jewish History and Folklore (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1944), 183.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Polish Jews Meet German Jews: The Refugees Elsewhere in the Empire 1. The text was translated for me by Agnes Romer-Segal. However, in bringing it ere, I have tried to retain a sense of the original by using rhymed couplets. To do this, h I have taken one or two liberties with the language. 2. Max Weinreich, “Tsvei yidishe shpotlider oyf Yidn,” YIVO Filologishe shriftn 3 (1929): 537–53. The lineation is Weinreich’s. 3. Di bashraybung, ll. 10–16. 4. In fact, Polish and German Jews w ere not the only groups mentioned. The poem ends with a similar, though much shorter, discussion between the German Jew and a Jew from Prague. 5. Di bashraybung, ll. 25–192, 193–304. 6. Ibid., ll. 161–64, 169–70. 7. Ibid., ll. 25–26. 8. Ibid., ll. 49–46. 9. Ibid., ll. 65–68. 10. Ibid., ll. 71–96. 11. Ibid., ll. 123–24. A more literal translation would be, “He cleans it away like ḥometz, he keeps just a kometz.” 12. Horowitz, “The Early Eighteenth Century Confronts the Beard,” 95–115. 13. Di bashraybung, ll. 139–40. 14. Ibid., ll. 159–60.
[ 348 ] Notes to Ch a pter T w en t y-Thr ee 15. Ibid., ll. 165–68. 16. Ibid., ll. 193–98. 17. This is a slang term based on the Yiddish for “thief.” 18. Di bashraybung, ll. 241–48. 19. Ibid., ll. 219–40, 259–60. 20. Ibid., ll. 213–18. 21. Ibid., ll. 181–82. 22. Ibid., ll. 257–58, 267–68, 278, 279–80. 23. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 40–45. 24. Di bashraybung, ll. 19–21. 25. Vienna was not mentioned presumably b ecause the poem was written a fter 1670, when the Jews were expelled from the town. 26. Isidor Kracauer, Geschichte der Juden in Frankfurt a. M., vol. 2 (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kauffman, 1927), 45–46. 27. Ibid. 28. National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Ms. Heb. 24° 662, p. 122b. It is possible that refugees might have appeared in a separate charity pinkas kept by the community. However, Kracauer, writing before the Holocaust, knew of no such references. Kracauer, Geschichte, 45–46. 29. Max Grunwald, Vienna (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of Amer ica, 1936), 75–12; Kaufmann, Die letzte Vertreibung. See also Yankev Hakhazn, Eyn Sheyn lid fun Vin benigen Akeyde (Prague, [1670]), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, E ngland, Opp. 8º 1103 (38), 2a. 30. John P. Spielman, The City and the Crown: Vienna and the Imperial Court, 1600–1740 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993), 123–27. 31. Grunwald, Vienna, 89–92. 32. Kaufmann, Die letzte Vertreibung, 41–42. 33. Pribram, Urkunden und Akten, 158, no. 96. 34. Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut, 250–62. 35. Archive of the Mantuan community, filza 32, doc. 13, CAHJP, HM 245 (microfilm). 36. Jean Berenger, “La communauté juive de Vienne au XVIIème siècle,” in D. Tollet, ed., Politique et religion dans le judaïsme modern: Des communautes à l’émancipation (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris, Sorbonne, 1987), 23–24. 37. Pribram, Urkunden und Akten, 188, no. 106. 38. See Shussberg’s colophon to a manuscript of Sefer ken tzippur, which he copied in Vienna in 1662: Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, England, Ms. Opp. 551, p. 1a. 39. Yonah ben Yeshʾayah Te’omim, Sefer kikayon de-Yonah (Amsterdam, 1669), “Hakdamat ben-ha-meḥaber”; Bałaban, Historia Żydów, 2:6–7. 40. Kaufmann, Die letzte Vertreibung, 60–62. 41. Pribram, Urkunden und Akten, 187, no. 105. 42. Ibid., 188, no. 106. 43. Peter Rauscher, “ ‘Auf der Schipp’: Ursachen und Folgen der Ausweisung der Wiener Juden 1670,” Aschkenas: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 16, no. 2 (2002): 421–38.
Notes to Ch a pter T w en t y-Four [ 349 ] 44. Pribram, Urkunden und Akten, 211–12, no. 115. 45. In 1671, the communities of Altona and Wandsbek, which were Ashkenazi, united with the Ashkenazim in Hamburg to found a joint community known as Kehillat AHW (pronounced Ahu). 46. Joachim Whaley, Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529– 1819 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 80–84. 47. Ibid., 82. 48. Günter Marwedel, Die Privilegien der Juden in Altona (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1976), 134–39. 49. Whaley, Religious Toleration, 73–83. 50. All the Hamburg community regulations h ere are from a German translation of the original record book: Cassuto, “Aus dem ältesten Protokollbuch,” JJLG 6 (1908): 1–54; 7 (1909): 159–210; 8 (1910): 227–90; 9 (1911): 318–66; 10 (1912): 225–95; 11 (1916): 1–76. Here: JJLG 6 (1908): 20, 46, 50, 51. 51. Ibid., JJLG 6 (1908): 31, 37. 52. Ibid., JJLG 7 (1909): 167. 53. This was a communal institution for the poor, something between a hostel and a hospital. 54. Hava Turniansky, ed., Glikl: Zikhronot 1691–1716 (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar le-Toledot Yisra’el, 2006), 76–77. 55. Marwedel, Die Privilegien, 135, no. 11. 56. Cassuto, “Aus dem ältesten Protokollbuch,” JJLG 7 (1909): 172–73. 57. Ibid., 173–74. 58. Ibid., 185–86. Other refugees did not come to Hamburg but founded a community in Moisling close to Lübeck: Peter Guttkuhn, Die Geschichte der Juden in Moisling und Lübeck von den Anfangen 1656 bs zur Emanzipation 1852 (Lübeck: Schmidt Römhild, 1999), 18–21. 59. Cassuto, “Aus dem ältesten Protokollbuch,” JJLG 7 (1909): 185–86. 60. Ibid., JJLG 9 (1911): 346–47; JJLG 10 (1912): 249–50; JJLG 11 (1916): 3. 61. Ibid., JJLG 8 (1910): 268. 62. Ibid., JJLG 11 (1912): 3, 13, 15, 17. 63. Diana Matut, “What Happened in Hamburg: A Yiddish Document about Polish-Jews in Germany during the Early Modern Period,” in M. Aptroot, E. Gal-Ed, R. Grushka, and S. Neuberg, eds., Leket: Yidishe shtudies haynt-Jiddistik Heute-Yiddish Studies Today (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2012), 321–55. 64. Ibid., 332–35. 65. On this, see Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
Chapter Twenty-Four: Amsterdam 1. Grain was also imported from Russia, which competed with Poland over the lucrative grain market. Willem Sybrand Unger, “Trade through the Sound in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Economic History Review 12, no. 2 (1959): 206–21. 2. Jonathan I. Israel, “The Sephardi Contribution to Economic Life and
[ 350 ] Notes to Ch a pter T w en t y-Four Colonization in Europe and the New World (16th–18th Centuries),” in Ḥayim Beinart, ed., Moreshet Sepharad, 374–82. 3. Daniel M. Swetschinski, “Vestiging, verdraagzaamheid en vereniging tot 1639,” in Hans. Blom, David Wertheim, Hetty Berg, and Bart Wallet, eds., Geschiedenis van de joden in Nederland (Amsterdam: Balans, 2017), 78. 4. Herbert I. Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1937), 1–32. 5. Bodian, Hebrews, 25–52. The exception to this was the Abodat Ahesed society. 6. Ibid., 1–24. 7. Kaplan, “The Self-Definition.” 8. Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim.” 9. Yosef Kaplan, “Yaḥasam shel ha-yehudim ha-sefaradim ve-ha-portuga’lim le- yehudim ha-ashkenazim be-Amsterdam ba-me’ah ha-17,” in Sh. Almog et al., eds., Temurot ba-historiyah ha-yehudit ha-ḥadashah: Shai le-Shmu’el Ettinger (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1988), 389–411. 10. Ibid., 394. 11. Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare among the Portuguese Jews in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 117–20. 12. Ibid., 17–18, 41–46. 13. Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim,” 598–602. 14. Ibid., 593. 15. Ibid., 605–6. 16. Ibid., 607–8. 17. Ibid., 607. 18. Hollantse Merkurius Behelzende De voornaemste Geschiedenissen in Christenryck In’t jaer 1656 (Haarlem: Pieter Casteleyn, 1657), 75. 19. Thomas Birch, ed., A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe Esq., vol. 5 (London: Thomas Woodward and Charles Davis, 1742), 110. 20. Rivkes, Hakdamah; Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim,” 611, 613. 21. Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim,” 611. 22. Cited by Kaplan, ibid. 23. A. M. Vaz Dias, “Merkwaardige Documenten voor de Geschiedenis van de Amsterdamsche Joden,” De Vrijdagabond jrg. 9 (1932): 255, no. 16 and 268–71, no. 17. It should nevertheless be noted that the amounts given to the Portuguese poor were usually higher than those given to others. See Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 182–83. 24. Deutz had been home to refugees from the Commonwealth before this. See Adolph Jellinek, Märtyrer-und Memorbuch (Vienna: Druck von Löwy & Alkalay, Pressburg, 1881), 16. 25. T here are a number of memorials to Asser Levy in New York City. T hese include Asser Levy Place and the Asser Levy Recreational Center in Manhattan and Asser Levy Park in Coney Island. 26. Samuel Oppenheim, The Early History of the Jews in New York, 1654–1664: Some New M atter on the Subject (New York: American Jewish Historical Society,
Notes to Ch a pter T w en t y-Four [ 351 ] 1909), 24–25, 60–68; Leo Hershkowitz, “Original Inventories of Early New York Jews (1682–1763),” American Jewish History 90, no. 3 (2002): 245–54; idem, “Dutch Notarial Records Pertaining to Asser Levy, 1659–1693,” American Jewish History 91, no. 3–4 (2003): 471–83. 27. Bloom, The Economic Activities, 66. 28. Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 310–11n371, 373n418. On the economic activity of Ashkenazi w omen, see Debra Kaplan, “ ‘B ecause Our Wives Trade and Do Business with Goods’: Gender, Work, and Jewish Christian Relations,” in E. Carlebach and J. Schachter, eds., New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations: In Honor of David Berger (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 241–61. 29. Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 248, table 24. 30. Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, “Financing Poor Relief in the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Community in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in J. Israel and R. Salverda, eds., Dutch Jewry: Its History and Secular Culture (1500– 2000) (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 70n22. 31. Cited in Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim,” 615–16. 32. Ibid., 617. 33. Gavri’el Polak, “Kadmoniyot,” in Ha-Karmel 7, Friday, February 14, 1868, p. 15. 34. Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim,” 618. 35. Ibid., 617. 36. Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare, 120–21. 37. Ibid., 15. 38. Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim,” 618–19. According Kaplan, t here w ere about 2,000 German Jews in Amsterdam at this time. 39. Kaplan, “Yaḥasam.” 40. Shabtai Sheftel Horowitz, Hakdamat sefer vavei ha-ʾamudim (Amsterdam: ʾImanu’el Benvenisti, 1653), 9b. 41. See, e.g., Yosef Atthias, printer’s introduction, Torah, neviyim, uksuvim, trans. Yosef ben Alexander (Amsterdam: Yosef Atthias, 1679). 42. D. M. Sluys, “Yehudei Ashkenaz be-Amsterdam mi-shenat 1635 ʾad shenat 1795,” in J. Michman, ed., Meḥkarim ʾal toledot yahadut Holland, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975), 70–71. 43. Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim,” 603. 44. Psalms 41:10. 45. Jeremiah 2:27, 32:33. 46. Halperin, Pinkas vaʾad arbaʾ ha-aratzot, 128. 47. Yitzḥak Duber Markon, “Takkanot shel kahal Yehudei Polin be-Amsterdam mi-shenat 1672,” in Tsiyyunim: Kovetz le-zikhrono shel Y.N. Simḥoni za”l (Berlin: Eshkol, 1929), 162–67. 48. Yitzḥak Maarsen, “Ha-va’ad dalet aratzot ve-ha-kehillot be-Amsterdam be-ha- me’ah ha-17,” Ha-tzofeh le-ḥokhmat Yisra’el 8, no. 4 (1924): 289–92. 49. Sluys, “Yehudei Ashkenaz,” 80–83. 50. See Halperin, Pinkas vaʾad arbaʾ ha-aratzot, 127–33, nos. 305–6. 51. Sluys, “Yehudei Ashkenaz,” 84–86.
[ 352 ] Notes to Ch a pter T w en t y-Fi v e 52. Yosef Kaplan, “The Portuguese Community in 17th-Century Amsterdam and the Ashkenazi World,” Dutch Jewish History 2 (1989): 41–45. 53. Leib Fuks, “Ha-rekaʾ ha-ḥevrati ve-ha-kalkali le-hadpasat shnei targumei Tanakh be-Yiddish be-Amsterdam, samukh li-shnat 1680,” Gal-Ed 1 (1973): 31–50. 54. Rosman, “The Authority,” 94–99.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Starting New Lives 1. The traditional thirty-day mourning period observed a fter the death of a close family member. 2. Elyakim Getz ben Me’ir, Sefer even ha-shoham u-me’irat ʾeinayim (Dyrenfürth: Yissachar Ber Katz, 1723), 6b–7a, no. 13. 3. In premodern times, quicklime was often put in graves to prevent the spread of disease and prevent odors. 4. Bloch, Militsch, 17. 5. Jellinek, Märtyrer-und Memorbuch, 16. 6. Aharon Shmu’el Kaidonover, Sefer emunat Shmu’el (Frankfurt a.M., 1683). 7. Emden, Megillat sefer, 5. 8. Weinryb, “Historisches,” 336. 9. Shmu’el ben David ha-Levi, Sefer naḥalat shivʾah (Amsterdam: Uri Feivish, 1667), 2a. 10. This is a halakhic term for documents that determine the rights of the holder. They might be economic in nature or be legal documents issued by a rabbinic court. 11. Shmu’el ben David ha-Levi, Sefer naḥalat shivʾah, 2a. 12. Tuviyah Guttman, Zivḥei Tuviyah (Amsterdam: David de Castro Tartas, 1683), 3a–b. 13. Me’ir ben Yitzḥak, Sefer ma’or katon, “Hakdamat ha-meḥaber.” 14. Jeremiah 48:11. 15. Ḥanokh ben Avraham, Sefer re’shit bikkurim (Frankfurt a.M.: Matthias Andreä, 1708), 2b. 16. Di bashraybung, ll. 291–92. 17. Müller, Urkundliche Beiträge, 29–31. 18. Max Freudenthal, Aus der Heimat Mendelssohns: Moses Benjamin Wulff und seine Familie, die Nachkommen des Moses Isserles (Berlin: J. E. Lederer [Franz Seeliger], 1900), 11–16. 19. Selma Stern, The Court Jew: A Contribution to the History of Absolutism in Europe (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1985), 55–59 and passim. 20. Shmu’el ben David ha-Levi, Sefer naḥalat shivʾah, 2a. 21. Ibid. 22. Barry L. Stiefel, Jews and the Renaissance of Synagogue Architecture, 1450– 1730 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014), 118–21, 136; Tamar Shadmi, “Ha-ketovot she-ʾal kirot batei ha-knesset be-mizraḥ Eiropah—mekoroteihen, mashmaʾutan ve- tafkidan be-ʾitzuv tefisat ha-ḥalal ve-ʾavodat ha-kodesh” (PhD diss., Bar Ilan University, 2011), 101.
Notes to Ch a pter T w en t y-Fi v e [ 353 ] 23. Stiefel, Jews and the Renaissance of Synagogue Architecture; Shadmi, “Ha- ketovot she-ʾal kirot batei ha-knesset ba-mizraḥ Eiropah.” 24. Shmu’el ben David ha-Levi, Sefer naḥalat shivʾah, 2a. 25. Kaidonover, Sefer emunat Shmu’el, 19b, no. 10. 26. Ibid. 27. Guttman, Zivḥei Tuviyah. 28. Yaʾakov ben Yehudah Weil, Shkhites un bdikes, trans. Alexander ben Mordechai of Prague (Amsterdam: Uri Feivish, 1667). 29. He eventually made his name as the first Jewish bibliographer. 30. Shabtai Meshorer Bass mi-Prag, Masekhes derekh eretz (Amsterdam: David de Castro Tartas, 1680). 31. Bloom, The Economic Activities, 54–55. 32. Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus librorum hebraeorum in bibliotheca Bodleiana, vol. 3, “Typograhi et qui cum iis conjuncti sunt, operarii, editors, etc.” (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1931), 2862, 2929–30, 2937; Yehudah Aryeh Leib ben Yehoshuʾa Ḥoshki, Sefer lev Aryeh (Wilhelmsdorf: Yitzḥak Yudels Katz, 1674), colophon. 33. Betsal’el Darshan, Seferʾamudeiha shiv’ah (Prague: Bnei Yehudah Bak, 1674), colophon. 34. Steinschneider, Catalogus. 35. Hanover, Sefer taʾamei sukkah, 1b, “Hakdamah shel ha-meḥaber.” 36. National Library of Israel, Manuscript Division, Heb. 24° 662, p. 126b. 37. Weinryb, “Historisches,” 335. 38. Zelig ben Yitzḥak, Sefer kesef nivḥar (Amsterdam: Shlomo Proops, 1712), “Hakdamat ha-meḥaber.” 39. Stern, The Court Jew, 223–25; Emden, Megillat sefer, 11. 40. Shlomo Eidelberg, “Rabbanim mehagrim mi-Polin le-A shkenaz ba-me’ah ha-17,” Ha-kongres ha-ʾolami le-madaʾei ha-yahadut 5, no. 2 (1969): 49–54. 41. Zvi Hirsh ben Aharon Shmu’el Kaidonover, “Hakdamah,” in Aharon Shmu’el Kaidonover, Birkat Shmu’el (Frankfurt a.M., 1692), 2b. 42. Jay R. Berkovitz, “Jewish Law and Ritual in Early Modern Germany,” in D. Bell and S. Burnett, eds., Jews, Judaism, and the Reformation in Sixteenth Century Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 481–502. 43. Avraham ben Yosef Moshe K”S [Kopserlish], Likkutim ʾal parashat ha- shavuʾa, National Library of Israel, Manuscript Division, Heb. 8° 1397, p. 289a, colophon; Hava Turniansky, “Ha-targumim ha-ri’shonim shel sefer ha-yashar le-Yiddish,” Tarbitz 54, no. 4 (1985): 588–91. 44. Schochet, “Taz,” 17–20. 45. David ben Shmu’el, Sefer divrei David (Dyrenfürth: Shabtai Bass, 1689), 78b. 46. Schochet, “Taz,” 19 reads it as a literal description of some kind of heart attack, which seems unlikely. A figurative reading is much more plausible. 47. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 31–52. 48. Yehi’el Mikhel ben Avraham Epstein, Kitzur shnei luḥot ha-brit (Amsterdam: ʾImanu’el ben Yosef Athias, 1701), 104b. 49. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 46. 50. Berliner, “Sefer hazkarat ha-neshamot, Kehillat Vermaiza,” 29.
[ 354 ] Notes to Conclusion 51. Moshe Mai, Bakashah (Metz: Joseph Antoine, 1764), 2a–5a. 52. Moritz Stern, “Analekten zur Geschichte der Juden: Das Gemetzel zu Brisk 1656,” in Magazin für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums, 14:149–52. Stern’s identification of the town is incorrect. 53. Mollica, Healing Invisible Wounds, 62–109. 54. Battenberg, Die Juden, 46. 55. Alexander Altman, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973), 3–6.
Chapter Twenty-Six: The End of the Crisis 1. Shmu’el Ettinger, “Migration and Economic Activity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in H. H. Ben-Sasson, ed., A History of the Jewish P eople (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 733–40. 2. Shulvass, From East to West, 51–125. 3. Teller, “Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Economy,” 588–95. 4. Cf. Adam Teller, “Gezeirot Tah-Tat as a Gendered Experience: Jewish Women Victims and Refugees, 1648–1683,” in R. I. Cohen, N. B. Dohrman, A. Shear, and E. Reiner, eds., Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2014), 39–49. 5. David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 43. 6. Israel, European Jewry, 101–18. 7. Battenberg, Die Juden, 45–47. According to Sorkin, if the Betteljuden are counted with the poorer strata of Jewish tradesmen, their proportion within German Jewry rises to almost two-thirds: Sorkin, The Transformation, 43. 8. Berkovitz, “Jewish Law and Ritual.” 9. Carsten Wilke, “Den Talmud und den Kant”: Rabbinerausbildung an der Schwelle zur Moderne (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2003), 89. Also: Sorkin, The Transformation, 57, 77, 102–3, 137–39.
Conclusion 1. Halperin, “Sheviyah u-pedut,” 17–56. 2. Anthony D. Smith, The Antiquity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 127–53. 3. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Zeraʾim, Hilkhot matnat ʾaniyim 10:1. 4. Lehmann, Emissaries, 169–241. 5. Noa Shashar’s argument that, for the most part, the rabbinic establishment was hostile to the needs of agunot suggests that this sending of legal documents may not have been as helpful as all that: Shashar, “ʾAgunot,” 286–325. 6. See the appendix. 7. Mollica, Healing Invisible Wounds, 88–109. 8. Ibid., 41–42. 9. Ibid., 165–75. 10. Mayseh ha-godl. 11. Mollica, Healing Invisible Wounds, 177.
Notes to A ppendix [ 355 ] 12. Ibid., 133. 13. Mintz, Hurban, 90–97. 14. The long-term effects of t hese phenomena on the development of Jewish culture are extremely difficult to isolate. I hope to deal with them in a f uture study. 15. Teller, “The Jewish Literary Responses,” 34–35. 16. Davis, “The Reception.” 17. Such as Reform, Positive-Historical Judaism, and Neo-Orthodoxy. See chapter 26, n. 9.
Appendix: The Question of Numbers 1. To complete the estimate of the numbers killed, those who died of disease in the wake of the fighting and those killed in the later Muscovite and Swedish wars must be added to Stampfer’s total. It is not unreasonable to assume that the total number of Jewish dead from 1648 to 1667 was at least 30,000. 2. Stampfer, “What Happened?”; idem, “Jewish Population Losses.” 3. Battenberg, Die Juden, 46. 4. Kaplan, “Pelitim yehudim,” 618–19.
bibl iogr a ph y of pr i m a ry sou rces
Manuscript isr ael Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem IT/Ve 80 IT-IT 1302 P127/399 Pl/Po 1a HM 245 (Microfilm)
National Library of Israel Manuscript Division Heb. 8° 1397 Heb 8° 6590 Heb. 24° 662
Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts F31652
Schocken Institute for Jewish Research, Jerusalem Ms. 70057
united kingdom Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, England Ms. Opp. 37 [Neubauer 939] Ms. Opp. 551
Montefiore Library, London, England Ms. Montefiore 112 Ms. Montefiore 257
[ 357 ]
[ 358 ] bibliogr a ph y of pr im a ry sources
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I n de x
Aboab, Avraham, 135 Aboab, Shmu’el, 17, 127, 135–36, 138–41, 153–54, 176, 187 Aboab, Yaʾakov, 127–28 Aboab, Yosef, 127–28 Abodat Ahesed society, 262, 266, 267 agunot, 57, 80–81, 183–86, 246, 256, 278–79 Ain sheyn naye lid vos tzu Hamburg iz geshehen, 256–57 Alessandria, xxiii, 153 Alexandria, xxii, 117, 119, 129 Alexis, Tsar, 62 Algiers, xix, xxii, 156 Altdorf, 240 Alteras, Moshe, 153 Altona, 252–58, 273 Amsterdam: Abodat Ahesed society, 262, 266, 267; about, 259; donations from, 48, 134, 138, 144, 145, 262–63, 266–67; economic success of, 270–71; emissaries to, 137–38, 141, 168–70; history of Jewish settlement in, 259–60; Jewish groups in, tensions between, 260–70; maps, xix, xxiv; number of refugees, 267; publishing in, 279; ransom network and, 135, 136; refugees in, 55, 70, 72, 147–50, 182, 204; refugees shipped out of, 264–65; regents, attitude of, 271; support system in, 284; transregional connections and, 3, 193 Anan ben David, 108 Ancona, xix, xxii, xxiii, 135, 138–39, 146–47 Antwerp, 135 Aron, Lewis, 53–54 Ashi, Rav, 118 Ashkenazi, David ben Avraham, 185–86 Ashkenazi, Elishaʾ Ḥayim, 176 Ashkenazi, Gershon (Ulif ), 239, 240, 251 Ashkenazi, Yaʾakov ben ha-kadosh Avraham, 182 Ashkenazi communities. See specific places and persons
Ashkenazy, Avraham ben Shmu’el, 56, 102, 136 Ashkenazy, Gershon (emissary from Lviv), 153 Ashkenazy, Moshe (emissary from Lviv), 153 Asser Levy (Asher Levy ben Yehudah Leib), 265 Astrakhan, xix, 66 Atlas, Galit, 53–54 Augustus the Strong, 277 Austria, 46, 207, 211, 232. See also Vienna Avraham ben Aharon, 279–80 Avraham ben Elimelekh, 156 Avraham ben Mordechai ha-Levi, 162, 182–83, 189 Avraham ben Yisra’el, 31–32 Avraham Berech bar Yo’el, 155 Avraham ha-Ger, 188 Avraham ibn Daud, 119 Avrom ben Yosef Segal, 72 Bahçesaray, 106, 108 Bamberg, xxiv, 248, 274, 275, 281 Bandinelli, Ottaviano, 143–44 Bar, xxi, 32, 48, 185 Barbary corsairs, 116, 121, 133 Barnai, Yaʾakov, 174–75 Baron, Salo, 7–8 Barukh Minden (Bernd Wulff ), 277 Bashan, Eliʾezer, 122 Bashraybung fun Ashkenaz un Polak, 243–48, 257, 276 Bass, Shabtai, 268, 279 Battenberg, J. Friedrich, 203, 204, 308 Bavaria, 207 Bayonne, 135 beards, 245 Beauplan, Guillaume de, 99 beḥirah (election), 158–59 Belgrade, xix, xxii, 144, 181, 182, 189 Benvenisti, Moshe, 185
[ 365 ]
[ 366 ] Index Benvenisti, Yaʾakov, 154–55 Berakhiah Bereikh, 55–56 Berlin, xix, xxiv, 203, 277, 291 Betsal’el ben Shlomo, 55 Betteljuden, 291 Beyle, 186 Biała Prudnicka (Zülz), xxiv, xxv, 232, 235, 241 Biale, David, 12 Bidziński, Stefan, 86 Black Sea slave trade. See slavery and slave trade Bohemia: census of Jews (1650), 216, 217; expulsion of Jews from, 207; king vs. nobility and refugee legislation, 216–17; Kraków trade with, 46; maps, xxiv, xxv; Polish merchants and, 211; population decline from Thirty Years’ War, 216; refugees from, 211; refugees in, 218, 232; serfdom in, 202 Bologna, xxiii, 133 Bordeaux, 135 Bornstein, Leah, 189 Boskovice, xxv, 278 Brandenburg, xxiv, xxv, 70, 202, 203, 211, 215, 221–22 Breslau (Wrocław), 207, 211, 235 Brest, xx, 41, 188 Broniowski, Marcin (Martin Broniovius), 16, 108, 110 “brotherhood,” 293–94 Buda, 240 Budapest, xxii, 189 Buna, Mistress, 36 Byczyna (Pitschen), xxv, 235 Bytom Odrzański (Oberbeutten), xxv, 228, 233, 235 Cairo: Avraham ben Mordechai ha-Levi in, 162; maps, xix, xxii; rabbis of, 182–83, 189; ransom and, 119, 120; ransomed captives in, 181, 186; Shabtai Zvi and Sarah bat Me’ir in, 148 cameralism. See mercantilism cantors, 56, 268, 275 Carcassoni, David ben Natan’el, 131, 132, 134–41, 153, 154, 169, 262 Carpi, Daniel, 15, 134, 144 Casale Monferato, xxiii, 135, 146, 153 Castelli, Pietro, 144
Catholics. See Roman Catholics Cave of Makhpelah, 165, 167 Çelebi, Evliya, 16, 105–6, 107–8, 110, 125 Chęciny, xx, 86 Chernihiv, xx, 37 children: German Jewish refugee c hildren, 211–12; identification of, 45, 50, 187 Chobienia (Köben), xxv, 235 Chortkiv, xxi, 77–78 Christians: millenarian Protestants, 169–73, 304; Orthodox, 25–26, 36–37, 101, 102–3; ransom system, 116; Roman Catholics, 25, 36–37, 101; spending night in homes of, 31–32 Cioka, Mikołaj, 80 Coen, David, 255 Conforte, David, 119 conversion and converts: death vs. conversion, 37; Khmelnytsky uprising and, 30, 37, 38; returns to Judaism, 57, 68, 81–83 Cordoba, 119 Cossacks: Cossack-Tatar alliance, 26–27, 62; Pereiaslav treaty, 62; “registered,” 99; slave captures by, 102, 105. See also Khmelnytsky uprising Council of Four Lands: Amsterdam Jews and, 269–70; Chortkiv ruling, 77–78; dispute with Frankfurt, 209–10; fast of 20 Sivan and, 57–59; identification issues, 45, 50, 56–57, 81; Lublin and, 164; Shussberg as scribe to, 251; Silesia and, 236; taxation by, 156; trade in Brandenberg and, 221; as transregional institution, 194 Court Jews, 203, 277, 280, 291, 302 Crimea, xxi, 107–11, 181. See also slavery and slave trade; Tatars, Crimean Crown Poland, 37, 39, 64, 70–71, 76 Czapliński, Daniel, 27 Czarniecki, Stefan, 63, 71, 74, 81, 199, 227–28, 236, 240 Częstochowa, xx, 63 Czetwertiński, 28–29 Damascus, xxii, 135 David ben Shmu’el. See Taz Davis, Joseph, 210 Davis, Robert C., 128 de la Croix, Edouard, 180–81
Index [ 367 ] de Paz, Yeshʾayahu ben Dani’el, 182 de Pinto, Avraham, 267 Derażno, 108 Dessau, 256, 277 Deutz, xxiv, 265, 273 Dinah, Mistress, 104, 185 Dinslaken, xxiv, 215 disease, contagious: as aftermath of vio lence, 287; in Altona, 254; at Olkusz, 75; plague in Kraków, 46, 59–60, 90, 250; refugees accused of carrying, 217 divorce, bills of, 82–83, 186, 256, 278–79. See also agunot Dniepr river, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, 26, 31, 99, 115. See also Zaporizhia region Dolní Kounice, xxv, 278 dream of Yehudah ben Nissan Katz, 52–54 Dresden, xxiv, 256, 281 Dubno, xx, xxi, 34, 79–80 Dury, John, 171 Dvorah from Jerusalem, 185 East Prussia, 70 economic activity, Jewish: in Amsterdam, 265–66; arenda businesses and transgression of the Sabbath, 55–56; Jewish involvement in postwar reconstruction, 86–87; mercantilism and, 201–2, 204, 220–22, 252–53, 288; publishing business, 182–83, 188, 279–80, 302–3; returning refugees and, 83; in Slutzk, 67; trade and religious occupations as common for refugees, 276–81 Efraim ben Avraham, 153–54 Eilenburg, Yehudah Leib, 188 Elblag, xx, 199 “Elegy for the Lithuanian Jews” (song), 70 Eleh ezkerah (Heller), 59–60, 113 Eliʾezer ben Natan, 59 Eliʾezer ben Yosef, 279 Elyakim Getz ben Me’ir, 272 Emden, Yaʾakov, 223–24, 273 emissaries: fraudulent, 150, 152; from Iran, 155–56; from Istanbul, 132, 134–35, 137–41, 154–55; from Land of Israel, 152, 161–63, 165–73; from Moravia, 253; from Poland-Lithuania, 136, 149–50, 153–54, 156, 253, 256; women’s, 165–67 Ephraim ha-Kohen, 240 Eschwege, 248
ethnic cleansing, 36 Ettinger, Shmu’el, 286–87 Fast of 9th of Av, 283 Fast of 20 Sivan, 57–61 Feodosia (Caffa), xix, xxii, 98, 109, 115 Ferdinand II, 216 Ferdinand III, 231–33, 237 Ferrara, xxiii, 135, 153 Fez, xix, 117, 152, 167 Fisher, Alan, 125 Flanders, 145 Flatow (Złotów), 71 forgeries, 152 Franco publishing house, Istanbul, 182–83, 188 Frankfurt am Main: Amsterdam plan to ship refugees to, 264; attitudes and policies toward refugees, 248–49; Carcassoni and, 138; dispute with Council of Four Lands, 209–10; donations from, 47; fundraising for Land of Israel and, 165, 171; Jewish community in, 203; maps, xix, xxiv; Polish Jewish merchants and, 211; rabbis of, 224, 240, 281; ransom network and, 193; refugees and, 148; wandering preachers banned in, 280 fraud and embezzlement, 151–52, 295 Freidel (widow), 163 Freud, Sigmund, 247 Friedberg, xxiv, 203, 248 Friedrich Wilhelm, Grand Elector of Brandenburg, 70, 221–22, 277 fundraising for Land of Israel. See philanthropic network for Land of Israel fundraising for relief and ransom: Aboab and Zacuto as organizers of, 17, 135– 36; Carcassoni’s mission to Europe, 131, 132, 134–41, 153, 154; fraud and embezzlement, 151–52, 295; individual requests, 145–51; Italian Jewry, role of, 142–59; Jewish solidarity and, 158–59; Jews of Istanbul and, 129–31; by Kraków community, 47–49; by Lithuanian Jewry, 43; in Poznań and Lithuania, 131; transregional networks and, 9–10; women’s role in, 130. See also ransoming of Jewish captives; taxation Fürth, xxiv, 240, 248, 275, 281
[ 368 ] Index gabilla (consumption tax), 128–29 Gallipoli, xxii, 181 Gdańsk, xix, xx, 86, 254, 259, 295 Genoa, xxiii, 133, 154 gezeirot taḥ ve-tat. See Khmelnytsky uprising Glikl of Hameln, 254–55 Głogów (Glogau), xxiv, xxv, 229–30, 232–33, 235, 240, 275, 281 Gniezno, 150 Gomel, xx, 37, 41 Goosens, Jan, 264–65 Great Northern War, 114 Great Novgorod, 65 Great Poland, 40, 55, 71, 204, 207, 227, 231, 235, 279–80 Grodno, xx, 41 Grodzisk Wielkopolski, xx, xxiv, xxv, 72–73, 227–28, 230 Guerre, Martin, 187 Guttman, Tuviyah, 274, 279 Hadiach, Treaty of (1658), 64 Ḥagiz, Yaʾakov, 172–73 halakhah. See law, Jewish Halberstadt, xxiv, 248, 274, 277, 280–81, 283 Halelujah, Mehalalel, 146–47 Halicz, 109 Halle, 277 Halperin, Yisra’el, 15, 158, 174, 175 Hamburg: Ain sheyn naye lid vos tzu Hamburg iz geshehen, 256–57; attitudes and policies toward refugees, 252–58; Carcassoni and, 138, 141; donations from, 48–49, 134, 144, 145; emissaries in, 153, 169; explusion of Ashkenazim from, 253; maps, xix, xxiv; ransom network and, 117, 135; refugees in, 70, 204, 277; transregional connections and, 3, 193 Hanan of Tomaszów, 28 Hanau, xxiv, 239, 248 Ḥanoch the Preacher, 82 Ḥanokh (shoemaker), 181 Ḥanokh ben Avraham, 275–76 Hanover, 72 Hanover, Nathan, 30, 33–35, 55, 56, 69, 102–3, 112, 148–51, 168, 189, 225–26, 280
Ḥanukkah, 283 Ḥayim ben Yehudah, 279 Ḥayim Bochner, 72, 251 Ḥayim Katzenellenbogen, 147 Ḥayim Mevoraḥ, 189 Hebron, xxii, 162, 165 Heller, Yom-Tov Lipmann, 46, 59–60, 113, 209 Henoch, Mister, 104 Hershenzon, Daniel, 144 Heshel, Yehoshuʾa ben Yaʾakov, 72, 240 Hesse, xxiv, 211 Hildesheim, xxiv, 248, 272, 281 Hiltebrandt, Conrad Jacob, 112 historiography, Jewish: lachrymose conception, 6–8; non-Jewish contextualization, 12–13 Hlusk, xx, 40, 52, 54, 280 Holešov, xxiv, xxv, 72, 218, 240 Holy Roman Empire: Ferdinand II, 216; Ferdinand III, 231–33, 237; Leopold I, 234, 237–38, 251–52; map, xxiv; mercantilism and absolutism in, 201–2, 204, 220–22, 252–53, 288; Swedish forces in, 71; Thirty Years’ War, 49, 71, 148, 200–203, 210–13, 245, 253 Holy Roman Empire, Jewish refugees in: from 1648 to 1654, 215–22; attitudes and social tensions in satire Di bashraybung, 243–48; cameralism and welcoming of Jews, 201–2, 204; flight from Poland, experience of, 223–30; in Frankfurt, 248–49; German Jews and Polish Jews, post-1648 encounter between, 202, 204; in Hamburg, 252–58; Hamburg news report on arriving refugees, 199–200; Moravia, rabbis passing through, 239–42; relations between German and Polish Jews before 1648, 206–14; settlement in Silesia and Moravia, 231–39; two waves of, 203–4; in Vienna, 249–52 Horn, Maurycy, 99 Horowitz, Shabtai Sheftel, 268 Hranice (Weisskirchen), xxv, 241 Hundert, Gershon, 12 Hungary, 46, 112, 286 Hunt, Nigel, 14
Index [ 369 ] Iaşi, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, 112, 149, 181, 189, 219 Ickowicz, Israel, 80 identity and identification, issues of: agunot, 57, 80–81, 183–86, 246, 256, 278–79; children and, 45, 50, 187, 212; Council of Four Lands, 45, 50, 56–57, 81; family trees, 45; German women and, 212; ransomed captives and, 186–87; refugee experience and sense of identity or belonging, 272–85; Shulḥan ʾarukh and Ashkenazic Jewish identity, 210; “social death,” 192 information network: common routes, 296; Khmelnytsky uprising and information flows, 34–35; women and, 183–86, 305 Innsbruck, xxiii, 154 institutional development, transregional, 194–95 intercommunal connections: intensification of circulation, 9–12; mass movement and, 301; non-Jewish context vs. Jewish intercommunal connectedness, 12–13. See also transregional connections “internationalism,” Jewish, 195 Iran, 65–66, 155–56 Israel, Jonathan, 121 Israel, Land of: Ashkenazi-Sephardi divide in, 162–63, 178; conquest by Ottoman Empire, 161; eastern European wars, effects of, 160–61; fraudulent emissaries from, 152; growth of Jewish population in, 122; war effects and debt to Muslims, 164–65. See also philanthropic network for Land of Israel Isserles, Moshe, 82, 208, 210 Istanbul: Chief Rabbi in, 128; donations from, 43; Esir Pazari slave market, 124–27; Jewish ransom agreement between Venice and, 129, 131; maps, xix, xxii; rabbis of, 185–86, 189; ransomed captives in, 182–83, 188; ransom network and, 117; slave market, 124–27 (See also slavery and slave trade); transregional connections and, 3 Istanbul captives, ransoming of. See fund raising for relief and ransom; ransoming of Jewish captives
Italy: aid for Jewish refugees in, 145–51; Jewish ransoming efforts, 137–45, 155–57; map, xxiii; support for Jewish communities in Poland, 153–54 Izmir, xix, 189 Izyaslav, xx, xxi, 32, 33, 55, 69, 149 Jan Kazimierz (king of Poland), 57, 63, 101 Jerlicz, Joachim, 105 Jerusalem: Ashkenazi debt to Muslims, 164–65, 173; Ashkenazi population growth in, 190; information network in, 185; maps, xix, xxii; population growth in, 122; primacy gained over Tzfat, 162; rabbi network and, 189; ransomed captives in, 181; transregional connections and, 3; war effects in, 160–61; Western Wall prayers, 167. See also Israel, Land of; philanthropic network for Land of Israel Jessey, Henry, 168–69, 171 Jewish communities. See specific places Jizna, 185 kabbalah: Carcassoni and, 138; concept of sin, 55; Lurianic, 174; Nathan of Gaza and, 177; Nathan Shapira and, 168; Sarah bat Me’ir and, 148; traveling preachers and, 280; Zacuto and, 136; the Zohar, 55, 171 Kaidonover, Aharon Shmu’el, 70–71, 224–25, 240, 273, 281 Kalinowski, Marcin, 32, 101 Kalisz, xx, 207, 279 Kaplan, Yosef, 15, 262, 267 Karaite Jews, 108–9, 130 Karo, Yosef, 118–19, 210 Kassel, xxiv, 248 Katz, David, 176 Katz, Yeḥezk’el, 225 Katz, Yehudah ben Nissan, 44–45, 49, 52–54 Kaufmann, David, 14–15 Kazan, xix, 65 Kedushah (holiness), 158–59 Khmelnytsky, Bogdan, 26–27, 29–30, 32–33, 37, 55, 62, 101, 111–13
[ 370 ] Index Khmelnytsky uprising (gezeirot taḥ ve-tat), 27–39; causes, 23–27; communal- level approach to refugees in Kraków, 44–50; Cossack-Tatar alliance and, 26–27; fast of 20 Sivan and prayers, 57–61; historiographic perceptions of, 6–8; Jews and context in Ukraine before, 23–27; Jews’ experience of, 27–30; Lithuanian Jewish Council and refugees, 41–44; numbers of deaths and refugees, 37–39; psychological effects of Khmelnytsky uprising, 51–54; violence and flight, 31–40 Khodorkiv, 186 kibutz (Collection Document), 138–39, 147, 152 Kiddush ha-shem (Sanctifying God’s Name), 37 Kiev, xix, xx, xxi, 39 Kizilov, Mikhail, 107 klausen, 280–81 Kleve, xxiv, 282 Knights of St. John, 121, 133, 143–45 Köln (Cologne), xxiv, 265, 273 Kołodziejczyk, Dariusz, 98 Komerhid, 28 Königsberg (Kaliningrad), xix, xx, 70, 217, 295 Kopserlish, Avraham ben Yosef Moshe, 282 Korsun, xxi, 32, 101 Kraków: converts in, 81; fundraising for, 155; investments for Land of Israel, 164; maps, xix, xx, xxiv; Nathan Shapira in, 167; plague in, 46, 59–60, 90, 250; prayers for fast of 20 Sivan and, 59; rabbis in, 209, 210, 239, 281; refugees and finances in, 44–50, 89; refugees from, 251; return to, 86, 182; Swedish invasion, 63, 72; transregional connections and, 3; Vienna, connections with, 211 Kremenets’, xxi, 34 Krokhmal, Menaḥem Mendel, 83, 219 Królewiec, 67 Kroměříž, xxv, 278 Krotnica, 28 Krotoszyn, 236, 272 Kryvonis, Maksym, 28, 55 Kushevich, Samuil, 29
lachrymose conception of Jewish history, 6–8 Larissa, xxii, 155 law, Jewish (halakhah), 18, 118–19, 135, 172, 189, 218–20, 272, 275–76, 294; agunot, 57, 80–81, 183–86, 246, 256, 278–79; Moravian case of Yo’el and wife, 218–20; ransom of captives in, 117–18; Shulḥan ʾarukh, 118–19, 170, 210, 212, 281. See also Talmud Lazarus, Abraham, 233, 236 legal cases. See prosecutions Lehmann, Berendt, 280 Leib of Krotnica, 28 Lekhno, David ben Eliʾezer, 111 Leopold, Prince, 277 Leopold I, 234, 237–38, 251–52 Leszno (Lissa), xx, xxiv, xxv, 58, 225, 241 Leyzer, 249 Lida, David, 270 Lipiny, xxv, 73, 228, 229, 235 Liski, 279 Lithuania, Grand Duchy of: Cossack attacks in, 41; fundraising for ransoms in, 131; German Jewish refugee children in, 211–12; Jewish refugees in Holy Roman Empire from, 204; Khmelnytsky uprising and, 37, 39; map, xx; records from, 16; Russian invasion and occupation of, 62–71; slave trade and, 101–2; unification with Poland (1569), 24. See also specific villages Lithuanian Jewish Council, 41–44, 67, 88, 131, 152, 163–64, 211–12 Little Poland, 40, 55, 71, 74–75, 204, 231, 238 Livorno, xix, xxii, xxiii, 117, 130, 135, 144–45, 148–49, 168 Löbell, Valten, 233, 236 London, xix, 117, 144, 168–69, 171–72 Loštice, xxv, 241, 280 Lower Saxony, 72 Lübeck, xxiv, 255 Lubin (Lüben), xxiv, xxv, 235 Lublin: emissaries from, 155, 256; fair in, 156, 164; great massacre of Jews (October 1655), 64, 147, 224, 240; map, xx, xx; printing in, 279; refugees in, 71; returning refugees and, 86; reunion story, 219
Index [ 371 ] Lubowo, 227 Łuck, 109 Luria, Yitzḥak, 138 Lviv: fundraising, 48, 253; Katzenellenbogen in, 147; Khmelnytsky uprising and, 27, 29, 37; maps, xix, xx, xxi; pledges from, 153; rabbinical court testimony, 28; rabbis in, 239; refugees from, 152, 282; travel through, 43, 44; Treasurer for the Land of Israel, 164, 166 maʾamad (ruling council): Amsterdam, 169; Hamburg, 255; Venice, 134 Magdeburg, 256 Magnus, Markus, 233, 235–36 Mahilioŭ (Mogilev), 62, 65 Maimonides, 118 Mainz, xxiv, 264–65 Malta, xix, 121–22, 129, 133, 143–46, 156, 181 Mantua: archives of, 141; emissaries in, 153–56; Katzenellenbogen in, 147; maps, xxii, xxiii; philanthropic network and donations from, 134, 135, 138–39, 142, 153, 180, 250–51; transregional connections and, 3 Margolis, Yaʾakov Koppel, 95–97, 104, 147, 187 market squares, purchases of houses around, 85–86 marriage: agunot, 57, 80–81, 183–86, 246, 256, 278–79; divorce, bills of, 82–83, 186, 256, 278–79; identification of children to prevent future inadvertent incest, 45 martyrdom, 37 Masekhes derekh eretz, 279 Mayseh ha-godl, 113–15, 124, 126–27, 130, 180, 299 “Maʾoz tzur,” 283 Me’ir bar Yitzḥak, 104 Me’ir ben Asher Lemel, 51–52 Me’ir of Szczebrzeszyn, 152, 188. See also Tzok ha-ʾitim Melekh, 28 Memel (Klaipėda), xix, xx, 70 memorbuch, 283 memorials. See remembrance Menaḥem bar Shlomo, 212
Menaḥem ben Yitzḥak Yoffe, 130 Menasheh ben Yisra’el, 138, 168–70, 304 Mendelssohn, Moses, 285 mercantile network, Sephardi, 10–12 mercantilism (cameralism), 201–2, 204, 220–22, 252–53, 288 Mercedarian order, 116 messianic year, prophesy of, 55 messianism. See Sabbatheanism Metz, xix, xxiv, 215, 239, 281, 283 Mezhyrichi, 33–35 Międzyrzecz, xxv, 272, 274 migration: to Amsterdam, 147–50, 259–71; economic, 287, 303; Ettinger’s theory of, 286–87; forced, 13–14, 284; to Frankfurt a.M., 248–49; to Hamburg, 252–58; to Holy Roman Empire, 200, 223–30; to Moravia, Silesia, and Bohemia, 49, 217, 231–42; to Vienna, 249–52 Mikulov (Nikolsburg), xxiv, xxv, 219, 239, 240 Milano, Attilio, 151 Milicz (Militsch), xxiv, xxv, 233, 235–36, 272 millenarian Protestants, 169–73, 304 Minden, xxiv, 248, 277 Minḥat Yehudah, 188 Miriam bat Avraham, 184–85 Mishnah, 117–18 Mishneh Torah, 118 Modena, xxiii, 135, 147 Mogila, Pyotr, 26 Mogilev (Mahilioŭ), xx, 62, 65 Mohyliv, xxi, 185 Moldavia, xxi, 111–13 Mollica, Richard, 14, 298–300 Monian, Abraham, 168 Monian, Daniel, 168 Moravia: Jewish communities in, 203; Kraków trade with, 46; maps, xxiv; population decline from Thirty Years’ War, 216; rabbis passing through, 239–42; refugees in, 49, 72, 77, 83, 216, 218–20, 232, 237–39, 275, 282; serfdom in, 202; synagogues in, 278; traveling preachers in, 280 Moravian Jewish Council, 220, 238 Mordechai ha-Levi, 186 Mordechai of Kraków, 278
[ 372 ] Index Morteira, Sha’ul Levi, 137–38 Moscow, xix, 25, 49, 62–63, 65–66, 98–99, 113 Moshe ben Yeraḥmi’el the Martyr, 184–85 Moshe Kohen, 215, 283 Muscovy, 64, 65
maps, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii; ransomed captives and decision to return home, 77. See also Istanbul; slavery and slave trade Ouderkerk, 261 Oyerbach, Shmu’el, 225
Nadav, Mordechai, 41, 85 Naḥalat shivʾah, 274, 279 Naples, xxii, 133 Nathan of Gaza (Avraham Nathan ben Elishaʾ Ḥayim Ashkenazi), 174, 175–76, 178 Nathan Shapira ben Re’uven David Teyvel, 167–73, 176, 304 Naʾima, Mustafa, 101 Nemyriv, xxi, 27, 29, 32, 36, 57–58, 114–15, 209, 299 Netherlands, 138, 145, 148, 170, 194, 259, 304. See also Amsterdam New Amsterdam, 265 “New Christians,” 10–11, 120–21, 135, 253, 259 New World, 10–11, 121, 265 Nicolay, Nicolas de, 124 Nimizowka, Dawidowa, 80 Nirenberg, David, 7–8 Nizza, xxiii, 153 Nowa Cerekwia (Neukirch), xxv, 235 numbers: of captives, 101, 308; of deaths, 37–39, 88, 307–8; of German Jews, 203; ransomed, 127–28, 180–81; of refugees, 37–39, 49, 290–91, 297, 307–8 Nuremburg, 211 Nysa (Neisse), xxv, 235
Padua, xxii, xxiii, 3, 134, 138, 141, 146, 154–56 Palermo, xxii, 133 Passover customs, 189 Patterson, Orlando, 192 Pavliuk uprising, 23 Peace of Westphalia, 46, 201 Pearl, 241 Pendzich, Barbara, 66 Pereiaslav, 62, 273 Perlhefter, Ber, 240 Pesaro, xxiii, 138–39 philanthropic network for Land of Israel: Aboab and Zacuto as organizers of, 17; competition with ransom network, 117, 161, 167; emissaries (Shluḥei de-Rabbanan or Shadarim), 161–63; millenarian Protestants and accep tance of Christian funds, 169–73, 304; Nathan Shapira in Amsterdam, 167–70; poor widows of Jerusalem, fundraising by, 165–67; pre-1648 support for Israel, 163–64; priority of ransom and local charity over, 119; Sephardi trading network compared to, 10–12; Treasurer for the Land of Israel, 164, 166; war effects and debt to Muslims, 164–65. See also fundraising for relief and ransom Piła, xx, xxv, 72, 227 pilpul ḥilukim intellectual system, 56 Pinczów, xx, 51 Pinsk, xx, 37, 41, 69, 85, 225, 251, 279 piracy, Mediterranean: as economic system, 96, 116; Jewish merchants, vulnerability of, 133; Knights of St. John, 121, 133, 143–45; Mediterranean trade and travel and, 121–22; Order of St. Stephen, 121; in Story of the Four Captives, 119; threats posed by, 133 Podilia region, 77 Podivín, xxv, 278 Pohrebyshche, xxi, 101–2, 104, 181
Oliwa, 64 Olkusz, xx, xxv, 46, 74–75, 79 Ołobok (Mühlbock), xxv, 272 orphans, 187 Orthodox Christians, 25–26, 36–37, 101, 102–3 Osoblaha (Hotzenplotz), xxv, 232, 235, 241 Ostroh, xxi, 31–34, 44–45, 48, 52, 153, 218 Ostsiedlung, 207 Öttingen, xxiv, 275–76, 281 Ottoman Empire: cultural contacts between Ashkenazi refugees and Sephardi society in, 188–90; Jews in, 121; Land of Israel, conquest of, 161;
Index [ 373 ] Poland-Lithuania wars and refugee crisis: Khmelnytsky uprising and the Jews, 23–30; losses, 88–89; refugees outside Ukraine, 40–50; resolution, 88–92; returning refugees, restitution, and reconstruction, 76–87; Russian invasion and occupation of Lithuania, 62–71; Swedish invasion of Poland, 63–64, 69–75, 91, 231; Tatar incursions, history of, 98–99; trauma, coming to terms with, 51–61; violence, flight, and chaos of war, 31–39 Polish Jewry, roots and rise of, 206–10 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: as center, 297; Crown Poland, 37, 39, 64, 70–71, 76; G reat Poland, 40, 55, 71, 204, 207, 227, 231, 235, 279–80; Little Poland, 40, 55, 71, 74–75, 204, 231, 238; maps, xx, xxv; Red Ruthenia, 37, 39, 55, 308. See also Khmelnytsky uprising; Lithuania, Grand Duchy of; Poland-Lithuania wars and refugee crisis; Ukraine; specific towns and villages Pollack, Yaʾakov, 208–9 Polnoye, xxi, 32–33, 101, 148 Popkin, Richard, 169 population growth: Ashkenazi, in Jerusalem, 190; Polish-Lithuanian Jewry and, 92; in Venice, 151; in Vienna, 251 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 14, 54, 282 Potocki, Mikołaj, 32, 101 Pożarowo, 227 Poznań: community budget for Israel donations, 163; fundraising in, 48–49, 131, 155, 156; maps, xix, xx, xxiv, xxv; rabbis of, 45; refugees from, 275–76; returning refugees and, 86; Swedish invasion, 63, 72; Talmud study in, 209; transregional connections and, 3, 193; Zacuto and, 136 Prague, xix, xxiv, 3, 163, 217, 240, 243, 279–80 prayers: Divine Revenge, calls for, 84; for fast of 20 Sivan, 58–61; Western Wall, 167 Proops, Shlomo, 279 Proops, Yosef, 279
prosecutions: murder cases, 83–85; property claims cases, 79–80; revenge, 83–85 Prostějov (Prossnitz), xxv, 239 Prussia, xxv, 202, 211 Przemyśl region, 39 psychological consequences of refugee crisis, 51–54, 275–76, 282–84 Ptaszków (Vogelsdorf ), xxv, 49, 52 publishing, 182–83, 188, 279–80, 302–3 Pyckowice (Peiskretscham), 235 Rabbanite Jews, 108–9, 130 rabbis: agunot and, 81; Ashkenazi rabbis serving in Sephardi society, 189; moving through Moravia, 239–42; as “star-status” refugees, 72, 149; transregional rabbinate and demand for Polish rabbis, 281; traveling, 274–75, 280–81. See also specific rabbis by name Radziwiłł, Albrycht, 105 Radziwiłł, Janusz, 37, 41, 66–68 Ragusa, xix, xxii, xxiii, 144, 153 raison d’état, 201 Rakoczy, Jerzy, 64 ransoming of Jewish captives ( pidyon shevuyim): about, 116–17; agent fees, 144; Christian and Muslim ransom systems compared to, 116; in Crimea, 110–11; emissaries on behalf of o thers, 153–57; fate of the ransomed, 180–90; identification issues, 126–27; institutionalization factors, 120–23; in Jewish religious law and culture, 117–19; Jewish solidarity and, 158–59; Khmelnytsky and, 27; Lithuanian Jewish Council and, 41–42; as main source of Tatar income, 29; Malta captives, 143–45; number ransomed, 127–28, 180–81; pledges, 153; prices and costs, 127–29, 144; process of, 100–101, 110–11; rabbinic leadership in, 126; return, struggle of, 182–83; scholarship on, 15; surrender to Tatars and, 30; transregional networks and, 9–10, 117; Venice-Istanbul agreement on division of, 129, 131; Wallachia and, 112; women and, 100. See also fundraising for relief and ransom ransoming strategies: Christian, 132–33; Muslim, 116
[ 374 ] Index Rapoport-Albert, Ada, 174 Ravina, 118 Red Ruthenia, xxi, 37, 39, 55, 308 “refugee,” as term, 13–14 refugee crisis (17th-century): about, 3–5; cost of, 4; as defining moment, 306; economic impact of, 301–2; end of, 286–92; interconnection and, 293–97; Mollica’s self-healing of trauma and, 298–300; significance and effects of, 301–6. See also Holy Roman Empire, Jewish refugees in; Khmelnytsky uprising; Poland-Lithuania wars and refugee crisis; specific places and topics Reggio, 173 remembrance: Divine Revenge, calls for, 84; fast of 20 Sivan and prayers, 57–61; liturgical calendar of memorial ceremonies, 283, 300 Re’shit bikkurim, 276 return home by refugees: Amsterdam community support for, 267; converts returning to Judaism, 81–83; decision to return, 76–78; economic life and positioning for f uture, 83, 85–87; gaining entrance to the town, 78–79; Olkusz community, 74–75; ransomed captives from Ottoman Empire, 182–83; reclaiming property, 79–80; revenge and prosecutions for murder, 83–85; widows, status of, 80–81 Reulse, Aert Janssen, 264–65 reuniting of separated families, 45, 219. See also identity and identification, issues of revenge, 83–85 Rivkes, Moshe, 69–70, 72, 264–65, 267 Roman Catholics, 25, 36–37, 101 Rome, xix, xxii, 133, 135, 145 Rosman, Moshe, 79 Roth, Cecil, 144 Rotterdam, 138, 141 Rubinowicz, Jakub Palti’el (Hieronim Rubinkowicz), 81 Rudna (Raudten), 235 Russian invasions and wars: captives, Jewish and Christian, 65–66, 102; Lithuania, invasion and occupation of, 62–71; Lithuanian Jewish Council and, 43; Pereiaslav treaty with
Cosssacks, 62; Tatar slave raids and, 98–99. See also Cossacks Rychtal (Reichthal), 235 Rydzyna, 225 Rzeszów, xx, 44, 251, 281 Sabbath, transgression of, 55–56 Sabbatheanism, 173–77, 178–79, 280, 301 Safah berurah, 225–26 Salomon Moises, 215 Salonica, xix, xxii, 129, 181, 184, 188–89 Sanctifying God’s Name (Kiddush ha-shem), 37 Sarah bat Me’ir, 148 Saraval, Shlomo Ḥai, 95–96, 168, 176 Saxony, xxiv, 72, 277 Scholem, Gershom, 174–75 Schönaich, Georg von, 228 Ścinawa (Steinau), 235 Sejm, 26, 27, 42, 43, 68 self-healing process, 298–300 Senai, Mehmed, 30 Senigallia, xxiii, 138–39, 147 Sephardi communities. See specific places and persons Sephardi community fundraising. See fundraising for relief and ransom; philanthropic network for Land of Israel Sephardi trading network, 10–12, 120–22 Serrarius, Peter, 170–71 Shabtai ha-Kohen, 57, 72, 239–40, 277 Shabtai Zvi, 148, 173–76, 178, 188, 190 Shadarim (emissaries), 161–63, 165–73 Shalom ben Moshe, 240–42, 273–74, 280 Shekhinah, 148 Shemaʾya ben Yehudah, 273 Shilton, Moshe, 185 Shimʾon Wolf, 277, 285 Shkhites un bdikes, 279 Shklov, xx, 40 Shlomo Zalman ben Yaʾakov Ephraim Menaḥem, 155–56 Shluḥei de-Rabbanan (emissaries). See Shadarim Shmu’el ben David ha-Levi, 278–79 Shmu’el ben Shimʾon, 184 Shmu’el Garmizan, 185 Shmu’el Levi, 165
Index [ 375 ] Shulḥan ʾarukh, 118–19, 170, 210, 212, 218, 281 Shussberg, Gavri’el bar Yehoshuʾa, 103, 105, 251 Sicily, 144 Siedlisko, xxiv, xxv, 228 Silesia: Jewish communities in, 203; Kraków trade with, 46; maps, xxiv, xxv; population decline from Thirty Years’ War, 216; refugee population in, 235; refugee representative body, 233–36; refugees from, 211; refugees in, 49, 72–75, 77, 216, 231–36; serfdom in, 202; Yuda ben Ephraim Hayim’s story as refugee in, 227–30 Sinop, xxii, 115 sins: blame for massacres, 51–52; of the generation, 56; God’s punishment for transgression of the Sabbath, 55–56 slaughterers, kosher, 228, 268, 278, 279 slavery and slave trade: Black Sea slave trade and journey to Crimea, 98–106; Christian and Jewish slaveholders, 125; in Crimea, 107–11; as economic system, 96, 98; escape, 103–4; history of Tatar slave raids, 98–99; to Iran, 65–66, 155–56; Istanbul slave market, 124–27; Jewish slave traders, 110–11, 125; journey from Crimea to Istanbul, 113–15; Khmelnytsky uprising and, 29–30; Koppel narrative, 95–97; Mayseh ha-godl narrative, 113–15, 124, 126–27, 130, 180, 299; Moldavia and Wallachia and, 111–13; new social networks among captives, 104; rescue, 111–12; to Russia, 65–66, 102; Smith narrative, 107; surrender to slavers, 102–3; transregional aspects of, 191–95. See also ransoming of Jewish captives Slovakia, 46 Słupecki, Krzysztof, 211 Slutzk, xx, 3, 41, 66–68, 85, 89, 217, 250 Smith, John, 107, 109 Smolensk, xx, 62, 65, 102 Sofia, xxii, 135, 144, 181, 184, 189 Sofino, Raphael, 130 solidarity, Jewish, 158–59, 293–95 Spain, expulsion of Jews from, 3, 78, 120–21, 161
spiritual impact of refugee crisis, 303–4 Spisz region, 46 Staatsräson, 201 Stampfer, Shaul, 38–39, 307–8 Starodub, xx, 37 Starokostiantyniv, xxi, 32 Stettin, 112 Story of the Four Captives, 119 Stráž pod Ralskem (Warttenberg), xxv, 233 St. Stephen, Order of, 121 Stuyvesant, Peter, 265 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 10 suffering, prayers reflecting, 58–60. See also trauma Swedish invasion of Poland, 63–64, 69–75, 91, 231 synagogues, Polish style in Moravia, 278 Talmud, 108, 118, 120, 171, 209 Talmud Torah community, Amsterdam, 260–62, 264, 266–67 Talmud Torah community, Venice, 136 Tarnopoler, Me’ir, 78, 83, 275–76 Tasharni, Mistress, 184 Tatars, Crimean, 26–27, 62, 98. See also slavery and slave trade taxation: gabilla (consumption tax), 128–29; in Jerusalem, 162; by Lithuanian Jewish Council, 42; for ransom, 156; in Silesia, 233–36; in Venice, 134; in Vienna, 251 Taz (David ben Shmu’el), 218–20, 239–40, 275, 282–83 Te’omim, Yonah ben Yeshʾayah, 251 Ternopil’, xx, xxi, 78, 184, 275 Terpstra, Nicholas, 3 Thirty Years’ War, 49, 71, 148, 200–202, 210–13, 245, 253, 277–78 Thurloe, John, 263–64 Tiberias, xxii, 162 Tokhfirer, Zvi Hirsh ben Shimshon, 155 Tomaszów Lubelski, xx, 28, 150 trade: Amsterdam and, 259; Brandenberg and, 221–22; Holy Roman Empire and, 202; Kraków trade with Holy Roman Empire, 46; Mollica’s self- healing process, 298–300; as refugee profession, 276–77; Sephardi trading network, 10–12, 120–22
[ 376 ] Index Trani, Yosef, 128–29 transregional connections: captive experiences and, 191–95; Jewish communities involved in, 3–4; Sephardi trading network compared to philanthropic network, 10–12; Subrahmanyam’s “connected history,” 10. See also intercommunal connections transregional institutional development, 194–95 Transylvania, 64 trauma: court process and, 84–85; fast of 20 Sivan and prayers for, 57–61; integration into flow of life, 60; Mollica’s self-healing process, 298–300; psychological aspects, 275–76, 282–84; psychological effects of Khmelnytsky uprising, 51–54; PTSD, 14, 54, 282; as term and concept, 14 Treasurer for the Land of Israel (Lviv), 164, 166 Třebíč, xxv, 240, 278 Trembowla, 38 Trieste, xxiii, 135 Trinitarian order, 116 Trivellato, Francesca, 11 Troki, 109 Tsoref, Moshe, 34 Tul’chyn, xx, xxi, 32, 101 Tul’chyn massacre, 27–29 Turin, xxiii, 154 Tuv ha-aretz, 168, 176 Tzaʾar bat rabim, 56, 102, 130, 136 Tzfat, xxii, 122, 128, 136, 161–62, 210 Tzok ha-ʾitim, 38, 152, 175, 184, 188 Uherský Brod, xxv, 149, 240 Ujazd (Ujest), 235 Ukraine: ceded to Poland (1569) and feudal system in, 24–25; Jewish colonization of, 208; map, xxi; Pereiaslav treaty and Poland’s loss of left bank, 62; return of refugees, 77–79; Tatar slave raids into, 98–105; Treaty of Hadiach and planned polity of, 64. See also Khmelnytsky uprising; specific villages Uman, xxi, 28, 40, 52, 279–80 Urbino, xxiii, 138–39, 147 Uri Feivish ha-Levi, 270
van den Broecke, Giovanni Battista, 144 van der Linden, David, 3 Vartemberk, 235, 236 Vaʾad pekidei ‘Eretz Yisra’el be-Kushta’ (Council of the Officials for the Land of Israel in Istanbul), 177 Venice: Ancona, tension with, 146–47; Carcassoni’s mission and, 132; day of fasting and mourning, 142; donations from, 47, 138–39; emissaries in, 154–56; Hanover in, 149; history of ransom in, 133–34; Jewish population of, 151; Jewish ransom agreement between Istanbul and, 129, 131; Jews in, 121; Malta ransoms and, 143–45; maps, xix, xxii, xxiii; Nathan Shapira in, 168; philanthropic network and, 177; ransom network and, 117, 122, 132–36; transregional connections and, 3; Yaʾakov ben Naftali in, 150 Verona, xxii, xxiii, 135, 136, 139, 147, 155 Vidin, xxii, 181 Vienna: attitudes and policies toward refugees, 249–52; donations from, 47–48; expulsion of Jews from, 203; Jewish community in, 203, 249–50; Kraków, connections with, 211; maps, xix, xxii, xxiv, xxv; rabbis in, 239, 281; ransom network and, 154; refugees in, 72, 154; route to Italy through, 147–48; as Torah study center, 251; transregional connections and, 3, 193 Vilnius: flight from, 68–70; fundraising for, 117, 171; maps, xix, xx; rabbis of, 57, 239–40, 264, 273; refugees from, 224, 249, 254, 265, 279; returning refugees, 79; taken by Russia, 63; Wolf dynasty and, 277 Vinnitsa, xxi, 32 Vistula river, xx, 199, 282 Vitebsk, xx, 62, 65 Volodymyr-Volynsky, xxi, 101, 209 Vossius, Gerardus, 211 Vyshnivets’, xxi, 185 Wagenseil, Johann Cristoph, 240 Wallachia, 111–13, 149, 189 Wandsbek, 252–53 Wanfried, 248 Warsaw, xix, xx, 211, 231
Index [ 377 ] Weil, Yoḥanan ben Moshe, 163–64 Weinryb, Bernard, 236 Western Wall, 167 Westphalia, xxiv, 215 widows. See agunot Widzim, xxv, 228, 229 Wilke, Carsten, 292 Wiśniowiecki, Jarema, 29, 39 Wiszowaty, 33 Wittenberg, 256 Witzenhausen, 248 Władysław IV, 26, 32 Wöchentliche Zeitung, 199–200 Wolf, Benjamin, 277 Wolf (Wulff ) dynasty, 277, 285 Wolsztyn, xxiv, xxv, 228 women: adultery, captives suspected of, 82, 100; agunot, 57, 80–81, 183–86, 246, 256, 278–79; divorce, bills of, 82–83, 186, 256, 278–79; harsher experience of, 192; poor widows of Jerusalem, fundraising by, 165–67; role in fundraising, 130; roles in refugee society, 89–90, 304–5; targeted bodies and violence against, 35, 89 Worms, xxiv, 203, 248 Woźniki (Woischnik), 235 Wrocław (Breslau), xx, xxiv, xxv, 207, 211, 235 Wronki, xxv, 227–28, 230 Wulff, Bernd (Barukh Minden), 277 Wulff, Moses Benjamin, 277 Yafe, Kalonymus, 279 Yafeh, Aharon, 40, 279–80 Yakovenko, Natalia, 36 Yanina, xxii, 181, 187 Yavein metsulah, 30, 102, 149–50
Yaʾakov bar Moshe ha-Levi, 142 Yaʾakov ben Naftali, 150 Yaʾakov ben Naftali Hirsch, 279 Yaʾakov ben Shimʾon, 150–51 Yaʾakov ben Yeḥezki’el ha-Levi, 71 Yaʾakov Yisra’el ben Yehonatan, 156 Yehoshuʾa ben David, 152 Yehudah ben Yitzḥak, 279 Yehudah from Podivka, 185 Yehudah Leib, 240–41 Yekil ben Binyamin Aharon, 100 Yeshivah Klalit, Venice, 136, 153 Yiddish language, 207–8 Yisra’el ben Aharon, 40, 52, 54, 280 Yisra’el ben Binyamin of Bełżyce, 55 Yitzḥak (convert), 185 Yitzḥak ben Avraham Moshe Yisra’el, 58 Yitzḥak Mokhiaḥ, 38 Yo’el, 218–20 Yosef ben Yehoshuʾa, 108 Yosef ha-Levi Nazir, 189 Yuda ben Ephraim Ḥayim, 72–74, 227–30, 274, 275 Zacuto, Moshe, 17, 135–37, 139–41, 147, 150, 153, 168, 176, 209 Zaim, Paul, 112–13 Zamość, xx, 27, 37, 147 Zaporizhia region, 26, 31, 99 Zator, 46 Zelig ben Yitzḥak, 280 Zelig Ḥazan, 275 Žemaitija region, 69 Zhukva, xxi, 37, 45, 52 Zhyvotiv, xxi, 30, 101–3, 182 Zivḥei Tuviyah, 279 Złotów (Flatow), xx, xxiv, 71 Zohar, 55, 171 Zviriv, xxi, 31