The Abyss of Despair (Yeven Metzulah): The Famous 17th Century Chronicle Depicting Jewish Life in Russia and Poland during the Chmielnicki Massacres of 1648-1649

The best explanation that I have ever read about this book was by, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Art of Shifting Contexts , THE FUTURE OF THE PAST, New Perspectives on Ukrainian History,edited by Serhii Plokhy , Harvard UniversityAbyss of Despair is as is currently called Fake News!Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies, Northwestern University writes…”Let me jump ahead four centuries and explore an event firmly embedded in the Ukrainian and Jewish historical imaginations. We can interpret this event as the beginning of the Ukrainian struggle for independence, a moment conducive to the 1654 reunification of the two great Slavic brethren, and, following Orest Subtelny, as the Cossack Revolution in Ukraine. There is little doubt that Bohdan Khmel’ nyts’kyi's rebellion is pivotal to the beginnings of Ukrainian nationhood and statehood, an event pregnant with multiple historical meanings.Alas, it is impossible to reconcile this conceptualization with the Jewish reading of the same events, carved in national memory as gzerot takh ve-tat, the catastrophe of 1648-49, and with the Jewish perception of its major figure, Khmel’nyts 'kyi, denigrated in contemporary mid-seventeenth-century historical narratives and dirges as the enemy of the Jews whose name and memory, like that of the biblical Amalek, should be blotted out. Seventeenth-century chronicles, including Natan Neta Hanover's Yeven metsulah (Abyss of Despair, 1653), bemoan what they call the complete destruction of the Jewish communities in Ukraine and the massacre of anywhere between 300,000 and 600,000 Jews."Attempts by leading participants in the Ukrainian- Jewish scholarly dialogue to breach the gap between these two irreconcilable narratives brought few results. The reason was simple: Both sides suggested one and the same context of political and/or ethnocentric history and were unwilling-or unable-to shift contexts, revisit the pools of sources, and utilize new methodologies. While a major breakthrough regarding the seventeenth-century events that were catastrophic for Jews, but also for Poles and Ukrainians, is still a scholarly desideratum, several recent insights suggest a serious revision of the Jewish traditional historical narrative. Scholars of Ukrainian studies such as Frank Sysyn, Zenon Kohut, and Nataliia Iakovenko have convincingly argued that the bloody events of the Ukrainian Cossack revolution dragged into their whirlwind Ukrainian peasants, Polish szlachta, Jewish urban, dwellers, Muscovite troops, Tatars, and Dutch and German mercenaries of the belligerent armies." What started as a kind of a Praetorian revolt quickly turned into a peasant rebellion and anti-colonialist revolution. The Cossacks targeted the Poles, whom they considered their foremost enemies; the Jews emerged as a by-product of Polish victimhood precisely because they acted as the economic and financial agents of Polish magnates and because they constituted the demographic majority in Polish private towns, be that Nemyriv or Tulchyn, Polonne or Zaslav.Several scholars of Eastern European Jewry advised changing the angle from exclusively political to demographic, quantitative, legal, and even literary. Adam Teller, for example, scrutinized the earliest accounts of the rebellion, looking at them as literary texts in a literary context. These texts followed certain rhetorical principles and pursued a distinct theological agenda. Teller maintains that Natan Hanover is usually accurate in his portrayal of the Jewish and Polish military allegiance in 1648; moreover, he emphasizes that back in 1653 Hanover depicted Jews counterintuitively: not as helpless victims of the bloodthirsty Cossacks, but as warriors fighting on the ramparts of towns on a par with Polish garrisons. Contrary to later depictions of Jews as meek objects of the calamity and his own rhetorical devices, Hanover introduced the Jews as people of arms, not necessarily of the Book: They knew how to handle weapons, were allowed to handle them, and did not hesitate to turn them against the Cossacks who were besieging their towns-a moment completely absent from later historiographic narratives.Legal contexts further complicate the picture. Moshe Rosman revisited what his predecessors imagined as the complete decimation of Jewish communities in Ukraine. Looking at the legal aspect of the matter and introducing heretofore unexplored court documents, he showed that two or three years after the gzerot takh Jewish refugees came back to their places of residence, reestablished themselves there, and were able to reclaim their stolen property by taking their complaints to the Polish courts. Furthermore, Rosman pointed out that the Council of Four Lands, a Jewish communal umbrella organization in Eastern Europe mimicking the Polish Sejm, suggested as early as 1654 discontinuing social relief to the communities in Ukraine, which, according to its data, had managed to reestablish themselves economically. Such a post-1648 economic revival could not have occurred if the entire population had been decimated. Obviously, the massacre did take place, but contemporary chronicles and later historiography hugely exaggerated the level of Jewish victimhood in the best rhetorical traditions of early modernity, be they Polish, Jewish, Russian, or Ukrainian.Proficient in demography and statistics, Shaul Stampfer, with his quantitative context, was particularly innovative in this regard. Before we discuss the hundreds of thousands of Jewish victims of the event that is seen by modern-day Israeli or North American Jews as second only to the Holocaust, Stampfer advises us to consider the magnitude of the devastation, balancing it against the population data. How many Jews lived in all of Eastern Europe and in the Ukrainian lands in the 1640S? Using Polish censuses of the early seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries as a point of departure, Stampfer resorted to a demographic constant calculated by European early modernists seeking to figure out an answer to this question. He attempted moving demographically "up" from the early seventeenth century to 1848 and "down" from 1764 to the same 1648. How many Jews should have been there but had disappeared? Of course, Stampfer had to introduce other variables, such as an approximation of the size of a Jewish household and that of the female population, rarely included in the early modern census. Even if we take into consideration a certain margin of error, Stampfer's figures describe more eloquently than all previous debates the political and religious causes and purposes of the gzerot takh, the calamity of 1648. He claimed that the entire population of the area never exceeded 80,000-90,000 Jews, that between 14,000 and 18,000 were the immediate targets of the Cossack rebellion, and that within this number perhaps several thousand were taken captive and brought to the slave markets in Istanbul (we also know this from contemporary Turkish sources), around a thousand converted to Eastern Orthodoxy under duress, several thousand, if not more, became refugees, and the rest perished. While Stampfer is by no means diminishing the magnitude of the catastrophe and its devastating impact on the Jews in Ukraine-after all, we are talking about one-fourth or one-fifth of the entire Jewish population-he provides a remarkable correction to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish victims allegedly murdered by the Cossacks. The numbers advanced in narratives of that period and recycled in modern-day historical accounts are simply unfeasible, as they correspond to no demographic reality on the ground.”…

This book describes a revolt by Ukrainians against their Polish overlords; this rebellion is most infamous because the Ukranians massacred tens of thousands of Jews (if not more). And because the rebellion involved siege warfare, many more people perished of starvation and disease during sieges. Hanover wrote only a few years after the massacres, and spoke to survivors in fashioning his book.Before reading this book, I was already familiar with the basic outlines of the story. I don't think I was aware that Poland was a feudal society rather than a centralized monarchy. This meant that the Ukranians were able to play one Polish noble or town off against another, enabling the rebellion to spread. On the other hand, the Ukranians were decentralized too, which meant that not every army was equally ruthless: some were genocidal, while others merely enslaved Jews or despoiled them.

The uprising of the Cossack leader Bohdan Chmielnicki (or Khmelnytsky in more modern phonetics) in the Ukraine is fairly famous but the massacre of the Jews is a great blot on the Orthodox Church (the religion of the Cossacks). I have read a number of secondary accounts of the events but I couldn't pass up an opportunity to read a contemporary Jewish account of the events. I have read the Jewish death toll to be anywhere between 10,000 to 100,000 so exact details must be difficult to discern. The death toll for the entire population was probably over one million.Nathan Hanover (died 1683) was present during the massacres. He fled to Venice and published the 'The Abyss of Despair' in 1653. The work itself is fairly short, covering pages 23 to 121 of the current translation. Nathan recounts massacres in 14 locations including Nalevaiko, Chmiel, Lwow and Ostrog. Some of the atrocities committed by the Cossacks are truly unbelievable and difficult to read - I can only hope there is some exaggeration.The Ukrainian peasants and the Cossacks were being repressed by the Polish government. Their Orthodox religion made them second class citizens. The Polish used the Jewish minority as tax collectors so the Ukrainians saw them as oppressors. Nathan Hanover confirms this aspect of the dynamics when he states 'They [the Ukrainians] were looked upon as lowly and inferior beings and became the slaves and handmaidens of the Polish people and the Jews' (page 27). If Nathan Hanover says this so bluntly then the Cossacks had a lot to be angry about.This is a valuable historical source. It is not a difficult text to read. Having a Jewish version of the events of the Chmielnicki Uprising is important. I will look for Polish and Ukrainian accounts to balance this book.

This short, but very informational book is basically the only resource on the 1648 Chmielnicki pogroms of thousands of Jews in Russia, the Ukraine and Poland.Just a warning: it is quite graphic at times, detailing the heinous crimes of Chmielnicki and his henchmen. But, these atrocities need to be told.I bought this book for a research paper at university and found it an invaluable resource. It should be essential reading for all students interested in genocide studies.Recommended!

Difficult to read, not familiar with a lot of terms, but interesting from historical point of view.

Very good book from beginning to end, unfortunately very true, and necessary to know and remember. Please read main part of the book not on you tov or the sabbath because it could bring to much pain.