02 - Hatred of the Jews

When the Jews settled in the Ukraine during the period of Polish rule, they found themselves between hammer and anvil: under the arenda system the Jewish lessee administered the estate in the name of the Polish landowner, and, if living in the town, he found his customers among the nobility, officials, the Catholic clergy, and the local army garrison. To the enslaved peasants and rebellious Cossacks, Ukrainians, and Greek-Orthodox the Jewish lessee appeared both as an infidel and an alien—an emissary of the Polish Catholic noblemen who sought to dominate them. The Ukrainian townsman was jealous of his urban rival, the unbelieving Jew, whose success was due to the assistance of the foreign and hated Polish regime. In times of rebellion and war, this hatred and jealousy was vented in severe persecutions and horrifying massacres. such as the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648–49, when over 100,000 Jews were brutally killed and almost all the communities of the Ukraine were destroyed, and the persecutions of the Haidamaks in the 18th century, which were more limited in scope but even more terrible in their cruelty. These massacres, whose perpetrators were admired as national heroes, gave rise to a popular tradition of hatred toward the Jews in the Ukraine; it was nurtured by the increase of the Jewish population in the country, by its economic position, and later by the propagation of the Russian language and culture by Jews—an act which the nationalist Ukrainian intellectuals (the "Ukrainophiles") regarded as collaboration with the "Muscovite" Russian government in its campaign against their awakening as a separate nation. This tradition of hatred toward the Jews found its expression in both folk songs and literature (T. Shevchenko; N. Gogol), in historiography (N. Kostomarov), and in political thought (M. Dragomanov). The Nationalist and Socialist Party of the Ukraine was also imbued with anti-Jewish feelings. The pogroms of 1881–82 broke out and spread through the provinces of the Ukraine; after 1917, in the Civil War and under the regime of S. Petlyura (the "Socialist" government), about 100,000 Jews were murdered in the Ukraine (1919–20), as in the days of Chmielnicki and with the same cruelty. Two decades of Soviet regime did little to eradicate the hostility against the Jews: during World War II great parts of the Ukrainian population wholeheartedly collaborated with the Nazis in exterminating the Jews in the occupied Ukraine.

The Period of the Independent Ukraine and Jewish National Autonomy

The period from March 1917 to August 1920 constitutes a special chapter in the history of the Jews of the Ukraine. The Ukrainians established a National Council (the Rada), which in January 1918 proclaimed the separation of the Ukraine from Russia; this episode came to an end in August 1920, when the Red Army completed the conquest of the Ukraine. During this time the leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist movement attempted to reach an agreement with the Jews. They established relations with the leaders of Zionism in eastern Galicia, and jointly waged a struggle against Polish aims in the Ukraine. During this period the Jews were represented in the Rada (with 50 delegates), a secretariat for Jewish affairs was established (July 1917), and a law passed on "personal national autonomy" for the national minorities, among which, the Jews were included. The Jewish ministry (M. Silberfarb was the first minister; he was succeeded by J. W. Latzki-Bertholdi) passed a law providing for democratic elections to the administrative bodies of the communities (December 1918), a Jewish National Council was formed, and the Provisional National Council of the Jews of the Ukraine was convened (November 1918). These institutions were short-lived. In July 1918 the autonomy was abolished, the Jewish ministry was dissolved and the pogroms which then took place—without the Ukrainian government taking any effective measures to assure the security of the Jewish population—proved that the whole of this project had been directed more at securing the assistance of the Jewish parties in order to achieve complete separation from Russia than at really developing a new positive attitude toward the Jews.

Religious and Social Movements in Ukrainian Jewry

Ukrainian Jewry became a focus of religious and social ferment within Judaism from the late 17th century. The massacres and sufferings endured by the Jews in the Ukraine also introduced spiritual and social trends. The messianic agitation which followed the massacres of 1648–49 paved the way for the penetration of Shabbateanism, while at the time of the Haidamak persecutions and the revival of blood libels, the Frankist movement made its appearance, and Hasidim as inaugurated by Israel b. Eliezer Ba'al Shem Tov developed and spread rapidly through the country. After the pogroms of the 1880s, the Ukraine was not only the birthplace of the Hibbat Zion, the Bilu, and the Am Olam movements but also of the Dukhovno-bibleyskoye bratstvo ("Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood," founded by Jacob Gordin and his circle) which sought to "bring back" the Jews to the religious purity of the Bible and thus draw them closer to Christianity. Activist and revolutionary trends were also prominent in the Hebrew and Yiddish literature which emerged in the Ukraine during the 19th and 20th centuries.

During the 1920s and the early 1930s three Jewish districts were created in the areas of Jewish settlement in southeastern Ukraine (Kalininskoye, Stalinskoye, and Zlatopol; ).

[Benzion Dinur (Dinaburg)]


Source:
www.heritagefilms.com

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* Historia: Ucrania