Jewish History In Rus’ Ukraine

THE PUTURE OF THE PAST

New Perspectives on Ukrainian History

Edited by Serhii Plokhy

Distributed by Harvard University Press

for the Ukrainian Research Institute
Harvard University

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 Jewish History In Rus’ Ukraine

YOHANAN PETROVSKY- SHTERN

The Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies
Northwestern University (NU)
e-mail: yps@northwestern.edu

Ph.D., Brandeis University, 2001 (Modern Jewish History)

Dissertation: “Jews in the Russian Army, 1827—1914”
Adviser: Antony Polonsky. Readers: Michael Stanislawski, Gregory Freeze.
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Moscow University (kandidatskaia diss.;
MGU), 1988
Dissertation: “The Poetics of Gabriel García Márquez”
Adviser: Svetlana Eremina-Piskunova. Readers: Natalia Malinovsky,
Eleazar Meletinsky.
M.A., Philology of German and Romance Languages, Kiev University
(KGU), 1984

Hochschule Bremen (University of Applied Sciences), Advanced German

language course, Oberstufe 1 Certificate, 2013
Intensive studies of the Rabbinics: Yeshivat Ohr Somayach, Israeli
Division, Jerusalem, 1993,
1995, 1996; havruta/continuing studies: with Prof. David Kazhdan, Boston,
1997-2001; with Rabbi Ochs, Boston, 2000-2003; with Rabbi Beider,
Chicago, 2004-2007.
Rothschild Fellow at Hebrew University, 1995/06: Studied with Shaul
Stampfer. Took courses with Yosef
Kaplan and Immanuel Etkes.
Studies in Jewish Paleography, Institute of Judaic Studies, Jerusalem;
certificate, 1993.

The Art of Shifting Contexts

'STANDARD TEXTBOOKS DEFINE UKRAINE as a “land at the edge”

a borderland, yet it took historians quite a while to start using "borderland"
as a critical concept and a research tool, not only as a metaphor. It was only
at the end of the twentieth century that scholars of Eastern Europe begin
exploring Ukraine as a territory claimed by various ethnic, religious, and
ethnonational groups, who crossed its breadth and width, inhabited it,
interacted with one another, and contributed in the long run to its versatile
cultural and historical developments. Their new multi-optic vision of
Ukraine necessitated a foray into the interplay of multicultural, intertwined,
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 Jewish History In Rus’ Ukraine
and increasingly complicated narratives of the various peoples inhabiting
Ukraine in the distant or recent past. This vision of Ukraine as a
multicultural and multiethnic entity was the product of what one might call
the intellectual rebellion of the adherents of V'iacheslav Lypyns’kyi
(1882-1931), one of the founding fathers of Ukrainian nationalism, who
conceptualized independent Ukraine as an Anglo-Saxon-type multiethnic
polity that did not discriminate against any of its constituencies (1).

{My comment PJP,

http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CL
%5CY%5CLypynskyViacheslav.htm }

The revision of Ukrainian-Jewish relations and the emerging Ukrainian-

Jewish dialogue in the postwar era started precisely when the
lypynshchyky, the spiritual heirs of Lypyns 'kyi, argued against the model of
Ukraine put forward by Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973), another founding
father of Ukrainian nationalism. Who envisioned Ukraine as a country ruled
only by representatives of a single titular nationality, ethnic Ukrainians.

{My comment PJP,

http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CD
%5CO%5CDontsovDmytro.htm }

While the multicultural approach generated by Lypyns 'kyi's followers is

slowly but steadily making its way into the mainstream, we still have to deal
with synoptic Dontsov-esque approaches, either narrowly nationalist or
broadly neo-Soviet, privileging only one homogeneous ethnic group. The
"people of Ukraine" or the "Ukrainian people;' understood teleologically,
dating back to the Paleolithic era, and presented as the only, sovereign, and
unique agent of Ukrainian history. {PJP, Teleology is the philosophical
attempt to describe things in terms of the doctrine of design, apparent
purpose, directive principle, or goal in the material world.}

Dontsovshchyna, that is to say, the attempts to create a narrowly

uni-ethnically oriented Ukrainian history, might be a powerful mechanism
of political action, but it is hardly an effective historical tool. So far, the
ethnocentric historiographic narrative has successfully privileged one titular
group at the expense of all others, and produces nothing but biased
scholarship in quite significant quantities (2).

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 Jewish History In Rus’ Ukraine
Ironically, a synoptic ethnocentric approach is not solely a problem
of Ukrainian historiography. Traditional Jewish historical narratives
follow exactly the same model, ignoring the multiple loyalties of Jews
and surrounding peoples, placing Jews at any given moment and at
any historical junction in the epicenter of events, and assuming the
unrelenting homogeneity of the ethnic Other-be it a Pole, a Russian,
or a Ukrainian. Modern-day scholars focused on the Jews in Ukraine
have to deal precisely with this Jewish version of dontsovshchyna, and,
like their Ukrainian colleagues, they seek to explore the historical past
using the multicultural model (as the lypynshchyky did for Ukrainian
scholarship) as a theoretical basis for their research (3).

I could have easily produced a list of new historical studies conducted by

historians of Ukraine that, with a variegated degree of consistency, seek to
integrate various minority accounts, for example, those of the Jews (4),
Karaites (5),
{ PJP Karaites,
http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CK
%5CA%5CKaraites.htm } , the non-Eastern Orthodox sectarians (6),
or the Poles (7), into the grand Ukrainian narrative.

Instead, I will explore recent works by several scholars who have discovered
that Ukraine is and was a multicultural, multi ethnic, and multireligious
borderland, rather than a homogeneous imperial southwestern backwater.
For most of its history, this borderland has been a colonial entity inhabited
by peoples of highly heterogeneous political, economic, cultural, and
religious loyalties and identities, very often in flux, and more often than not
in multiple horizontal interactions with one another. It was definitely not an
independent polity where Russians or Poles ruled over the Jews and where
Ukrainian peasants appeared once every hundred years to rebel against the
former and beat the latter. These scholars help us place not only the Jews of
Ukraine but also Ukraine as a historical entity at the crossroads of cultural,
linguistic, and population exchange. Their observations can be read as a
strong argument in favor of a multicultural model for the study of the
Ukrainian past and-present.

My purpose is to demonstrate how scholars of Jewish history went beyond

the traditional ethnocentric historical narrative, the ways in which they
changed their frame of reference for the discussion of Jews in Ukraine, and
what kind of innovative perspectives they produced once they changed
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contexts. In short, I would like to look at the results of the
recontextualization of Jewish historical developments in Ukraine,
examining quite unpredictable and trailblazing observations of scholars
who placed vexing issues in a nontrivial context.

•••

Where did the Jews of Ukraine come from? We might think that this
distant episode is a minor issue of interest exclusively to a tiny group
of social historians, demographers, geneticists, and genealogists. In
fact, it has long been the focus of scholarly debates among politicians,
political scientists, and historians as a formidable question with
far-reaching geopolitical ramifications. These debates connect this
allegedly insignificant episode to the origins of the first Slavic polity,
the ethnogenesis of the Ashkenazi Jews and their connection to biblical
Jewry, the early beginnings of Ukrainian-Jewish relations, and the
legitimacy of the state of Israel.

In this regard, historians have repeatedly pinpointed the Germanic (or

Ashkenazi) roots of the Ukrainian Jews, and savored the legend of the Jews
who ruled over Khazaria and migrated eastward after the demise of this
nomadic polity that, at the end of the first millennium, controlled the
territories from the Volga to the Dnipro rivers, the Crimea to the Desna
River.

{PJP, Khazars
http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CK
%5CH%5CKhazars.htm }

For centuries, the Khazarian legend and the purportedly undisputable

connection of the Ukrainian Jews to the kingdom of Khazaria suppressed
any scholarly innovations in this field. Mythmakers from Lev Gumilev to
Arthur Koestler to Moshe Zand contributed to the enormous popularity of
the Khazarian legend (8). Existing Hebrew documents apparently
supported it too. The Hebrew-language medieval correspondence between
Hasdai ben Shaprut, a Jewish courtier of one of the rulers of the Spanish
Muslim kingdoms, and King Joseph, the ruler of Khazaria, rarely
questioned by medievalists, cemented the conceptualization of Khazaria as
a Judaic kingdom. This late-ninth- or early-tenth-century Hebrew
epistolary exchange seems to prove that the Khazarian rulers converted to
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Judaism sometime in the eighth century and had the entire country
converted thereafter (9).

Scholars also have multiple testimonies of travelers and missionaries, both

Muslim and Christian, who confirm that Khazaria was a Judaic kingdom.
Found by Norman Golb in the Cairo Geniza, the tenth-century Kyivan letter
illuminating the presence of allegedly Turkic-named Jews among the
Kyivan Jewish elites, again pointed to the Khazarian origin of Jews in
Kyivan Rus ' { PJP the apostrophe over the r’, softens the sound to
something like sh. } , and to the Judaic character of the Khazarians (10).
The courageous attempts of Omeljan Pritsak to question the extent of the
impact of the pre-Caspian Jews on the Khazarian elites and his
well-grounded hypothesis of the multiethnic constituency of Khazarian
Khanate hardly changed this view (11). Despite the absence of
archaeological proof, many still readily conceive of Khazaria as thoroughly
Jewish, of Khazarians as converts to Judaism, of the Khazarian Jews
moving to Kyivan Rus ' once their kingdom was defeated, and of Eastern
European Jews as the heirs of the Khazarians, ninth-century converts to
Judaism.

This legendary connection inspired multiple claims of Euro-Asian

geopolitical mythmakers, who maintained that the Slavs built their first
polity only because they managed to beat the Khazarians (read: the Jews)
and overthrow the Khazarian yoke (read: Jewish oppression). One can find
this interpretation not only in the writings of Alexander Dugin, the Kremlin
court's foremost conservative political philosopher, but also among
modern-day Ukrainian xenophobes and racial anti-Semites (12). This
vision also fostered a no less vociferous radical leftist claim that traces the
Ashkenazi Jews back to the Khazarians that is, to converts to Judaism. If
Ashkenazi Jews came from converted Khazarians, this implies that they
were medieval Jewish parvenus, had no roots in the biblical Holy Land, no
relation to the biblical historical narratives connecting Jews of different
religious and cultural identities, and therefore had no legitimate claim to the
land of Israel.

Recently, three groups of scholars changed the field radically. Moshe Gil, a
foremost Israeli scholar of medieval Islam and Byzantium, suggested
changing the context and examining the evidence. If Ukraine was somehow
related to Khazaria, and Muslim travelers allegedly traversed Khazaria, one
should use the Muslim geopolitical and cultural context, not only the
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Turkish linguistic context (as did Pritsak), and should thus explore
contemporary Arabic documents. By whom, when, and in what words was
the argument conceived that Khazaria was Jewish and the Khazar people
were of the Judaic faith? Gil proved that Christian missionaries had copied
certain passages verbatim from Muslim travelogues, Muslim geographers
who had never traveled beyond Aleppo had copied from one another, and
scholars who made this or similar claims had cut and pasted from one and
the same source. Furthermore, the Ur-text, the oldest text that most likely
drew heavily on firsthand evidence, never claimed that Khazaria was
Judaic. It merely stated that there were groups of Jews residing in the
territory controlled by the Khazarian Khanate (13).

The complete lack of sources testifying to the Judaic character of Khazaria

and generated either in the Abbasyde Caliphate or Byzantium, both at odds
with Khazaria, corroborates this observation by default: Groups of Jews did
live in or migrated through Khazaria, but Khazaria was never a Judaic
polity. Of course, common sense should have led us to a similar conclusion
long ago. If Khazaria had been a nomadic kingdom with quite fuzzy
relations between the center and the periphery and even fuzzier borders,
homogenizing its population through a top-down enforced conversion
would have been a daunting, practically impossible task. As far as the
Hebrew correspondence containing the conversion story goes, one can read
it as a beautiful and very much self-serving medieval legend composed by an
astute representative of the Spanish Jewish elites to uplift himself and his
diaspora group in the eyes of the Iberian Muslim taifa rulers such as abd al-
Rakhman IV. The fact that the legend is based on the pattern of "choice of
faiths" well known to Ukrainian historians, proves its literary, legendary,
and fictitious character only too well. Thus, the unexpected Muslim/Arabic
context allows us to leave the Khazarian legend to the geopolitical
mythmakers and look for the roots of Ukrainian Jews elsewhere.

We may put to rest once and for all the Khazarian legend and return calmly
to the Ashkenazi theory. Here, too, the most fascinating discoveries came
from scholars who advanced a new frame of reference. Alexander Kulik, a
scholar of Church Slavonic apochrypha, discovered traces of
thirteenth-century Jewish communities in Ostrih, Volodymyr-Volynskyi,
and Chernihiv, demonstrated European intellectual ties between these
communities and the Talmudic academies in Europe, and even showed how
a traveling Jewish scholar shared basic knowledge of the Slavic language
with Christian scholars as far away as medieval England (14). Dan Shapira,
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the Iranist and Turkologist, explored the settlement of Greek-speaking Jews
and Turkish-speaking Karaites in Crimean ports such as Caffa, and their
northward migrations to Volhynia and the Duchy of Halych (15). The
specialist in Romance and Germanic philology Cyril Aslanov explained how
the incoming Yiddish-speaking European Jews absorbed the local Slavic -
speaking Jewish population and how this absorption brought about the
luminary presence of Slavic elements in the fusion of Eastern European
Yiddish (16).

The Holy Roman Empire was no less significant for Ukraine than the Arab
Caliphate. Israel Ta-Shma, a scholar of medieval mysticism in the Ashkenazi
realm of Central Europe, suggested considering the origins of Eastern
European Jews in a Germanic frame of reference. Namely, he placed this
question in the context of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, a pietistic religious trend in
Judaism that emerged in an attempt to rationalize theologically and heal the
traumas of the Crusades. Ta-Shma offered not only a new context but also a
new set of documents, called she'elot u-teshuvot (Heb. "questions and
answers,” cf. Lat. responsa) and a new approach to these documents. It
should be recalled that the rabbinic responsa, known in Hebrew as SH"UT
(acronym of she'elot u-teshuvot), are one of the key genres of rabbinic
writings on legal issues. When individuals, communities, communal elites,
or rabbis had to deal with a challenging legal situation they could not solve
themselves, they addressed a high-ranking rabbinic scholar (called a posek),
whom they considered authoritative, who belonged to their own
geopolitical, cultural, and religious realm, with whom they shared their
customs, rites, and trend in Judaism, and whose answer they considered
legally binding. Rabbinic answers are prescriptive documents and, given the
absence of external sources, we can only speculate whether, at the end of the
day, they were implemented or not. The questions, however, were
descriptive, reflecting the situation on the ground, and should be treated as
accurate and unbiased historical testimony with no tradition of forgeries.

Working with the rare thirteenth-century responsa, Ta-Shma discovered a

number of questions that Jews from what is today central Ukraine
forwarded to rabbinic scholars in Regensburg and beyond. Some questions
reflected communal tensions, other addressed specific halakhic (legal)
issues, and all of them proved that Jews in the Ukrainian lands at that time
did not have their own legal authorities of high standing able to tackle the
problems they faced. The rabbis to whom they turned belonged to the
pietistic trend of Hasidei Ashkenaz. They emphasized a frugal introspective
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life, intense prayer, regular ritual ablutions and fasts, and other pietistic and
mystically inspired (inherently Kabbalistic) practices as the path toward
communal redemption.
Ta-Shma suggests insightfully that Jews from several communities in,
Eastern Europe addressed this or that rabbinic scholar from the Hasidei
Ashkenaz circle precisely because they considered those rabbis as belonging
to their own cultural, legal, and theological realm, respected them as
authoritative figures, and considered their answers binding. For the same
reason, for example, Jews from ninth-century medieval Spain or Egypt sent
their questions to the ge’onim, the heads of the Talmudic academies
thousands of miles away in Sura and Pumbedita in Babylonia. Like the Jews
living under the crescent, Eastern European Jews turned to rabbinic leaders
in Regensburg most likely because they previously belonged to the same
geopolitical realm and because they had migrated in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, along with Germanic settlers from Central Europe, to
what we know today as Ukraine. Ta-Shma also suggests considering that
Eastern European piety, mysticism, and what we call today lower-case
hassidism (premid-eighteenth-century pietism) inherited these
characteristics from Hasidei Ashkenaz. Furthermore, he pointed out the
shared cultural, legal, and theological heritage of Central and Eastern
European Jews, the astounding proof of their common Ashkenazi origin and
of the medieval links between Ukraine and the Holy Roman Empire (17).

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

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the complete destruction of the Jewish communities in Ukraine and the
massacre of anywhere between 300,000 and 600,000 Jews (18).

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 (19). What started as a kind of a Praetorian revolt
quickly turned into a peasant rebellion and anticolonialist 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. {PJP, or Buchach / Buczacz
in the middle of the 17th century the Cossacks raided Buczacz during the
Khmel ' nyts 'kyi uprising of 1648. The Jews fought alongside their fellow
townsmen. Armed with rifles and gunpowder and sometimes manning the
cannons, the Jewish population defended the town together with the
Christians. }

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
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depictions 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 (20).

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 (21).

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
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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
(22).

Let us take another three-hundred-year leap, this time into

twentieth-century Ukraine, the history of which has been aggressively
occupied by political historians. True, several important revisions of Jewish
history in twentieth-century Ukraine were made by scholars of political
history, ranging from Taras Hunczak to Alexander Motyl. They explored
various aspects of rising Ukrainian nationalism, the Civil War, the
government of the Directory, Jewish policy in the Ukrainian National
Republic (UNR), and mass violence. Henry Abramson asked a key question:
Was the period from 1917 to 1920 just about Ukraine's short-lived
independence and anti-Jewish pogroms? How about going beyond this
artificial parallel created by political historians?

Using a sociocultural but also an institutional context, Abramson

carefully disassociated the UNR leadership from the perpetrators of
anti-Jewish massacres, particularly in 1919 (23). He reconstructed the
consistent attempts of the Ukrainian government, whatever its scope of
operations and longevity, to incorporate Jewish parties and Jewish
politicians into the Ukrainian government and the Jews as a nation into
the newly established national-cultural autonomy available for ethnic
minorities in Ukraine. What would be the reason for Petliura and
Vynnychenko to instigate anti - Jewish mass violence when they were
working hard to accommodate Jews as individuals in the government
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and as one of the minorities residing in Ukraine? Or, in the same vein; to
print Ukrainian money in Ukrainian but also in Yiddish as one of the state
languages-while attempting to erase the Jewish communities? Yaroslav
Tynchenko added to this picture an important and previously neglected
military context, showing how the troops of the Western Ukrainian National
Republic (ZUNR) incorporated the Jews, establishing two Jewish regiments
(zhydivs' ki kureni) and a machine-gun unit that defended the Western
Ukrainian Republic from the Poles and which were praised by the officers of
Ukrainian descent (24). Several scholars introduced a fascinating artistic
context by reconstructing the activities of groups, such as the Kultur Lige.
This avant-garde institution brought together leading painters, etchers,
poster artists, book illustrators, poets, and writers of Jewish origin, who, in
turn, turned the Kyiv urban space ranging from workers' dorms to city
streets into a feast of cutting-edge artistic experiments with form and color
(25). A young student, Olga Popova, explored the cultural context. In her
groundbreaking thesis she examined the daily periodical of the UNR and
proved that it contributed significantly to the broadening and deepening of
Ukrainian awareness of Jewish issues and showed how the first Ukrainian
literary texts sympathetically portraying the Jews emerged on the Ukrainian
cultural horizon (26).

While these scholars have made a productive start, there is still a lot to be
done to unravel the complexities of the relations between Ukrainian
national democrats and Jews during the brief period of Ukrainian
independence in the late 1910s. At least we know today that the multiple
efforts of Soviet and post-Soviet historians to pin the blame for thousands of
Jewish victims squarely on the leading Ukrainian national revivalists do not
hold water. Quite another question is how and why the tenure of one of the
most philosemitic Ukrainian governments coincided with a new wave of
anti-Jewish atrocities. It is only once we have a better vision of what the
UNR actually controlled territorially and what it claimed it controlled but
where it had no power to enforce its decisions that we will be able to
understand the limits of geographical scope and political capability of
the UNR, which was, to my mind, hardly in control of the city where it was
present, be that Kyiv, Berdychiv, or Kam'ianets- Podilskyi, let alone of the
nominal territory of the republic. Geographical research combined with
political and local history would be the next step in this direction, helping us
to unravel what circumstances triggered and who was responsible for the
mass anti-Jewish atrocities of 1919.

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As elsewhere, the attempts of the new generation of historians of the
twentieth century to move the conversation beyond the political context
were much more significant and far-reaching. Once this shift took place, it
turned out that sociocultural, sociopolitical, socioeconomic, literary, artistic,
and intellectual history contexts produce a very different vision of what the
Jews were all about. While ethnocentric (Dontsov-esque) historical
narratives on both sides persist in concocting stories about Jews
overwhelmingly supporting the Bolsheviks and becoming the oppressors of
the Ukrainian people, if not the perpetrators of the Holodomor, and about
Ukrainians as rabid anti-Semites, if not the perpetrators and bystanders of
the Holocaust, scholars who stepped out of the vicious circle of political
history have advanced far more productive approaches.

Working at the junction of cultural, social, and urban studies, several

scholars, both experts and beginners, have reshaped the field significantly.
Natan Meir discussed Jews, Russians, and Ukrainians contributing to the
creation of the Kyiv urban infrastructure and developing philanthropy,
health care, and social relief institutions in the late Russian Empire (27).
Hillel Kazovsky demonstrated that the Yiddish-centered Kultur Lige society
and the Jewish avant-garde shared the same pool of artistic ideas and trends
with the key artists of the Ukrainian avant-garde." Israel Kleiner explored
the contribution of major Jewish literary and political figures, such as Zeev
Jabotinsky to the defense of the Ukrainian language and culture and the
Ukrainian irridenta in the broadest sense (29).

{ PJP, Jabotinsky, Ze’ev/Zhabotinsky, Vladimir

http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CZ
%5CH%5CZhabotinskyVladimir.htm }

The research of local historians is full of new meanings and discoveries,

inasmuch as it is shaped by the necessity to present a multifaceted approach
to a locality, an approach entailing social, urban, political, cultural,
religious, and linguistic aspects. In most cases but not all, local histories are
cultural by default. David Rechter's new book on the Jews of Bukovyna and
Joshua Shanes' monograph on diaspora Zionism in Galicia have political
issues at their very core, yet they significantly enrich our understanding of
the Jews in the former Austrian territories of today's Ukraine with
formidable examples of Jewish cooperation with Ukrainians in urban
development, mass mobilization, the economy, and minority rights (30).
The most recent ethnographic research on the collective memories of the
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inhabitants of the former Podilian and Volhynian shtetls, predominantly
Russians , and Ukrainians, conducted by the St. Petersburg European
University group of enthusiasts and scholars, and groundbreaking attempts
to reconstruct the visual aspects of Jewish life in Galicia, in its large
urban centers and in the shtetls, undertaken by Lviv-based scholars,
prove that we are witnessing a significant revival in the field of cultural
studies that transcends previous ethnocentric approaches (31).

Research on the sociocultural and literary contexts has been particularly

paradigm-changing. Myroslav Shkandrij meticulously reconstructed Jewish
voices in Ukrainian literature-Jewish imagery created by ethnic Ukrainians
and ethnic Jews who integrated Ukrainian culture. Once he posed the
question of the perception of Jews in the newest Ukrainian literary
endeavors, a long-term scholarly desideratum, it turned out that the
maximum he could do was to make a brief survey of the sources. The pool of
sources turned out to exceed the size of a solid, all-encompassing
monograph, and many more examples supporting Shkandrij's explorations
remained beyond his focus, only because of the magnitude of the theme
(32). Similarly, I myself examined several case studies of Jews who
preferred Ukrainian cultural endeavors, supported Ukrainian national
revivalism, and became Ukrainian writers and poets of some renown. What
I called the "anti-imperial choice”, along with the research of Shkandrij,
opened up a new subfield in the exploration of the Jews of Ukraine,
circumscribed by the context of cultural studies (33).

Bertolt Brecht once observed that there are several obstacles faced by a
person who desires to tell the truth. One of these obstacles is
self-explanatory: in order to tell the truth one needs to know the truth.
By the same token, in order to place the history of the Jews in Ukraine
in a Ukrainian context, one needs to know this context. Attempts to move
the research of the Jews in Ukraine beyond narrow political history do not
guarantee innovative explorations into Ukrainian multiculturalism. Written
by a renowned historian of unquestionable integrity, a book such as The
Erased shows that Jewish historians have a long way to go in order to be
able to master the Ukrainian context, understand its complexities and
nuances, and create a new, solid historical narrative tracing the
millennium-long experience of Jews in the Ukrainian lands." We can invoke
the notion of multiculturalism as often as we like, but we will not produce
new multicultural research if we limit ourselves to sources, say, in Hebrew
and Polish, or in Yiddish and Russian. Our multifaceted vision of the history
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 Jewish History In Rus’ Ukraine
of the Jews in Ukraine requires new sources-not only Polish, Turkish, and
Russian, but also Ukrainian. Of course, this suggestion presumes that
scholars of Ukraine themselves would sometimes bother to glance at
the volumes written by their colleagues who focus on the history of
one of the most sizeable ethnic minorities residing on the Ukrainian
lands, and that they, also, shift their contexts.

Notes
1. For more detail, see my essay "Reconceptualizing the Alien: Jews in
Modern Ukrainian Thought;' Ab Imperio, no. 4 (2003): 519-80; a reworked,
shorter version, "Jews in Ukrainian Thought: Between the 1940s and
the 1990s;' The Ukrainian Quarterly 60, nos. 3-4 (2004): 231-70.
2. Perhaps the monograph best representing this approach is Orest
Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 4th ed. (Toronto, 2009), first published
under the same title and with the same press in 1988. After the
proclamation of Ukraine's independence in 1991, the book was translated
into Ukrainian. With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, this book has
exerted a significant impact on the new Ukraine's historical field.
3. Among historians of Ukraine, Paul Robert Magocsi is perhaps one of
the most consistent adepts of the multicultural paradigm of Ukraine,
which he presents as the history and culture of peoples inhabiting the
lands of Ukraine. See his A History of Ukraine: the Land and Its Peoples,
2nd rev. and expo ed. (Toronto, 2010).
4. Amelia Glaser, Jews and Ukrainians in Russia's Literary Borderlands:
From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop (Evanston, Ill., 2012);
Taras Vozniak, Shtetly Halychyny: intelektual' nyi putivnyk (Lviv, 2010);
-Shirnon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and
Ukrainians, 1919-1945 (Bloomington, Ind., 2002).
5. Volodymyr Shabarovskyi, Karaimy na Volyni: shtrykhy do portretu
zahadkovoho narodu (Lutsk, 2013); Mikhail Kizilov, ed., The Karaites of
Galicia: An Ethnoreligious Minority among the Ashkenazim, the Turks,
and the Slavs, 1772-1945 (Boston, 2008); Dan Shapira, ed., Matsevot
bet ha- 'almin shel ha-yehudim ha-Karaim be-Chufut-Kaleh, Krim
(Jerusalem, 2008); Stefan Gasiorowski, Karaimi w Koronie i na Litwie
w XV-XVIII wieku (Cracow, 2008).
6. See, e.g., Liudmyla Shuhaieva, Pravoslavne sektanstvo v Ukraini:
osoblyvosti transformatsii (Rivne, 2007); Sergei Zhuk, Russia's Lost
Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern
Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917 (Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, 2004).

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 Jewish History In Rus’ Ukraine
7. Iwona Kabziriska-Stawarz, Miedzy pragnieniem idealu a
ryecyzwistoscia: Polacy na Litwie, Bialorusi i Ukrainie w okresie
transjormacji systemowej przelomu XX i XXI stulecia (Warsaw, 2009);
Daniel Beauvois, Pouvoir russe et noblesse polonaise en Ukraine: 1793-1830
(Paris, 2003); idem, La bataille de la terre en Ukraine, 1863-1914: les
Polonais et les conflits socio-ethniques (Lille, 1993).
8. On the geopolitical context of this legend, see Victor Shnirelman, The
Myth of Khazaria and Intellectual Antisemitism in Russia, 1970s-1990s
(Jerusalem, 2002).
9. See, e.g., a popular book based on these myths taken uncritically, Kevin
Alan Brook, The Jews of Khazaria (Lanham, Md., 2009).
10. Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of
the 10th Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982).
11. Omeljan Pritsak, "The Pre-Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe in
Relation to the Khazars, the Rus and the Lithuanians:' in Ukrainian-Jewish
Relations in Historical Perspective, ed. Peter Potichnyj and Howard Aster
(Edmonton, 1988), 3-21.
12. Valerii Lapikura and Nataliia Lapikura, Khazars' ka balada: ne proishlo
i tysiachi rokiv (Kyiv, 2001).
13. Moshe Gil, "Did the Khazars Convert to Judaism?" Revue des Etudes
Juives 170, nos. 3-4 (2011): 429-41.
14. Alexander Kulik, "Jews from Rus ' in Medieval England:' Jewish
Quarterly Review 102, no. 3 (2012): 371-403; idem, "Yehudei rusyah bimei
habeinayim: lemetodologiyah shel hamehkar,' Peamim, nos. 111-12 (2007):
185-208; idem, "Judeo-Greek Legacy in Medieval Rus," Viator, no. 39
(2008): 51-64; idem, "The Earliest Evidence of the Jewish Presence in
Western Rus," Harvard Ukrainian Studies 27, nos. 1-4 (2004-2005):
13-24.
15. Dan Shapira, "The First Jews of Ukraine;' Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry
26 (2014): 65-77.
16. Siril Aslanov, "Izrnenenie iazykovoi identichnosti evreev Vostochnoi
Evropy: k voprosu o formirovanii vostochnogo idisha," in Istoriia
evreiskogo naroda v Rossii, ed. Israel Bartal and Alexander Kulik, 3
vols. (Jerusalem and Moscow: Gesharim/Mosty kultury, 2010-12), 1:
398-417.
18. Israel Ta-Shma, "On the History of the Jews in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-
Century Poland”, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 10 (1997): 287-317.
19. For detailed analysis of the contemporary Slavic and Jewish chronicles
and reflections of the Cossack revolution, see Joel Raba, Between
Remembrance and Denial: The Fate of Jews in the Wars of the Polish
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 Jewish History In Rus’ Ukraine
Commonwealth during the Mid-Seventeenth Century as Shown in Con-
temporary Writings and Historical Research (Boulder, Colo., 1995).
19. For a special journal issue containing their contributions, see Jewish
History 17, no. 2 (2003): 115-39, 141-63, 165-78.
20. Adam Teller, "Killer or Be Killed: Realities and Representations of
Violence in Seventeenth-Century Ukraine,” Early Modern Workshop, vol.
10, Jews and Violence in the Early Modern Period (University of
Maryland, 18-20 August 2013), 1-57; idem, "Jewish Literary Responses to
the Events of 1648-1649 in the Creation of Polish- Jewish Consciousness,”
in Culture Front, ed. Gabriella Safran and Benjamin Nathans (Philadelphia,
2008), 17-45.
21. Moshe Rosman, "Dubno in the Wake of Khmel ' nyts 'kyi,' Jewish
History 17, no. 2 (2003): 239-55.
22. Shaul Stampfer, "What Actually Happened to the Jews of Ukraine in
1648?” Jewish History 178, no. 2 (2003): 207 -27; idem, “Maps of Jewish
Settlement in Ukraine in 1648,” ibid., 107-9.
23. Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews
in Revolutionary Times, 1917-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). The
Ukrainian version of this book has long been a scholarly desideratum,
and while this volume has been in preparation, the Kyiv-based publishing
house "Dukh i Litera" acquired the rights to publish a Ukrainian
translation of Abramson's book.
24. Yaroslav Tynchenko, "The Jewish Formations of Western Ukraine in
the
Civil War;' Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 26 (2014): 197-212.
25. Gennady Estraikh, "The Yiddish Kultur-Lige," in Modernism in Kyiv:
Jubilant Experimentation, ed. Irena R. Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz
(Toronto, 2010), 197-218.
26. Olga Petrova, "The Jewish Question in the Ukrainian Revolution (1919-
1920): A Reappraisal of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations Based on the Daily
Ukraina" (master's thesis, Central European University, 2013).
27. Natan Meir, Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859-1914
(Bloomington,
Ind., 2010).
28. Gillel' Kazovskii [Hillel Kazovsky] , Khudozhniki Kul 'tur-ligi (Moscow,
2003).
29. Izraїl’ Kleiner, Volodymyr (Zeiev) Zhabotyns 'kyi i ukratns 'ke
pytannia (Kyiv, 1995).
30. David Rechter, Becoming Habsburg: The Jews of Austrian Bukovina,
1774-1918 (Oxford, 2013); Joshua Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and
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 Jewish History In Rus’ Ukraine
Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (New York, 2012). See also the
review by Mykhailo Gaukhman in Judaica Ukrainica 2 (2013): 233-40.
31. V. Dymshits, A. L'vov, A. Sokolova, eds., Shtetl: XXI vek: Polevye
issledovaniia (St. Petersburg, 2008); H. Hlembots 'ka and Iu. Biriulev, eds.,
Obrazy znykloho svitu: IevreiskhidnoiHalychyny (seredyna XIX -persha
tretyna XX st.): Kataloh vystavky zi zbirok L 'vivs 'koi halerei mystetstv,
L 'vivs 'koho istorychnoho muzeiu, Muzeiu etnohrafii ta khudozhnioho
promyslu, Muzeiu istorit relihiї pryvatnykh kolektsii (Lviv, 2013); Vozniak,
Shtetly Halychyny.
32. Myroslav Shkandrij, Jews in Ukrainian Literature: Representation
and
Identity (New Haven, 2009).
33. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of
the Ukrainian Jew (New Haven, 2009).
34. Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in
Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton, 2007).

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