The current rebellion began developing a few years ago due to disputes between Prince Choraczy, general of the Polish army, and a military chief, the ataman, as the Cossacks call them, a certain Bogdan Chmielnicki. This man, also known as Chmiel, communicates, like almost all countryfolk, with the Byzantine church, despite having studied with the Jesuits and, they say, he speaks Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Latin, and came to become Ataman thanks to his raids and ferocity as well as for the immensity of his possessions. His prosperity was such that he ended up inspiring the prince’s envy, who resolved to eliminate him. Because of that, Choraczy confiscated half of Chmiel’s livestock and the Cossack did not protest, but swore to take revenge. The Jews of Zamość say that the ataman’s tactic was to go to the South and alert the Crimean Tartars about the secret intentions of the Polish general, who, he told them, soon aimed to wage war against them. With the Tartars placed on a war footing, Choraczy had to flee, since his forces were very inferior compared to those of his neighbors.
Apprised of the move, the prince put Chmiel in jail and ordered his decapitation for acts of treason. But the Cossacks decided to rescue the ataman. Then Chmiel declared himself in rebellion and, with his pals, organized a great band of poor country folk, more than twenty thousand men, under the banner of a battle against the despotism of the princes and the abuses of their Jewish allies, who had become rich off the work of the countryfolk of the Orthodox faith.
Before throwing themselves into combat against the princes’ armies, Chemiel made an alliance with the king of the Tartars—the khan, they called him—thanks to which they raised a legion of sixty thousand men between them with whom they began their rebellion attacking the army summoned by Choraczy, whom they disbanded. As could be expected, the victors, drunk with success, then unleashed their cruelty against their opponents and carried out a great quantity of decapitations, kidnappings, rapes, and confiscations of goods, from Catholics as well as Jews. To stop the killing, several princes from small Russia decided to make a pact with Chmiel, and came to swear fidelity to the ataman as they had previously sworn to the king.
You can imagine, Maestro, the tension among the people of that city when that news arrived, and more so, when a few days after Purim, Chmiel and his Cossacks began what some of them called a holy war, which, as Chmiel announced, will not abate until they put an end to the exploitation by the parasitic princes and their Jewish front men.
All of the information that I have accumulated since then I have heard in person from some Jews who managed to escape from the cities of Nemirov, Tulczyn, or Polanów and found refuge in Zamosc, where I see myself trapped by the events. At the beginning, as I listened to them, I refused to accept that the barbarities they relayed were real and not a nightmare forged by the confusions of miscommunication … Because the horror that was unleashed at last past 20th of Adar, Shabbat, when Cossacks and Tartars, in numbers surpassing a hundred thousand, approached the city of Nemirov, where they have told me that, in a climate of prosperity, there used to live (and it is not by coincidence that I use the past tense) a very rich and large Jewish community, adorned with the presence of important scholars and scribes. When these Jews learned that an army, larger than they had ever seen, was approaching the city, even when they were unaware of whether they were dealing with Polish troops or mobs of Cossacks and Tartars, they chose to take refuge with their families and wealth in the fortified citadel. Other Jews, less confident, preferred to leave their homes and many of their goods behind to await the development of events far away.
Only when they no longer had any salvation did the Jews of Nemirov come to know that, while they and the princes were confining themselves in the citadel, the ataman Chmiel had sent a group of men to the city to ask the citizens for their help against the Jews responsible for all of their misfortunes. That alliance concluded, the Cossacks, raising Polish flags, approached the walls disguising themselves as men from the king’s army, while the city’s inhabitants announced that those arriving were Polish soldiers and they opened the gates to the citadel.
It was then that, all at once, the Cossacks, the Tartars, and Nemirov’s inhabitants unleashed their hate and thirst for loot and entered in pursuit of the Jews with all possible weapons. They immediately massacred a great number of Hebrew men and raped the women, regardless of age. They say that many young girls, to avoid dishonor, leapt into the cistern providing water to the citadel and drowned to death there. But, when the attackers took over the square, so many men dead already and women raped, that was when the true horror began: the cold and perverse horror of a crime without humanity … Drunk on hate, alcohol, and the desire for revenge, the Cossacks then handed themselves over to carry out the most incredible ways of causing suffering and death. They ripped the skin off of some men and threw the flesh to the dogs; they cut the hands and feet off of others and threw their bodies in the path to the citadel so that the horses would stomp on them until they died; and still more were forced to dig graves, then thrown alive into them and beaten with shovels until they issued their last groan of pain; some others were quartered alive, or slit open like fish and hung in the sun … But every rung on the ladder of cruelty had not yet been covered: they opened the bellies of any women who were pregnant and removed the fetuses; they cut the bellies of others and put cats inside, although, before this, they took the precaution of cutting off their hands so that they could not take out the animals stirring inside of them. Some children were beaten to death or thrown against walls and then roasted in the fire and brought to their mothers to force them to eat them, while their executioners announced, “It’s kosher meat, it’s kosher meat, we bled them first…” According to the rabbi who brought the news to Zamość, there was no way to bring about death that was not used against them. More than six thousand sons of Israel were killed in Nemirov during that bestial orgy of sadism practiced in the name of faith and justice. The most terrible thing is that they were massacred without any one of them offering resistance, since they considered their fall into disgrace a celestial decision.
Many women were taken captive by the Tartars, who take them to their lands as servants, or as wives and concubines, announcing that they can be freed if someone pays a ransom … But while some Cossacks and Tartars participate in executions or rapes, others occupy themselves in seizing the scrolls of the Torah, which were broken apart, to make bags and socks with them. They rolled up the threads of the phylactery in their feet, like trophies. They used the holy books to make walkways on the roads.
As we listened to Samuel’s story, that is the name of the surviving rabbi who arrived in Zamość, the worst is that all of us knew that that massacre, which took place in the holy community of Nemirov, represented just the beginning of a slaughter without any foreseeable end, since the strength of the Cossacks and Tartars could only be stopped by the most impregnable walls and, a long time off, by the presence of a Polish army whose arrival to these lands had not yet been spied. And because I must tell you now that the tragic fate of Nemirov, as we foretold, turns out to be just the prologue of a horror story whose next chapter took place in the city of Tulczyn.
At the same time that Chemiel, whom they have started to call “The Pursuer,” focused on destroying small communities on the banks of the Dnieper River, one of his representatives, known as Divonov, went to Tulczyn with the mission of taking it. When they found out Divonov’s purpose, the two thousand Jews taking refuge in Tulczyn and the Polish princes banded together to fight them, after swearing not to betray one another. They fortified the citadel and with their weapons they took their posts at the walls, at the same time that the Orthodox joined the ranks of the invaders. The Cossacks, meanwhile, loaded up on battering rams: they say it was like a sea of men, thousands upon thousands, who advanced uttering extraordinary shrieks, capable in and of themselves of intimidating the most courageous. But those who were defending the walls of Tulczyn, since they were fighting for their lives, managed to repel them.
In the face of that unexpected resistance, Divonov decided to change tactics. The crafty Cossacks proposed peace to the princes, promising them not only their lives but also that they could keep the Jewish loot. Seeing that the situation was not sustainable for long, the princes accepted the treaty, under the condition that the lives of the Jews would also be administered by them. The Jews, who soon realized the betrayal of which they were the object, decided to resist by force, but the leader of the community gathered them and told them that if the taking of the city was a decision by the Holiest, they had to accept it with resignation: they were not worth more than their brothers in Nemirov, who died as martyrs … Thus, compelled by the rabbi to accept their destiny, or crushed by the evidence that their fate had been decreed by the impossibility of escape, the Jews handed over all of their goods. The princes, satisfied with their earnings, at last opened the doors of the fortress to the Cossacks. The duke who served as the chief of the nobles, a man so fat that he could barely move, told the victors: here you have the city; here is our payment. Immediately, the princes took what was due to them from the arrangement and put the Jews in jail, they said to better protect them.
Three days later, the Cossacks demanded that the princes hand over the prisoners to them and, without thinking much about it, they agreed, since they did not want to make enemies of the invaders. The Cossacks took the Jews to a walled garden and left them there for a while. Among the prisoners, there were several eminent teachers, who exhorted the people to sanctify His name and not change religion under any circumstance, reminding them that the end of time was coming and the salvation of their souls was in their hands. Why did they not incite them to fight for their lives, with sticks, with stones, with their hands? Why the resignation, submission before insurrection? The Cossacks, who knew those sermons, decided to test the Israelites’ moral fortitude and told them that whoever changed their religion would be saved, and the rest would die tortured beyond words. They even announced it three times, but none of those Jews, who had not rebelled, agreed to deny their God. The Cossacks, irritated, entered the garden and, without further delay, began the killing of the defenseless … In just a few hours, they annihilated about one thousand five hundred people, massacring them in the most incredible ways which I will omit mentioning since they are known and the very act of writing them is so painful. Thanks to the intervention of the Tartars, Cossacks left ten rabbis alive and withdrew from the city with the young women, the rabbis, and a part of the booty, mainly the gold and pearls the Israelites had amassed. A few days later, it became known that those rabbis had been saved thanks to a very high ransom that arrived from the rich community of Polanów.
But the Cossacks were annoyed, since, apart from the blood that they so love to see run, they received barely any benefit from taking that city. For it, they broke the pact with the princes, willing to recover the loot. To begin their macabre diversions, they lit the fortress on fire, then took the Jewish loot hoarded by the Catholics and left the torture of the princes for the end. As they so enjoyed, Divonov and his men were merciless with some of them, especially the duke of the city, the same one who had opened the doors to them. They raped the nobleman’s wife and two daughters in front of him, and then amused themselves dishonoring him, until a miller of the Orthodox faith took things into his own hands and, after reminding them of the state of slavery to which he had subjected the poor people of the region, exhibited him nude throughout the city, like a fattened pig, and after flogging him endlessly and sodomizing him with a stick, they decapitated him with a sword right in the middle of the street.
We had just received the news of this massacre when several Jews arrived in Zamość who had escaped from the Cossacks’ incursions on the other side of the Dnieper River, where the events of Nemirov and Tulczyn had repeated themselves. According to those survivors, Chmiel the Pursuer already had an army of five hundred thousand souls and, in fact, controlled all of Little Russia, and at this pace, like the tenth plague, he not only killed Jews but also destroyed churches and tortured the priests. This last piece of news sounded like the trilling of birds in the ears of the Jews, since, when they learned it, the princes decided not to believe again in Chmiel’s pleas for peace, and not to repeat the mistake of Tulczyn that led them to hand over the Jews to their mutual enemy.
After listening to the news coming from the Polish side, I was able to understand in all of its dimensions why the country’s inhabitants were crying over the death of King Wladyslaw IV and felt that the kingdom was like a flock without a shepherd. Perhaps the misfortunes that took place these weeks had to occur for Cardinal Casimir to decide on the intervention by the kingdom’s army and give the order to all the princes to prepare their men and get ready for war, under threat of losing their condition and goods if they refused. The fate of the murdered noblemen of Nemirov and Tulczyn and of the fathers of the Church influenced greatly in taking that position, but I estimate that a reality has also weighed into that as well, as has happened in other known countries, and has brought such evil to the sons of Israel: being the moneylenders to the kingdom. Because, if the Cossacks and the Tartars run away with all of the Jews’ money, this country will be ruined. It is clear that the deaths and fleeing of the Hebrews, in addition to the raids of their goods, would greatly affect life in the kingdom and especially its noblemen and leaders. Would that that money serve as the source of our salvation today rather than the basis of our perdition, as happened to us in Spain.
A few days ago, after we found out about the fate of Tulczyn and other cities on the eastern shore of the Dnieper, the surviving rabbi from Nemirov, who responds to the name of Rabbi Samuel, allowed me to have a talk with him. We sat close to some watchtowers, in the high part of the city. The landscape at our feet seemed to be of insulting beauty to me, so calm in the middle of the panorama of pain this country is experiencing. Summer has arrived with all of its splendor to this region of Little Russia, a territory of immense plains and mighty rivers, where riches sprout from the earth prodigiously, but where injustice, misery, and hunger have been capable of generating hate, fanaticism, and the desire for the cruelest revenge among men.
I conversed with Rabbi Samuel for hours. Ever since I heard him speak at the synagogue, he seemed like a pious man to me. He is a man who feels guilty for having managed to escape with his life while his family was devoured by the fury that destroyed Nemirov. For those reasons, as I spoke to him, I reaffirmed myself in the idea that he could be the suitable person to fulfill a need that had become urgent for me: to confess to someone the true reasons for which I have come to be in these lands from where, I feel it more every day, I will never be able to leave. Unless the Holiest has another plan and allows me to carry out what, learning what I have learned, is now my only purpose: joining the troops of Sabbatai Zevi. Maestro: the barbarism and horror unleashed here have persuaded me that, as certain Kabbalists announce, the end of time could be near and Sabbatai could well be the Anointed, arrived on earth when it moans in pain, like a mother who sees her child die … It is only thus that I can explain to myself that the God of Israel, all-powerful, can allow His children to be the objects of the most inconceivable cruelty. Only if the punishment is part of a cosmic plan that leads to redemption … Isn’t it thus, Lord?
When I set off on my story, the rabbi listened to me silently and finally told me he regretted what had happened to me and that I so easily—according to him—could have avoided it by accepting my mistakes and making a public petition for forgiveness for my confused interpretations of the Law. When I thought of rebutting him, the kindness I had thought I saw in him came to the surface, since he told me that, in his opinion, the mentioned possibility of joining Zevi’s followers, in Palestine, seemed the most pertinent: my personal problems with God could be overcome with that proof of faith. And, to leave me without any options for controversy, he added: after what he had seen in Nemirov, what had happened in the communities along the Dnieper and in Tulczyn, my heresies seemed li
ke such a minor shortcoming that no one should have even noticed them and, in contrast, they should think more about the reasons for which humans are so given to devouring one another.
When the rabbi confided to me that he had chosen to continue his voyage to the North, I asked if he could do me the favor of taking from Zamość and safely delivering a letter that I wanted to reach my Maestro. Then the rabbi asked me something that seemed to make him doubt: “Why do you write all of that to your Maestro and not to your teacher Ben Israel or one of the rabbis in your city? They would better understand what is happening here and could turn it into a lesson for the community.” At first I thought he was right, I even concluded that in truth, I didn’t have a very clear idea of why I wanted to write that letter and, besides, I had chosen you and not, for example, my own father or my beloved Mariam, much less my Hakham. It was at that juncture that I dared to take a further step and removed from the saddlebags with which I carry the ark where I keep your painting, the landscape Keil the Dane gave me, and a pair of my works that I decided to maintain with me because they are especially beloved. Showing him the portraits you made of me, I responded, “Because the Maestro is a man who is capable of painting something like this.” The rabbi took the linen and fell into contemplating it. His silence was so prolonged that I had time to conceive of too many insane notions, the first, that that man was going to accuse me of idolatry for having allowed myself to serve as the model for that painting, and, above all, for preserving it with me. But the response he gave me was an enigmatic relief: “I now understand you,” and he returned the linen to me, to then ask me to show him my own works. Very ashamed, although at the same time with pride, I unfolded the paper on which I had sketched my grandfather and the canvas with Mariam’s face, conscious that I was submitting myself to an inevitable comparison that I would never dare to carry out. With the sketch in which I drew my grandfather in his hands, he asked me about him and I told him a little bit about his life. Lastly, he contemplated the portrait of Mariam Roca, and when he noticed my mood, he told me that he already knew who that young woman was, and began to collect the linens and papers, as he recommended to me that I not be exhibiting them, less still in those times.
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