A Portrait in Ambivalence

The Case of Natan Hanover and His Chronicle, Yeven metsulah

Adam Teller

IN 1994, YO'EL RABA, a Polish-born Israeli scholar, wrote a comprehensive survey of the historiography surrounding the Jews' fate during the Khmelnytsky uprising, which he called Between Remembrance and Denial. Though written in the State of Israel at the end of the twentieth century, this work of monumental scholarship was firmly in a Jewish historiographical tradition whose roots go back at least to the Middle Ages, because it focused very narrowly on issues of Jewish martyrology. Raba's goal was to see how the fate of the Jews massacred in the uprising was reflected in historical depictions of the events from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. His analysis was given a clearly twentieth-century aspect by his decision to use a nationalist framework to analyze his sources: these were largely divided into Jewish, Polish, or Ukrainian writings, setting up not just comparisons but confrontations between the three.

In fact, Raba framed his whole work around the question of Holocaust denial — dedicating the book "To the memory of the victims of the Holocaust which is denied while the survivors are still alive." In this highly emotive context, what Raba saw as the downplaying of Jewish suffering in writings on the seventeenth century became subsumed in the category of Holocaust denial.

Though contemporary reviews were quick to critique Raba's work for this, new approaches to understanding the events were neither suggested nor developed. It is my goal here to reconsider how the Jews' part in the uprising — and particularly their attitude toward it — developed. In order to do this, I shall look beyond the vivid descriptions of death and destruction in the Jewish historical chronicles composed in the 1650s to the portrayal of Ukrainians, Cossacks, and particularly Bohdan Khmelnytsky himself.

Five short Hebrew chronicles and one "historical song" in Yiddish were published in these years. One other remained in manuscript, to be published only at the end of the nineteenth century. For the most part, these were extremely short texts, focusing almost entirely on the sufferings of the Jews and paying little or no attention to the broader historical context in which they occurred. Two of them — Tsok ha-'itim by Meir of Szczebrzeszyn and Petah teshuvah by Gavriel Schussberg of Rzeszów — contained a certain degree of detail that could shed some light on the larger picture. Only one, however, Yeven metsulah by Natan Neta Hanover of Zaslaw, paid significant attention to the developments in the non-Jewish world that led up to the outbreak of the uprising and shaped its course. I shall, therefore, focus most of my discussion on this text.

Hanover, the author, who fled his hometown in the face of the Cossack assault of summer 1648, joined the stream of Jewish refugees spreading across Europe, passing through the Holy Roman Empire and Amsterdam, and ending up in Italy in 1652. He eventually reached Venice, where he published his chronicle. He was a talented writer, having previously made his living as a preacher, and he put his literary skills to excellent use in his historical chronicle. After completing the text, Hanover seems to have received rabbinical ordination in Italy, since he took up the post of rabbi first in Jassy in 1660, and subsequently in Ungarisch Brod, where he was killed during the Ottoman push to Vienna in 1683.

Yeven metsulah is written in limpid Hebrew prose, eschewing the flowery language beloved of the rabbinic authors of his generation. Though the book quotes from the classical sources of Jewish culture to add depth to its narrative, it refers much more to the Bible, well known from the weekly synagogue readings, than to the complex Talmudic text. As a result, though uneducated Jews who did not know any Hebrew would not have been able to read Yeven metsulah, it was not necessary to be a full-blown Talmudic scholar in order to understand it. This undoubtedly led to its popularity with a relatively wide audience and to as many as four editions before 1800.

Hanover's skill as a writer meant that his prose was of such deceptive simplicity that many generations of historians have taken it as a wholly credible firsthand testimony of events. It is only recently that more critical readings have begun to reveal the levels of artifice in the text, and the literary means he employed to get his messages across.

The book itself is quite short. After an author's foreword, the text is divided into three sections. It opens with an historical introduction, which discusses the political, religious, economic, and military background to the events, starting from the accession of Zygmunt III in 1593. The body of the book focuses largely on the massacres of the Jews in various towns. Structured episodically, descriptions of the strategic and political maneuvering of the Polish and Ukrainian camps are used to connect the various sections, providing some explanation of how the events unfolded. The...