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Seminar in Ukrainian Studies

In the Wake of Catastrophe: Jewish Refugees Following the Khmelnytsky Uprising

In this seminar, Adam Teller will examine the experiences of the huge numbers of Jewish refugees created during the 1648 Khmelnytsky uprising in order to understand how Jewish society was able to recover from the terrible losses it suffered during the violence. Based on a range of primary sources from the period, the presentation will allow us to hear Jewish voices describe their experiences and give first-hand accounts of what happened.

Though most previous research has focused on the massacres, we will here look at the survivors, prominently among them the refugees. The focus of the discussion will be the ways in which they managed to overcome the social, economic, legal, cultural, and even psychological challenges that faced them in the post-war years. They did not do this alone. Jewish society was extremely active in devising solutions to all these problems, so helping the returnees reintegrate into Jewish life the best way they could. As a result, the Jews were well placed to return to their economic relations with the all-powerful magnates in the latter part of the century.

It is also to be hoped that examining a refugee crisis from the past will provide us with new perspectives on dealing with those of the present.

Adam Teller, Professor of History and Judaic Studies, Brown University

Adam Teller is Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Brown University, specializing in the history of the Jews in early modern eastern Europe. He has published widely on the economic, social, and cultural history of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. His first monograph, Living Together: The Jewish Quarter of Poznan in the Seventeenth Century, was published in Hebrew by the Magnes Press in Jerusalem in 2003. His second book, Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth Century Lithuania: The Jews on the Radziwill Estates, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the POLIN Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and is on the editorial boards of the journals, POLIN: Studies in Polish Jewry, published in the UK, and Gal-Ed: Journal for the History and Culture of Polish Jews, published in Tel Aviv. His current project deals with the Jewish refugee crisis which developed in the wake of the Khmelnytsky uprising and the subsequent wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Co-sponsored with the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University.