DAYS OF WRATH

While the improbable symbiosis of the Arabs and the Jews persisted and flourished, despite a few relatively minor inconveniences, caused by overzealous foreigners, the Ashkenazic part of the Judenthum had no ties to the Christian communities among whom they resided, and looked down on them with a thinly disguised contempt. Completely segregated from the goyim, both in their culture and everyday life, they developed a whole different civilization, unlike that of their Sephardic and Middle Eastern brethren, but their vigorous bid at non-assimilation carried a sizable price tag, which was quietly accumulating interest until collection time would come and strike their midnight, again, and again, and again.

My title’s implicit reference to Dies Irae is intended to invite an immediate association with the Christian persecution of the European Jewry. Long before the Holocaust there were several lesser known Holocausts, and this entry intends to bring them back to mind, continuing my probe into the roots of anti-Semitism.

“…If all the seas were ink, and all the reeds pens, and all the people scribes,--- it would not be enough to record all the misfortunes of the Jews in a single year.” Thus wails a gloss to Megilat Taanit, written about the year 1400. By then, the Judenthum had experienced, among other miseries, the horrors of the Crusades, expulsions from England, France, parts of Germany, Switzerland and Italy,  and from several other places where they had resided, and more recently the massacres of 1391 in the wake of the widespread accusations blaming the Jews for the Great Plague. More tribulations came in the form of such Papal Decrees as this one of 1442 by Pope Eugenius IV: “We order that from now on, and for all time, Christians shall not eat or drink with Jews, nor admit them to feasts, nor cohabit with them nor bathe with them. Christians shall not allow Jews to hold civil honors over Christians or exercise public offices in the state.” And then, of course, followed more expulsions, in 1492 from Spain, in 1497 and in 1506 from Portugal, in 1569 from the Papal Territories, and so on and so forth. Some of these woes were clearly the consequences of the Christian bias, but others, manifested in the plunderings of the well-to-do Jewish communities of the Rhineland and other such areas, were motivated by a combination of factors, where the bias, even if present, played a secondary role. Had those plundered Jewish communities been destitute themselves, the hungry and destitute hordes of Christian crusaders would, in all likelihood, have left them alone, finding some prosperous communities to plunder, regardless of their religion or race. It just so happened that their quarry were Jewish, which gave the attackers a properly “Christian” pretext to plunder and kill “the enemies of Christ.”

The worst of all Jewish Holocausts, predating the Nazi Holocaust and in terms of the percentage of victims exceeding it, becoming the worst wholesale slaughter in history, was the Ukrainian Holocaust, perpetrated by the Ukrainian nationalist freedom-fighters under the leadership of Bogdan Khmelnitzky, hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, in the course of a war of liberation from Poland, which started in 1648 and ended in 1654 with Ukraine’s reunification with Russia.

Approximately half-a-million Jews were cut to pieces, burned, impaled, and otherwise butchered, in a lurid display of popular fury against the foreign occupiers, the Poles, and their hated stooges, the Jews, who were employed by the Poles to collect taxes from the populace. Unlike the Poles, whose numbers in the occupied territories were small, there were some three-quarters of a million Jews living in Ukraine, doing their Polish masters’ dirty work for them, while naturally getting prosperous themselves in the process. And so they did end up paying a heavy price for their perks from the job, whose occupational hazard had been slow to show its full force, but when it did, reportedly consumed five hundred thousand of them (two-thirds of the total Jewish population!) in one large hellfire.

For more details on this darkest page of Jewish history one is invited to read Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba, a classic of Russian-Ukrainian literature. The events depicted in Taras Bulba, leading to the wholesale massacre of Ukrainian Jews (only partially shown in Gogol’s novel) have not that much to do with Ukrainian anti-Semitism (Bulba has no qualms receiving help-for-money from the double-dealing Jew Yankel), but everything to do with Ukrainian nationalism, its war of national liberation, and a genuine class struggle, à la Karl Marx, to boot. Still, Bogdan Khmelnitzky has entered Jewish history as a monster just as heinous as Hitler would later prove to be.

As a gloss to the tragic episode described above, this appalling case of a seventeenth-century Holocaust was conveniently and shamelessly disremembered during the George W. Bush Administration, when it came to the American war of independence on behalf of the post-Soviet Ukrainians, led by that great pro-American democrat Mr. Yushchenko, as thousands of colorful portraits of this Jewish enemy par excellence, Bogdan Khmelnitzky, were carried by the cheering crowds of orange demonstrators through the streets of Kiev, the awfully suspicious, and certainly auspicious, symbol of the new Ukrainian nationalism. As if that were not enough, the commanding 19^th-century equestrian monument to Khmelnitzky in the center of Kiev remains up to this day by far the most distinctive landmark of the Ukrainian capital. How many American Jews, I wonder, watching those demonstrations on TV ever realized whose portraits, and whose magnificent statue were staring at them from the screen; in other words, who was that celebrated national hero, along with the bunch of heroic Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators from World War II, of America’s newest freedom-loving friend?