Anatomy of a Genocide Read online

  Hanover recounts several instances in which the Poles betrayed the Jews and handed them over to the rebels to save their own skin. In other instances, Jews fought shoulder to shoulder with Poles on city walls, yet even then their own townsmen at times eventually betrayed them. Hanover wrote, “We wandered from place to place in the towns and villages and we lay on the open streets and even there we could not find rest. We were robbed and crushed, despised and reviled.” In October 1648, having swelled with Jewish refugees from the east, Buczacz also came under siege by the Cossacks: “All the nobles and the Jews stood against them and shot at them with big guns and killed large numbers of the rabble and they could not conquer them.” But “thousands upon thousands of Jews fell victim” to “great epidemics and famine” in the region caused by the war.

  Overall, anywhere between twenty thousand and fifty thousand Jews were slaughtered, a substantial percentage of the Jewish population in the eastern part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The uprising ended in summer 1649 with the creation of a Cossack state from which Poles, Jews, and Jesuits were driven out; five years later the new state was merged with Muscovy, the rising power that became the Russian Empire.3

  Buczacz was peaceful for the next couple of decades. The German tourist Ulrich von Werdum visited in February 1672. “This is a large and very amusing town, situated on mountains and valleys” and “surrounded by a stone wall,” he wrote. The city had “rather good houses, as well as three Roman Catholic churches, and a Russian monastery, now in the hands of the Dominicans. The Armenians also have a church there, and the Jews have a synagogue, as well as a beautiful cemetery, surrounded by a peculiar wall and planted with tall gay trees. The castle is built of stone as are its fortifications. It is situated on a mountain, below which the Strypa River flows, whose waters drive ten or twelve watermills that stand next to each other.” “This picturesque town,” continued von Werdum, “belongs to Lord Potocki” and “was completely burned down at the beginning of the Cossack uprising.” But “it has now been largely rebuilt, especially by the Jews, who are very numerous in this town, as they are in all of Podolia and Rus.”

  A melted seventeenth-century cannon in the Buczacz castle photographed in the early twentieth century. Source: ÖST-KA.AT-OeStA/KA BS I WK Fronten Galizien, 5502.

  Only a few months after von Werdum’s visit, a vast Ottoman army besieged Buczacz. Since the lord of the city, Jan Potocki, was away fighting the Ottomans elsewhere, the city submitted to the invaders after only a brief defense. All of Poland followed soon after. In October 1672 King Michał Wiśniowiecki and Sultan Mehmed IV met in Buczacz and signed a treaty in which Poland was forced to surrender much of its eastern territories to the Turks and pay a hefty yearly tribute to the sultan.4

  In 1675 the Ottomans stormed Buczacz once more, despite preparations by Jan Potocki, who even invited representatives of the Jewish community to discuss the defense of Buczacz and appointed a special superintendent charged with defending the Jewish quarter. The Ottoman general Ibrahim Shyshman, also known as Abraham the Fat, swiftly overcame these defenses and torched the city. While the nobles and some city dwellers escaped into the castle, the Jewish inhabitants were stranded in front of the locked gates and, in Agnon’s words, “were slaughtered by the Turks like rams and sheep and their corpses found their graves in the bellies of wild animals and birds of prey.”

  The castle managed to hold out until the arrival of an army commanded by King Jan III Sobieski of Poland. But the following year, defended this time by Stefan Potocki, Jan’s successor, the castle was finally seized. François-Paulin Dalairac, a French courtier of Sobieski’s, observed that the Ottoman troops had “accomplished a lasting destruction” of the town, “so severe that only debris remained from the walls and the towers, and from the buildings almost nothing could pass for more than a ruin.” As Stanisław Kowalski, a Polish author who lived in Buczacz during the interwar period, recalled in his memoirs, well over two centuries later local legend still maintained that the mighty castle had fallen only because of “the treachery of a woman.” Her ghost, it was said, “appears in the gate of the castle on Resurrection Day, weeping and repenting her sin of betrayal.”5

  For the next few years, the Strypa River intersecting Buczacz served as the border between Poland and the Ottomans. But in 1683 King Sobieski finally liberated Buczacz. Writing his impressions of a visit the following year, Dalairac remarked that Buczacz, “once built of stone and surrounded from all sides by quadrilateral towers,” now contained mostly “ruined and partly burned buildings, and only a few wooden taverns with thatched roofs.” Once “a very considerable and well defended city” of such “vital strategic importance” that “the Sultan Mehmed IV himself came to its siege,” Buczacz had become a mere shadow of its former proud self. As for its inhabitants, Dalairac noted that “round the city a large number of orchards are situated next to a great many springs,” and “the peasants build their huts in accordance with the old Polish custom, next to the gate of the city and under the guns of the castle. Inside the city,” he stressed, “live only Jews and some Poles.”

  Three centuries later Agnon observed that when they “returned to Buczacz” after the Turkish wars, the Jews “found the city desolate and their homes partly destroyed and partly occupied by gentiles. The synagogues and study houses had been uprooted and plowed and one could not tell where they had been.” But Potocki, the lord of Buczacz, gave them land to build a new synagogue “so that they would dwell in his city and be satisfied with their residence, because it was the tradition since the days of his earliest ancestors in Poland that any place where the Jews dwelled saw life.”

  In 1699 Potocki reaffirmed and expanded the privileges granted by his predecessors to the Buczacz Jewish community, thereby creating the basis for Jewish life in the city until the Austrian annexation seven decades later. Jews were allowed to reside and pursue trade and commerce in Buczacz, to produce and sell alcoholic beverages, and to buy Christian homes; they were also protected from municipal courts by Potocki’s assertion of his role as sole arbiter in “petty and major crimes” by Jews, whereas internal community disputes were handled by the rabbinical court; and while market days on the Jewish Sabbath were prohibited, Jews were allowed to “use the path leading from the walls of the church and the house of the priest to their synagogue on the banks of the Strypa River.”6

  In 1728 a massive stone edifice replaced the wooden synagogue on the riverbank. As was typical of “fortress synagogues” in this region, the building was designed to serve as a refuge for the community in times of war and violence, with walls up to fifteen feet thick; in order to prevent it from towering over nearby churches, its floor was dug well below street level. For Agnon it was the beating heart of the community: “As long as Buczacz existed, prayer in it never ceased.” Its opulently decorated interior was illuminated by twelve opaque windows and four bronze chandeliers, shedding light on the murals of flowers and angels, the two iron rams topped by metal palms on either side of the Torah ark, the marble bimah, or reader’s platform, at the center of the hall, and an array of other precious objects.

  The Great Synagogue and the Study House in 1921–22. Source: Beit Hatfutsot, Tel Aviv (Museum of the Jewish People, hereafter BH), 30544, 31266.

  The town’s most spectacular edifices were built by Stefan’s maverick son, Mikołaj Potocki, who started ruling in 1733. He funded the construction of the rococo city hall, the Basilian monastery, an adjacent two-story school, and a monastery church. Even more important, in 1754 Potocki provided an endowment for the Buczacz Collegium, the first secondary school in the city, which also provided housing, meals, and clothing to the students. Within fifteen years the school boasted 343 Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic students studying such fields as theology, history, geography, physics, Latin, and Greek. Jewish students were extremely rare, despite the growing presence of Jews in the city, who numbered over a thousand in 1765.7

  Early twentieth-century views of t
he Basilian monastery and the city hall. Source: AT-OeStA/KA BS I WK Fronten Galizien, 5492, 5541.

  On October 3, 1772, as Barącz describes it, Mikołaj Potocki “watched sadly” as the Austrian “armed forces marched” into “his Buczacz.” The humiliation of occupation made the magnate “completely lose heart,” and the following year he handed over the ownership of Buczacz to his relative Jan Potocki. By the time Mikołaj died a decade later, the newly named province of Galicia, torn off from southeastern Poland and annexed by the Habsburg Empire, had undergone a radical transformation.8

  With a total population of 2.6 million, the province was made up predominantly of serfs, along with 300,000 Christian town dwellers, 200,000 Jews, and 100,000 nobles. Buczacz was now located in Eastern Galicia, where Ruthenians formed the majority.

  The new Austrian rulers sought to restrict the number of Jews in Galicia by imposing a “toleration tax” in 1773, which caused the deportation to Poland of those unable to pay it, as well as by demanding the payment of a fee for official permission to marry. But the authorities also believed that assimilated Jews could act as agents of Germanization; for this purpose, as of 1787 all Jews had to take German family names and the authority of Jewish religious leadership was subjected to centralized government control. The Austrians also tried to transform the socioeconomic condition of Galician Jews from a heavy concentration in trade and handicrafts to farming and agriculture by forbidding those not directly engaged in work on the land from leasing estates, mills, inns, taverns, and breweries. As a result, a third of the Jews in Galicia lost their livelihood and were compelled to move into towns and cities; this only increased Jewish poverty and highlighted their profile as inhabiting a narrow economic niche.

  Nationalities of the Habsburg Empire. Source: A.J.P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918 (Harmond Sworth, UK, 1985), 36–37.

  Under the impact of the French Revolution, the Austrian government granted the Jews “the privileges and rights of other subjects,” but while Jews were allowed to practice their religion and restrictions on marriage were lifted, they were still subjected to the “toleration” and “meat” taxes, to which a tax on candles, essential for Jewish religious rites, was added. Most troubling for Orthodox Jews was the imposition of military service, since recruits could not practice their religious customs. Still, in the long run, thanks partly to evasion of taxes and restrictions, and partly because of greater consideration by the authorities, the dynamic toward equal status for Jews led to substantial improvement in their status.9

  The governmental effort to bring the Jews into the modern world was particularly visible in education. In 1787 Naftali Herz Homberg, a maskil (supporter of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment) from Bohemia, was appointed superintendent of all German-Jewish schools in Galicia. Homberg established 107 “normal” public schools throughout the province, including the Jewish boys’ school in Buczacz that opened its doors in 1788. This radical educational reform aimed at creating a new generation of Jews, fluent in German and in proper Hebrew grammar, morally cultivated, and effectively trained to take up a productive trade. Attendance at the school in Buczacz increased from twenty-eight students in 1788 to two hundred in 1790, a clear sign of growing enthusiasm reflected in Galicia as a whole, where the number of students rose from six thousand to thirty thousand in the same two years.

  The majority of Orthodox Jews in Galicia vehemently opposed this initiative, and Homberg’s educational system was eventually abolished; the school in Buczacz closed down in 1806. But advocacy for Jewish educational reform continued. The moderate Galician maskilim Mendel Lefin and his disciple Joseph Perl, for instance, envisioned adaptation of Jewish customs, laws, and identity to the changing world around them. In 1814 Perl founded his Israelite Free School in Tarnopol (Ukrainian: Ternopil), forty miles north of Buczacz, which provided elementary education to boys and girls, combining Jewish and general subjects taught in “purified German.” Perl’s proposals to institute vocational training were also rejected, and his call to eradicate Hasidic mysticism and obscurantism similarly fell on deaf ears. Perl concluded in 1838 that the popular belief that a Jew “engaged in any kind of non-Jewish knowledge abandons both the Torah and the commandments” caused the ignorant to “hate and pursue” reformed Jews “almost to their deaths.”10

  In 1850 the maskil Moriz Bernstein published a pamphlet in Vienna ascribing Galician Jewry’s “dearth of culture,” “fanaticism,” “dogmatism,” “prejudices,” and “spiritual stunting” to their children’s education. At home, he wrote, children were told that religion was the product of “an endless series of forefathers,” creating in them “a slave mentality” that “dragged human liberty to the grave” and made for the “stark religious barriers that divide people into enemy neighbors and separate humanity into numerous species.” In the traditional cheder, the “filth and uncleanliness” of the classroom had a “most detrimental impact on the physical condition of the child.” The teachers, who “had no knowledge of the world, no social tact, and no understanding of life,” would “doggedly hammer the assigned weekly Biblical chapter into the poor child” and were “often very harsh.” Such schooling was the cause of “all the mental lethargy, all the nonsense and muddled faith, and often all the spiritual ossification, which then accompanied the youth into adult life.” Educated in this manner, lamented Bernstein, the ordinary Galician Jew was still “marked by his long caftan” and “grating jargon,” making “the circle of his cultivated neighbors almost inaccessible” to him. Only by learning “the language of the land” would the Jews of Galicia “feel reconciled with their nationality at home,” build “peaceful relations and even friendships with their neighbors,” and “gradually tear down the partition that separates them.”

  Bernstein believed that the conundrum of the Jew’s existence “as a tolerated person” and a “foreigner,” who could naturally “have but little taste for any nation,” would be resolved by granting the Jews equal rights. Once they could engage in other professions, Bernstein argued, Jews would no longer have to face “the bitter, offensive allegations and vituperative slurs that heartlessly insult” their “sense of morality and rights” and “injure the Jew within them.” After all, “it is not the Jew who is a swindler, a usurer, as he is often called,” but the legal restrictions that compel him to become that “profit-seeking salesman” detested by his neighbors.11

  Emancipation would finally come in 1867, with Emperor Franz Josef’s “constitution.” Jews were labeled a community of faith rather than one of the empire’s ethnic peoples; hence they could not declare Yiddish their “language of daily use,” since language determined nationality. Instead Jews had to declare another language and were counted as members of the nationality that spoke it. Initially the Austrians had hoped this would increase the number of Germans in Galicia, but by 1910 almost all Jews registered as speaking Polish.12

  Emancipation fundamentally changed relations between Jews and their neighbors. In 1848, reeling from the impact of revolutions that swept across Europe, the Habsburg Empire had abolished serfdom in Galicia, and over the next two decades a new nation would emerge in the larger, more populous eastern part of the crown land. Early stirrings of Ruthenian nationalism had preceded the revolution of 1848, led by small groups of priests, seminarians, students, and intellectuals, but before abolition they could not count on popular support. In the aftermath of the revolution, and especially following further reforms in the 1860s, the peasant masses, as the saying went, awoke from their slumber.

  Most of the former serfs remained wretchedly poor, illiterate, and the target of ruthless exploitation by landowners. Ruthenian peasants associated their landlords with Poles and associated merchants, traders, shopkeepers, and tavern owners with Jews. The Ukrainophiles—Narodovtsi, or populists—who propagated the notion of a distinct Ruthenian-Ukrainian nationality and language, articulated best the political implications of these socioeconomic realities; they also reached growing numbers of
people as literacy gradually spread with the introduction of village schools and peasants began reading newspapers. Helped by the Habsburg Empire’s tolerant attitude toward nationalism, and by speaking directly to the peasants’ concerns in their own words, the Narodovtsi became increasingly dominant.

  Emancipation’s lifting of restrictions on occupation and residence enabled Jews to return to the countryside just as rural Ruthenians were being nationalized through reading clubs and political rhetoric. Accompanied by the shift of the feudal system to a money economy, the growing presence and economic role of Jews in the villages created a popular sense of material exploitation and cultural decimation. Jewish moneylenders, shop and tavern keepers, cattle dealers, estate and mill leasers or owners were all presented as fleecing the ignorant peasants, tricking them into alcohol and tobacco addiction, lending them money at cutthroat rates, and retarding the development of a healthy Ruthenian nation. Indeed anti-Jewish comments in the new Ruthenian press soon surpassed attacks on Polish landlords.13

  The Ruthenian newspaper Batkivshchyna (Fatherland), launched in 1879 by the national-populist Prosvita (Enlightenment) society, reflected such sentiments in a special section dedicated to reports by local activists in Galician villages and towns. One report spoke of “villages where out of a hundred households it is hard to find a single landed peasant who is not in debt—to the Jews, of course.” Another report asserted that once a peasant borrows money from a Jew he “can’t get the Jew off his back; he pays and works off the debt, but still ends up losing his land.” This also meant, one correspondent wrote, that “our own Ruthenian way of life is dying out; in its place, bad customs from the outside are being introduced.” The American etcher, lithographer, and writer Joseph Pennell shared the view that the Jews were destroying rural cultures, concluding from his European travels in 1892 that “the average Jew all over the southeastern part of the Continent is doing his best to crush out all artistic sense in the peasants by supplanting their really good handiwork with the vilest machine-made trash that he can procure.”14