The Abyss of Despair

The Abyss of Despair: The Khmelnytsky Massacres

In the summer of 1648, the world of East European Jewry was destroyed in a single season. Cossack forces under Bohdan Khmelnytsky swept through the Ukrainian borderlands, burning the taverns and estate offices of the arenda economy, massacring the Jewish communities of Nemyriv, Tulczyn, and dozens of smaller towns, and setting in motion a civilisational catastrophe whose consequences shaped the Jewish world for the next four centuries.

The Abyss of Despair is the first comprehensive narrative history of the Gezeirot Tach V'Tat, the Evil Decrees of 1648 and 1649, and their long aftermath. It traces the catastrophe from its roots in the exploitative colonial economy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, through the military collapse that made mass violence possible, to the global refugee crisis that followed, the extraordinary philanthropic mobilisation of the Istanbul Jewish community, and the halakhic genius of scholars who rebuilt Jewish legal life in the ruins. It follows the spiritual shockwaves outward, through the Lurianic Kabbalah that gave the suffering its meaning, the messianic fever of the Sabbatean movement, and the Hasidic revolution that eventually addressed the wound the catastrophe had opened.

Drawing on the full range of Hebrew chronicles, demographic scholarship, and the latest revisionist historiography, this is the definitive account of the catastrophe that made the modern Jewish world