Dr. Kohut examines Ukrainian historical depiction of Jews at U of T
by Thomas M. Prymak
May 19, Dr Zenon Kohut, a distinguished Ukrainian historian and director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, spoke at the University of Toronto on "The KhmeInytsky Uprising, The Image of Jews, and the Shaping of Ukrainian Historical Memory". The lecture was well attended with members of the general public and Ukrainian specialists from various southern Ontario universities were present.
Dr Kohut presented a picture of how Jews have been depicted in the Ukrainian historical literature over the course of almost 200 years; that is, from the time of the KhmeInytsky rebellion against the Poles of 1648 to the beginning of the 19h century. Large numbers of Jews were killed in the rebellion and the whole question of Ukrainian-Jewish conflict formed the backdrop to Dr Kohut’s presentation.
Dr Kohut argued that very little attention was paid to Jews by the first Ukrainian writers after the uprising who focused mainly upon Polish oppression, but slowly over the course of many decades more and more attention was given to the Jewish question and especially to the question of the oppression of the Ukrainian peasantry by Jewish lease holders who ran the estates of the Polish landlords in Ukraine. At this time, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, of which Ukraine was a part, was known as a virtual "paradise" for Jews and Jews formed an intermediate class between Polish landlords and Ukrainian peasants.
Dr Kohut zeroed in on the story that Jewish lease holders were so powerful that they even controlled access to the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches and the Ukrainian peasants had to pay the Jews a fee for the use of their own churches; that is, to get "the keys to the churches". Thus arose the scandalous situation of unbelieving Jews controlling the means of salvation which was linked to the dispensation of the sacraments in the Christian churches. Dr Kohut maintained that this story is, at present, not generally known to be documented in contemporary records and only appears very late in the historical literature, the famous History of the Ruthenians (Istoriia Rusov) of the early 19th century being the archetypal account of the negative image of the Jews in Ukrainian historical literature. Ukrainian romantic writers of the 19th century largely borrowed their attitudes from the History of the Ruthenians and from them these attitudes passed into common Ukrainian lore.
Dr Kohut stressed that he was reluctant to say anything about whether the Ukrainian Jews of KhmeInytsky’s time actually controlled the "keys to the churches" but that his research showed that this was a late story which grew over the centuries until it formed a major motif of Ukrainian historical literature about the uprising. Dr Kohut stated that although there was very little contemporary Ukrainian literary evidence to support this story, there does exist some ethnographic evidence (in folk songs, the historical epics called Dumas, and such) but that this was only collected during the early nineteenth century and might not be independent evidence but rather dependent upon the later literary traditions. Dr Kohut seemed to believe that the "keys to the churches" story was taken over by the Ukrainian chroniclers from earlier Polish sources which do tell this story, perhaps in an effort to deflect blame for the uprising from the Polish landlords onto the Jews. The Polish sources are the ones closest to the actual events in question.
Dr Kohut’s lecture was followed by a lively discussion in which the "keys to the churches" question formed the focal point. Marco Carynnyk of Toronto pointed out that the whole "keys to the churches" story formed a narrative "discourse" which operated independently of the historical reality of 1648; while Dr Frank Sysyn of the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research argued that documentation could not be found because the Jewish lease holders were very powerful, having life and death powers over the peasants subject to them, and that records of such minor rents and fees, which were quite common, were seldom kept Thus it was not beyond the realm of possibility that the story was grounded in some historical reality.