Ukraine Jewish Migration, Part 2

Jews had lived peacefully in the German states (while they shared a common language, Germany was a set of small kingdoms until unified in 1871 by Bismarck). The northern Jews or Ashkenazim intermarried with Jews expelled from Spain and France (the southern Jews or Sefardim), and with women of Scandinavian origin who converted from paganism to Judaism bringing their blond features to an otherwise dark-skinned people.

Martin Luther, the leader of the Reformation Movement, embraced Jews urging them to convert to his form of Christianity. As Jews rejected his pressure and that of his followers, Luther became a vehement anti-Semite and made their lives miserable. Jews who had lived in these Protestant areas of the German states for centuries migrated eastward to escape the brutality inflicted on them.

The Catholic princes such as the King of Poland and the Prince of Lithuania welcomed them. Those who migrated first were merchants and bankers, the latter providing loans that Catholics were prohibited from advancing because of Church dicta against usury, the former enhancing the treasuries of their respective sponsors.

Later migrants were of a managerial class who nobles employed to oversee their holdings. After losing a dispute over land with lesser nobility, Chmielnicki assailed the nobles representatives, Jews, resulting in the massacres of 1648-49. Beyond his initial target to settle a land dispute, vast settlements of Jews were snuffed out as he rallied the uneducated serfs who attacked, looted, killed and burned any place where they could find their overlords, Jews, mainly in central and eastern Poland, the area claimed by Chmielnicki's Cossacks of to be the free country of Ukraine.

While the death toll was in the thousands and communities (like Pogrebishche) that had existed for over 500 years were made into graveyards, Jews in the western sectors of  Poland survived virtually unscathed. These survivors had many offspring, the youngest of which were forced to leave because there was not enough opportunity for them to prosper. They repopulated the decimated eastern areas of Poland that were later incorporated into the Russian Empire as Russia, Austria and Germany dismembered Poland in the 18th century. This area became known as the Pale of Settlement, an expanded Ukraine.

Poland Lithuania Alliance 1648