Bogdan Khmelntiski Killed 100,000 Jews in Ukraine

In 1648 the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky led a major uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants against the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Resentment of Polish nobles, who controlled vast estates, and of the Catholic order in a largely Orthodox land fueled the revolt. Jews, who often served as estate managers, leaseholders, and tax collectors for the nobility, were widely associated with that oppressive system.

As the rebellion spread across Ukraine, Jewish communities became deliberate targets of the violence. Towns were sacked and their Jewish inhabitants killed or driven out, while many also suffered as the fighting engulfed the region. Contemporary and later accounts recorded enormous Jewish losses, with traditional estimates often citing figures around 100,000 killed, though modern historians debate the precise scale.

The Khmelnytsky uprising devastated the Jewish population of Ukraine and ranks among the most catastrophic events in early modern Jewish history, remembered with deep mourning in Jewish tradition. Politically, the revolt shattered Polish control over Ukraine and led to the Treaty of Pereyaslav in 1654, by which the Cossacks accepted the protection of the Russian tsar, drawing Ukraine into the Russian orbit.