Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century by Adam Teller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century by Adam Teller Joshua Teplitsky Adam Teller. Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 408 pp. In Rescue the Surviving Souls, Adam Teller weaves together sources and studies from across central and eastern Europe, the Italian peninsula, and the Ottoman Empire to breathe life into a little-told aspect of early modern Jewish history in the wake of the intense upheavals that followed the Khmelynytski Uprising of 1648–1649 (gezeirot tah ve-tat). The uprisings saw Polish Jews violently assaulted, killed, and subjected to extensive material loss, with a death toll of at least 18,000 lives and some 30,000 Jews forced from their homes. Teller's book picks up where most scholarly treatments end. Focusing not on the dead but rather, as the title proclaims, on the survivors whose lives were thrown into disarray, the book explores the search for solutions undertaken both by victims of the event and by others who offered them solidarity and material relief. The result is a sweeping study that aims to offer fresh paradigms for considering major episodes in early modern Jewish life and for the writing of early modern Jewish history more generally. The book is divided into three parts. The first section deals with the "internally displaced persons" who fled their homes but remained within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Much of this section is engaged with the larger theme of trauma. It begins with a chapter outlining the events of the uprising itself before following the refugees from their homes to the confusion of the roads and into new sites of settlement. Approaching his subject with great humanity, Teller activates fragmentary sources to reconstruct not only the events as they transpired but also the emotional states of individuals. He invokes modern theories of trauma, and even the analysis of dreams, to supplement sources that are often challengingly laconic and partial, and reads individuals' struggles with their own sinfulness and the fulminations of preachers as attempts to exert agency over the most destabilizing of experiences. The second section takes as its geographic focus the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean and explores the larger themes of "Capture, Slavery, and Ransom." It follows the Jews who were sold in the slave trades in the Crimea and Istanbul, examining not only the fate of the Jews in those places but also the different energies undertaken across a large transregional network to raise funds for their redemption. He argues that a transregional network to redeem captives was made possible in the early modern period both on account of a more formal [End Page 423] and structured system of Jewish self-governance and through the emergence of a large Sephardic merchant trading diaspora, with a central hub in Italy. Following the trail of material relief—both its successes and failures—Teller compellingly bridges the histories of Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish subethnicities, arguing for far-reaching forms of transregional support. In so doing, Teller offers fresh perspectives on Jewish collective identification as expressed through widespread cooperation. He argues that "the increased levels of intercommunal cooperation that developed in the wake of the Polish crisis were thus a new phenomenon" (194), a novelty of the period that predated forms of nineteenth-century Jewish solidarity when it is commonly dated. Teller understands these cooperations as an expression of a Jewish collectivity, which he roots not in a vague sense of peoplehood or protonationalism as mid-century Zionist historians posited, arguing instead that they were formatively shaped by normative religious law and its behavioral frameworks, which resulted in a "single socioreligious system accepted by Jewish communities everywhere" (294, also 158–59). Even as he uncovers sprawling connections, Teller textures this coordination with cultural tensions and competition between different stakeholders. In the third and final section, he turns to the fate of the Jews who fled to the Holy Roman Empire and attempted to make new lives for themselves there, attracting the attention of local territorial rulers, straining Jewish communal resources, and clashing with customs and norms. Beyond its vivid depiction of this important...