An extremely rare miniature copy of the first edition of this work.

In 1648-1649, hordes of Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Bogdan Chmielnicki in alliance with Crimean Tatars, revolted against their Polish overlords and, in tandem, massacred tens of thousands of Jews in Ukraine, Volhynia, Podolia, and parts of Lithuania in one of the single deadliest onslaughts against the Jewish people before the Nazi Holocaust of the twentieth century. Communal memory of these horrific events is preserved in the corpus of chronicles, selihot (penitential prayers), and kinot ♉(elegies) written by contemporary scholars in the af🎃termath of the destruction.

The present volume comprises the selihot and kinot composed (and in three cases signed in their acrostics) by the renowned Lithuanian halakhist Rabbi Shabbetai ha-Kohen (1621-1662), known as “the Shakh” after the name of his most famous work, Siftei kohen. In his poetic introduction, later titled Megillat eifah and appended to Rabbi Solomon Ibn Verga’s Shevet yehudah (Amsterdam, 1655; ff. 85r-ꦛ88v), the Shakh recounts the unfolding of the persecutions, including details like dates, communities obliterated, and numbers of martyrs, mentioning specific rabbinic victims by name. Toward the end, he writes that he instituted “for myself and my descendants a day of fasting, mourning, eulogizing, and lamentation on the twentieth of the month of Sivan” for three reasons. First, the community of Nemyriv, one of the first to fall to the Cossacks, was attacked that day; second, a group of Jews in the French town of Blois were also massacred on that date in the year 1171; and third, 20 Sivan never coincides with the Sabbath. He goes on to urge other God-fearing individuals to accept upon themselves “to lament on [this day] as over the two destructions [of the Temples in Jerusalem],” including by reciting the liturgy presented here. (In 1650, the leaders of the Council of Four Lands had similarly enacted a fast on 20 Sivan.) Indeed, some Jews in Eastern Europe were apparently still observing this fast well into the twentieth century.

The text of this diminutive volume was reproduced by Benveniste at the end of a folio-format Lithuanian-rite selihot he printed the same year. The present duodecimo edition is highly rare, with known&nb💫sp;copies held by the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana (Amsterdam) and the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Literature

Lajb Fuks and Renate G. Fuks-Mansfeld, Hebrew Typography in the Northern Netherlands[,] 1585-1815: Historical Evaluation and Descriptive Bibliography, vol. 1 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1984), 152, 1🌊75 (no. 229).

Marvin J. Heller, The Seventeenth Century Hebrew Book: An Abridged Thesaurus, vol. 1 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011), 694-695.

Joel Raba, Between Remembrance and Denial: The Fate of the Jews in the Wars of the Polish Commonwealth during the Mid-Seventeenth Century… (Boulder: East European Mon🎉ographs, 1995), 39, 44-45, 48.

Shaul Stampfer, “Gzeyres takh vetat,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe Online, available at: //yivo🍸encyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Gzeyres𒁃_Takh_Vetat.

Vinograd, Amsterdam 193

Da🥃vid Wachtel, “The Ritual and Liturgical Commem⛄oration of Two Medieval Persecutions” (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1995).