Poland and Lithuania became a joint kingdom in 1386 with the marriage of the Polish queen Jadwiga and the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila, so most of the land that is now Belarus ended up under Polish rule anyway. Although Poland and Lithuania at the time of their union were equal (on paper anyway), in reality Poland, by having perhaps a larger population and more wealth, and a 300-year headstart in being a Catholic Christian country (with the benefits implied), ended up the dominant partner. The Lithuanian elites melted into the Polish aristocracy (szlachta) and lost their Lithuanian identity and culture, and Lithuanian farmers and artisans (who came under the Catholic Church) ended up no better off than other groups of people including Orthodox Eastern Slavs under Polish aristocratic rule.

The Poles kept all these different peoples, Lithuanians, Galicians, Volhynians and others alike, at arm’s length by employing Jews (who could read) to administer their estates and collect taxes from their peasant tenants. It was this situation, with Jews employed as bailiffs and tax collectors, that later became the context for the disastrous and tragic relations between Jews and the peoples ruled by the Polish elites, starting with Bohdan Khmelnitski’s 1648 Cossack rebellion against Polish rule. The rebellion culminated in massacres of thousands of Jewish people in cities and towns by Cossacks and other peoples oppressed by Polish rule, after Polish elites fled and left Jewish people (the majority of whom having had nothing to do with working for their Polish feudal overlords, and who were just as oppressed as the peasants who killed them) in their shtetls to their fate.

The name of Bohdan Khmelnitski was anathema to Jewish people for a long time before World War II because of the huge scale of the violence and killings.

Bear all this in mind, when Poland decides it’s going to resurrect its beloved Commonwealth over western Ukraine.

by: Refinnejenna