Jews being massacred at the hand of Russians & Swedes?

Question

I was watching a documentary about the Jewish history. It mentions that in the 1600s the Cossacks massacred the Jews in Poland. This massacre was followed by another at the hand of the Russians, then the Swedes. Can anybody tell me a brief story of those 2 massacres?

Answer 1

"The entire Jewish population of the Commonwealth in that period (1618 to 1717) has been estimated to be about 200,000[9] to 500,000[10]. Most Jews lived outside Ukraine in the territories unaffected by the uprising, as the Jewish population of Ukraine of that period is estimated at about 50,000.[11] however virtually all sources agree that Jewish Ukrainian communities were devastated by the uprising. It should be noted that in two decades following the uprising the Commonwealth suffered two more major wars (The Deluge and Russo-Polish War (1654–1667); during that period total Jewish casualties are estimated at at least 100,000.[10]
The accounts of contemporaneous Jewish chroniclers of the events tended to emphasize large casualty figures, but they have been reevaluated downwards at the end the 20th century, when modern historiographic methods, particularly from the realm of historical demography, became more widely adopted.[7]. According to Orest Subtelny:
Estimates of Jews killed in the uprising have been greatly exaggerated in the historiography of the event. According to B. Weinryb, the total of losses reported in Jewish sources is 2.4 million to 3.3 million deaths, clearly a fantastic figure. Weinryb cites the calculations of S. Ettinger indicating that about 50,000 Jews lived in the area where the uprising occurred. See B. Weinryb, "The Hebrew Chronicles on Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Cossack-Polish War," Harvard Ukrainian Studies 1 (1977): 153-77. While many of them were killed, Jewish losses did not reach the hair-raising figures that are often associated with the uprising. In the words of Weinryb (The Jews of Poland, 193-4), "The fragmentary information of the period—and to a great extent information from subsequent years, including reports of recovery—clearly indicate that the catastrophe may have not been as great as has been assumed." [12]

Early twentieth-century estimates of Jewish deaths were based on the accounts of the Jewish chroniclers of the time, and tended to be high, ranging from 100,000 to 500,000 or more; in 1916 Simon Dubnow stated:
The losses inflicted on the Jews of Poland during the fatal decade 1648-1658 were appalling. In the reports of the chroniclers, the number of Jewish victims varies between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand. But even if we accept the lower figure, the number of victims still remains colossal, even exceeding the catastrophes of the Crusades and the Black Death in Western Europe. Some seven hundred Jewish communities in Poland had suffered massacre and pillage. In the Ukrainian cities situated on the left banks of the Dnieper, the region populated by Cossacks... the Jewish communities had disappeared almost completely. In the localities on the right shore of the Dneiper or in the Polish part of the Ukraine as well as those of Volhynia and Podolia, wherever Cossacks had made their appearance, only about one tenth of the Jewish population survived.[13]

From the 1960s to the 1980s historians still considered 100,000 a reasonable estimate of the Jews killed, and, according to Edward Flannery, many considered it "a minimum".[14] Max Dimont in Jews, God, and History, first published in 1962, writes "Perhaps as many as 100,000 Jews perished in the decade of this revolution." [15] Edward Flannery, writing in The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, first published in 1965, also gives figures of 100,000 to 500,000, stating "Many historians consider the second figure exaggerated and the first a minimum".[14] Martin Gilbert in his Jewish History Atlas published in 1976 states "Over 100,000 Jews were killed; many more were tortured or ill-treated, others fled..."[16] Many other sources of the time give similar figures.[17]
Although many modern sources still give estimates of Jews killed in the uprising at 100,000[18] or more,[19] others put the numbers killed at between 40,000 and 100,000,[20] and recent academic studies have argued fatalities were even lower.
A 2003 study by Israeli demographer Shaul Stampfer of Hebrew University dedicated solely to the issue of Jewish casualties in the uprising concludes that 18,000-20,000 Jews were killed out of a total population of 40,000.[21] Paul Robert Magocsi states that Jewish chroniclers of the seventeenth century "provide invariably inflated figures with respect to the loss of life among the Jewish population of Ukraine. The numbers range from 60,000-80,000 (Nathan Hannover) to 100,000 (Sabbatai Cohen), but that "[t]he Israeli scholars Shmuel Ettinger and Bernard D. Weinryb speak instead of the 'annihilation of tens of thousands of Jewish lives', and the Ukrainian-American historian Jarowlaw Pelenski narrows the number of Jewish deaths to between 6,000 and 14,000".[22] Orest Subtelny concludes:
Between 1648 and 1656, tens of thousands of Jews—given the lack of reliable data, it is impossible to establish more accurate figures—were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytsky uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history.[23]

"Then the incompetent politics of the elected House of Vasa kings brought the weakened state to its knees, as it was invaded by the Swedish Empire in what became known as The Deluge. The kingdom of Poland proper, which had hitherto suffered but little either from the Chmielnicki Uprising or from the recurring invasion of the Russians and Ottomans, now became the scene of terrible disturbances (1655-1658). Charles X of Sweden, at the head of his victorious army, overran Poland; and soon the whole country, including the cities of Kraków and Warsaw, was in his hands. The Jews of Great and Little Poland found themselves torn between two sides: those of them who were spared by the Swedes were attacked by the Poles, who accused them of aiding the enemy. The Polish general Stefan Czarniecki, in his flight from the Swedes, devastated the whole country through which he passed and treated the Jews without mercy. The Polish partisan detachments treated the non-Polish inhabitants with equal severity. Moreover, the horrors of the war were aggravated by pestilence, and the Jews and townsfolk of the districts of Kalisz, Kraków, Poznań, Piotrkow, and Lublin perished en masse by the sword of the sieging armies and the plague. Certain Jewish writers of the day were convinced that the home and protection which the Jews had for a long time enjoyed in Poland were lost to them forever.
Some of these apprehensions proved to be unfounded. As soon as the disturbances had ceased, the Jews began to return and to rebuild their destroyed homes; and while it is true that the Jewish population of Poland had decreased and become impoverished, it still was more numerous than that of the Jewish colonies in Western Europe. Poland remained as the spiritual center of Judaism; and the remarkable vitality of the Jews manifested itself in the fact that in a comparatively short time they managed to recuperate from their terrible trials. King Jan Kazimierz Vasa (1648-1668) endeavored to compensate the impoverished people for their sufferings and losses, as is evidenced by a decree granting the Jews of Kraków the rights of free trade (1661); and similar privileges, together with temporary exemption from taxes, were granted to many other Jewish communities, which had suffered most from the Russo-Swedish invasion. John Casimir's successor, King Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki (1669-1673), also granted some privileges to the Jews. This was partly due to the efforts of Moses Markowitz, the representative of the Jewish communities of Poland. The heroic King John III Sobieski (1674-1696) was in general very favorably inclined toward the Jews; but the clergy and Catholic nobility deprecated such friendliness toward "infidels."

Answer 2

Its called Pogroms not massacre.
You have this one
http://www.jccaudiobooks.com/shmooze_11_01.htm
and this one
http://www.west.net/~jazz/felshtin/issue3/proskurov.html
and this one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev_Pogroms_(1919)
http://www.jewukr.org/observer/eo2003/page_show_en.php?id=386
and this one
http://www.romanianjewish.org/en/mosteniri_ale_culturii_iudaice_03_13.html
http://www.jewishamerica.com/ja/timeline/span2isr.cfm

There was never a Swedish pogrom to the best of my knowledge
http://www.soc.uu.se/staff/texts/tb_ji_js.html