A groundbreaking examination of a little-known but defining episode in early modern Jewish history
A refugee crisis of huge proportions erupted as a result of the mid-seventeenth-century wars in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Tens of thousands of Jews fled their homes, or were captured and trafficked across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Rescue the Surviving Souls is the first book to examine this horrific moment of displacement and flight, and to assess its social, economic, religious, cultural, and psychological consequences. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in twelve languages, Adam Teller traces the entire course of the crisis, shedding fresh light on the refugee experience and the various relief strategies developed by the major Jewish centers of the day.
Teller pays particular attention to those thousands of Jews sent for sale on the slave markets of Istanbul and the extensive transregional Jewish economic network that coalesced to ransom them. He also explores how Jewish communities rallied to support the refugees in central and western Europe, as well as in Poland-Lithuania, doing everything possible to help them overcome their traumatic experiences and rebuild their lives.
Rescue the Surviving Souls offers an intimate study of an international refugee crisis, from outbreak to resolution, that is profoundly relevant today.
Nonfiction
Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century
January 25, 2020
Discussion Questions
Rescue the Surviving Souls throws us back to a decisive moment in the history of the Jewish people. In the mid-seventeenth century, wars and pogroms in Eastern Europe left thousands of Jews dead and caused the displacement of tens of thousands more. Many of the Jewish refugees fled westwards in what would become a pattern in modern Jewish history — earlier migrations tended to move toward the east while other Jews found themselves in shackles, transported to the slave market of Constantinople. With exceptional erudition, penetrating intelligence, and sparkling prose, Adam Teller depicts this horrendous moment in all of its complexity: as a moment of death but also of new life; disruption and connection; and senseless violence but also precious moments of human sympathy. Based on research in dozens of archives and almost as many languages, Rescue the Surviving Souls is a tour de force of historical writing: it is at once compulsively readable and scholarly to a fault, and it connects, in a way rarely if ever seen before, histories of East and West, Jews and non-Jews, what happened many centuries ago in a faraway country and what is still happening in our world.
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