The Second Wave of Wars

This chapter investigates how the events of the second round of wars caused further waves of Jewish refugees, this time not just within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth but across Europe and Asia. On one level, it could be said that Poland–Lithuania successfully weathered the storm that began with Khmelnytsky in 1648 and ended in the Peace of Andrusów some nineteen years later. However, the price it had paid for the years of war was incredibly high, so getting the country back on its feet was a very complex operation. Poland–Lithuania's Jews, too, had suffered huge losses during the wars, not the least of which was the number of Jews who had been uprooted from their homes and forced to start new lives elsewhere, often in difficult—not to say traumatic—conditions. Beyond that, many of the refugees displaced by this second wave of wars left the Commonwealth never to come back. The chapter then details the experience of these people. It looks first at the refugees in the parts of Lithuania under Russian occupation, then at those in the westerly regions where the Swedish and Polish armies fought it out in the second half of the 1650s.