Selihot ve-Kinot al ha-Gezerot Ra'ot ... Takh ve-Tat (Penetential Prayers and Elegies on the Evil Persecutions ... of Takh ve-Tat [1648-1649]), Shabbetai ha-Kohen, Amsterdam: Immanuel Benveniste, 1651

12mo (5 1/8 x 3¼ in.; 130 x 82 mm). collation: 1-3^{8=24 leaves, title within a border of printer's ornaments; title stained and soiled, dampstain in upper portion of several leaves, lightly browned, top and bottom margins shaved affecting some headlines and quire marks. Antique blindtooled calf, stamped emblem in center of both covers.}

Vinograd, Amsterdam 193; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,  Zakhor, preface to the 1996 ed. and pp. 31-52; David Wachtel, The Ritual and Liturgical Commemoration of Two Medieval Persecutions (MA Thesis), Columbia University, 1995

12mo (5 1/8 x 3 ¼ in.; 130 x 82 mm). collation: 1-38=24 leaves, title within a border of printer's ornaments; title stained and soiled, dampstain in upper portion of several leaves, lightly browned, top and bottom margins shaved affecting some headlines and quire marks. Antique blindtooled calf, stamped emblem in center of both covers.
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In 1648-9, hordes of Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Bogdan Chmielnicki revolted against their Polish overlords and, in tandem, led an assault on the Jews of Poland and Lithuania that resulted in the deaths of many tens of thousands and perhaps as many as 100,000 Jews in what would remain the greatest act of destruction against the Jewish people until the Nazi Holocaust in the twentieth century.  The decimation of Polish and Lithuanian Jewry became known among Jews as the persecutions (gezerot) of tah ve-tat, a name taken from the Hebrew acronyms for the years 5407-5408 in which the massacres took place. The greatest single episode of destruction during this period occurred on the twentieth day of the month of Sivan.

Evidence of communal memory of these horrific events is to be found in the large corpus of liturgical poems or piyyutim, poignant elegies to the victims and martyrs of the attacks and selihot or penitential prayers.  Many of these early poems were written by eyewitnesses or those who heard of the catastrophes firsthand.  The present volume comprises the selihot and kinot composed by the renowned Lithuanian Talmudic commentator and sage, Rabbi Shabbetai ha-Kohen, known as the Shakh. He accepted upon himself and his descendants the twentieth of Sivan in perpetuity as a day of fasting and mourning. In doing so, ha-Kohen instituted a tradition that was accepted by almost all Eastern European Jewry; the fast day of 20 Sivan was commemorated well into the twentieth century.

In his introduction to the present lot, ha-Kohen makes reference to an earlier persecution, a massacre in the French town of Blois in 1171. As a result, it has long been supposed that the widespread tradition of fasting on 20 Sivan, had its origins in that episode and not in the events of 1648-49. However, scholars have recently discovered that the fast was actually instituted contemporarily with the publication of the present work. The supposed establishment of 20 Sivan as a fast day centuries earlier to commemorate the Blois events represented a misreading of several early documents.