Yeven Mezulah

Yeven Mezulah, translated into English as Abyss of Despair, is a 17th-century book by Nathan ben Moses Hannover. It describes the course of the Khmelnytsky Uprising in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from a Jewish perspective. Hannover in this work gives a brief description of the Polish Crown of the time and of the relations between the Poles, Jews and Cossacks, and the causes which led to the uprising. He also gives a vivid picture of Jewish life in Poland and the yeshivot.

Publication history

The book was printed in Hebrew in Venice in 1653. It was translated into Yiddish, into German, and into French by Daniel Levy. Daniel Levy's translation was revised by the historian J. Lelewel, and served as a basis for Meyer Kayserling's German translation. Kostomarov, utilizing Salomon Mandelkern's Russian translation, gives many extracts from it in his Bogdan Chmielnicki.. It was translated into English as Abyss of Despair by Abraham J. Mesch in 1950, reprinted in 1983 with a foreword by William B. Helmreich.

Book title

The author writes in his introduction "I named my book YEVEN M'TZULAH because the words of Psalmist allude to these terrible events.". Before that, in the introduction the author performs some gematria: "TAVATI B'YAVAN M'FZULAH is of the same numerical value as "CHMIEL VKEDAR B'YAVAN YACHDAV CHUBARU, which involves a biblical pun: hinting that he sunk into the mire of Yevanim. Jakob Josef Petuchowski suggests that this pun / allusion was known to the censors of the Russian Empire and therefore Yeven Mezulah was banned.

Modern translations

1912: Polish by Majer Balaban as
1950: English by Abraham Mesch as
1997: Russian by as
2010: Ukrainian by Natalya Yakovenko as Глибокий мул. Хроніка Натана Гановера