These divisions also meant the promotion of “Ukrainianness” created conflict with Ukraine’s colonial rulers, as well as with the inhabitants of the Jewish shtetls who had made their home in the territory of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since the Middle Ages. Khmelnytsky’s uprising included a mass pogrom, during which thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of Jews were murdered. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ukrainians rarely saw the Jews as their most important rivals—Ukrainian poets and intellectuals mostly reserved their anger for Russians and Poles—but the widespread
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