The Shtetl

New Evaluations

Steven T. Katz

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814748626
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Dating from the sixteenth century, there were hundreds of shtetls—Jewish settlements—in Eastern Europe that were home to a large and compact population that differed from their gentile, mostly peasant neighbors in religion, occupation, language, and culture. The shtetls were different in important respects from previous types of Jewish settlements in the Diaspora in that Jews had rarely formed a majority in the towns in which they lived. This was not true of the shtetl, where Jews sometimes comprised 80% or more of the population. While the shtetl began to decline during the course of the nineteenth century, it was the Holocaust which finally destroyed it.

During the last thirty years the shtetl has attracted a growing amount of scholarly attention, though gross generalizations and romanticized nostalgia continue to affect how the topic is treated. This volume takes a new look at this most important facet of East European Jewish life. It helps to correct the notion that the shtetl was an entirely Jewish world and shows the ways in which the Jews of the shtetl interacted both with their co-religionists and with their gentile neighbors. The volume includes chapters on the history of the shtetl, its myths and realities, politics, gender dynamics, how the shtetl has been (mis)represented in literature, and the changes brought about by World War I and the Holocaust, among others.

Contributors: Samuel Kassow, Gershon David Hundert, Immanuel Etkes, Nehemia Polen, Henry Abramson, Konrad Zielinski, Jeremy Dauber, Israel Bartel, Naomi Seidman, Mikhail Krutikov, Arnold J. Band, Katarzyna Wieclawska, Yehunda Bauer, and Elie Wiesel.

This is the first book published in the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies Series.

1
The Importance of Demography and Patterns of Settlement for an Understanding of the Jewish Experience in East–Central Europe

Gershon David Hundert

If we could travel back to eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, what would we see? One way to attempt to discover the answer to this counterfactual question is to travel there with eighteenth-century tourists from Western Europe and America, who were as foreign to that region as we would be. In their descriptions, the most recurrent observation about Jews in Poland-Lithuania is how numerous Jews were. Nathaniel William Wraxall (1751–1831), an English diplomat and Member of Parliament, visited Warsaw in the late 1770s at a time when Jews constituted no more than 5 percent of the population. Yet he was impressed with the size of the Jewish population and found that “Warsaw is … crowded with Jews, who form a considerable portion of the inhabitants.” Archdeacon William Coxe (1747–1828), perhaps the best known of the English travelers of this period, as well as the most scholarly, asserted that the Jews in Lithuania were even more numerous than those of Poland. Indeed, they

seem to have fixed their headquarters in this duchy. If you ask for an interpreter, they bring you a Jew; if you come to an inn, the landlord is a Jew; if you want post-horses, a Jew procures them, and a Jew drives them; if you wish to purchase, a Jew is your agent: and this is perhaps the only country in Europe where Jews cultivate the ground: in passing through Lithuania, we frequently saw them engaged in sowing, reaping, mowing and other works of Husbandry.¹

John Thomas James (1786–1828), an English academician who took holy orders when he returned from the Continent and eventually became Bishop of Calcutta, offered similar observations but added a plausible explanation:

We now crossed the frontier of Poland, and passed from the land of the credulous to the habitations of the unbelievers, for every house we saw was in the hands of Jews. They seemed, indeed, the only people who were in a state of activity, exercising almost all professions, and engaged in every branch of trade: millers, whitesmiths, saddlers, drivers, ostlers, innkeepers, and sometimes even as farmers. Their constant bustle makes them appear more abundant in number than they really are; and although the streets of Zytomir [Żytomierz; Zhitomir] seemed full of them, we were informed that out of a population of 6,000, not more than one third were of this sect, … we could easily have imagined the contrary to have been the fact.²

In emphasizing Jewish numbers, the travelers were not far from wrong in identifying what must be a central element in any description of East European Jewry. Consideration of demographic history is indispensable to an understanding of the Polish Jewish experience. Their large numbers, their residence mainly in urban settlements, their concentration in the eastern half of the Commonwealth, and their continuing intense expansion, all profoundly affected both their relations with the state and their non-Jewish neighbours, as well as the quality of Jewish culture in East–Central Europe. In this brief chapter I will illustrate how important demography and patterns of settlement are to a proper understanding of the Jewish experience in East–Central Europe in the eighteenth century.

We begin with the term “minority.” It is used to describe groups outside of an imagined homogeneous citizenry in modern nation-states. But it has a set of connotations that are misleading when applied to Jews in the Polish Commonwealth. First of all, identity in pre-modern European society was characterized by a multiplicity of loyalties and memberships. Indeed, there was no majority as we now understand the term. Local patriotism was the order of the day, and there was little sense of belonging to a nation, let alone a nation-state. Even in the eighteenth century, ethnic Poles were not a majority in Poland-Lithuania. In addition to having autocthonous Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians, alongside Tatars and Romany, many of the cities and towns were distinguished by the further ethnic and religious diversity of their residents: Germans, Italians, Scots, Armenians, and Greeks. Therefore, Jews cannot be seen as a minority group when less than 20 percent of the population of the country was urban, and only 40 to 60 percent was ethnically Polish.

More important, however, is the fact that about half of the urban population of Poland-Lithuania in the eighteenth century was Jewish. A significant proportion of Jews lived in towns where there was a Jewish majority, and an even larger proportion can be said to have experienced living in towns where there appeared to be a Jewish majority because so many of the Christian town dwellers had turned to agriculture. A substantial majority of Jews lived in communities of 500 or more.³ Thus, most of the shops and stalls on the marketplace as well as the inns and the taverns would have belonged to Jews. Indeed, as Bishop James observed in Żytomierz, most of the people moving through the streets would have been Jews. In other words, most Jews lived in communities that were quite large enough to support the living of the dailiness of life in a Jewish universe. For all of these reasons, the term “minority group” is utterly inappropriate.

The best estimate of the number of Jews in Poland-Lithuania is the one arrived at by Raphael Mahler based on his analysis of the count carried out in 1764–1765.⁴ The actual count was 429,587 for Poland and 157,649 for Lithuania. After correcting for children under one year of age (6.35%) and under-reporting (20%), Mahler concluded that there were 750,000 Jews (549,000 in Poland, 201,000 in Lithuania) in the Polish Commonwealth in 1764–1766.⁵ While tax records are not the best place to seek the truth about any population, Mahler’s corrected figures are a sound beginning point, and they will be used throughout this chapter.

Mahler’s figures can be used to estimate the number of Jews in earlier periods. Assuming a moderate rate of growth of 1.6% per year, there should have been about 150,000 Jews in Poland-Lithuania in 1660, and 375,000 in 1720.⁶ The Jewish proportion of the total population of the Commonwealth also rose: whereas Jews formed less than .5% of the Polish population in 1500, by 1672, they made up about 3%, and by 1765, about 5.35%. This shows that the Jewish population was increasing at a rate substantially faster than the general rate of growth.⁷ The usual estimate of the Polish population for the last decade before the first partition in 1772 is 14,000,000.⁸ This faster rate of growth was due less to higher birth rates than to lower death rates. That is, the incidence of infant mortality was lower among Jews. Zdzis

aw Budzyński studied 26 sets of data from various years between 1777 and 1799. In 25 of the 26 cases the Jewish death rate was lower, and generally significantly lower, than the rate for Christians.⁹

The Jewish population was expanding more rapidly if compared with the entire Christian population of the country. There can be no single explanation of this phenomenon. The existence of systems of support within the Jewish community undoubtedly helped poorer people in the community to find the shelter and nourishment necessary for nurturing children to a certain extent. The relative stability of the Jewish family, which may well have meant lower incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and relatively lower rates of alcoholism, probably also contributed to lower rates of infant mortality among Jews. Finally, the system of kest in which a newly married couple was billeted at the home usually of the parents of the bride also may have played a role in the lowering of rates of infant mortality. The age at marriage of those who expected to be supported by their parents in this way was generally low. Statistics published by Jacob Goldberg show that early marriage and the practice of kest was characteristic of about 25% of Jews.¹⁰ These were self-evidently the wealthier stratum. The accommodation of additional “mouths to feed” in the form of the young couple and newborn children as well was possible only for the wealthier. That is, it was in the families best able to provide heat, clothing, and food that the age at first birth was likely to have been the lowest.¹¹

The data on the growth in Jewish numbers are incontrovertible. And if this growth was, as we have maintained, largely because of a lower rate of infant mortality, it means that the proportion of young people among Jews was expanding continuously. I have proposed elsewhere that this fact must be integrated into our understanding of the origins and growth of Hasidism.

Keri

More than one scholar has noted that the solution to the problem of how to atone for keri (nocturnal seminal emission) attracted almost obsessive attention during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and beyond.¹² Entire books were devoted to the subject, and it is addressed in virtually every work of moral and ethical guidance published in that period. According to the Zohar—and this position is repeated in the Shulhan arukh—keri was a sin for which there was no atonement. Still, sixteenth-century and later authorities generally maintained that forgiveness was possible if extraordinary acts of penitence were undertaken.¹³

The demographic history of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry is one of the ingredients that must be included in any explanation of the eighteenth-century preoccupation with this matter. As the proportion of young people in the population grew, the number of those for whom the traditional solution of early marriage was available would have diminished. That is, the number of young people with families who could not afford the practice of housing, feeding, and supporting the newly married couple for a number of years would have increased. The enormous popularity of the Kabbalistic understanding of the commandments, the preoccupations with the demons of “the other side,” and the notion of almost inescapable sinfulness, together with the burgeoning number of young males, combined to make keri a central and urgent problem.

Patterns of Settlement

The Jewish population was unevenly distributed. Forty-four percent lived in the southeast (Ruthenia-Ukraine) and 27% in the northeast (Lithuania-Belarus). Seventeen percent lived in the central areas (Ma

opolska), and only about 12% lived in the west (Wielkopolska). That is, more than 70% of the Jewish population of the Polish Commonwealth was concentrated in the eastern half of the country. Five of the six provinces (województwos) with the largest Jewish populations were in the east: Ruś (100,111); Volhynia (50,792); Podolia (38, 384); Troki (33,738); and Wilno (26,977). The sixth was Sandomierz, in the center (42,972). The distribution of larger communities followed the same pattern. Of 44 towns in which more than 1,000 Jews lived, 4 were in the west, 7 in the center, 5 in Lithuania-Belarus, and 27 were in Ruthenia-Ukraine. One, Warsaw, was in Mazovia. That is, the Jewish population became more concentrated as one moved eastward.

Slightly more than two thirds of Jews lived in urban settlements, though many of these were rather small cities. In the second half of the eighteenth century there were just over 2,000 cities in Poland. The remarks of Hubert Vautrin (1742–1822), a Frenchman who resided in Poland for several years, are relevant here.¹⁴ He wrote that he would not use the French term for “city” to designate what the Poles call miasto because the Polish term denotes something that is little more than a village. The word miasto, Vautrin said, has no analogue in French. In sum, the characteristic form of urban settlement in Poland was the small town. Even at the end of the eighteenth century, not more than twelve Polish cities had populati...