The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881

Israel Bartal, Chaya Naor

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780812219074
• eBook ISBN: 9780812200812
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

In the nineteenth century, the largest Jewish community the modern world had known lived in hundreds of towns and shtetls in the territory between the Prussian border of Poland and the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. The period had started with the partition of Poland and the absorption of its territories into the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires; it would end with the first large-scale outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and the imposition in Russia of strong anti-Semitic legislation. In the years between, a traditional society accustomed to an autonomous way of life would be transformed into one much more open to its surrounding cultures, yet much more confident of its own nationalist identity. In The Jews of Eastern Europe, Israel Bartal traces this transformation and finds in it the roots of Jewish modernity.

Chapter 1

The Jews of the Kingdom

The Jews living two hundred years ago in the Pale of Settlement in the western part of the Russian empire and in the eastern districts of the Hapsburg monarchy did not arrive there in the eighteenth century; they were already residing in these areas in large numbers hundreds of years before Russia and Austria annexed them. Although numerous hypotheses exist, some totally legendary and others with some basis in archaeological or literary sources, the beginnings of Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe remain an enigma. Ancient coins engraved with names in Hebrew letters, probably coined by wealthy Jews who supplied financial services to the early kings of Poland, provide the best evidence of the presence of Jews on Polish soil. Scholars of Eastern European Jewish history agree on one point: although there are clear signs that an earlier Jewish settlement existed in Eastern Europe, the Jewish community in Poland grew mainly out of the waves of Jewish immigrants from Germany, and it was the German element that left the most salient cultural and social imprint on the character of the Eastern European community. One can only speak of a continual Jewish presence in Poland from the second half of the thirteenth century. The Jewish society in Poland was a society of immigrants that coalesced into a community over several generations—similar, perhaps, to the way the Jewish community living today in the United States developed. Although for several centuries it was a dynamic society, constantly augmented by waves of immigration, it took a long time to coalesce into a single society. Only over a long period did a cultural character take shape, with traits shared by the entire Jewish population.

What attracted Jews to emigrate from Central Europe to Eastern Europe? What was there in Poland that led Jews to immigrate to that country in large numbers during the Middle Ages and the early modern era, until in the mid-seventeenth century, the largest Jewish community in the world lived there? The explanation, as in every historical instance of immigration, is connected to the places from which the Jews emigrated, as well as with the countries to which they moved. At first, Jews emigrated from Central Europe to the East as part of the overall emigration movement, seeking better economic conditions. As their situation in the cities of Germany worsened, in the wake of persecution and attack, particularly during the great plague in the mid-fourteenth century, the cities of Eastern Europe seemed safer. At the end of the fifteenth century, when relations between Jews and their Christian neighbors in Central and Western Europe were at their worst, hardly any Jews remained in most of the European kingdoms.

After 1500, owing to pogroms and expulsions, nearly all the Jews living in the world were concentrated in two large realms on the eastern and southern margins of Europe—the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. This marginality had an impact on how the special character of Polish Jewry was shaped. There were many similarities between Polish Jewry and the Jews of the Ottoman Empire, the largest Jewish communities at the time when the world stood at the brink of the modern era. The ethnic composition and cultural character of these societies were largely determined by the waves of immigration from Western and Central Europe. In both cases, new immigrants arrived in cities where Jews with a different cultural tradition had been living for several generations. In both the Ottoman Empire and Poland, the culture imported by the new immigrants “swallowed up” the local tradition. In the cities of Greece and Turkey, the Romaniot Jews became “Sephardim.” In Poland and Lithuania, the local Jews, about whose language and culture we have only fragmented information, became “Ash-kenazim.” Since Jewish settlement in Poland was part of the general immigration movement from Germany to Eastern Europe, it bore a German character. The organization of the communities, the immigrants’ legal status, spoken language, and cultural world were linked to their German roots. The live connection with the German heritage was preserved because of the constant movement of population from west to east and because the rabbis who ruled on halakhic matters in Germany continued to maintain their authority many years after the new settlers had left their former homes. In fact, Jewish emigration to the east expanded the geographical boundaries of the community known as the Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora. This diaspora, which made a modest beginning in the communities of southwest Germany, expanded eastward beyond the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire, and in the fifteenth century extended up to the eastern border of Lithuania.

Historians and scholars of Ashkenazi Jewish culture often address the issue of the similarities and disparities between Eastern European Jewry and German Jewry, these two branches of the Jewish diaspora known as the Ashkenazi. The similarities between the two, while they diminished as the immigrants became increasingly alienated from their country of origin, nonetheless remained a significant element in the social and cultural life of Polish Jewry for several centuries. Israel Halpern (1910-71), a scholar of Eastern European Jewry, noted three elements common to Polish and German Jewry:

1. Language: The spoken language is the most striking similarity. One language—Yiddish—was the language of Ashkenazi Jewry from northeastern France, the Alsace region, up to the eastern border of Polish Jewry, which was later a part of the Russian empire. There were, of course, various dialects of Yiddish, which differed in their syntax, grammar, and vocabulary. But within this broad region in which Jews spoke one of the dialects of Yiddish, they were able to communicate in writing and in speech in a language that was understood (albeit at times only partially) by all.

2. Religious Practice: The religious practice known as minhag Ashkenaz (Ashkenazi custom), which originated in the early Jewish communities in the Roman cities in Germany, spread and was also accepted in the Eastern European communities to which Jews immigrated. There were, of course, significant differences between the Ashkenazi custom and the Polish custom, but basically, all the Jews in Eastern Europe followed one religious practice and one form of prayer.

3. Communal Organization: Methods of communal organization provide a social key to an understanding of the life of the Jewish community in Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages and the early modern era. The structure of the Polish Jewish community was similar to that of the German Jewish communities, so that one can find many similarities between the communal organization in the towns of Kraków or Lublin in Poland and in towns like Frankfurt in Germany.¹

Moreover, texts used in the towns of Germany formed the legal basis for the communities’ existence, in the form of the document known as privilegium, granted by the Polish kings to the new settlers. Owing to the similarity and affinity of Polish Jewry to German Jewry in language, religious practice, the form of communal organization, and legal status, we can regard communities shaped by the copious numbers of Jewish immigrants to Eastern Europe as an offshoot of German Ashkenazi Jewry. But over the years, what happened to many other immigration movements happened to the immigrants from Germany. As Polish Jewry grew in number and developed, becoming more socially and culturally creative, it took on more and more singular traits of its own. Further on, we will see how, in later periods, these singular traits also came to denote significant differences between the eastern and western parts of the Ashkenazi diaspora.

The difference between socioeconomic life in the Polish kingdom and in Central Europe greatly influenced the way that the special character of the Polish community was shaped. It was this difference that also brought many Jewish settlers to Eastern Europe. The Jews in Poland, whose numbers greatly increased in the towns and the villages, engaged in a totally different type of economic activity from that of the Jews in Germany. In Central Europe, the economic activity of Jews was linked primarily to moneylending; in Eastern Europe, although at first the Jews did specialize in finances, they became a part of the feudal economy and managed businesses that they leased from the nobility. This was a total departure from what they had experienced in Central Europe. The Jewish town dwellers engaged in a wide variety of commercial and productive areas, running industries that they leased from aristocrats. An alliance of interests was formed with the Polish landowning nobility, who invited the Jews to settle on their lands. The Jews had a colonizing function, taking part in establishing towns in agricultural areas. This process intensified in the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, when the Jews played a significant role in the Polish large-scale settlement project. The magnates (members of families of the upper nobility) invited them to settle in towns established in the southeastern borderland of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom on the fertile lands of the Ukraine. Huge estates were founded in these expansive territories, where grains were grown and exported to the cities of Western and Central Europe. The economic activity of the Jews was integrated into the agricultural economy of the estate structure on different levels, beginning with the supply of services and the sale of products to the serfs in the villages; the purchase of agricultural produce, marketed in the vicinity or shipped to far-off destinations; and the processing of agricultural produce or other natural products, such as lumber and other forest products, areas the Jews engaged in to a great extent. One branch that became a hallmark of Jewish economic activity in the early modern era—the production of alcoholic beverages (beer, mead, and vodka)— clearly attested to the large-scale Jewish involvement in the agricultural economy of the estates in Poland. The new settlement in the eastern areas of Poland attracted Jews from the older, more established communities, where the urban Poles tried to keep them down and limit their economic opportunities.

The Jewish community in Poland, which took shape over several centuries as a society of immigrants, grew in size both demographically and geographically, and at a certain point in the sixteenth century, it became spiritually and religiously self-sufficient. This turning point had a significant impact on the ties between the two parts of the Ashkenazi diaspora. Before then, the halakhic religious authority of German Jewry was still valid for the Jews in Poland, but in the sixteenth century, the center of gravity shifted to the east. At the end of that century, there were at least fifteen talmudic academies (yeshivot) in various towns throughout the Polish kingdom. Talmudic scholarship in the large communities became the central axis in the Ashkenazi religious world and maintained its preeminence until the last days of the independent Polish kingdom. One distinct expression of the change in the status of these two religious centers was the shift in the direction taken by young men seeking to study Torah. Until the mid-sixteenth century, students traveled to study Torah in the communities of Germany; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was almost an accepted norm that Jews of a certain social class in Germany, Bohemia, and Moravia would send their sons to study in Polish yeshivot. These young men, the wandering students of the Ashkenazi world of culture, in many cases traveled to the new country to settle there, joining the flow of immigration from west to east that continued at least until the Cossack revolt of 1648-49, during which the Jews suffered greatly.² This was one more manifestation of the change in status of the immigrant community in Poland, which became stronger and more eminent than the original community from which the new settlers came.

As noted, the Eastern European Jewish community bore a fundamental resemblance to the German Ashkenazi community. It was a religious-ethnic corporation recognized by law and protected by the monarchy. The legal basis for its existence was the royal privilegium granted in the second half of the fourteenth century, which assured the Jews of the king's protection and defined their duties to the royal treasury. This document, which underwent various transformations over time, was still valid in the days of the last king of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. The broad autonomy maintained by the Jews in Eastern Europe for several centuries will be presented in a later chapter of this book as one of the main questions that preoccupied the Jews as well as the authorities when Poland lost its independence: How can a population maintaining a separate, foreign autonomy be integrated into a modern centralized state? The Jewish community was organized along the lines of an oligarchy. A small group of families that held all the political and economic power within the self-ruling autonomy usually occupied the key positions in the community's leadership. Three factors determined membership in the leading elite: property, family lineage, and religious status. Each of these was the subject of examination and evaluation. Property was a major element in the communal taxation system; family connections were meticulously examined in the matchmaking market; and in the traditional society, religious scholarship was translated into titles, such as chaver or morenu, and could be quantitatively assessed and examined through discussion of a halakhic issue. All three of these factors were combined in the Polish Jewish elite, which, early in the modern era, was but a small percentage of the entire Jewish population in the kingdom. Its members had “Torah and wealth dwelling together,” plus family lineage.

The communities were managed by the kahal, a small group of people who possessed these three elements. Members of the kahal held the positions of control and governance in the community, replacing one another periodically through rotation as well as secret elections conducted in a complicated manner. The kahal collected taxes, provided services to members of the community, and supervised their religious, social, and economic activity. The communal leadership enacted and enforced regulations in all walks of life. The communal court deliberated and judged according to Jewish law, and the kahal had the means to enforce and penalize.

Recent studies have highlighted a significant historical feature: the marked connection between the oligarchic Jewish self-rule, on the one hand; and the external ruling systems, on the other. Today it is indisputably evident that the Jewish autonomous organization can be regarded as a well-integrated part of the overall system, not something deviant or exceptional.³ Moreover, a considerable number of the powers enjoyed by the autonomous Jewish community largely rested on the mutuality of interests of the external political forces, namely, the families of the Polish nobility and the families of the Jewish elite who ran the kahal. This situation prevailed even after the last king of Poland was deposed. In the first half of the nineteenth century, many years after the partition of Poland, the ties between the Jewish leaseholders and the owners of the Polish estates were still strong as ever. The Polish Jewish society enjoyed political stability that stemmed from the political and economic interests shared by the Polish elite, the nobility that owned the estates and controlled the lands and means of production, and the families of the Jewish elite. The Jews played a decisive role in operating the means of production in the towns and the estates, and in return enjoyed a broad autonomy, anchored in the Polish political-legal system.

The structure of the Jewish autonomous community differed from one place to another. A detailed comparative study of various communities shows, for example, that the organization of Jewish self-rule in Kraków differed in several respects from that in other cities, such as Pozna

or Lublin. In general, despite the disparity in one detail or another, a network of Jewish communities extended across the large kingdom, drawing its strength from the local communal authority. When the Jewish population increased demographically and expanded geographically, toward the sixteenth century, organizations developed that were supra-communal or regional (va'adei hagalil, provincial diets), as well as nationwide organizations (va'adei ha'aratzot, Councils of the Lands). In the historical consciousness of Eastern European Jewry in modern times, these supra-communal organizations became symbols of a national entity. The Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow (1860-1941) regarded the supra-communal Jewish autonomy as an all-embracing parliamentary structure, a sort of substitute for a state. He regarded the autonomous system with all its elements, from the individual community to the Councils of the Lands, as an expression par excellence of a national entity: “A broad and well-ordered social organization, with communities and associations of communities, and with a complex network of religious, social, and cultural institutions. The national and cultural value of this autonomy was very great. The autonomy provided strength and unity to the outcast nation and, at the same time, gave it culture and laws and educated it in the spirit of discipline and self-rule. The Jew felt that he was a part of a living national body.”⁴ The Councils of the Lands were loosely formed federations of community representatives who drew their strength from below, from the individual local communities. These organizations, which operated separately in the two parts of the kingdom—Poland and Lithuania—were the “Council of the Four Lands,” which operated from the second half of the sixteenth to the second half of the eighteenth century (dissolved in 1764), and in parallel, the va'ad, or Lithuanian Council, which was active during a similar period and was dissolved in 1765.⁵ These bodies functioned as federative parliaments, somewhat like the assemblies of the nobility (the Sejmiki), the consummate expression of that class's political power. At the councils, which were convened in several of the major cities for a brief period, elected representatives of the main communities in the kingdom met. According to Israel Halpern's estimates, only 1.08 percent of the Jewish population in Poland participated in electing the leadership of the national organization, and fewer (0.7 percent) voted in the elections for the Lithuanian leadership. In other words, only a very small segment of Polish Jewry (which, according to the official count in 1765, numbered about 590,000) took an active part in this supra-communal political system.⁶

Why were these supra-communal organizations founded, and what was their true function, beyond the myths and national images created later? From the standpoint of the Polish state, the councils served the Polish government as bodies that collected Jewish taxes.⁷ The legal basis for the existence of Jews in Poland, the privilegia previously mentioned, granted by the kings of Poland, defined their status as “slaves of the royal treasury.” As such, the Jews of Poland were required to pay a tax to the royal treasury. This tax, imposed according to the number of persons (poll tax), was to be collected from every Jewish adult throughout the kingdom. Since someone had to organize the method by which the burden of collecting taxes would be divided among the various communities, these supra-communal bodies set tax quotas that were imposed on the communities. They did not deal with the actual collection of taxes but only with dividing the taxation amounts into portions (known as sechumot), using a complicated key that was the topic of fierce debates and endless quarrels throughout the existence of these councils, quarrels that did not end even after the councils were abolished. The councils were recognized by the Polish government solely as bodies responsible for apportioning the burden of taxation among the communities. As far as the Polish government was concerned, the councils decided how much each individual community would collect from the residents in its town and transfer to the royal treasury; the government showed no interest in whether one Jew paid less and another paid more. The treasury expected to receive a certain total sum, fixed by the Polish parliament, the Sejm.

However, the supra-communal councils, which had not received any legal recognition beyond their function of collecting taxes, became, from an internal standpoint, the coordinating body of Jewish communal activity. They arranged various matters that needed to be coordinated between communities, enacting regulations on joint economic affairs, such as the handling of bankrupts who fled their town for another community. They dealt with the copyrights of book publishers, approved the printing of new books, and intervened in religious matters that were outside the purview of the individual community. When religious movements appeared in Poland that threatened the accepted religious order, the councils took a stand ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Jews of the Kingdom
• 2. The Partitions of Poland: The End of the Old Order, 1772-1795
• 3. Towns and Cities: Society and Economy, 1795-1863
• 4. Hasidim, Mitnagdim, and Maskilim
• 5. Russia and the Jews
• 6. Austria and the Jews of Galicia, 1772-1848
• 7. “Brotherhood” and Disillusionment: Jews and Poles in the Nineteenth Century
• 8. “My Heart Is in the West”: The Haskalah Movement in Eastern Europe
• 9. “The Days of Springtime”: Czar Alexander II and the Era of Reform
• 10. Between Two Extremes: Radicalism and Orthodoxy
• 11. The Conservative Alliance: Galicia under Emperor Franz Josef
• 12. “The Jew Is Coming!” Anti-Semitism from Right and from Left
• 13. “Storms in the South,” 1881-1882
• Conclusion: Jews as an Ethnic Minority in Eastern Europe
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments