The Golden Age Shtetl

A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781400851164
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

A major history of the shtetl's golden age The shtetl was home to two-thirds of East Europe's Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet it has long been one of the most neglected and misunderstood chapters of the Jewish experience. This book provides the first grassroots social, economic, and cultural history of the shtetl. Challenging popular misconceptions of the shtetl as an isolated, ramshackle Jewish village stricken by poverty and pogroms, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern argues that, in its heyday from the 1790s to the 1840s, the shtetl was a thriving Jewish community as vibrant as any in Europe.Petrovsky-Shtern brings this golden age to life, looking at dozens of shtetls and drawing on a wealth of never-before-used archival material. Illustrated throughout with rare archival photographs and artwork, this nuanced history casts the shtetl in an altogether new light, revealing how its golden age continues to shape the collective memory of the Jewish people today.

CHAPTER ONE

RUSSIA DISCOVERS ITS SHTETL

In 1823, Andrei Glagolev defended his dissertation in literature and decided to take a trip through Europe, which would result in his famous Notes of a Russian Traveler and would bring him fame as a perspicacious ethnographer and geographer. Glagolev did not expect to see much once he left Kiev, yet his discovery of the shtetls in Ukraine fascinated him.

He visited Berdichev with its “eternal Jewish marketplace.” He found Korets with its beautiful palace and Christian Orthodox convent to be as nice as the Russian districts’ central towns. He liked the fortress and the valley around Ostrog and observed that the house in Ostrog that held the first Slavic printing press now belonged to a Jew. In Dubno, he found an impressive Catholic temple, a military depot, the castle of the Polish magnates, and an excellent hotel with top-notch cuisine.¹

Whatever town he visited, he never failed to mention its Polish owners—the Potockis or the Lubomirskis—and to notice whether Russia had or had not already purchased the town from the magnates for its own treasury. Of course, he complained of the importunate Jews who besieged him in Radzivilov, but his encounter with them did not mar his impressions of the towns situated on the Russian lands belonging to Polish nobility where Jews served as translators, commercial intermediaries, and tour guides.

His impressions, appended with a lengthy ethnographic chapter about the Jews, transcended the travelogue genre. His was one of many early discoveries of the shtetl, quite different from the experiences of later Russian travelers, who were supercilious and xenophobic and who called the shtetl muddy and moldy.

NEW IMPERIAL BORDERLANDS

The golden age of the shtetl coincided with the period of Russia’s enlightened despotism and geographic expansion. It was precisely this epoch, from Catherine II through Alexander I, that came to be known as Russia’s golden age. Russian monarchs found themselves in new political and geographic circumstances.

Between 1772 and 1795 Russia, in close cooperation with Austria and Prussia, partitioned Poland and swallowed up 66 percent of its territory—about 400,000 square miles, the entire eastern part of the country with its cities, towns, townlets, villages, valleys, roads, lakes, rivers, forests, and 900,000 to 1,200,000 Jews. Yet in the early 1790s, self-indulgent Russian statesmen showed little if any interest in exploring their new domain—a strange reaction in light of the nascent Polish military resistance, the 1794 Kosciuszko rebellion, and the 1795 third partition of Poland. The newly established administrators sent Catherine II dozens of “Potemkin” reports, which unsurprisingly ignored the reality on the ground and surprisingly neglected the Jews, never before allowed into Russia.

The newly appointed rulers felt they were living in a bucolic utopia. Your Majesty, reported the administrators, in Your territories nothing extraordinary has happened: no fires, epidemics, sicknesses, or accidents. “Everything is calm and peaceful,” assured the Volhynia governor. “Everything is alright here,” penned a state clerk from Podolia. Oh, yes, acknowledged a Kiev official, there was a fire in Kiev’s Laura monastery, a flood near the Dnieper River, and an earthquake in the Kiev region, but this was all local and had no negative impact elsewhere. True, locusts did harm crops here and there but this was really of minor concern.

In passing, a senior clerk mentioned that Count Potocki had purchased weapons—2,000 rifles, 2,000 pistols, 4,000 swords—and the Russian governor allowed him to bring this cargo to his shtetl: after all, Potocki was a magnate, and who could prevent a magnate from purchasing some hunting weapons for personal use? Overall, the Eastern Orthodox peasants were happy, and the Catholic gentry—the Poles—were not, but the optimistic Russian bureaucrats thought they could tame the Polish landlords: they’d make them take an oath of allegiance to the Russian Empire, and their further compliance would be a matter of time.²

More prescient than all her governors put together, Catherine knew that things were not that simple. She presented herself as a female savior who had come to redeem Poland from the vicious political threat emanating from revolutionary France. Not from the Poles in general and not from the Sejm—the Polish parliament—in particular but from the “evil-thinking party” of the “encroaching French Jacobins,” who had “exhausted her patience” and triggered the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. She, Catherine the Great, had come forth to suppress a “hideous rivalry” among Poles and eradicate those “furious and corrupt French rebels who were destroying Poland.”

Thanks to Catherine II, Polish patriots would thus appear in Russian discourse as alien French-inspired revolutionary mutineers, enemies of the supposedly submissive Poland, rather than fighters for Polish independence. Only half a century later did Catherine’s suspicions concerning some disloyal Poles become transformed into full-fledged governmental mistrust of the Russian Poles at large. By the late nineteenth century the regime had transferred this mistrust to the Jews, dismissing their growing loyalty to the Russian crown, and eventually to other borderland ethnicities, including Eastern Orthodox Ukrainians.

Yet before Russia’s rampant late nineteenth-century xenophobia came to dominate politics, Catherine addressed her newly acquired peoples—Jews included—with the same empathy a stepmother would show her foster children. She expected awe, not love. From her subjects she sought mercantilist profit, not cultural homogeneity. She ordered a manifesto declaring the results of the partitions and the incorporation of the Polish lands into Russia. She wanted the territories rearranged: Kiev, Podolia, and Volhynia provinces established in lieu of the old Bracław woewodstvo, districts introduced, and governors appointed.

All Polish crown assets were confiscated for the benefit of the Russian treasury. Combining military candor and political paternalism, Catherine warned her administrators to be “nice” in their treatment of the newly acquired borderland population. “We desire,” she explained, “that these provinces be conquered not only by the power of weapons. Russia will win the hearts of the people in these lands by a kind, righteous, merciful, modest, and humane management.”

Now the Jews found themselves in Catherine’s field of vision, though what would be notoriously called the Russian Jewish question was treated by the tsarina as something quite secondary at best. Like many travelers of that time, she considered the Jews in the Polish private towns as a profitable asset, not a burdensome liability. With her flowery rhetoric, Catherine extended her powerful benevolence to the Jews. She loved the docile and loyal, and abhorred dissenters and rebels. She expected the Jews to be the former, never the latter.

“It goes without saying,” she declared, “that Jewish communities, dwelling in the towns and lands attached to the Russian Empire, will maintain all those freedoms which they now legally enjoy, because Her Majesty’s love of humanism makes it impossible to exclude them from the universal future commonwealth under Her blessed rule, while the Jews in turn as loyal subjects will dwell with appropriate humility and engage in trade and industry according to their skills.”³

With her enlightened paternalism firm in hand, Catherine legalized Jewish residence in some fifteen western provinces of the Russian Empire, the future Pale of Jewish Settlement, or simply the Pale—a turning point in the history of the country previously intolerant of the Jews. Catherine allowed Jews to enroll in the established estates by declaring their status as merchants or townsfolk, thus administratively integrating them into the texture of the empire and extending to them the privileges granted to the Christian merchants and townsfolk. Naturally, the shtetl, the dwelling place of most Jews and the economic headquarters of the new imperial lands, became a focal point of Catherine’s geopolitics.

THE SHTETL OF CONTENTION

Catherine was essentially an enlightened despot, quite often more despotic than enlightened, whose intuition did not always serve her well.⁴ She committed herself to preserving the privileges of the landlords, the Polish gentry in the western borderlands included, and got herself stuck in a trap. Any town with a Polish landlord would find itself under the dual control of the Russian administration and the Polish nobleman. Catherine realized that this double management would be counterproductive and turned to political manipulations.

In 1794, she instructed two borderland governors, Saltykov and Tutolmin, to indiscriminately apply punitive measures to Polish magnates conspiring against Russian authorities. “Take the towns and estates of the secret rebels under state control,” she instructed, “so that they should not turn their income into harmful actions against the Russian state.”⁵ These private landlords’ towns were the shtetls, now becoming a point of contention between the Russian and the Polish elites.

After Catherine, subsequent Russian rulers up to Alexander II had to consider the shtetl problem again and again. In the tone set by the tsarina, they instructed the governors “to do whatever possible to get data and acquire the townlets for the state treasury by purchasing them from the owners.” They would require that the magnates, the richest among Polish nobility, submit reports disclosing their regular income, number of registered taxpaying inhabitants, number of unregistered inhabitants and plans for resettling them, and the sum they would like to get for selling the town.⁶

The Polish landlords were frightened: their privileges were in jeopardy. Most avoided submitting the data. Strutinski, whose case stands for many, feigned naiveté: my town, he wrote, with the surrounding villages costs 1,025,000 złoty—and he did not provide any further information: take it or leave it.⁷ Despite the ambiguous treatment of the Polish magnates, some of whom the imperial regime appointed to supervise the local Russian administration, the internal Russian documents reiterated: we should suppress in the former Polish territories “a false concept of freedom which is nothing but arbitrariness,” and therefore we should take over such and such shtetl aggressively and appropriate it from the Polish magnate.⁸

The more serious the attempts of the Poles to restore independence and separate themselves from Russia, the more decisive the Russian regime became about appropriating the shtetls, which functioned as pawns in Russian relations with Poles. As early as 1795 the Russians introduced state management and established governmental offices, magistrates, post offices, and provincial courts in such shtetls as Tulchin, Yampol, Mogilev, Makhnovka, Lipovets, Bershad, and many others, allocating impressive government funds for the purpose.

Whatever the town’s economic significance, the governors named towns such as Vladimir-Volynsk, known in Jewish cultural memory as Ludmir, and Kamenets-Podolsk, known as Kamnits, as district capitals. Jews could not but benefit from these developments as legal and state institutions moved into the shtetls, previously run and ruled by the whim of a magnate.

Shtetls such as Litin, Khmelnik, and Gaisin, recently withdrawn from Polish noblemen but preserving the entirety of their shtetldike infrastructure, were to become district centers, with a solid presence of Russian power.⁹ To this end, the governor ordered that officials “begin inventory of the assets” of the Polish crown where Russian state institutions, including but not limited to custom houses, courts, and hospitals, could be established.¹⁰ “Very nice buildings could be used for government offices,” wrote the Zhitomir governor with the Polish nobleman’s palace in mind, which he was planning to expropriate.¹¹

As soon as the shtetl emerged as a point of contention between the Poles and Russians, relations between the Russians and Poles came to a head. “It is harmful for the government to have its power shared between the state treasury and the town owner,” argued the Zhitomir military governor in 1839. “We should replace privately-owned central district towns with state-owned ones.” He recommended establishing a commission in charge of what we would call today information hijacking and insisted that the administration “should buy out Ostrog and Starokonstantinov from Karla Jabłonska and Countess Rzewucka.”¹² When Count Lubomirski suggested exchanging his Dubno for a couple of villages, the enlightened Count Kiselev wrote on his petition that the government does not bargain and that Lubomirski should “sell the town—that’s it”!¹³ Even as late as the 1870s, the Russian administration still urged “getting whatever possessions possible from Polish hands.”¹⁴

1.1. Town hall (ratusha) in Kornits.

IA, f. 9, spr. 43, ark. 27. Courtesy of the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Still, by the 1870s, Russia, with all its resolve, had managed to take from the Poles o...