Nancy Sinkoff, In the Podolian Steppe, (excerpt)
In: Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands, Brown Judaic Studies, 2004.
Nancy Sinkoff is Director, Center for European Studies and Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers,
The State University of New Jersey.
http://jewishstudies.rutgers.edu/faculty/core-faculty-information/nancy-sinkoff
In this excerpt the author gives a concise description of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as well as the origins of the Jewish
migration into the region. The symbiotic relationship between the Jewish community and its Noble patrons, focusing particularly on
the economic nexus between the two groups, is then covered.
Thanks are due to the author for her permission.
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chapter one
IN THE PODOLIAN STEPPE
The contents [of Mendel Lefin’s Der ershter khosed (The First Hasid)] are
obvious from the title. It investigates the origins of Hasidism, which was
rooted in the cities of Podolia from the very beginning. Who knows
what we lack in losing this book? He undoubtedly informed us truthfully
[about Hasidism] because he was its contemporary, both in time and
place.
1
Abraham Baer Gottlober (1885)
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
In 1569, in an act of state known as the Union of Lublin, the Kingdom of
Poland and the Duchy of Lithuania came together to form the Polish-Lithu-
anian Commonwealth. The new state was one of the largest in Continental
Europe, stretching from the Dvina in the north to the Black Sea in the south
and from beyond the Dniepr in the east to Silesia and West Prussia in the
west. The two parts of the Commonwealth shared a common king, parlia-
ment (Sejm), political structure, and foreign policy, but had distinct law
codes, armies, and administrations. The Commonwealth’s republicanism was
unique in Europe, but severely delimited by the social structure of the state,
the majority of whose denizens were peasants. Known as the “Noble Repub-
lic,” the Commonwealth boasted one of the largest noble classes in Europe.
Free from taxation, with almost unrestrained power in the Polish Sejm to
enact legislation and elect the king, the Polish szlachta (nobility) enjoyed a
high level of political rights compared to their noble peers in the rest of
Europe. The Polish nobility regarded itself as descendants of a race of
“heroic Sarmatians” who had defeated Rome. Central to their identity was an
assumption of national uniqueness; believing the Polish-Lithuanian Com-
monwealth to be the apotheosis of liberty, the szlachta defined themselves in
opposition to other European nobilities and stubbornly mythologized their
liberties, privileges, religion, culture, and economic structure. They gave
pride of place to their independence from the Polish king.
2
Economically,
1
Emphasis in the original. Abraham Baer Gottlober, “R. Isaac Baer Levinsohn and His
Time–Memoirs of the History of the Russian-Jewish Haskalah,” He’asif (Warsaw, 1885), 7.
Cited by Avraham Rubinstein in [Joseph Perl], Über das Wesen der Sekte Chassidim (ed. Avra-
ham Rubinstein; Jerusalem: Publications of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities,
1977), 5, footnote 28.
2
The nobility alone had a voice in the Sejm; clergy, burghers, and peasants had no repre-
in the podolian steppe 15
the nobility was similarly empowered, although the greatest wealth was con-
centrated in the hands of about twenty magnate families, and not distributed
equally among the szlachta. For example, in the 1770s, 1.9 percent of the
szlachta controlled 75 percent of the nobles’ wealth in Lithuania. The eastern
lands of the Commonwealth, in Podolia, Volhynia, and Ukraine, were domi-
nated economically by the huge latifundia (agricultural plantations) of a few
magnate families.
3
Characteristic of the Commonwealth was its ethnic and religious hetero-
geneity. Home to Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belorussians,
Ruthenians, Letts, Estonians, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Scots, and Jews, the
Commonwealth tolerated Protestanism, Greek and Armenian Orthodoxy,
Ukrainian Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism.
4 This diversity was even more
pronounced in the private cities of the eastern and southeastern part of the
state. For example, in sixteenth-century Zamos%c%, Scots, Jews, Italians, Hunga-
rians, Germans, Greek Orthodox, and Armenians comprised the forty-four
home owners in the city.
5
The childhood memoirs of Jacob Frank, the eight-
eenth-century messianic pretender, relate that when the shamash (beadle) of
the Jewish community of Korolówka knocked on the doors of the Jews to
rouse them for penitential prayers in the month before the New Year, he
also knocked on the doors of Polish Christians and Armenians, attesting to
the heterogeneity of the town.
6
Yet, the implicit religious tolerance of the
Commonwealth would be sorely tested, as with so much else, in the political
crisis that began in the seventeenth century.
7
Poland suffered numerous foreign incursions and wars during the seven-
teenth century, including a series of Cossack rebellions (beginning in 1591
and culminating with the notorious Chmielnicki revolt in 1648–1649), the
Northern War (1655–60), the invasion of Muscovy in 1654, the Turkish
invasion of 1671, which resulted in the Ottoman acquisition of almost one-
third of Commonwealth territory, and the wars with Sweden (1700–1721).
sentation. See Jerzy Lukowski, Liberty’s Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the
Eighteenth Century, 1697–1795 (London: Routledge, 1991), 20–22, 77, and 222–23 and Jerzy
Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999), 1–3.
3
Jerzy Lukowski, The Partitions of Poland, 1772, 1793, 1795 (London: Longman, 1999),
10–15 and Lukowski, Liberty’s Folly, 14.
4
Frank E. Sysyn, Between Poland and the Ukraine: The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 1600–1653
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 6.
5
Edward Fram, Ideals Face Reality: Jewish Law and Life in Poland, 1550–1655 (Cincinnati,
Ohio: Hebrew Union College Press, 1997), 20.
6
Chone Shmeruk, “Investigations into Jacob Frank’s Childhood Memoirs,” Gal-Ed 15–16
(1997): 39.
7
In 1733, for example, non-Catholics were barred from civil office. See Lukowski, Liberty’s
Folly, 22.
16 chapter one
One Polish historian has argued that the ruin resulting from the wars of the
mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century was “as devastating to Poland as
the Black Death, which missed Poland, was for western Europe.”
8
The
unremitting assault on Poland’s sovereignty continued in the eighteenth
century, culminating in the three partitions in 1772, 1793, and 1795 by
Austria, Russia, and Prussia.
Jewish Settlement in the Noble Republic
All peoples tend to embellish the longetivity of their settlement in a region,
as if to secure their rightful claim of residence and belonging. The Jews of
Poland were no different. The “Khazar theory of origins,” a Polish-Jewish
etiology tale that gripped the imaginations of medieval and modern Jews
alike, posited that the Khazar kingdom in the region of the Black Sea was the
Ur-community of East European Jews.
9 Pressure from the tenth-century
Kievan state dissolved Khazaria, whose king and inhabitants had converted to
Judaism in the middle of the eighth century, but its Jewish population
remained in eastern Europe, the legend goes, settling communities through-
out the Slavic world. There is little evidence to support this account as the
basis of Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe. More credible is the analysis
that the Jews of early modern Poland are the descendants of German Jews
who migrated eastward, beginning in the eleventh century, and became a
significant stream simultaneous with German migration to Poland in the
thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Because Muscovy and Prussia were
barred to the Jews, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became the most
important area of Jewish settlement in Europe. Immigration rose in the
second half of the fifteeenth century when Jews were expelled from the lands
of Germany, Austria, Silesia, and Bohemia. By the end of the century, there
were between 10,000 and 15,000 Jewish souls in Poland.
10
8
Ibid., 14.
9
The most famous example is Sefer hakuzari (first printing, 1506) by the poet and philoso-
pher Judah Halevi (before 1075–1141), in which the converted Khazar king conducts a
philosophical religious dialogue with representatives of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and
Aristotelian philosophy. Modernizing Jews turned to Halevi’s work throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both as an expression of religious tolerance and ardor
for Hebrew poetry. See Shmuel Werses, “Judah Halevi in the Mirror of the Nineteenth
Century,” in Megammot vetsurot besifrut hahaskalah (Jeruselem: Magnes Press, 1990), 50–89.
Ovadiyah ben Pesakhiyah, the protagonist of Joseph Perl’s satire, Boh[ en tsaddiq, relates with
amazement the “truth” of the existence of the Jewish kingdom of Khazaria, which is con-
firmed during his travels to the region of the Caspian Sea. See [Joseph Perl], Boh[ en tsaddiq
(Prague, 1838), 89–90.
10
Bernard Weinryb, The Jews of Poland (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1976), 3–32.
in the podolian steppe 17
The Jewish population rose dramatically with the geographic expansion of
Poland that took place after the Union of Lublin. The Commonwealth
encompassed Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine (including Podolia and Volhynia),
and Rus’ (Ruthenia or Red Rus’), the area that came to be called East
Galicia (see map 1). These southeastern regions became particularly hospi-
table to Jewish settlement as a burgeoning economy based on grain grew
with the expansion of noble holdings in the steppe.
11 The vast plateau of the
Ukraine, known for its mineral-rich, black soil, became the breadbasket of
Europe as raw materials were shipped on Poland’s many rivers north and
northwest. To maximize production, Polish magnates turned their estates
into agricultural plantations, which, from the sixteenth century onward, were
worked by enserfed peasants who were legally bound to the land and to
weekly labor duties (corvée or robot). The magnates, who sought to exercise
complete control over their estates and to restrict the privileges of the
burghers, stunted urban development. Yet szlachta hostility to urban life
created a huge obstacle to their desire for economic growth.
12
They needed
managers and administrators to oversee their affairs and hence turned to
Jewish intermediaries to manage their holdings, in the process encouraging
Jewish settlement in their towns. From the mid-sixteenth century onward,
Jews were an essential component in the Polish colonization of the Ukrai-
nian provinces of Volhynia, Podolia, Brac¬aw, and Kiev; indispensable to the
management of the newly acquired magnate lands, the Jewish population of
Ukraine increased thirteen-fold between 1569–1648.
13
By 1765, more than
half of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s Jewish population (750,000)
lived in private, noble-owned towns.
14
This economic interdependence
between magnate and Jew had a portentous effect on the region in general
and on the Jewish community in particular.
11
Sysyn, Between Poland and Ukraine, 24; Shmuel Ettinger, “The Participation of the Jews in
the Settlement of Ukraine (1569–1648),” in Bein Polin leRusya (ed. Israel Bartal and
Jonathan Frankel; Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1994), 107–43; Adam Z.ó¬towski, Border
of Europe: A Study of the Polish Eastern Provinces (London: Hollis & Carter, 1950), 2.
12
Maria Bogucka, “Polish Towns between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in A
Republic of Nobles: Studies in Polish History to 1864 (ed. J. K. Federowicz; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), 138–56.
13
Ettinger, “The Participation of the Jews in the Settlement of Ukraine (1569–1648),”
107–43 and Shmuel Ettinger, “The Role of the Jews in the Settlement of the Ukraine in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Bein Polin leRusya (ed. Israel Bartal and Jonathan
Frankel; Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 1994), 143–49.
14
M. J. Rosman, The Lords’ Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Common-
wealth during the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukranian Research Institute,
1990), 39.
18 chapter one
Although since the thirteenth century Jewish immigrants had been subject
to the direct authority of the Polish king, by the mid-sixteenth century they
became subject to the local lord. The Sejm of 1539 granted owners of private
towns the exclusive right to place obligations on their Jewish populations,
which, in turn, freed the Jews from royal authority and opened up enormous
administrative and economic opportunities for them.
15
Denied settlement in
royal towns in the western part of the state, and subject to competition from
Christian burghers and guilds, the Jewish community looked east toward the
private towns of the Polish nobility, where they were welcomed with favor-
able privileges, including the right of municipal residency and self-govern-
ment. In private Polish towns the Jewish community enjoyed a special econo-
mic relationship with the local lord, in contrast to the native townsmen, who
were hampered in their efforts to encourage urban industry. For example,
native burghers were forbidden to export any of Poland’s raw materials on
the Wis¬a River, except for cattle and oxen, while Jewish middlemen virtually
dominated all other commercial activity on the river.
16
From the sixteenth
century onward, the Jews of Poland were increasingly concentrated in noble
lands and had turned away from collecting taxes for the king and toward a
variety of economic roles associated with the nobles’ latifundia. Jews collected
taxes on private estates, ran inns and taverns, extended credit, and were
involved with both foreign and domestic trade.
17
The Jews were an essential feature of the landscape of southeastern early
modern Poland. As William Coxe, an early nineteenth-century British
traveller in the borderlands remarked, “In stating the different classes of in-
habitants the Jews must not be omitted. This people date their introduction
into Poland about the time of Casimir the Great, and as they enjoy privileges
which they scarcely possess in any other country, excepting England and
Holland, their numbers have surprisingly increased.”
18
So, too, were they an
integral component of Polish urban life. At the time of the census of 1764,
there were Jewish communities established in at least 823 private towns.
19
15
Jacob Goldberg, “The Privileges granted to Jewish Communities of the Polish Common-
wealth as a Stabilizing Factor in Jewish Support,” in The Jews in Poland (ed. Chimen Abram-
sky, Maciej Jachimczyk, and Antony Polonsky; London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 31–54; Adam
Teller, “The Legal Status of the Jews on the Magnate Estates of Poland-Lithuania in the
Eighteenth Century,” Gal-Ed 15–16 (1997): 41–63.
16
Lukowski, Liberty’s Folly, 20–22, 77; Gershon Hundert, “Some Basic Characteristics of
Jewish Life in Poland,” Polin 1, no. 1 (1986): 31; Rosman, The Lords’ Jews, 39–40.
17
Judith Kalik, Ha’atsulah hapolanit viyehudeihah bemamlekhet Polin-Lita bere’i hateh[ iqqah bat
hazeman (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1997) and Ettinger, “The Participation of the Jews in the
Settlement of Ukraine (1569–1648).”
18
William Coxe, Travels in Poland and Russia (London, 1802; repr. New York: Arno, 1970),
118–19.
19
Lukowski, Liberty’s Folly, 77–80 and Artur Eisenbach, The Emancipation of the Jews in
in the podolian steppe 19
Concentrated in the private towns of the Polish nobility, the Jews were legally
free, neither juridically bound by the authority of the Christian magistrates
nor subject to municipal taxes. This singular status of Polish Jewry, which by
the mid-eighteenth century constituted at least half of the Polish urban
population and was the principal component of the middle class, engen-
dered deep animosity on the part of the beleaguered native burgher class.
20
Poland, 1780–18
70 (ed. Antony Polonsky and trans. Janina Dorosz; London: Basil Blackwell,
1991), 28.
20
Gershon Hundert, “Jewish Life
in the Eighteenth-Century Polish-Lithuanian Common-
wealth,” in Qiyyum veshever: yeh
udei Polin ledoroteihem (ed. Is rael Bartal and Israel Gutman;
Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1997), 226.