Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania: The Jews on the Radziwill Estates - Hardcover

Teller, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804798443 ISBN 13: 9780804798440

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

It has often been claimed that Jews have a penchant for capitalism and capitalist economic activity. With this book, Adam Teller challenges that assumption. Examining how Jews achieved their extraordinary success within the late feudal economy of the eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, he shows that economic success did not necessarily come through any innate entrepreneurial skills, but through identifying and exploiting economic niches in the pre-modern economy-in particular, the monopoly on the sale of grain alcohol.

Jewish economic activity was a key factor in the development of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and it greatly enhanced the incomes, and thereby the social and political status, of the noble magnates, including the powerful Radziwill family. In turn, with the magnate's backing, Jews were able to leverage their own economic success into high status in estate society. Over time, relations within Jewish society began to change, putting less value on learning and pedigree and more on wealth and connections with the estate owners.

This groundbreaking book exemplifies how the study of Jewish economic history can shed light on a crucial mechanism of Jewish social integration. In the Polish-Lithuanian setting, Jews were simultaneously a despised religious minority and key economic players, with a consequent standing that few could afford to ignore.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Adam Teller is Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Brown University.

Adam Teller is Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Brown University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania

The Jews on the Radziwill Estates

By Adam Teller

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9844-0

Contents

Preface, 
Note on Place Names and Transliteration, 
Introduction, 
1. Jewish Settlement on the Estates, 
2. Jews and Jewish Communities in the Urban Economy, 
3. The Economic Institutions of the Estates, 
4. Jews as Estate Leaseholders: The Rise and Fall of the Ickowicz Brothers, 
5. Arendarze: Jewish Lessees of Monopoly Rights, 
6. Jews and Trade in the Estate Economy, 
Conclusion, 
Notes, 
Glossary, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Jewish Settlement on the Estates

Before we can come to any understanding of how important the Jews' economic activities were for the Radziwills and their estates, we need some idea of just how many Jews lived there. This is not a simple task because the basic sources from the period are fragmentary and raise a number of highly complex issues of interpretation. All we know for certain is that the number of Jews on the estates grew substantially over the course of the eighteenth century. This is far from enough. We really need to quantify the absolute numbers of Jews on the estates and then calculate their rate of growth. It is only once we have done that, that we can begin to work out the reasons for the increase.

Even this, however, is not the end of the story. To understand how the population growth came about, we must establish first whether it was caused by factors specific to the situation of the Jews on the Radziwill estates or whether it formed part of broader trends, common either to all the inhabitants of the estates (Jewish and non-Jewish) or to Polish-Lithuanian Jews as a whole.

Next, the factors at work just on the Radziwill estates have to be identified and assessed. Since the evidence strongly suggests that the Jewish population there increased largely as a result of the family actively encouraging Jewish settlement on its lands, we need to understand why it did so. So the question then becomes one of the benefits that the growth of the Jewish population brought to the family and its estates.

The discussion here answers these questions first by assessing the extent of Jewish settlement on the Radziwill estates in Lithuania at three different times. It starts at the turn of the seventeenth century and then looks at both the beginning and the end of the period under discussion (1689–1764). Next it examines the nature and causes of the Radziwills' settlement policy, pointing out some of the financial benefits it brought. Finally, it weighs up the significance of general demographic factors in order to determine just how successful was the family's policy of bringing Jews to the estates.

EARLY SETTLEMENT

Jews had lived on Radziwill estates since the sixteenth century, but it was only in the eighteenth century that Jewish population growth really began to take off. A look back at early stages of Jewish settlement will help explain this.

The first source referring to Jews living on Radziwill lands is from the mid-sixteenth century. In 1529 the Jewish community of Kleck was included in a list of those paying a special tax imposed on Lithuanian Jewry by King Zygmunt I. So when the city became Radziwill property in 1551, it already had a Jewish community.

Jews seem to have come to the town of Nieswiez, the Radziwills' family seat in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a little later, in the second half of the century. The earliest documentation is a 1589 privilege granted to the local Jewish community at the request of its representative, Joseph ben Isaac, by Mikolaj Krzysztof ("the Orphan") Radziwill, lord of the town. In the charter Radziwill permitted the Jews to settle there and enjoy the tax exemption that King Stefan Batory had granted its other inhabitants. The privilege permitted Jews to purchase houses on only a single street that had gates at each end. Some Jews were allowed to rent houses and apartments outside the Jewish street, while those living in the market square on the basis of personal privileges could remain there until they sold their homes to Christians. Radziwill also allowed the Jews of Nieswiez to build a synagogue and ritual bath and to purchase a plot of land outside the city for a cemetery. The final clause of the privilege gave the kahal (the governing body of the local Jewish community) the right to admit new members to the community and expel existing ones if the need arose.

The third Jewish community on Radziwill lands seems to have been established in Sluck, near Nieswiez. In 1601, Janusz Radziwill granted the Jews of the town a privilege that was based on a previous charter, so presumably this community too had been founded in the second half of the sixteenth century. By 1623, Jews occupied sixteen houses on a single street that could be roped off at both ends.

Next to be settled seems to have been the town of Birze (Birzai, Lithuania). Documents from the early seventeenth century indicate that there was a Jewish community there too, since in 1609 Krzysztof II Radziwill issued an order formalizing the status of the Jews in the town. Based on the context and the names of the Jews in the documents, Bardach has argued that this was actually a Karaite community that flourished until the mid-seventeenth century. According to him, there was no community of rabbanite Jews in Birze until the 1660s.

The Radziwills' attitude towards Jewish settlement in this period can be seen in an order given by Aleksander Ludwik Radziwill in 1621 to the Jews in another of their early settlements, Biala Podlaska. There they were allowed to own thirty houses, for each of which they had to pay only a low annual fee to the town council. Were they to purchase any more houses, they would have to pay the council the full amount of tax for each and do compulsory service for the lord of the town just as a Christian householder did. This ruling was a kind of balancing act. Radziwill wanted to bring Jews to town, and so gave them a tax break. On the other hand, he needed to put a limit on this Jewish settlement, presumably in the face of opposition from the town council, which stood to lose income from the houses these Jews occupied (as well as suffering business losses as a result of increased Jewish competition). The net result was probably positive for Jews considering settling in Biala, though there were certainly tensions involved in doing so. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were not, then, a period of untrammeled encouragement for Jewish settlement.

The situation began to change following the wars of the mid-seventeenth century. Between 1648 and 1654, Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossack forces ravaged much of Belarus, reaching as far as Sluck, though the Jews there managed to flee and save themselves. In the ensuing war between Russia and Poland that began in 1654, Belarus was the major theater of battle, and destruction was immense. After the fighting formally came to an end in 1667, the Radziwill estates — at least those that remained to the family — began slowly to recover.

This was not a process that happened naturally but was the result of a deliberate policy. The first order of business was to encourage the repopulation, and then the continued growth of the villages and towns, many of whose inhabitants had either died or fled during the wars. Jews played a not...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804798443
• ISBN 13: 9780804798440
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande