Jewish History

Volume I. Foreword

This work, which I here make public, answers a scholarly need that became evident to me twenty-five years ago, when I was still a young student writing my first book, The Beginning of Capitalism among Western European Jewry. Without any guide, without any paradigm, I attempted then to unravel the problems of Jewish economic history as an independent scholarly discipline. [ . . . ] I began with studies of the economic history of Polish Jewry. As a result, as early as 1908 I completed a book about Jewish–Polish economic history, encompassing the entire Middle Ages. Since then I have conducted further research in Polish archives and have collected materials for an economic history of the Jews in Poland and Lithuania during the modern period. In the midst of this, the world war broke out. [ . . . ] Before events transformed me into a soldier, I had the opportunity to spend two whole years in Vienna and use the free time available to a “refugee” to become acquainted with the rich collections of Jewish historical literature found in the Vienna community library. [ . . . ] Sadly, the war drew me into its clutches and I managed to publish only fragments of the work.

I continued collecting materials [ . . . ] when I once again became a civilian. [ . . . ] I could not do this with the same intensity as before. I felt that other problems were more important. It was difficult to write history while “history was being made,” while the foundations for a new life and different circumstances were being laid—and I had the occasion to experience such a lofty and difficult time along with my brothers in Poland. [ . . . ] Only during breaks from my political and public work could I turn to my scholarly workshop and seek a rest from the current history that was being woven before my eyes. [ . . . ] The subject kept me occupied—with longer and shorter breaks—for about twenty-five years, but I would not have begun to work on the great deal of material that I had managed to accumulate were it not for a timely, completely accidental stimulus. Two years ago the Central Publishing House approached me with a proposal to work on additions to Graetz’s Jewish history. I liked the proposal and took on the project. However, I immediately became convinced that this task was almost interminable, as no general Jewish economic history exists which would constitute a basis for such additions. I therefore changed the original plan and began working on materials I had collected as an independent work. It became clear that my preparations were far from complete and that it would be worthwhile to investigate many more details thoroughly before moving on to the writing. However, I refused to do this, since the preparatory work nonetheless had to come to an end. [ . . . ]

Thus, this book, which I now present here to the reader, developed. It is a complete work in its own right and at the same time serves as a call for further volumes about Jewish economic history in the modern period. [ . . . ] In my preparatory work I often questioned whether I was not wrestling with problems that ignore the “necessities of the present time.” These doubts, however, dissipated when in the framework of my public work I met with Jewish youth and Jewish workers. In these circles—which are our hope and our future—I continually noticed how little the old way of understanding Jewish historical questions satisfied them. Moreover, in the course of the last two decades I have also noticed a characteristic trend in the Jewish scholarly world. It is a sign of the times that Jewish researchers and scholars, who would previously approach problems of Jewish economic history in the best case as a contribution to Jewish cultural history (compare, for example, Moritz Güdermann’s works), recently have been occupied with economic historical materials as an independent research subject. [ . . . ] Reality has confirmed the idea, which I already declared in 1908 when writing the introduction to my economic history of the Jews in Poland, that the portrait of the “Shabbesdik Jew with his Yomtovdik soul” given to us by the old generation of Jewish historical scholars is no longer sufficient for our modern consciousness; rather, we yearn “to become acquainted with the history of everyday Jews,” the history of those mostly anonymous “hundreds of thousands who wove a memory for the future . . . of their toil and hard labor.” [ . . . ] Certainly in light of this book people will single me out as an advocate of the materialist historical approach. This was already done in connection with my previous economic historical monographs. If one understands “historical materialism” as a view that negates Jewish themes in history, I must emphasize that I have no link whatsoever to such a raw and primitive historical approach. I mean “materialist” in the sense that I see economic forces as an enormous stimulus for historical development and I will prove this scientifically. The materialist historical approach is one of the surest research methods—I agree with this. I do not agree, however, that a method should be transformed into ideology. [ . . . ]

Volume II. Jewish Settlements in Poland and Russia and Their Economic Profile in the Period 1241–1350

Using the material presented here, we have demonstrated that both the center of Jewish life and the main route of the Jewish eastern trade route moved from Rus (the Kiev and Ludmir region) to Poland and Silesia from the year 1241. Now we will see what kind of elements made up the Jewish settlements that blossomed in the period under discussion in the territories of the Piasts. We have already highlighted one of the migration flows—the stream that was linked to eastern Jewish trade from Asia and Greece and due to which Asian and Greek Jews established themselves in the Polish–Silesian territories in the period under discussion. The second migration stream came from the west and it, too, played a decisive role in molding Jewish life in Poland. For this period we possess two kinds of sources that provide us with evidence of contemporary migration from the west: 1) one is the names of Polish Jews found in the Polish Acts from the first half of the fourteenth century. Most are German or Hebrew names with German diminutive endings. Thus, for example, Jews in Kraków at the time were called Merklin, Koslin, Mushin (from Moshe), Yakola, etc. We encounter these names in the same period among the Jews of Nuremberg and Vienna, as well as among the Jews of Styria (Steiermark) and of Czech and Silesian towns; 2) the second source is the oldest privileges granted to the Polish Jews. These are the privileges given by Duke Boleslaw of Kalish to the Jews in the year 1264 and the privileges that Casimir the Great granted to the Jews in 1334. Both sets of privileges were based on the well-known Austrian privileges granted in the year 1244 and include a characteristic remark, that they are given “ad peticiones Judaeorum” [through the petitioning of the Jews]. Indeed, the initiative originated with the Jews. The Jews themselves searched for a model for the privileges, and the fact that they adopted as their model the famous Austrian privileges of the year 1244 is proof that they were in constant contact with German Jewry, as they formed an eastern branch of the latter. [ . . . ]

Following the Western model, Polish Jews in this period were organized into communities, which were ruled through the so-called episcope iudaeorum. In matters concerning themselves (with the exception of capital cases), Jews were judged by autonomous Jewish courts, which gave rulings according to Jewish law.

The documents that shed light on the economic life of Polish Jewry reveal the first information about Jewish credit operations during the century under discussion. [ . . . ]

Life in Poland then reached such a level that the rope with which one wanted to fetter the Jewish credit-business no longer had any substance. So too, limiting the Jewish credit business was not in the interest of the Jewish patron, and the latter was then strong enough to defeat all efforts to damage the profits that he received from the credit business of his Jewish serfs.

Our period ends with a catastrophe, the so-called “Black Death,” which together with all its tragic accompanying phenomena sent shockwaves through Jewish society in Poland. As the Polish chronicler, Jan Dlugosz, reports (1348), one-third of the Polish population was killed by the plague [ . . . ] in the year 1349, noting that the Jews then “poisoned springs and wells and therefore were slaughtered in almost all of Poland: some were killed by the sword, others were burned at the stake.” [ . . . ] Likewise, Hebrew sources mention that Jewish blood was spilled in Kraków and Kalish at the time. However, the reports do not suffice to create a clear picture of the events—in particular the socioeconomic factors—that worked together in the terrible events.