History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (Vol. 1-3). Dubnow Simon

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ href="#ulink_4349ca6b-2aad-5d79-ac55-0a88418b3b86">38 [Lithuania was administered by starostas as Poland was by voyevodas (see p. 46, n. 1). The starostas—literally "elders"—were originally nobles holding an estate of the crown, which was given to them by the king for special services rendered to him. In the course of time they became, both in Lithuania and in Poland proper, governors of whole regions, taking over many of the functions of the voyevodas. The relationship between the two officers underwent many changes. On the effect of this change upon the jurisdiction of the Jews compare Bloch, Die General-Privilegien der polnischen Judenschaft, p. 35.]

39 [A semi-ecclesiastic, semi-military organization of German knights, which originated in Palestine during the Crusades, and was afterwards transferred to Europe to propagate Christianity on the eastern confines of Germany. The Order developed into a powerful state, which became a great menace to Poland.]

40 [In Polish Nieszawa, the meeting-place of the Diet of that year.]

41 More exactly Kazimierz, the Polish form for Casimir (the Great), after whom the town was named.

CHAPTER III

       THE AUTONOMOUS CENTER IN POLAND AT ITS ZENITH (1501–1648)

       Table of Contents

      1. Social and Economic Conditions

In the same age in which the Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal were wending their steps towards the Turkish East, bands of Jewish emigrants, fleeing from the stuffy ghettos of Germany and Austria, could be seen wandering towards the Slavonian East, towards Poland and Lithuania, where, during the period of the Reformation, a large autonomous Diaspora center sprang into life. The transmigration of Jewish centers, which is so prominent a feature of the sixteenth century, found its expression in two parallel movements: the demolished or impoverished centers of Western Europe were transplanted to the countries of Eastern Europe on the one hand, and to the lands of contiguous Western Asia on the other. Yet the destinies of the two Eastern centers—Turkey and Poland—were not identical. The Sephardim of Turkey were approaching the end of their brilliant historic career, and were gradually lapsing into Asiatic stupor, while the Ashkenazim of Poland, with a supply of fresh strength and the promise of an original culture, were starting out on their broad historic development. The mission of the Sephardim was a memory of the past; that of the Ashkenazim was a hope for the future. After medieval Babylonia and Spain, no country presented so intense a concentration of Jewish energy and so vast a field for the development of a Jewish autonomous life as Poland in the sixteenth and the following centuries.42

The uninterrupted colonization of Slavonian lands by Jewish emigrants from Germany, which had been going on during the Middle Ages, prepared the soil for the historic process which converted Poland from a colony into a center of Judaism. The large Jewish population settled in the towns and villages of Poland and Lithuania formed, not a downtrodden caste, nor a homogeneous economic class, as in Germany, but an important social entity, unfolding its energy in many departments of social-economic life. It was not tied down to two exclusive occupations, money-lending and petty trade, but it participated in all branches of industrial endeavor, in production and manufacture, not excluding rural avocations, such as land tenure and farming. The men of wealth among the Jews farmed the tolls (transit and customs duties) and the excise (state taxes collected on wine43 and other articles of consumption), and frequently attained to prominence as the financial agents of the kings. When, at a later date, the Jews were hampered in the business of tax-farming, their capital found a new outlet in the lease of crown and Shlakhta estates, with the right of "propination,"44 or liquor traffic, attached to it, as well as in working the salt mines, in timbering forests, and opening up the other resources of the soil. The big merchants were busy exporting agrarian products from Poland into Austria, Moldavo-Wallachia, and Turkey. The lower classes engaged in retail trade, handicrafts, farming, vegetable-growing, gardening, and, in some places, particularly in Lithuania, even in corn-growing.

      The economic activity of the Jews, entwined with the material life of the country by numerous threads, was bound to produce a similar variety of form also in their legal condition. Considering the peculiar caste structure of the Polish state and the relative political freedom enjoyed in that semi-constitutional country by the "governing classes"—the landed nobility, the clergy, and partly the burghers—the legal position of the Jews was of necessity determined by the conflict of political and class interests. Bridled by an oligarchic constitution, the royal power was bound to clash with the vast privileges of the landed magnates, the big Shlakhta. The latter, in turn, on the one hand fought the claims of the petty rural Shlakhta, and on the other resisted the advance of the Christian urban estates, the business men, and craftsmen, who were a powerful factor, owing to their municipal autonomy and their well-organized guilds. The fight was carried on in the Diets, municipalities, and law courts. Within this conflict of economic interests the clergy of the dominant Catholic Church pursued its own line of attack. Having been weakened during the Reformation, it now renewed its strength in consequence of the Catholic reaction and the arduous endeavors of the Jesuits.

      These estates differed in their relation to the Jews, each in accordance with its own interests. Medieval ideas had already taken such deep root in the Polish people that, despite the constitutional character of the country, a humane and lawful attitude towards the Jews was out of the question. They were appraised according to the advantages they could bestow upon this or that class, and since in many cases what was advantageous to one class was disadvantageous to another, a conflict of interests was unavoidable, with the result that the Jews were the objects of protection on the one side and the targets of persecution on the other.

      The Jews of Poland were favored by two powers within the state, by royalty and in part by the big Shlakhta. They were opposed by two others, the clergy and the burghers. Aside from the interests of the exchequer, which was swelled by regular and irregular imposts upon the Jews, the kings derived personal benefits from their commercial activities. They valued the financial services of the Jewish tax-farmers, who paid large sums in advance for the lease of customs duties and state revenues or for the tenure of the royal domains. These contractors and tenants became, as a rule, financial agents of the kings, owing to their ability to advance large sums of money, and were incidentally in a position to exert their influence upon the court in the interest of their coreligionists. The high nobility in turn appreciated the usefulness of the Jewish farmers and tenants to their estates, which they themselves, with their aristocratic indifference and indolence, knew only how to mismanage. The protection which this class accorded the Jews, principally at the Diets controlled by them, was in exact proportion to the services rendered by the Jews as middlemen between them and the peasants. The magnates accordingly were entirely indifferent to the welfare of the rest of Jewry, the toiling masses of the Jewish population.

      Uncompromising hostility to the Jews marked the attitude of the urban estates, the merchants and artisans of the burgher class, with a considerable sprinkling of German settlers, whose influence was clearly noticeable. These organized tradesmen and handicraftsmen looked upon the Jews as their direct competitors. The magistracies, acting as the organs of municipal self-government, placed severe restrictions upon the Jews in the acquisition of real estate and in the pursuit of business and handicrafts, while the trade-unions occasionally set the riotous mobs at their heels. Still more resolute was the agitation of the Catholic clergy, which frequently succeeded in influencing legislation in the spirit of ecclesiastic intolerance.

      The СКАЧАТЬ