Read an Excerpt
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: 978-0-8047-9987-4
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 insignificant role in this process, at least as far as the towns were concerned. In the 1660s the first rabbanite Jews settled in Birze, and by 1695 they owned fifty-three houses in the town. In 1661 there were eighty-six Jewish families living in Sluck and another twelve in the new town (that is, the suburbs). Twenty-two years later, 150 Jewish families were living in Sluck and another 15 in the new town.
Even more significantly, the proportion of Jews in the total population of Sluck also grew, from 10.1 percent in 1661 to 13.5 percent in 1683. This meant that the Jews' population growth outstripped that of the non-Jews. Bearing in mind that the town council consistently opposed Jewish settlement, we can infer that the rapid expansion of the Jewish population was due to a policy adopted by the Radziwills themselves. Nor was this policy limited to the Jews of Sluck; it extended across the latifundium, continuing and even gathering momentum in the eighteenth century. As a result the Jewish population of the estates grew dramatically.
DEMOGRAPHIC GROWTH IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
In an ideal world we could examine the size and nature of population growth by comparing a census of the Jews on the Radziwill estates from the beginning of the period with one from the end. No general census of the estates was ever made, however. The first sources of this sort that can be usefully mined for data concerning Jews on the estates are the censuses of all Polish-Lithuanian Jewry taken in 1764–65 and 1775. However, the lack of a similar census from an earlier period means that is impossible to assess the growth rate of the Jewish population.
There is another problem here too: the size of the Radziwill latifundium was never stable. Estates were added or lost over the years (for example, as dowries for daughters). In fact, by the early 1760s Karol Stanislaw administered a latifundium that was at least three times as large as his grandfather's had been. A simple comparison of the number of Jews on the estates at two different dates would not yield very valuable results.
The solution is to use as a basis for comparison partial details drawn from the local censuses and inventories that the Radziwills made from time to time. Creating from these sources series of data dealing with places that remained part of the latifundium over the whole period gives at least a sense of the demographic trends among the Jewish population. Since these sources always included both Jews and non-Jews, they are also useful for identifying changes specific to the Jewish population. To round out the picture, the general census of Jews in 1764–65 gives a snapshot of the size and structure of Jewish settlement on the estates at the end of the period discussed here.
The Beginning of the Period: The Late Seventeenth Century
Suitable data are available for the Jewish population of nine Lithuanian towns owned by the Radziwills in the late seventeenth century (Table 1.1).
The figures in the table are based on inventories showing the taxes owed to the Radziwills. The major tax in the towns was the czynsz, assessed on each chimney. Most houses had just one chimney, so the number listed for Jewish and for non-Jewish householders can be used to give a sense of the relative size of each population. The figures cannot be taken entirely at face value because Jews in the towns generally lived in more crowded conditions than their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the average number of Jews per house was probably larger than the average number of Christians. We can therefore assume that the proportion of Jews in the towns was in fact larger than the percentage of houses owned by Jews shown in the table.
Calculating the actual number of people is difficult unless we have some idea of the average number of people in each house. Several attempts have been made to come up with such averages for various periods (presumably, the average changed as conditions changed), but the results vary widely and are not helpful. Given the sketchy source base, coming up with even an estimate of the total number of Jews in the towns on the estates is simply impossible.
So what can we learn from these data? Even in the late seventeenth century Jewish settlement in the estate towns was relatively sparse. In the nine towns for which we have details Jews owned only 182 houses. In most cases the number of Jewish-owned properties formed less than 10 percent of the total. There were only two places where Jews owned a greater proportion than that: Biala, 23 percent and Kojdanów (Dzyarzhynsk, Belarus), 11 percent. On average, Jews owned just 8 percent of the dwellings in the towns surveyed here. Clearly widespread Jewish settlement had not yet begun. Though the Radziwills had been encouraging some Jewish settlement in the second half of the seventeenth century, they seem to have kept it within bounds.
The End of the Period: The 1760s
By the later eighteenth century the picture had changed dramatically. To see this we need to compare the figures from the late seventeenth century with corresponding data from the 1760s. Doing this involves going back to the nine localities for which we have data from the earlier period (in Table 1.1) and examining the Jewish population of those same localities in the 1760s, or as close to them as the sources allow (Table 1.2).
The most striking detail in Table 1.2 is perhaps the growth in the number of Jewish-owned houses: in the nine towns, Jews now owned 553 properties — an increase of 204 percent. This could be seen most impressively in Mir, where Jews owned only one house in 1681 but 110 in 1757.
Even more significant was the growth in the proportion of Jewish-owned properties: while the number of Jewish-owned houses in these towns rose by 204 percent, the total housing stock grew by only 45 percent. As a result, the Jews in these nine towns, who had owned only 8 percent of the houses in the late seventeenth century, now accounted for no less than 24 percent. In none of the places did the Jews own less than 10 percent of the houses. In fact in three of them, Biala, Mir, and Kojdanów, Jewish-owned properties accounted for more than 30 percent of the total. So, if we take into account the fact that conditions in houses owned by Jews were relatively crowded compared to those owned by non-Jews, we can conclude that Jews made up between a third and a half of the total urban population on the Radziwill estates in the 1760s.
The reasons for this sharp growth in the size of the Jewish population on the estates are to be sought in the encouragement of Jewish settlement by the Radziwill family and in the rapid natural increase of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry in this period. Another factor was the effect of war on the Jewish population. Eighteenth-century Lithuania suffered much death and destruction from military actions, most significantly during the Great Northern War (1702–1720). To assess the importance of the war, its differing impact on the Jewish and non-Jewish populations of the estates must now be considered.
THE IMPACT OF THE GREAT NORTHERN WAR
The 1702 entry of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into the Great Northern War, fought principally between the Tsardom of Russia and the Swedish Empire, proved a fateful moment in its history. The Commonwealth quickly became the main battleground and endured prolonged destruction and depopulation, at a time when it had not yet completely recovered from the horrors of the mid-seventeenth century wars. Lithuania experienced the worst of the conflict because Russian and Swedish forces crossed it time after time, plundering as they went, even when they did not fight any real battles. The Radziwill estates suffered along with the rest. The towns of Nowy Swierzen (Novy Sverzhan', Belarus) and Nieswiez, including the family's palace there, were razed by Swedish troops in the spring of 1706, and Krzyczew (Krychaw, Belarus), where Karol Stanislaw Radziwill was starosta, was sacked by the Russians in 1708. Jews were frequently targeted not only by the troops but also by the local townspeople, who regarded them as dangerous economic rivals as well as a hostile religious element. The estates, like the country as a whole, also suffered from all the side effects of early modern war including depopulation from flight, famine, and disease.
Urban populations were also hit hard. At war's end the towns had to be repopulated and Jewish settlement was again encouraged. Though the reasons for this policy were never made explicit, it may have had to do with one of the economic limitations imposed on the Jews in Poland-Lithuania. Unlike the Christian townspeople, Jews were not allowed to own agricultural land, which was an important way for those living in towns to augment their incomes. During times of upheaval, many non-Jewish townspeople survived by giving up their urban occupation and turning to agriculture to support themselves. Jews, on the other hand, had no choice but to continue with trade and crafts, becoming in effect the main group keeping the towns alive and functioning. In these conditions, encouraging Jews to settle in towns was a logical choice, though one which could have significant consequences for urban development.
To demonstrate these, Table 1.3 shows some of the changes in the population structure of four towns between the turn of the century and the 1720s.
The table shows a clear trend. Although the total number of houses dropped in the war years, the number that belonged to Jews actually grew. This is best seen in Mir, where the total housing stock dropped from 382 to 262 (down more than 30 percent), while the number of Jewish-owned houses rose from 8 to 63 (up more than 750 percent). This did not happen just in the Radziwill towns; the same thing can be seen on the Neuburg estates, which were no longer under the family's control. In Sluck, for example, the total number of houses dropped from 1,353 in 1683 to 787 in 1712, while the number of Jewish-owned properties rose from 171 to 200; in Kopys the total number of houses dropped from 336 to 183 between 1694 and 1713, while the number owned by Jews grew from 12 to 17.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania by Adam Teller. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
