The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe

by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

Overview

A major history of the shtetl's golden age

The shtetl was home to two-thirds of East Europe's Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet it has long been one of the most neglected and misunderstood chapters of the Jewish experience. This book provides the first grassroots social, economic, and cultural history of the shtetl. Challenging popular misconceptions of the shtetl as an isolated, ramshackle Jewish village stricken by poverty and pogroms, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern argues that, in its heyday from the 1790s to the 1840s, the shtetl was a thriving Jewish community as vibrant as any in Europe.

Petrovsky-Shtern brings this golden age to life, looking at dozens of shtetls and drawing on a wealth of never-before-used archival material. Illustrated throughout with rare archival photographs and artwork, this nuanced history casts the shtetl in an altogether new light, revealing how its golden age continues to shape the collective memory of the Jewish people today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400851164
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/30/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern University.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION What’s in a Name? 1
CHAPTER ONE Russia Discovers Its Shtetl 29
CHAPTER TWO Lawless Freedom 57
CHAPTER THREE Fair Trade 91
CHAPTER FOUR The Right to Drink 121
CHAPTER FIVE A Violent Dignity 151
CHAPTER SIX Crime, Punishment, and a Promise of Justice 181
CHAPTER SEVEN Family Matters 213
CHAPTER EIGHT Open House 243
CHAPTER NINE If I Forget Thee 273
CHAPTER TEN The Books of the People 305
CONCLUSION The End of the Golden Age 341
Abbreviations 357
Notes 361
Acknowledgments 417
Index 421

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This book ushers in the golden age of shtetl scholarship. Challenging the homogenized and sanitized images of East European Jewry that followed its near obliteration, Petrovsky-Shtern combs the archives to reveal how the Jews who lived in these market towns enjoyed great opportunities amid the political tensions between Poland and Russia. A book to be grateful for."—Ruth R. Wisse, author of No Joke: Making Jewish Humor

"The Golden Age Shtetl turns upside down the nostalgic image of the shtetl as a decaying Jewish village, presenting the historical shtetl as a place where Jews enjoyed prosperity and stability. Drawing on huge archival evidence, this pathbreaking study challenges our historical mind and provides an innovative account of the Jewish experience in nineteenth-century Russia."—Israel Bartal, author of The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881

"The shtetl, home of most East European Jews for several centuries, has been the subject of endless romantic re-creations in the American Jewish corpus. Finally a serious historian of Russian Jewry gives us a well-documented but still lively and fascinating picture of this lost world. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand the immediate Jewish past."—Art Green, Brandeis University and Hebrew College

"An inspiring and rich study. In this highly innovative book, Petrovsky-Shtern demonstrates how the shtetl in early nineteenth-century Russia constituted a unique context for the unfolding of a proud, resilient, and sustainable Jewish community."—François Guesnet, University College London

"The shtetl comes to life in all its complexity, vitality, and beauty in Petrovsky-Shtern's new book. Like an archaeologist who uncovers and brings to light one layer after another of a long-gone civilization, he draws on previously untapped archival sources to reconstruct a crucial part of Jewish history."—Serhii Plokhy, Harvard University

Editorial Reviews

05/01/2014
Shtetls (small towns with large Jewish populations) are popularly remembered as places where the Jews who lived there were considered pious, powerless, and poor and where the pace of life was set by the Sabbath, festivals, and holy days. Petrovsky-Shtern (Jewish Studies, Northwestern Univ.; Lenin's Jewish Question) argues that this fallacy is drawn from the era of the shtetl's decline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries after the tsarist government, administratively responsible for the towns, destroyed the local economy. Rather than a place of poverty and weak industry, the shtetl, during its heyday from roughly 1790 to 1840, was a dynamic engine of economic life. Jews living there dominated liquor manufacturing and made up the majority of innkeepers and guild merchants. Petrovsky-Shtern marshals an impressive array of archival and literary sources to reconstruct the licit and illicit economy of the towns, the family life of the residents, and their patterns of consumption—including alcohol and book purchases. VERDICT General readers may find the first chapter about legal definitions somewhat slow going. Past that point, however, the vibrancy of shtetl life in the days before it was destroyed by the Russian state comes through vividly. This book should appeal to anyone interested in Jewish or Eastern European history.—Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll.

Library Journal

…if he sometimes works too hard to push over the old straw shtetl in favor of one that "at its height was afraid of nothing," Petrovsky-Shtern also succeeds in vividly evoking a Jewish world that survived not merely in spite of its neighbors but in complex collaboration with them. There is a reason much of this has been forgotten. The golden-age shtetl lies at the heart of what the historian Timothy Snyder calls "the bloodlands," a region that was a central battleground in the war against the Jews. Which makes The Golden Age Shtetl a moving feat of cultural reclamation and even, in its way, an act of quiet heroism.

The New York Times Book Review - Jonathan Rosen

02/03/2014
Neither a comprehensive history of Eastern European Jewish life or the shtetl, Petrovsky-Shtern, professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern Univ., focuses on three provinces—Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev—of the then Russian Empire during what he deems the golden age period, 1790–1840, when the shtetl was “the unique habitat of some 80 percent of East European Jews.” Here are portraits of Jewish life in small towns and cities quite different from those Sholom Aleichem immortalized in Fiddler on the Roof, where Jews lived in “an impoverished yet God-fearing dwelling place” afflicted by Russian pogroms. In this account, Russian authorities had a “relatively benevolent attitude” toward Jews. While some Jews were poor, others thrived as traders, owning stalls at fairs that, in the city of Berdichev, featured a casino, horse races, and trapeze artists. Petrovsky-Shtern also notes how important Jews were in selling liquor and owning taverns, introducing us to shtetl criminals and surveying Jewish folklore relating to the Land of Israel (such as tunnels under houses supposedly leading to Jerusalem). At times Petrovsky-Shtern gets bogged down in anecdotal detail, but this is a colorful, exhaustively researched study of a period when Jews were fully at home in shtetl life. 50 photos, 1 map. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Exuberant and revolutionary, founded on extensive archival scholarship in multiple languages, this book is fundamental for understanding the authentic significance of the predominately Jewish market towns known in Yiddish as shtetls, which once dotted the map of Eastern Europe. . . . The book is colorfully written and documented with mordant humor and cynical humanism. Reading this book reveals the vibrant heart of Eastern European Jewish civilization, whose traces can still be seen among the descendants of millions of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, compelled to leave by the economic decline resulting from czarist Russian policies. An outstanding work of scholarship about the fabric of life in a multiethnic region."

Choice

Winner of the 2014 National Jewish Book Award in History (Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award), Jewish Book Council

Honorable Mention for the 2015 PROSE Award in European & World History, Association of American Publishers

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2015

From the Publisher

"In a tour de force of archival research, Petrovsky-Shtern re-creates life in the shtetls in all its amazing richness."

Foreign Affairs

"Aligned throughout with rare archival photographs and artwork, this more than nuanced history casts theshtetl itself in an altogether new light; revealing how its influential golden age continues to shape the collective memory of Jewish people to the present day."

David Marx Book Reviews

2014-01-29
A demonstration of how the shtetl of Eastern Europe enjoyed an early period of thriving prosperity and cultural diversity. Petrovsky-Shtern (Jewish Studies/Northwestern Univ.; Lenin's Jewish Question, 2010, etc.) turns some of the received knowledge about Jewish history on its head as he delves into rich, formerly classified primary sources delineating the evidence of Jewish economic power during the transition between the partitions of Poland by Russia (1772–1775) and the advent of the Russian military age, beginning in the 1840s, which brought xenophobia and nationalism. During this 50-year period of lax Russian rule, when Russia inherited these formerly Polish territories, the Jews were encouraged in their important roles as traders, tavern keepers and liquor sellers. What was shamefully referred to as a shtetl (small town) by later Yiddish writers like Mendele Moykher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem was proudly called a shtot by its contemporaries. Humming market towns in the provinces of Podolia, Volhynia and the southern part of what was the Pale of Settlement attracted thousands of merchants and enriched the Polish landlords, Russian administrators and Jews alike. Although the areas were spiritual centers and gave rise to Hasidism, for example, the most important aspect was the economic activity of the marketplace. Jews proved they were loyal, industrious and reliable and were entrusted to run the mail service and to make and sell liquor. Their homes, clothing and artifacts revealed a sense of prosperity and dignity, and their language reflected the mingling with their Christian and Slavic neighbors—a half-century before the alienation from and the scapegoating of Jews for "the shortcomings of modernism." Packed with vigorous case studies, Petrosvky-Shtern's book is lively and enlightening. A welcome study that is by turns picturesque and scholarly, startling and accessible.

Kirkus Reviews