Class 8. Early Jews of Modern Ukraine (2)
and then there are historians who completely deny it,
who think this whole thing was a myth
and that all these sources are forged.
Your reading was Dan Shapiro's article.
It's probably the best article we have on the origins of,
you know, Jewish presence in the Ukrainian lands.
He kind of, he contradicts himself.
He kind of does both.
On the first page you'll notice he says,
"There was no Jewish elite that converted," you know,
"in the Khazar kingdom,"
and then, three three pages later, he's quoting it.
He's citing it.
He's mentioning it,
and if you look at the footnote,
he says that Pritzak's book on this,
which goes through a lot of these sources,
is complete nonsense,
and I could write a whole book, you know,
that contains all the mistakes in this work,
and then, those three pages later, he's quoting Pritzak,
so, you know, we're all over the place with this,
and I think part of the problem is it's been politicized
because if you are an anti-Zionist,
it becomes very interesting,
the possibility that actually Jews didn't originate in,
you know, ancient Israel.
They originated in Khazaria,
and this is something that the early Zionists
are actually having to contend with,
and so really, every anti-Zionist
gets very excited about this possibility,
and, of course, every Zionist historian
is very interested in refuting
even the existence of a Jewish presence in this kingdom,
so Shaul Stampfer recently published an article
in which he went through all these sources
and showed they were all complete fabrications and nonsense,
and that's where we are,
so I can't say anything for sure about the Khazar kingdom
other than, I don't know,
maybe where there's smoke there's fire.
That may be the best that we can do.
There might have been some indication
of a Jewish presence there among certain elites,
but we're on more solid ground
when we get into Kyivan Rus,
and here's a map.
I watched a few of Professor Snyder's YouTube videos,
and I noticed he didn't use a lot of maps,
so here's a good opportunity to see what it looks like.
Anybody know what the Golden Horde is?
Yeah, what's the Golden,
well, not asking the grad students going-
- Mongols.
- What?
- The Mongols. - Mongols, right?
Do, you know, why it's called the Golden Horde?
Their battle tents were gold,
and so that's how they got this name,
and I don't think it's pejorative,
but I'm not 100% sure,
so that's the Mongols over there,
and we have Jewish presence is really on an axis,
kind of a diagonal axis running through Kyiv,
and I looked at a map of trade routes,
and sure enough,
it's towns along a trade route leading into Hungary,
and that's how the Jewish presence is determined there.
It's an unstable existence, you know,
and it's not very permanent,
and you find little tiny mentionings here and there.
It's not a sizeable Jewish presence there at all.
Where it's gonna get much bigger
is when the Grand Duchy of Lithuania comes into the picture
and effectively colonizes these areas.
Now, the Jews are temporarily expelled.
Some link it to the expulsion of Jews from Spain.
I guess it was a copycat expulsion.
That's what you read sometimes,
but then, when he changes his mind a few years later,
it's revoked under the same monarch,
and now you have approximately 4,000 Jews
in 24 Ukrainian towns.
That doesn't sound like a whole lot.
It's a frontier kind of existence
where we find evidence of Jews
actually taking part in the defense of these towns,
which are under a lot of pressure from Tatars, especially.
They're learning to shoot.
They're doing even military exercises.
It's not your typical image
of East European Jews,
so it's kind of interesting,
but they do manage to survive,
and it becomes safer and safer
as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
really sort of concretizes its presence there,
and then you start to have more Jews moving in,
and that's where we are, really,
with our knowledge about these areas.
I mean, there's not a whole lot more,
and we're kind of just about up to the point
where you are in the...
I think we're past the point that you are chronologically,
so now we're gonna go beyond that a little bit
for the next 100 years or so,
and this is where Poland,
Crown Poland is gonna come into the picture,
and I really call this colonization full-fledged
because it is kind of a big land grab.
You know, you have Polish nobles, petty nobles,
magnates, these large landholders,
coming in and just grabbing up as much territory
as they possibly can.
It's the result of the actual agreement
called the Union of Lublin
whereby the threat of Russia is such
that Lithuania kind of accedes to this agreement,
which seems to really benefit the Poles.
It's almost like a protection agreement, it seems like,
and you'll probably learn a lot more about it,
but for our purposes today,
those Polish nobles are going to bring Jews in
to settle their towns and to run their enterprises,
and this is what it looks like,
so the dark gold parts
are what the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is,
and these other parts are Poland,
and this comes to be known
as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
and by 1648,
you go from 4,000 to 40,000 Jews
living in 115 Ukrainian towns,
and, you know, that colonizing activity
is very good for the Jews
because they have these economic possibilities.
They're still not allowed to own land,
but what they do is
they begin leasing the various enterprises.
Now, I'm gonna put a question to you.
Why is leaseholding,
like, leasing a tavern or a mill,
better, from the Jewish perspective, than owning it?
And I'll give you a big hint.
They're leasing it from the all-powerful nobility.
Any ideas why it's better to lease than to own?
Yeah.
- You have the protection of the nobles.
- You got it right away.
It's you have the protection the nobles.
Nobody is going to burn down a tavern
if it belongs to the noblemen,
but as, I mentioned before, you know,
Jews are in a very physically vulnerable situation,
so this leaseholding arrangement
is actually very beneficial to Jews
because they get noble protection,
at least from that standpoint.
They're also being taxed pretty mercilessly,
and the nobles don't want their best taxpayers
to be, you know, physically assaulted either,
so it's not the most stable situation,
but it's one of, it's good enough.
You know, they have Polish protection.
Now, what's in it for the nobility? Why Jews?
And I'll give you another hint.
It's not because they like Jews.
In fact, it's very much the opposite,
so why would you invite Jews in
to lease your various enterprises?
Any ideas?
Yeah?
- Maybe so you can, like, keep your eye on them,
make sure that they're not doing
anything you don't want them to be doing.
- For sure.
I mean, there's a lot of control involved as well,
but okay, yeah?
- Wasn't moneylending sort of like unbelief?
- Okay, good, so it's not quite true.
You know, you do have actual banks, at a certain point,
the nobles can borrow from,
but there are a lot of hoops to jump through,
and Jews represent easy credit,
you know, and you're in a socially superior position
to your creditor,
so that becomes very tempting,
and Jews are involved very much in moneylending,
and it's funny because what I base a lot of this on
is an article, a series of articles by Shmuel Ettinger.
They're in Hebrew,
so most of you wouldn't have access to them,
but they're the most, I would say,
full information about this time period and this place,
and he spends a lot of pages trying to argue
that Jews really weren't that involved in moneylending,
but then he contradicts himself too.
I think moneylending has a bad image,
but the fact of the matter is
people needed credit, you know,
and this is where they could get it, for the most part,
so yes, moneylending's a big part of it.
Anything else about Jews
that makes them attractive as leaseholders?
Yeah?
- Does it have something to do with the fact that
because they're just,
they can't enter other industries or they can't own land,
then there's guarantee that they'll serve that role or that-
- Very much so.
I would call it a captive service sector.
You know, they don't have a lot of options.
Yeah.
- Because they're not necessarily
paying a tithe to the church,
maybe they're (indistinct) be a good source of tax revenue.
Is that- - Okay,
so that's a complicated question.
Yes, they're great source of tax revenue,
but believe me, they're paying more taxes than anybody.
They're paying taxes to the crown,
and we'll go into that a little bit.
They don't pay tithe to the church.
That's actually an interesting point
that I haven't thought about a lot,
so that's a great point,
but they're paying so many other ways,
including to their own communities,
and I'm not, it probably offsets, but absolutely.
Now, one thing
nobody thought of yet is politics.
No matter how wealthy
your Jewish leaseholder is going to become,
and some of them really do quite well by this system,
they're never gonna be a political threat to you, okay?
And I can add other things, business acumen,
you know, historically involved in trade.
Where they came from was
Western and Central Europe,
especially the German- and Czech-speaking lands,
and in those areas,
they worked as merchants a lot of the time
until they were pushed out by the townspeople.
They're also being pushed out
of parts of Poland proper, we could call it, Crown Poland,
by the same Christian townspeople, and they're moving.
They're being pushed into these areas,
so it's actually,
it's a great boon to the Jews
who are losing opportunities in one place
to be able to come to another place,
but, of course, this is all a colonial scheme,
so it's volatile.
It's dangerous, you know.
Jews are running these leases,
but, you know, they're not very popular with the peasants
who are now being enserfed,
and this is like a second serfdom, it's called,
and so there we have
Augustine's rule being violated
because they're in a position of superiority
to the surrounding peasants
by running these taverns and mills and tolls and so on.
It becomes a real problem.
It becomes intolerable.
Now, this is the reason they're not allowed to own land
because if they own land,
they're gonna be lording it directly over peasants
who are farmers, essentially, and that's intolerable.
It just, the optics are too bad,
but to run a tavern and a mill and so on,
that's seen as okay
except from the perspective of the peasants,
who really experience this in a negative way, obviously,
and, you know, we have a volatile system,
but it's held in place
as long as the Polish nobility is in power,
and here's the thing.
The nobility doesn't want the headache
of collecting taxes directly from these Jews.
Plus, they can't be trusted to,
you know, pay their taxes,
and they all seem to have the same name,
like Yitzchak ben Moshe and so on.
You know, there's like 17 of them in one town,
and so what they do is they entrust the Jewish communities,
first Jewish tax collectors, specifically,
and then the kahals, which is the Jewish self-government,
to collect the taxes for them,
and in the process, they're giving the kahal...
I guess you'd compare it to a municipality.
They're giving the kahals complete autonomy, almost,
to run daily affairs,
to manage the garbage collection and keep the streets clean
and try to make sure
people don't encroach on each other's leases,
and they manage the educational system,
