Class 8. Early Jews of Modern Ukraine (1)

- All right, good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Maksimas Milta.

I am a graduate student

at European and Russian Studies program here at Yale,

and also one of the teaching fellows for this class,

and as the syllabus says,

today's lecture is focused

on the history of Jews in Ukraine,

and we learned earlier

that Jews are among those people who lived the longest

in the territory of modern-day Ukraine,

and hence, the topic of today,

and the lecture will be today delivered

by our special guest, Professor Glenn Dynner.

Glenn Dynner is the Carl and Dorothy Bennett

Professor of Judaic Studies

and director of Bennett Center at Fairfield University.

Since 2014, he has served as a professor of religion

and chair of religion department at Sarah Lawrence College.

Professor Dynner holds a PhD from Brandeis University

in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies,

and his scholarship focuses

mostly on Eastern European Jewry,

and more specifically,

on the social history of Hasidism and Haskalah,

also known as Jewish Enlightenment.

He also works on the topics of Polish Jewish relations,

Jewish economic history, and popular religion.

Professor Dynner is the author of two award-winning books.

One of them is called "Men of Silk:

"The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society,"

and the other one is called "Yankel's Tavern:

"Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland."

Currently, Professor Dynner works on the book

titled "The Light of Learning:

"The Hasidic Revival in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust."

For those of you

who consider an academic career in your future,

I'd like to emphasize the fact

that Professor Dynner is also a coeditor of "Shofar,"

a journal of interdisciplinary Jewish studies,

and he also serves on the editorial boards

of "POLIN" and "East European Jewish Affairs" journals.

He's a member of several

Jewish studies related advisory and academic boards,

including YIVO,

and also, an academic advisory board

of the Fortunoff Archive here at Yale.

Professor Dynner, welcome to Yale,

and thank you for joining us.

- Okay, thanks, Max.

(audience clapping)

Thank you.

Yeah, it's great to be here.

I guess you figured out I'm not Timothy Snyder,

and I teach at Fairfield,

which is down the highway a little bit,

and I missed my exit,

and somehow I wind up here, which is a great honor,

so I'm gonna be talking a little bit

about the Jews of Ukraine up to the year 1648.

I understand you guys came up

to the Battle of Grunwald in 1410,

so I'm gonna go a little bit beyond that

because honestly, not a whole lot is known

about the Jewish communities

in this part of Eastern Europe before then,

and so we're gonna go through all this,

and we're gonna come up to 1648.

I assume, to this point, you've really been learning

about the story of colonizers and the colonized.

Colonizers being Lithuanians,

and then Poles, which you're just starting to get into,

and the colonized being Ukrainians in this part.

What I would like to talk about today

is a third very prominent group,

and that's the Jewish community,

which is neither one of these things, right?

The Jews constitute a diaspora group,

meaning they're without a homeland, so to speak.

They're a guest,

and they have to somehow mediate

between these colonizers and the colonized.

There's certain advantages to being a diaspora group,

if you think about it.

They have a pretty far-flung

social and mercantile network.

They speak their own language

and are able to cultivate,

you know, an elite culture

or subculture in these parts,

and, you know,

it's a situation of

where they're able to obtain economic niches

and have a great deal of mobility.

Those things are true.

However, it's also a situation of physical vulnerability.

The Jews are members of a,

well, ostensibly problematic religion,

and, you know, as a result of this,

they really wind up serving the more powerful groups,

meaning the Lithuanian and the Polish colonizers,

and this works out for a while

until they really pay a horrible price for this,

you know, because Ukrainians

are gonna rise up under Chmielnicki,

and Chmielnicki is an anticolonial hero

from a Ukrainian perspective,

but from a Jewish perspective,

after a series of horrific massacres,

you know, Chmielnicki, for them, is a vicious persecutor,

and this is kind of the price that they pay.

I wanna start with the bad news

and then move on to better news.

The bad news is Jews, as you probably figured out,

are a pariah group,

as some of the things I mentioned indicate,

and that has very deep roots here.

It goes all the way back, in fact, to early church fathers.

The most benign,

and, I would say, the formula that's basically adopted

throughout most of real everyday life

is probably that one

that's attributable to Augustine, okay?

And we'll go into that in a minute,

but first, I just want to address this image,

which, if you can make it out,

is really a kind of image of ambivalence

because over here on this side

you have Jewish merchants, traders.

They don't look very prosperous.

On the other side, you have peasants in their holiday garb,

and the painter is called (indistinct),

who would paint Polish and Ukrainian kind of everyday life,

landscapes, and depict sort of scenes of everyday life.

They're together.

They're gathered in front of a tavern,

but you can tell they're pretty apart, right?

They're divided by their dress.

They're divided by their language.

You know, Jews are speaking Yiddish, predominantly,

and the peasants have their own local dialect.

It's gonna be a Slavic language,

and there's little kind of communication between them.

The Jews are also involved in very different activity,

you know, as traders, as petty merchants,

compared to the peasants who, on their holiday are dancing,

and they're enjoying themselves, probably drinking,

and inside, if we went in there,

we would probably see a Jewish tavernkeeper.

Jews leased taverns and distilleries from the nobility.

The vast majority of taverns and distilleries

throughout these regions were actually run by Jews,

and you really have sort of a, I would say,

an interaction, but not an integration, right?

An interaction within

very prescribed social categories.

You can call it a symbiosis

because Jews are providing essential services,

the peasants providing essential services to them,

but, of course, it can also develop into real animosity,

misunderstanding, resentment, and outright violence,

so that's why I would call it a situation of ambivalence.

Where does the pariah status come from?

If we go back to Augustine,

I'd like to look at this text very closely

because it looks like anti-Semitism,

but it's not really intended to be so.

This is from his "Contra Faustum":

"It is not, as you say, not by bodily death

"shall the ungodly race of carnal Jews perish,"

and what he's basically saying is you can't kill Jews.

You know, they may have rejected Christ,

but they live among us,

and they're not to be harmed bodily,

and this is in a context

of forced conversions at this time period,

you know, outright violence and death,

and so he's really actually proscribing this.

He's forbidding this kind of thing.

"For whoever destroys them in this way,

"shall suffer sevenfold vengeance,"

that is, shall bring upon himself the sevenfold penalty

under which the Jews lie for the crucifixion of Christ,

and so he is blaming Jews for the death of Christ,

and deicide,

or at least the murder of the human embodiment of God,

is a pretty heavy penalty,

so to the end of the seven days of time,

the continued preservation of the Jews

will be proof to believing Christians

of the subjection merited

by those who, in the pride of their kingdom,

put the Lord to death,

and here is perhaps the most dangerous formula of all

because what it's basically saying is

Jews are to be kept around in a state of misery, right?

As witness to what happens when you reject Christ,

but they're to be kept around.

Now, the reason why I consider this so dangerous is

what happens when Jews don't fulfill that role

of misery, of subjection?

What happens then?

What happens when they're perceived

as maybe violating that hierarchy,

even subverting that hierarchy?

And, of course, at the heart of anti-Semitism is the claim

of excessive Jewish power, influence, and wealth,

and all these things come into play,

so what I'm asking is

is this formula a license to kill

when that, the Jewish part of the deal

is not held up, right?

The subjection or the misery,

and, you know, I think that kind of explains

the trajectory that we're gonna follow.

Most of the time,

most of the time, Jews are gonna lead

a relatively prosperous and stable existence,

but then there are these episodes,

extremely violent devastating episodes,

today, what we would call genocide in some cases, you know,

and, you know, are Jews even aware of this bargain?

Are they aware of this formula?

It seems they are, to an extent,

because rabbinical leaders will actually forbid

ostentatious display

like jewelry and fancy clothing and that kind of a thing,

and they'll try very hard,

but it's very hard to control such things also.

That being said, so we've got this kind of,

I would say, dangerous balancing act, you know,

and it's like a collective balancing act

and this collective sense of ambivalence.

That being said,

most of the Jews of the world

are going to move to this part of the world,

not all the Ukraine.

It's gonna be, also, you know,

the Polish kingdom and other lands in Eastern Europe,

but it's pretty incredible.

75% of the world's Jewish population

is going to reside in Eastern Europe by the 19th century,

and there's a reason for that.

It can't be that horrible if they're living there.

It certainly can't be that deadly.

The reason for that is that stability

and relative prosperity.

They have economic autonomy.

They're not allowed to own land,

yet that can also be,

I suppose, an advantage

because they move into somewhat more lucrative pursuits

like trade, crafts, moneylending,

and most importantly all, as time develops,

leaseholding from the nobility.

They will lease pretty much all

of the nonagricultural enterprises of the nobles.

Political autonomy.

We're gonna see how they develop virtually self-government.

Now, later on, anti-Semitic claims are gonna be

that they constitute a state within a state.

I think that goes way too far.

You know, it's all contingent on the Polish landowners

who own the vast majority of land in these areas

and linguistic autonomy.

The vernacular everyday language is Yiddish,

a combination of German and Hebrew

with some Slavic elements thrown in,

and then Hebrew, which functions a lot like Latin

as an elite clerical language, a literary language,

one that's not really spoken until the rise of Zionism.

Now, we can go way back

to the origins of Jewish presence

in what becomes the Ukraine,

but historians will often start

with the Khazar kingdom,

and it's kind of exciting to historians

to think that there was a Jewish kingdom.

Supposedly, the king converted to Judaism.

There's a classic called the "Kuzari,"

which tells this story how the king had a representative

from the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims,

and he chose Judaism,

and it's exciting

because you thought that it was only ancient Israel.

That was the last time that you had autonomy,

and suddenly, we find we have this Jewish kingdom,

and there are little bits of evidence here and there

that such a Jewish kingdom existed,

letters, mentionings in chronicles and that kind of a thing.

It's kind of a mess

because there are historians who accept this

and who devote their whole careers to writing about this,