Petrovsky-Shtern Yohanan - The golden age Shtetl: a new history of Jewish life in East Europe

THE GOLDEN AGE

SHTETL

Copyright 2014 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

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ISBN 978-0-691-16074-0

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Jacket art: Golden Gefilte Fish, acrylic on canvas, 2008 Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern.

TO MY JEWISH HISTORY MENTORS

Arthur Green
Antony Polonsky
Moshe rosman
shaul stampfer

.

(I learned from all my teachers. Mishnah Avot 4:1)

THE GOLDEN AGE

SHTETL

INTRODUCTION

WHATS IN A NAME?

M any of us recall Anatevka from Fiddler on the Roof with warmth, mercy, and grief. Anatevka was a Jewish village in dire straits, with its broken-down Jews, wooden huts, rotting shingles, clumsy wooden fences, cracked church walls, and pitiful marketplace with several crooked wooden stalls. Anything made of stone in this villagethe church, a factory, the administration officeswas clearly not Jewish, except, of course, the tombstones. The hand-polished copper candlesticks and samovars of the inhabitants of Anatevka shone like rare treasures in that sepia world of decay.

The literary invention of the ingenious imagination of Sholem Aleichem, Anatevka represented the wooden age of the shtetl, the penultimate chapter of its existence. The actual shtetl, however, had seen much better times. A century earlier, in the 1790s, it entered a fifty-year period that I shall call the golden age of the shtetl. Of course, this description sounds like an oxymoron. How could a ramshackle village in the middle of nowhere where nothing happened but pogroms and expulsions have had a golden age?

This book seeks to answer this question by inquiring into the huge archival evidence that turns upside down the received wisdom about the shtetl and demonstrates the golden age shtetl as economically vigorous, financially beneficial, and culturally influential. The shtetl between the 1790s and the 1840s was an East European market town in private possession of a Polish magnate, inhabited mostly but not exclusively by Jews and subject to Russian bureaucracy. The golden age shtetl presented fascinating opportunities for the Russian Empire to integrate its Jews, and for Jews to adapt themselves to Russiaopportunities that Russia, following a new nationalist and chauvinistic state ideology, completely lost. The golden age shtetl was the manifestation of a highly productive and promising encounter between the Russian Empire and the Jews, but an encounter ultimately ruined by the ideologically and geopolitically driven Russian administration, not without the help of some Jews.

Between the 1790s and the 1840s the shtetl went through a fifty-year period of prosperity and stability, a time of economic and cultural opportunity. During this period the shetl was very different from what we usually imagine it to have been. The beginning and the end of this little-known golden age were marked by two events. The first was the partitioning of Poland by Russia, with the help of Prussia and Austria, which began in 1772, continued in 1773, and ended in 1795. It diminished Polish presence, offered new socioeconomic opportunities, and brought about the flourishing of the shtetl. The second event was the Russian imperial iron age, with its militarization, political and economic rivalry, xenophobia, and nationalism, which after the 1840s transformed the shtetl little by little into a ramshackle town, perhaps even a village, stricken by poverty and pogromsan Anatevka of sorts. In East European Jewish cultural memory, that later shtetl replaced the shtetl as it had been before. It is precisely this earlier shtetl that this book resurrects by digging it out from beneath layers of literary and cultural stereotypes.

As a result of the partitions, Russia inherited the shtetl with its Polish magnate town-owner and the Jews as its driving economic mechanism. The golden age shtetl was a Polish, Jewish, and Russian joint effort, and it was a proud place with a fascinating social tapestry. Russia treated the shtetl at first with caution and respect, then turned envious, suspicious, and intolerant. Seeking to suppress the Polish shtetl owners, Russia introduced laws that the Jews saw as meted out specifically against them. While the shtetl retained its delicate balance of power among Poles, Russians, and Jews, it endured through its golden age. Yet the more vigorous the shtetl was, the more dangerous it became in the eyes of the new regime, which now sought ways to undermine the shtetls economic power. In a word, the shtetl prospered so long as the Russian regime put up with its Polish heritage, and it entered into a decline when the regime chose to eradicate it. When in the 1840s Russia finally chose ideology and protectionism over economic growth, the balance shattered, and the glorious years of the shtetl came to a halt. The shtetls golden age tells the story of a lost struggle for freedom and survivalthe early nineteenth-century understanding of survival and freedom.

For some fifty years, between the 1790s and the 1840s, the shtetl was politically no longer Polish but administratively not yet entirely Russian, and its Jews were left to their own devices. It was the unique habitat of some 80 percent of East European Jews, who constituted two-thirds of world Jewry at the time. The shtetls unlikely golden age marked the first encounter of East European Jews with the Russian Empire. The shtetl had little to no chance of surviving Russias modernization, yet it endured as long as it withstood the attempts to reform and transform itand as long as Russia left it in peace. Once its better days were over, the shtetl continued on in the cultural memory, folklore, literature, and phraseology of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Moreover, the shtetl realities informed much of these cultural memories, as reflected in the literature, language, and folklore, which thus posthumously perpetuated, perhaps even immortalized, the shtetl.

Since this golden age had a beginning and an end, an examination of this specific period reveals not only the everyday reality but also the unrealized potential of the shtetl: who its Jews and other inhabitants were, what kind of lives they lived, why the Russian regime could not accept them as such, and how the regime hastened the shtetls demise. The story of the golden age shtetl is a story of unfulfilled promise and myopic geopolitics. By trying to make the shtetl one of its own, Russia broke its back, destroyed its uniqueness, and triggered its transformation into Anatevka. The shtetl could have become the economic if not sociopolitical backbone of the western part of the Russian Empire and could have had a very different history, but because of its unique socioeconomic, political, and legal structure, it never did. This story also illuminates how the shtetl Jews changed when the regime forced them to, yet still remained who they had been. If we consider the attempts of the regime to transform the shtetl as a forced modernization, the desire of Jews to remain who they were could equally be considered as countermodernity. But the dichotomy of modernity and countermodernity only poorly conveys the vagaries and travails of the shtetls grass roots, which is precisely what this book seeks to revive.