Eastern European Jewry
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The expression 'Eastern European Jewry' has two meanings. Its first meaning refers to the current political spheres of the Eastern European countries and its second meaning refers to the Jewish communities in
At the beginning of the 20th century, over 6 million Jews lived in Eastern Europe. They were organized into large and small communities, living in big cities such as Warsaw (with a population of about 300,000 Jews) as well as in small towns with populations of only tens or hundreds of Jews.
Before the 18th century
At the beginning of the 16th century, the number of Jews who lived in
In the mid-18th century, two-thirds of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe lived in cities or towns, and a third of it lived in villages - a unique phenomenon that hardly existed in Western Europe. In every village where Jews lived, there were only two Jewish families on average, and each family usually consisted of no more than ten Jews. In most of the urban localities in which they lived, the Jewish population comprised half the number of residents on average. It follows that in many towns, there was a Jewish majority. This reality has been intensified over the years, with the percentage of Jews in cities and towns increasing, and thus the "shtetl" phenomenon was created - the "Jewish town", a large part of which was Jewish, and whose Jewish cultural character was prominent.
Economics and commerce
The Jews engaged in trade and various crafts, such as tailoring, weaving, leather processing and even agriculture. The economic activity of Eastern European Jewry was different from that of Central and Western European Jews: in Eastern Europe, the Jews developed specializations in trade, leasing, and crafts, which were hardly found in Western Europe. The Eastern European Jewry also had a great deal of involvement in economic matters that Jews in Central and Western Europe did not deal with at all.
Until the mid-17th century with the 1648 Cossack riots on Jewish population, eastern European Jews lived in a relatively comfortable environment that enabled them to thrive. The Jews, for the most part, enjoyed extensive economic, personal and religious freedom. Thus, for example, deportations, foreclosure of Jewish property, and the removal of financial debts of non-Jews to Jews, which were common in Western Europe, hardly existed in the East. Despite the privileges, there were also hatred expressions towards the Jews. This phenomenon was described by a Jewish sage named Shlomo Maimon:
"It is possible that there is no country other than Poland, where freedom of religion and hatred of religion are found in equal measure. The Jews are allowed to preserve their religion with absolute freedom, and the rest of the civil rights have been assigned to them, and they have even their own courts. And in opposite to that, you find that religion hatred is so great there to the extent of that matter, the word 'Jew' is an abomination."
Traditional life
The amount of Torah study among Eastern European Jews at the beginning of their settlement was little. As a result, many halakhic (from Hebrew: הלכתיות) questions and problems were addressed to rabbis and Torah scholars in Germany and Bohemia which were close to them. From the 16th century, luxurious study centers were established in Eastern Europe, where the Hassidic movement also began to develop.
Social structure
The Jewish social structure in Eastern Europe was built of communities and from the mid-16th century to 1764, central institutions, including communal ones, of self-leadership in Eastern Europe were running. The two main institutions were the Four-State Committee and the Lithuanian State Council. The committees' role was to collect taxes from the Jewish communities and deliver them to the authorities. Later they took it upon themselves to represent the Jewish community to the foreign rulers of those countries. In addition, the committee had judicial authority over internal laws and Halachot (from Hebrew: הלכות) within the Jewish communities.
The Council of Four Lands was the highest institution among the committees. The committee was composed out of seven rabbinic judges when the head of them was always a representative of the Lublin community. The other members of the committee were representatives of the cities of Poznan, Krakow and Lvov. Historical documents bearing the Committee's signature indicate that in certain periods the committee was expanded to represent all the important communities in the kingdom, and then the number of representatives was close to thirty. At first, the committee met in Lublin, giving the city the status of a top-notch Jewish center. The conference, which lasted about two weeks, was held once a year during the winter, when the city's largest trade fair was coordinated. In a later period, the conference was held twice a year: a winter gathering in Lublin and a summer conference in the city of Yaroslav in Galicia.
From the late 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century
In the late 18th century, the Jews of Eastern Europe were divided into two major geographic regions: a settlement controlled by the Russian Empire, and a Galicia under the control of the Austria-Hungarian Empire.
The settlement
The
At the beginning of the 20th century, more than five million Jews lived in Czarist Russia, with 90% of them concentrated in the region of the Settlement and about three million Jews lived in the former borders of Poland. According to various estimates, Eastern European Jewry at the beginning of the 20th century constituted 80% of world Jewry.
Galicia
Another large Jewish community in Eastern Europe was
The Jews in Galicia were known for their religious piety, and they fought hard against the Enlightenment and against attempts to "assimilate" them culturally. There was also a sharp confrontation between supporters of
In 1867, the Jews of Galicia were granted full equality of rights, and thus were the first among the Jews of Eastern Europe to be emancipated. The Zionist movement flourished in Galicia. During the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, before World War I the Jewish community flourished in Galicia. A large number of books and poems were published there, many Torah sages were engaged in it and Zionism and Yiddish culture also emerged. At the beginning of the 20th century, the number of Jews in Galicia reached more than 800,000.[citation needed]
Antisemitism
As
See also
- Ashkenazi Jews
- History of the Jews in Poland
- History of the Jews in Russia
- History of the Jews in Ukraine
- Council of Four Lands
- Shtetl
- Pale of Settlement
References
- ^ The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, May 29th, 2016.
- ^ Cecil Roth, The World History of the Jewish People. Vol. XI (11): The Dark Ages. Jews in Christian Europe 711-1096 [Second Series: Medieval Period. Vol. Two: The Dark Ages, Rutgers University Press, 1966. Pp. 302-303.
- ISBN 978-3-11-086792-3.
- Sergio DellaPergola, "Some Fundamentals of Jewish Demographic History", in Papers in Jewish Demography 1997, Jerusalem, The Hebrew University, 2001.
- PMID 30840069.
- ISBN 978-1-5107-3497-5.
- ^ "The End of German-Jewish Life: Ostjuden as a Metaphor for All Jews". The University of Chicago Library.
Sources
- Jared Diamond (1993). "Who are the Jews?" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-21. Retrieved November 8, 2010.
- Hammer, MF; Redd, AJ; Wood, ET; et al. (June 2000). "Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 97 (12): 6769–6774. PMID 10801975.
- Wade, Nicholas (9 May 2000). "Y Chromosome Bears Witness to Story of the Jewish Diaspora". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 October 2012.
- "Germany: Virtual Jewish History Tour". Jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Retrieved 2013-07-19.
- Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopaedia 2007. Europe. Archived from the original on 28 October 2009. Retrieved 27 December 2007.
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Further reading
- Roth, Joseph (1927). Juden Auf Wanderschaft (The Wandering Jews), translated by Michael Hofmann. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
- Zweig, Arnold (1920). Das Ostjüdische Antlitz (The Face of East European Jewry), with drawings by Hermann Struck, translated by Noah Isenberg. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2nd ed., 2004.