Chapter 17 Jewish Tavern-Keepers and the Myth of the Poisoned Drinks: Legends and Stereotypes in Romanian and Other East-European Cultures (17th–19th Centuries)*

Andrei Oişteanu

Jewish migration to and settlement in areas of Eastern Europe began in the first century AD, when from Asia Minor started settling in urban and commercial centres on the northern Black Sea coast. The countries of origin of Jewish migrants into East-Central Europe changed over time, as did the causes and patterns of migration. A more significant migration into Eastern Europe started in the 17th century with the arrival into Hungary and the Romanian Principalities of Jews from war-ravaged Poland-Lithuania. The market towns of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Romanian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia, as well as Hungary remained key areas of Jewish settlement throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries. Available data show that, dur- ing the 19th century, the Jewish population grew much more rapidly than the populations of Eastern Europe as a whole, until the late 19th century, when consecutive waves of emigration took Jews westwards, mainly towards Vienna and the , but also eastwards, into Palestine.1 In the Danubian Principalities, throughout the long 19th century up to the War of Independence which led to the creation of the Kingdom of Romania (1881) under a Hohenzollern dynasty, Jews were allowed to settle and exer- cise professions, including tavern-keeping. They did not, however, gain civil and political rights until after WW1. Steady Jewish migration from Habsburg

* Research for this chapter was supported by a grant provided by the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of , Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Some of the material has been presented previously in: Andrei Oişteanu, Imaginea evreului în cultura română (Iaşi: 2012). See also idem, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic stereotypes in Romanian and other Central- East European cultures (Lincoln & : 2009). The present chapter has been updated and translated by Angela Jianu and revised by the author. 1 For further statistics, see the entry “Population and Migration before World War I” by Mark Kupovetsky, trans. I. Michael Aronson, in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New York: 2010), URL: http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx?id=2053 [accessed 3 August 2017].

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004367548_019 Jewish Tavern-Keepers and the Myth of the Poisoned Drinks 479 and Russian territories into the Principalities led to a constant increase of the Jewish community. By 1904, around 21.1 per cent of the country’s merchant class were Jewish, forming a majority in Moldavian market towns, as opposed to the smaller communities in the historic province of Wallachia.2 Patterns of acculturation and assimilation differed between the two principalities, but the attitude of the ethnic Romanian population towards Jews seems to have re- mained by and large one of “hostile tolerance,” to use a phrase suggested by the Romanian historian Şerban Papacostea.3 This is a very basic outline of what is a complex mix of trends and patterns of migration, settlement, expulsion and re-settlement of Jews in East-Central Europe, on which a considerable body of literature is now available. What has been less studied perhaps than the politics and statistics of Jewish migrations are the cultural underpinnings of interactions between the Jewish communi- ties and the local populations of their host countries.4 The present study aims to be a contribution to the study of representations of the Jew in Romanian culture with contextual referenced to other East-European cultures. One of the main objectives of the research was to assess the extent to which images and tropes used in folklore, literature and the press had the potential to contribute to the later 19th-century shift from “hostile tolerance” to exclusionary and anti- semitic practices. The first part of the study examines the origins and sources of the negative discourse which developed around the figure of the Jewish tavern lease-holder. The last section looks at the science behind one of the key stereotypes linked to the Jewish tavern-keeper’s activities: the entrenched myth of his role in selling adulterated liquor to the Christian residents of the countryside.

The Abode of the Devil vs the Abode of the Lord

There exists a category of Christmas carols in Polish, Romanian, Bulgarian and, to a lesser extent, in Ukrainian folklore, dedicated to tavern-keepers. Romanian and Polish carol-singers wish the Jewish tavern-keeper wealth and

2 See the entry “Romania” by Leon Volovici in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, URL: http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx?id=24 [accessed 3 August 2017]. The entry, with a comprehensive bibliography, is a good starting point for understanding the background of the present study. 3 Ibid. 4 Recent examples of a growing body of such studies include: Leonid Livak, The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A case of Russian literature (Stanford University Press: 2010) and Glenn Dynner’s Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, liquor and life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford: 2014).