4 Lords and Masters Most rural Jews were not self-employed entrepreneurs, but were dependent on, and/ or served in one way or another (mostly as leaseholders) their landlords, who were private persons, mainly Polish and Lithuanian nobles, and various institutions. This was a direct continuation of the situation in the late Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, although with changes in the land ownership structure which had occurred under Czarist Russian rule. These changes included the penetration of Russian landowners into former Polish territories, and the abolition of the nobles’ monopoly on land ownership. These opened a way for non-noble landowners (including Jewish ones) to acquire land in the region. The other changes were: stripping the Uniate (Greek-Catholic) Church of most of its property and giving it to the Orthodox church in 1805, and a distinction between Imperial estates (udel’nyye zemli) and treasury estates (kazionnyye zemli), which did not exist under Polish rule. However, it should be taken into account that the eviction lists were composed after the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit when Polish nobles in the service of Napoleonic Grand Duchy of Warsaw were not regarded as Russia’s enemies. The connection between Jews and Polish-Lithuanian magnates is, of course, one of the best-studied topics in the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Jewry204, and I have personally contributed several studies on the economic connections between Polish Jews and various churches in the pre-partition period205. All these studies, however, are based either upon private magnates’ archives or ecclesiastic archives and do not provide a full picture. Thus, it should be stressed that the eviction lists for 1808 held in Minsk and used for this study provide us, for the first time, with complete information about the distribution within a relatively large region of rural Jews along with different groups of their lords and masters. The private landlords of the Jews were of three kinds: 214 Polish-Lithuanian nobles (see table 4.1), 26 Russian dignitaries (see table 4.2), and 3 non-noble merchants (see table 4.3). The institutional landlords were either ecclesiastic institutions (16 monasteries, 6 parish churches, 2 bishops and 2 priests: see table 4.4) or administrators of public lands (22 imperial estates, 3 treasury land-tracts, and 2 municipal land- tracts: see table 4.5). The three groups of private employers were heterogeneous. Most of the members of the first group, were either Lithuanian magnates, or Belarusian 204 The principal studies on this subject are Rosman, Moshe, Lords’ Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge (Mass.), 1990 and Teller, Adam, Kesef, Koaḥ VeHshpa’a: HaYehudim BeAḥuzot Beit Radziwiłł BeLita BaMea Ha-18, Jeru- salem, 2006. 205 Kalik, Judith, “Patterns of Contacts between the Catholic Church and the Jews in Polish-Lithua- nian Commonwealth during the 17-18th Centuries: Jewish Debts” in: Studies in the History of the Jews in Old Poland in Honor of Jacob Goldberg , ed. A. Teller, Jerusalem (Scripta Hierosolymitana 38), 1998, pp.102-122; Kalik, Judith, Economic Relations between the Catholic Church and the Jews in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th-18 th Centuries, Gal-ed 23, 2012, pp. 15-36. Lords and Masters 133 nobles of boyar origin. Ethnic Polish magnates were a minority. The second group were predominantly German, Danish, Scottish, or Georgian in origin, although there were a few ethnic Russians. It is not easy to distinguish between these two groups of landowners, since many Polish magnates held high positions in the Russian administration, and some of them were even newcomers whose estates were granted to them by the Russian authorities. Thus, Prince Adam Czartoryski served as the Russian Foreign Minister from 1804 to 1806, and the widow of the Polish General Jόzef Zabiełło, who was hanged by Kościuszko rebels as a Russian spy, received estates in Belarus as a reward for her late husband’s service. The third group of private landlords consisted of one Jewish, one English, and one Belarusian merchant. The Polish nobles belonged to two distinct groups: the so-called magnates, i.e. the members of the senatorial families, and local middle nobles, members of the szlachta. In their relations with Jews, however, the distinction between large landowners holding hundreds of Jews and small landowners with one or two Jewish leaseholders followed different lines. Many “magnates” were junior members of senatorial families and had little property in Minsk Guberniya, while many local powerful potentates, though not being “magnates” per se, dominated some Jewish communities. All in all, 82 magnates controlled 2808 Jews of both sexes in 690 villages, while 341 middle nobles controlled 1460 Jews in 133 villages. In other words, Polish nobles controlled 82% of all rural Jews in Minsk Guberniya in 1808, 54% of the Jews served the magnates, and 28% served the middle nobles. However, 28 “magnates” possessed just one village with one Jewish leaseholder. Many of these nobles bore the court titles of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which were mostly already obsolete under the Russian rule. 4.1 Polish-Lithuanian Magnates The largest landlords, quite naturally, were the members of the Lithuanian aristocratic family of Radziwiłł, the richest magnates of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The 11th Prince-Ordynat of Nesvizh, Dominik Radziwiłł, alone controlled 686 Jews of both sexes, including members of their families in 168 villages. Only 61 of them belonged to the ordynacja of Nesvizh, while the remainder were scattered through his other estates in the districts of Slutsk, Bobruisk, Borisov, Minsk, and Mozyr’. The composition of the eviction lists in 1808 coincided with the dynastic crisis in the Radziwiłł family. In 1807 Dominik Radziwiłł married Elżbieta Mniszek, but 14 days after the wedding he fled the Nesvizh castle with his married cousin Teofila Starzeńska (née Morawska), who gave birth in 1808 to their illegitimate son Aleksander. Dominik and Teofila married only in 1809 after costly divorces with their previous spouses, and at the end of the same year their legitimate daughter Stefania was born. When Dominik Radziwiłł fell in action at the battle of Hanau in 1813 fighting on the side of Napoleon, his premarital son Aleksander was disinherited, and Stefania became his sole heiress. The ordynacja of Nesvizh, as a primogeniture possession, passed then to the Radziwiłł family, 134 Lords and Masters namely to the Prince-Ordynat of Ołyka, Antoni Radziwiłł, while Stefania inherited the remainder of her father’s estates. Stefania was raised in St. Petersburg under the patronage of the Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna (née Sophia von Württemberg), widow of Czar Paul a distant relative of hers. Antoni Radziwiłł planned to marry Stefania to his son, Ferdynand, in order to reunite the Radziwiłł family possessions in Belarus, but Ferdynand died in 1827. In 1828 the Dowager Empress arranged Stefania’s marriage with Ludwig von Wittgenstein, who had been involved in 1825 in the Decembrist conspiracy, but thanks to the Empress’s protection was not only pardoned, but received the richest bride in Europe in marriage. Two lists of the Jewish subjects of von Wittgenstein in district of Slutsk from 1848 and 1852 have survived.206 Wittgenstein’s estates were inherited by Ludwig and Stefania’s son Peter, who died in 1887 without issue, and his possessions passed to his sister Maria, who married Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenloe in 1847, Governor of Alsace-Lorraine and future Chancellor of the German Empire (1894-1900). However, in 1887 Czar Alexander III passed an edict forbidding foreign citizens from inheriting lands in the Russian Empire, and so Princess Maria was forced to sell her estates piecemeal to Russian nationals. This was the end of Dominik Radziwiłł’s possessions in Minsk Guberniya. Antoni Radziwiłł controlled in 1808 only twelve Jews in three villages in district of Pinsk, since his main estates were located in Volhynia in the ordynacja of Ołyka. In 1813 he became the 12th Prince-Ordynat of Nesvizh. The ordynacja of Nesvizh continued to exist until 1939. Antoni Radziwiłł settled in Prussia in 1796, where he served as the Governor of Grand Duchy of Poznań from 1815 to 1831. After his death in 1832 his son, the Prussian general Wilhelm inherited the ordynacja of Nesvizh. In 1870 Wilhelm’s son Antoni became the 14th Prince-Ordynat of Nesvizh and in 1874 he also inherited the ordynacja of Kletsk. The 9th Prince-Ordynat of Kletsk Jόzef Radziwiłł controlled 169 Jews in 56 villages in 1808, mostly in the ordynacja of Kletsk, but also in the district of Mozyr’. Since his only son, Antoni died 1810 without issue, the ordynacja of Kletsk passed after his death in 1813 to his brother Michał, who controlled 288 Jews in 47 villages in the district of Borisov in 1808. Michał died in 1831 and the ordynacja of Kletsk passed to his grandson Leon, who died childless in 1874. The primogeniture holding was therefore inherited by Antoni, the Prince-Ordynat of Niesvizh, and thus both ordynacjas were united until their dissolution in 1939. An unnamed Princess Radziwiłłowa was another member of Radziwiłł clan mentioned in the eviction lists of 1808, a landlady of just four Jews in two villages in district of Minsk. This was probably Julia, the unmarried daughter of Dominik Radziwiłł from the so-called Annopol branch of the Radziwiłł family, who later married Andzej Prόszyński. All in all five