East European Jewish Affairs the MARKETPLACE in BALTA
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
This article was downloaded by: [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] On: 30 September 2014, At: 04:04 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK East European Jewish Affairs Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/feej20 THE MARKETPLACE IN BALTA Yohanan Petrovsky‐Shtern Published online: 14 Nov 2007. To cite this article: Yohanan Petrovsky‐Shtern (2007) THE MARKETPLACE IN BALTA, East European Jewish Affairs, 37:3, 277-298 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501670701653419 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions East European Jewish Affairs, Vol. 37, No. 3, December 2007 THE MARKETPLACE IN BALTA Aspects of economic and cultural life Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern TaylorFEEJ_A_265183.sgm10.1080/13501670701653419East1350-1674Original2007373000000DecemberYohananPetrovsky-Shternyps@northwestern.edu European and& Article Francis 2007(print)/1743-971XFrancis Jewish Ltd Affairs (online) To the blessed memory of John Doyle Klier A marketplace in a shtetl (a Polish private town) was a locus of exchange of artefacts and goods, perhaps as any European marketplace.1 Historians from Ignacy Schiper to Gershon Hundert, Moshe Rosman and Adam Teller have thoroughly recreated the predomi- nance of Jews in East European, mostly 18th-century Polish, economy and emphasized their leading role in the trading life of the shtetl. Their studies have equipped the modern researcher with a panoramic vision of Jewish economic activities and provided an excellent grasp of what historians tend to call “the Jewish trade.” And yet, while the forms of “exchange” have been studied, the “artefacts and goods” have not. Nor has a marketplace as a specific locus of the shtetl received attention. Recreating the 19th-century shtetl marketplace in its economic, political, social and cultural contexts seems an unfeasible task. Given the dearth of documentary evidence (even the founding fathers of Russian economic history complained of that), it is hardly possible to walk through the stalls of a marketplace, check out what is on sale and what the prices are, talk with the salesmen over the counter about their concerns and troubles, find out what local authorities—and travellers—think and do about the marketplace, and figure out what was the impact of a fair on the daily life of the townsfolk. Even if the scanty evidence allows a glance into the grassroots history of the town fair, the ways to interrogate the evidence, that is to say, the choices of interpretative historical methodology, are not so obvious. To deal with the challenge, this essay seeks to reconstruct the marketplace of an East European Jewish town in a variety of contexts—economic, cultural, religious and social, taking the town of Balta in Podol province as a point of reference.2 Balta emerges from this essay as a paradigmatic borderland town in transition. In the 1790s the Polish administration was slowly vanishing as the result of the second and third Polish partitions, which led in turn Downloaded by [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] at 04:04 30 September 2014 to the disappearance of Rzecz Pospolita, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, as an independent polity. Simultaneously the Russian administration began establishing itself in what the contemporary Russian documents often called the “newly returned territories from Poland.” While Russian-Jewish historians from Simon Dubnow to John Klier have recon- structed the whole plethora of the governmental regulations on the Jews and emphasized the role of Russian legislation in shaping the life of the 19th-century East European Jewish community, this essay suggests a methodological shift from vertical to horizontal. It flags the necessity of moving the research of Russian-Jewish history beyond the institutions ISSN 1350-1674 print/1743-971X online/07/030277-22 © 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13501670701653419 278 YOHANAN PETROVSKY-SHTERN controlled by the government. It might be helpful to translate this approach into Russian as a trend toward a razgosudarstvlenie of the Russian-Jewish scholarly discourse. Instead of analysing St-Petersburg-elaborated state policies in their relation to Jews in the 15 western provinces of Russia known as the Pale of Settlement, this essay focuses on horizontally oriented local interaction between the Russian administration, Jewish trade and Slavic and Jewish customers. A Russian state clerk, a member of the degraded Polish szlachta (gentry) and a Jewish merchant found themselves in the whirl of the shtetl marketplace as a result of the Polish partitions. Under new conditions, all three sides, Russians, Poles and Jews, had to make new sense of this situation. In a way, the marketplace turned out to be a locus of exchange not only of artefacts and goods, but of ideas and values. When Poles, Jews and Russians perceived the marketplace to be the locus of value exchanges, clashes of interests did not wait to surface. As part of a larger work-in-progress, tentatively titled “The Russian Shetl, 1790–1840,” this essay offers a new approach to the study of economic history integrated within the history of culture. Three in One In the early 1800s, Balta both was and was not a shtetl. Formally it was not, for starting in mid-1790s this Polish private town (called the miasteczko in Polish and the shtetl in Yiddish) came under the patrimony of the Russian Empire and entered the imperial records as a crown town (kazennyi gorod), not to be confused with the Crown towns in the Kingdom of Poland with their often granted De non tolerandi Judeos privilege.3 Economically, however, at the end of the 18th century Balta was still a shtetl that retained each and every characteristic of the Polish private town, including its trades, its lease-holding economy, its significant Jewish population and its intensive Polish–Jewish commercial interaction.4 In 1799, Balta comprised 1,895 inhabitants, of whom 1,347 were Jews and 548 Christians (in 2007, Balta has some 20,000 inhabitants).5 For the Poles—that is to say, for the magnate Lubomirskis family—Balta was a pivotal, private border town, which militarily separated Polish territories from Turkish domains, but connected them economically. For the Russians, Balta was a new town stemming from three separate settlements that had emerged close to one another at different times and under various political and military circumstances. What in the late 1790s the Russian administration called the crown town of Balta incorporated the early 17th-century village called Palievo Ozero (literally, the “Lake of Palii”), part of Lubomirski’s latifundium, and co-opted the Turkish settlement Foksan Balta, located on the lower right bank of the Kodyma river. In 1690–95, Count Józef Lubomirski (?–1736) erected his castle on the high left bank of the Kodyma to keep Tatars and Turks at bay and thus protect southern Poland—which would later become the Podol province of the Russian Downloaded by [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] at 04:04 30 September 2014 Empire. To immortalize his own contribution, Lubomirski called his castle and adjacent settlements Józefgród.6 The three settlements—Foksan Balta, Józefgród and Palievo Ozero—became one in the course of the 18th century. After 1699, Turkey ceded to Poland the left bank of the Kodyma river, that is, the entire Podol territory, retaining, however, the Balta fortress on the right bank. In 1776, Alexander Lubomirski (?–1808), the commander-in-chief (kasztelan) of the Kiev fortress, obtained a Magdeburg law for his town Józefgród from the Polish King Stanisl aw August Poniatowski (1732–98). Now free from Polish Crown control, the town acquired its urban privileges; it could establish its own magistrate and town court, elect magistrate members and select two heads of the city council (magistrate) for a one-year term and two THE MARKETPLACE IN BALTA 279 elders for life term. Furthermore, it could now develop and tax its own trade and establish guilds to benefit local merchants and artisans. A free town, the left-bank part of the future Balta was still controlled by the magnate who bestowed economic privileges on this or that