Jewish Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Poland

1997 ◽  
pp. 3-39
Author(s):  
Jacob Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
Early Marriage ◽  
Stable Model ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
Marital Breakdown ◽  
Polish Jews

This chapter discusses Jewish marriage in eighteenth-century Poland. Jews, as well as many non-Jews, acknowledged that Jewish marriages embodied a good, stable model and praised them as examples to be emulated in an era when immorality and marital breakdown seemed to threaten the institution. Even in much earlier times, Jewish marriages, particularly those of Polish Jews, were recognized as embodying all desirable matrimonial attributes. In the course of the eighteenth century, Jewish marital practices attracted the attention of all levels of Polish society, as well as of leading maskilim in other countries. It was during the period of the Polish Enlightenment that the model of Jewish marriage was promoted on a wider scale because it conformed to popular ideas based on contemporary mercantilist and cameralist principles. The chapter then considers the convergence of opinion between Jewish and Christian Enlightenment representatives on some aspects of marriage in Jewish society, and looks at the incidence of early marriage in the Jewish population and the vicissitudes in the practice of young couples living in the home of their parents.

Introduction

2005 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Marcin Wodziński
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Jewish Historiography ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Polish Jews

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the conflict between representatives of the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah) and its rival hasidic movement, which has been seen in the historical literature as one of the most important debates to occupy Jewish society in central and eastern Europe in the modern age. Indeed, the earliest studies devoted to this question made their appearance at the dawn of modern Jewish historiography. However, a closer reading of such studies reveals that the overwhelming majority of references to the ‘age-old hostility’ of enlightened Jews to hasidism are based on stereotypes that often obscure a proper understanding of the sources. This book analyses attitudes towards hasidism among a few famous representatives of the Polish Haskalah, from the first enlightened comments concerning hasidism at the end of the eighteenth century to the demise of the Haskalah and its successors at the start of the twentieth century. It also looks at the ideas, concepts, and prejudices of a broad section of the maskilim among Polish Jews.

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 10

1997 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Internal Factors ◽  
Marriage Patterns ◽  
Ritual Murder ◽  
Spiritual World ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
Jewish Ritual

Jewish society in Poland–Lithuania in the second half of the eighteenth century was by no means insular: Jews numbered about 750,000, and comprised about half the urban population of the country. The contact between Jews and the wider Polish society found expression in the languages Jews knew, in their marriage patterns, even in their synagogue architecture and decoration, but also in Polish accusations of Jewish ritual murder. All these aspects are here systematically reviewed. Internal factors influencing developments within Jewish society are discussed: treatments of the medieval rabbinic ban on polygamy, as well as various influences of the growing interest in kabbalah — its impact on synagogue structure, on prayer, and on the spiritual world of women. The growth of hasidism is considered through critical analysis of the legends about its founder, Israel Ba'al Shem Tov. This wealth of topics helps to fill the gaps in our understanding of Jewish life in this important period. The New Views section of the volume incorporates valuable studies on other topics.

Home for the Homeless? The Hekdesh in Eastern Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natan M. Meir
Keyword(s):  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
East European ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Jewish Hospital ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
Polish Jews ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Structural Poverty ◽  
Social Marginality

This chapter examines the hekdesh, one of the grimmest institutions in East European Jewish society. The hekdesh, or Jewish hospital-cum-poorhouse, is a somewhat elusive historical phenomenon but also a useful venue for analyzing traditional forms of Jewish charity in the Russian Empire as well as the dynamics of social marginality among Russian and Polish Jews. The chapter first considers an important characteristic of Jewish charity—the tendency to distinguish between conjunctural poverty and structural poverty—before discussing the hekdesh as an institution. In particular, it describes efforts to transform the hekdesh into a true medical institution and its incarnation in the late nineteenth century as a place for beggars and other cast-offs of society, with only a nominal connection to caring for the sick. It also explains how the hekdesh may have served to perpetuate the problem of begging and vagrancy.

The Trickle before the Flood

2020 ◽  
pp. 215-222
Author(s):  
Adam Teller
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Power Struggles ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Jewish Refugees ◽  
Jewish Refugee ◽  
Polish Jews ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter focuses on the Jewish refugees in the Holy Roman Empire in 1648–1654. Though the vast majority of the Jews fleeing the Khmelnytsky uprising preferred to remain within the Commonwealth, there is evidence of Polish Jewish refugees in the empire from as early as 1649. There are no relevant data concerning Jewish refugees in Silesia before 1654, but it seems clear that Jewish refugees from Poland, together with displaced local Jews looking for a new home, were active in repopulating the towns in Bohemia and Moravia at that time. Since Jews had long been seen as important sources of income for their lords, there had often been power struggles for control over them between the monarch and the nobility. Thus, there was more going on than anti-Jewish legislation. In his orders of 1650, the king of Bohemia may have been continuing his efforts to put a brake on the nobility by depriving it of one of its sources of income: Jews. The chapter then considers the relationship between the Jewish refugee society and the local Jewish society. It also shows the limits of mercantilism, looking at the Polish Jews in Brandenburg.

Żydzi

1999 ◽  
pp. 339-340
Author(s):  
Jerzy Tomaszewski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Important Group ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

This chapter considers a series of books, A to Polska właśnie (This is Indeed Poland). These books introduce their readers to various issues of interest to anyone studying Polish society. The chapter focuses on the volume Żydzi (The Jews), in particular, as it is the first to discuss an important group among Poland's population. The volume covers the period up to the second half of the eighteenth century, political and social problems from the second half of the eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth, Jewish culture and religion in the nineteenth century, the period from the First World War until 1939, the Holocaust, and Jews in Poland after the Second World War. The chapter contends that this book should be regarded not as just one more study about Polish Jews, but as making a singular contribution to the promotion of knowledge about Jewish traditions, culture, and history in Poland.

The High Point (II): Jewish Society (1650–1713)

1997 ◽  
pp. 119-150
Author(s):  
Jonathan Israel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
The Political ◽  
High Point ◽  
The Third ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Czech Lands

This chapter addresses how the climax of the European debate over Jewish readmission came during the third quarter of the seventeenth century. For a quarter of a century, conferences, commissions, and petitions published and unpublished over whether or not to tolerate Jews, and if so on what terms, abounded from Poland to Portugal and from Hungary to Ireland. Why did the political and intellectual process of readmission culminate at this particular time? Several factors converged to intensify previous trends but what was the most crucial was the widespread backlash in Germany, following the evacuation of the Swedish, French, and other foreign garrisons at the end of the Thirty Years War. The substantial gains made by the Jews of central Europe during the conflict, of Austria and the Czech lands as well as Germany, had aroused intense opposition and controversy, so that the coming of peace was almost bound to be accompanied by a formidable reaction. The chapter then considers the Jewish population and Jewish economy during this period.

The Conditions in Jewish Society in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Middle Decades of the Eighteenth Century

1996 ◽  
pp. 45-50
Author(s):  
Gershon David Hundert
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
East European ◽  
Explanatory Factors ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This chapter investigates the conditions in Jewish society in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The place of hasidism in the religious history of the eighteenth century ought to be reconsidered not only in light of the questions about the schismatic groups in the Orthodox Church raised by Ysander, but also in light of the general revivalist currents in western Europe. The social historian cannot explain hasidism, which belongs to the context of the development of the east European religious mentality in the eighteenth century. Social history does, however, point to some significant questions that ought to be explored further. One of these is the role of youth and generational conflict in the beginnings of the movement, and not only in its beginnings. A realistic recovery of the situation of the Polish-Lithuanian Jewry in the eighteenth century shows that neither the economic nor the security conditions were such as to warrant their use as causal or explanatory factors in the rise and reception of hasidism.

Decline and Renewal (1713–1750)

1997 ◽  
pp. 195-215
Author(s):  
Jonathan Israel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Steady Increase ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Relevant Factor ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Manufacturing Activity

This chapter explains that the period 1713–50 was one of sharp deterioration in European Jewry's demographic position. It is true that a steady increase persisted in many parts, but, from the second decade of the eighteenth century onwards, the population of Europe as a whole began to burgeon once more so that, other than in the eastern territories of Poland, Jewish population growth now lagged well behind that of the rest. Moreover, and a more immediately relevant factor in the economic and cultural decline of European Jewry during the eighteenth century, practically all the leading Jewish urban centres displayed a marked incapacity for growth. Previously, from 1570 down to 1713, the economic policies of the European states, concentrating on the promotion of long-distance commerce, had encouraged the increasing integration of the Jewish trade network into the European economy as a whole, and this had laid the basis for the revival of Jewish life in progress in central and western Europe since the late sixteenth century. After 1713, however, a less favourable trend set in. Whilst the European states were still ruled by mercantilist notions, they now adopted more comprehensively protectionist policies, concentrating on the promotion of manufacturing activity rather than long-distance trade.

From Toleration to Verbesserung: German and English Debates on the Jews in the Eighteenth Century

1989 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Liberles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Moses Mendelssohn ◽  
General Utility ◽  
The Status ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
Council Of State

In 1780 Christian Dohm, a ranking Prussian civil servant, collaborated with the Berlin Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn on a memorandum submitted on behalf of the Jews of Alsace to the French Council of State. A year later Dohm issued his Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, a treatise on the civil improvement of the Jews, which contained a comprehensive program for increasing the general utility of the Jewish population. By that time, the European debate over the Jews was already long in progress. The seventeenth century had dealt with the question of readmission and the first half of the eighteenth century less successfully with naturalization. Both debates had centered in England, although the issues involved were pertinent to Holland, France, and to some extent Italy as well. Both debates had also produced a considerable number of polemics. Most recently, a 1753 bill sponsored by the Pelham government sought to facilitate the process of naturalization for Jewish immigrants. The so-called Jew Bill precipitated a wide-ranging public debate on the status of the Jews in England.

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