Article:Jewish Trade in Poland

 Title: Jewish Trade in Poland

 Author(s): Adam Teller

 Topic(s): Topic:Economics

 
 
 Extension(s): Extension:Fairs in Future Galicia in the Pre-Partitions Age

 
 
 Images: File:TomaszTreter1609.jpg

 
 

The fundamental shape of Jewish life in general in Poland, and Jewish mercantile life in particular was first determined in a privilege given to the Jews of Kalisz by Prince Bolesław the Pious in 1264. That was later expanded and granted to the Jews in Wielkopolska in 1333 and in the regions of Kraków, Sandomierz, and Lviv in 1367 by King Kazimierz Wielki. He also granted a third general privilege to the Jews living in all the cities of his kingdom in 1364.

The Jews’ economic activity mentioned in these privileges was moneylending, their major business in the Middle Ages. The privileges’ importance for the development of Jewish trade lay more in their establishment of the Jews as a legally recognized urban group, parallel to the Christian burghers. According to the so-called Magdeburg Law Magdeburg Law which determined every aspect of urban life, the region of the town within its walls was a monopoly zone controlled by the Christian burghers, who therefore had the right to exclude the Jews from economic life. The Polish privileges, on the other hand, established the Jews as a second urban population providing income to the Crown, so giving them royal support in their economic lives.

This set up a tension between the two already hostile groups which was almost impossible to resolve satisfactorily. It could play out in different ways: in Lviv in 1356, the King, disregarding the complaints of the Christian burghers, expanded the urban groups he favored to include not only Jews, but Armenians, Muslims, and Ruthenians, too; while at the end of the fifteenth century, the Kraków town council, with royal support, first restricted Jewish trade and then forced the Jews to move out of the city and settle in neighboring Kazimierz. As the number of Jews in the Polish towns continued to grow rapidly, a result first of immigration, and then, in the sixteenth century, of natural increase, their struggle to break into the urban monopoly became more intense. Growing inflation made moneylending less profitable, which led to a significant move from the credit market to mercantile activity. In some towns, it proved possible for the Jews to negotiate trade pacts with the town council, though these were often not very advantageous.

Instead, other strategies were developed. The idea was to find places where Jewish merchants could trade unfettered by the urban restrictions. Perhaps the best venue for this was during the annual fair that each town held, because for the few days it lasted, the town monopoly was lifted to encourage business. Within a short time, many Jews moved into regional trade. The most important of these was the Candlemass (Gromnica) Fair held in Lublin each February. In Wielkopolska, the major fairs were those in Łęczyca, Poznań, and Gniezno, in Małopolska and Rus Czerwony those in Lviv, Kraków, and Jarosław. However, much of the Jews’ regional trade was done in the less important fairs which were within easier reach. Jews from Lviv, for example, traded in the quite local fairs of Sniatyn, Kolomyia, Przemyśl, Ternopil, Belz, Rohatyn, Buchach, Terebovlia, Yazlovets, Zolochiv, Khodoriv, Busk, and Pidhaitsi, among others.

A different strategy, adopted by less well-off Jews, was to move trade outside the city walls where the urban monopoly was not in force. Jews would wait on the roads leading into town and do deals with those bringing goods to sell there. This gave them a double advantage because, as well as buying what the seller had to offer, they could also broker deals to supply the seller with the goods he had intended to buy in town. Unrestricted by the town council, the Jewish merchants and brokers could offer the seller higher prices than he would receive in town for the goods he wanted to sell as well as lower prices for his purchases. Though this reduced the Jewish merchants’ profit margins, it dramatically increased turnover, which enabled them not just to survive but often to make a good living.

The Jews’ best customers in this enterprise were noble landowners coming to town with grain to sell and a shopping list of luxury items. In addition to the profit motive, however, the szlachta (the Polish nobility) preferred the Jews over the Christian burghers because they were interested in weakening them as potential rivals for positions of power and influence in the state.

As far as the Jews were concerned, the economic relationship they built with the nobility was extremely important because it significantly bolstered their position vis-à-vis the burghers. For a start, all the high administrative positions in the royal towns were filled by nobility, who could give the Jews support if they needed it. More significantly, however, on their own estates, the noble owner was the sole source of authority which made them much more comfortable places to live for Jews.

So beginning in the late sixteenth century and continuing through the end of the eighteenth, there was a constant wave of Jews moving out of royal towns into the so-called “private towns” (i.e. towns owned by noblemen rather than the king) on the noble estates. Since the bulk of these estates were in the eastern parts of the country, the center of Jewish settlement began to move east, too.

Jewish trade flourished, with Jewish merchants increasingly selling agricultural produce on behalf of the nobility, either directly in the form of grain or flour, or indirectly in the form of alcohol (beer and vodka). This was by no means all, however. Jews bought and sold many different kinds of merchandise, including honey, timber, fur, leather, textiles, fish, and even cattle and horses. Here, too, the relationship with the szlachta brought benefits. Since their noble lords were exempt from taxes, if a Jewish merchant was formally acting on behalf of a szlachcic, all the goods in his possession, including his own, were exempt from taxes, too.

A key aspect of Jewish trade was the Jews’ ability to supply goods from outside the Commonwealth, particularly to their noble customers. The sixteenth and early seventeenth century was the period when Poland-Lithuania was the major supplier of grain to central and western Europe via the Baltic. Jews were largely excluded from this highly profitable business but by acting as agents for the szlachta who sold their grain in Gdańsk, they were able to do their own trade there, buying salt, salt herring, iron, and textiles for resale on Polish markets. The peripatetic nature of Polish Jewish trade, with merchants traveling from fair to fair, helped significantly with the distribution of these imported goods

In addition to this, Polish-Lithuanian Jews, though never the most prominent figures in foreign trade, maintained a transregional mercantile network of their own. So, for example, the Jews in the two major towns in western Poland in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Poznań and Kraków, not only did business with the Christian merchants of Breslau, but also exploited family and other connections to trade with the Jewish communities of Vienna and Prague, as well as with Frankfurt a.M., Nuremberg, and Leipzig. There was also lively trade with the Ashkenazi Jewish communities of northern Italy, particularly Venice. The major exports to these, as to all the foreign markets, were largely hides and leather, furs, homespun, honey, and wax; the imports, fine textiles, wine, and metal goods. Specific features typical exclusively for the Jews of future Galicia in the Middle Ages was their involvement in the pepper trade with the East via the Genoese Caffa on Crimean Peninsula and their involvement in the salt trade from Wieliczka salt mines and from numerous salt refineries in Sub-Carpathian Red Ruthenia.

On the Commonwealth’s eastern border, the Jews of Lviv traded both with the flourishing Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire, in particular Istanbul, as well as Bucharest in Walachia and Iasi in Moldavia. Their imports included luxury textiles, fine wines, metal goods (including firearms), and spices. This was also the route by which Polish-Lithuanian Jews received the etrogim they needed to celebrate the Sukkot festival. A community of Sephardic merchants from the Ottoman empire was established in Zamość in 1588 by its owner, the noble Jan Zamoyski.

The Khmelnytskyi uprising (1648-1654) and the subsequent Polish wars with Russia (1654-1667), and Sweden (1665-1660), caused enormous damage to the Polish-Lithuanian economy, hitting the Jews very hard indeed. Reconstruction took decades and was interrupted by the Great Northern War (1702-1720). Nonetheless, since the process of rebuilding the country and its economy fell largely to the highest nobility, the fabulously wealthy magnates who owned huge estates, the Jews were able to benefit from it. Remembering the economic services they had received from the Jews before the wars, the magnates decided to renew the connection, inviting Jews to settle on their estates and giving them economic incentives to do so. Their goal was to exploit the Jews’ proven mercantile skills to improve their income from their lands. Central to this was the Jews’ role in the sale of the grain produced on the estate farms. This was done largely through the sale of alcohol, either in estate taverns leased and run by Jews, or through licenses to sell liquor in the towns. Also key to the magnate plan for economic reconstruction was bringing the Jews into their towns to revivify trade. As a result, the great royal towns that had dominated Jewish life before 1648, such as , Kraków, Lviv and Poznań began to decline in favor of private towns, such as Leszno in Wielkopolska and Pinczów, Tarnow, and Rzeszów in Małopolska. In Rus Czerwona, Lviv lost ground first to Zhovkva, a private town belonging to the Sobieski family, and then to nearby Brody. This last had a meteoric rise, helped by a loan of 1,000,000 zloties which its owner, Józef Potocki, extended to the Jewish community to encourage its growth following a disastrous fire in 1742.

It did not take long before Jews formed a third, a half, or even more of the urban population on the magnate estates, particularly in the small agricultural towns in the Commonwealth’s eastern regions. With the support of the magnates, the Jews were able finally to overcome existing mercantile restrictions and soon came to dominate the urban markets. By the mid-eighteenth century, foreign visitors were reporting that the only people doing trade were Jews.

This had significant implications for Jewish life. First, the Jews were no longer limited to separate quarters in the towns. By the end of the seventeenth century, it was commonplace for Jewish merchants to own most, if not all the houses in the central market square. The rhythm of life in these small towns (shtetlach) became increasingly Jewish: no business was done on Shabbat or Jewish holidays – and if the local market was traditionally held on one of those days, it was rescheduled.

The Jewish demographic explosion that had begun in the sixteenth century continued, leading to a population growth that outstripped the growth in economic opportunities. With more and more Jews competing for the same market, economic competition became increasingly cutthroat and growing pauperization ensued.

As a result, Jewish women’s contribution to mercantile activity grew in importance. The active participation of Jewish women in trade had been a feature of Jewish life in Polish-Lithuania since the sixteenth century. When the Jewish men had begun to travel to regional markets, their wives had remained behind to run the family stores, while poor Jewish women began to engage in petty trade on the streets. As Jewish control of mercantile activity grew in the eighteenth century, women became even more active. Amongst the better off, Jewish women became highly prominent in the textile trade while increasingly large numbers of poor Jewish women were forced to support the family budget by peddling – even despite strict religious and social prohibitions.

Jewish merchants remained active in international trade. They continued doing business in the Baltic ports, such as Gdańsk and Königsberg by renting space on the noble barges plying the rivers with grain from their estates. To the south, a new market opened up in Hungary, where Jews from towns such as Lviv and Bolekhiv in the east and Kraków and Nowy Sącz in the west, traveled to buy wine.

Trade with central and western Europe flourished, encouraged by the growth of new Jewish communities there, as well as by the ascension to the Polish throne of the Saxonian Wettin dynasty (1697-1763). The rapid growth of Warsaw as a Jewish mercantile center in the later eighteenth century also opened up a new and highly significant trade route connecting the Jews there to Jewish merchants in Frankfurt am Oder, Berlin, and Amsterdam.

By this time, however, the magnate regime in Poland-Lithuania, which had focused on noble consumption at the expense of economic development, had so weakened the country that reform was desperately needed. Under the rule of King Stanisław August Poniatowski (1763-1795), various ideas were developed, many of which involved strengthening the towns at the expense of the nobility – a development which would have deprived the Jews of their greatest defenders and so threatened their economic life. However, so entrenched were the magnates that the plans for reform came to nothing. Perhaps the best sign of the Jews’ continued importance in trade is that, between 1764-1800, Jews made up over 85% of all the Polish-Lithuanian merchants who did business at the major international fair in Leipzig.

In the less developed regions, such as Galicia, however, the Jews dominance in trade continued to be measured by the fact that all the merchants and tradesmen in the towns were Jewish and that Jews owned most, if not all the houses around the central market squares.