The Coming of Jews to Ukraine

Jews have had a long tradition of settlement on Ukrainian territory, which can be traced back to the Greek cities of the Bosporan Kingdom in the fifth and fourth centuries âñå and the Khazar Kaganate in the seventh and eighth cen­turies ce.

Poland’s kings, trying to rebuild the country after the destruction caused by the Mongol invasion of the mid-thirteenth century, welcomed immigrants, whether Jews or Germans from the west or Armenians from the east. The newcomers settled primarily in urban areas and helped Poland revive its cities. Before the end of the thirteenth century, the Jews had been awarded the first of many privileges (beginning with the 1264 Statute of Kalisz of Prince Bole­slaw V ‘the Pious’) that defended them as a group whose main business was moncylcnding. Originally servants of the royal court (semi camerati, Jews col­lectively paid a separate tax - often higher than that of Christians - but were entitled to administer themselves in a self-governing municipality known as the kahal (Yiddish: kehilè). Jewish self-government in Poland-Lithuania became formalized in the mid-sixteenth century, when the kahals joined to form an umbrella organization known as the Council of Lands.

I'he first Jews came to Poland from Silesia and were followed by others from Bohemia, Moravia, and other Germanic lands. All were of the Ashkenazi tradition, speaking the medieval German dialect of Yiddish. By the sixteenth century, Poland had also become attractive to Jews of the Sephardic tradition from as far away as Spain, Italy, and the Crimea.

In the Ukrainian lands, small communities of Ashkenazi Jews developed in Galicia and Volhynia in as early as the twelfth century, when these regions were still ruled by their own Rus' princes. The Jewish communities there really began to expand, however, only during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, after the regions had become part of Poland and Lithuania. The Jews in Lithuania were even better off than those in Poland, because Grand Duke Vytautas awarded them a wide body of privileges (1388-1389), includ­ing tax-free concessions for their places of worship and burial, and the right to trade, hold any craft, and own land.

The further spread of Jews eastward into Ukrainian lands along both the Right and the Left Banks was directly related to Poland’s territorial expansion and the colonizing efforts led by Rus’ (Ukrainian) and Polish magnates and gentry after the Union of Lublin in 1569. In this process, Jews became servi­tors on manorial estates owned by the nobility. According to one Jewish histo­rian (Israel Kriedlander), as leaseholders they functioned as 'sponges to convey the wealth of the country and the toil of its inhabitants into the pockets of the lords.’ Some Jewish arendars not only held leases, but also obtained contracts to administer entire estates.

Arenda is a Polish term referring to the lease of fixed assets, such as land, mills, inns, breweries, and distilleries, or of special rights, such as the right to collect cus­toms duties and taxes. The Polish landowning nobility was anxious to exploit the rich agricultural resources of the area that formed the basis of a profitable and expanding grain trade with western Europe through Poland’s Baltic ports, but they had little interest in administering vast landed estates on their own. They continued, however, to cultivate their luxurious habits and cultural pursuits, even though they lacked the capital or commercial skills necessary to exploit their properties and support their style of life. The landowners therefore turned to the Jews for money and for their expertise in leasing. The Jews obliged, and by the six­teenth and seventeenth centuries they had come to dominate the arenda system and to manage a considerable portion of the agricultural economy in Ukrainian lands. Not surprisingly, because they served as middlemen for Polish landlords, Jews became symbols of oppression and exploitation in the eyes of the Ukrainian peasant masses.

The realignment of international trade patterns

The expansion of Poland’s magnates and gentry into Ukrainian lands in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and their development and exploita­tion of the region’s agricultural resources made them part of the new interna­tional economic order that was coming into being in eastern Europe. In the early centuries of Kievan Rus', the highly important international trade routes which crossed eastern Europe transported mainly luxury goods from the Orient via the northern Black Sea ports to Byzantium or to Kiev, and thence northward up the Dnieper to the Baltic Sea ports or westward overland through Galicia to central and western Europe.

This trend toward a profit-making agriculture-based economy with export to the southern Crimean and Byzantine markets was interrupted in the twelfth century by the nomads’ seizure of control of the steppe and by the decline of the Byzantine Empire. Then, with the arrival of the Mongols in the mid-thirteenth century, an economic as well as a political realignment took place in eastern Europe. The Mongols once again made international trade from the Orient and Central Asia via the Black Sea to a revived Byzantium or to the Mediterranean ports of Venice and Genoa their most important economic concern. By the first half of the fifteenth century, however, the Mongolo-Tatar domination of the Black Sea region had declined, and in 1453 the Byzantine Empire ceased to exist. The rise of the Lithuanian and, later, Polish presence in eastern Europe that cul­minated in the sixteenth century eventually made agricultural production eco­nomically viable once again. But the traditional trade routes to the south were cut off, since the Ottoman Empire, which succeeded Byzantium, was locked in a fierce struggle with Christian powers for control of the Balkans and Black Sea region.

As a result, a new western European-oriented economic order emerged, in which the Polish Kingdom and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth func­tioned as a supplier of raw materials to western European countries, for which fin­ished products were received in return. That Poland could find a ready market for its products was a result of changes taking place simultaneously in western and southern Europe. A population explosion during the fifteenth and sixteenth cen­turies, combined with a phenomenal acquisition of wealth from the New World (especially by Spain and Portugal), produced an ever-increasing need for food­stuffs and building materials in western Europe, which now had the financial means (gold and silver from the Americas) to pay for extensive imports.

Poland’s economic and cultural revival

From its ports along the Baltic Sea and by land through Lublin and Poznan, Poland shipped to central and western Europe lumber products (timber, tar, pot­ash), cattle (10,000 were exported annually during the early sixteenth century, and 40,000 annually by the end of the century), and raw hides. The most impor­tant export, however, was grain, grown in western Ukraine (Galicia and western Volhynia) and shipped down the Vistula and its tributaries to the Baltic port of Gdansk (Danzig), which Poland had recovered from the Teutonic Order in 1455. It was from the Vistula grain trade that Poland really acquired its wealth. The growth of the grain trade was indeed remarkable: in 1491-1492, an estimated 13,000 tons (12 thousand metric tons) were exported, and that figure rose rapidly to 152,000 tons (138 thousand metric tons) in 1563 and to a high figure - never to be repeated - of 272,000 tons (248 thousand metric tons) in 1618. In return, Poland imported manufactured goods: cloth from Flanders, England, and France and wine from Spain, France, and Portugal. The growth of the grain market and its lucrative return only increased the appetite of Poland’s nobility for more land and greater control over those who toiled on it.

It is also interesting to note that, unlike in Poland in previous centuries and in much of contemporary western and central Europe, the role of Polish cities and townspeople in the economic expansion was limited and even decreased during the period under consideration. The wealthiest townspeople had fewer rights than the poorest noble, and only the largest cities had self-governing privileges. Of the smaller towns, many were owned outright by nobles. But most important was the fact that the Vistula grain trade bypassed the cities entirely, since interna­tional shippers (mostly Dutch) and merchants in the Baltic port of Gdansk, near the mouth of the Vistula, dealt directly with the nobles.

Poland’s increasing economic wealth was matched in the sixteenth century by its cultural achievement.

Given this atmosphere, it is not surprising that the Lithuanian and Ortho­dox Rus' nobility in the east were attracted as by a magnet to sixteenth-century western-oriented Polish culture. Many of them aped Polish customs, adopted the Polish language, and, in the case of the Rus', converted to Roman Catholicism, the official state religion. As for that portion of the Rus' nobility (whether in Lithuania or in Ukraine) who remained Orthodox, Polish political identity became an important element in their outlook. It is precisely from this segment of the Ukrainian nobility that the concept gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus (a Pole of Rus' religion) developed. In this regard, it is interesting to note that in 1569, on the eve of the agreement at Lublin to unite Poland and Lithuania, it was the Rus' magnates and gentry who for the most part wanted the remaining Ukrainian lands in Lithuania - Volhynia, Bratslav, eastern Podolia, and Kiev - to become, as Galicia had previously, an integral part of Poland. While there may have been some disagreement in 1569 over the exact political relationship with the Polish Kingdom, the leading strata of the population, whether Orthodox or Catholic, was anxious to become part of the Polish sphere and to obtain the political and economic advantages that would thereby accrue. Accordingly, the leading strata in Ukrainian society welcomed Polish rule in the late sixteenth century.

Still, there remained the vast majority of the population, represented by peasant-serfs and a small number of Rus' townspeople. As long as Poland’s agri­culture-based economy was thriving as a result of the Vistula grain trade, both groups led a tolerable existence. But when grain prices began to fall in the early seventeenth century, Ukrainian peasants and townspeople - not unlike their Polish and Lithuanian counterparts in other areas of the Commonwealth - began to suffer the negative effect of economic change whereby the nobility attempted to make up for its losses by exploiting the serfs further and by limiting the prerog­atives of the townspeople. Added to these general economic developments was the fact that the Rus' (Ukrainians and Belarusans) were differentiated from the rest of society by their Orthodox Rus' religious identity. That identity was to prove an extra liability in a Polish society that was experiencing both economic difficul­ties and the gradual growth of social and religious intolerance. As will become evi­dent in the next two chapters, the manner in which the Rus' townspeople and peasants reacted to these changes and the degree to which their Orthodox church became involved were to have a profound effect on Ukraine’s relationship to the rest of Poland.