EEJA in Action: “The Development of the Jewish People Over the Last 100 Years” by Yakov Leshchinsky

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Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Robert Brym is S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He specializes in political sociology and race and ethnic relations, and has published widely on these subjects, including works on Jews in Canada, the former Soviet Union, and Israel. For downloads of his published work, see www.utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym.

Notes

1 Leshchinsky, “Di antviklung fun Idishn folk far di letzte 100 yor,” 1–64, 259–61. A version of this essay was published in German in two parts: Lestschinsky, “Die Umsiedlung und Umschichtung des jüdischen Volkes im Laufe des letzten Jahrhunderts,” 123–56; and Lestschinsky, “Die Umsiedlung und Umschichtung des jüdischen Volkes im Laufe des letzten Jahrhunderts,” 563–99.

2 Alroey, “Demographers in the Service of the Nation,” 265–82; Estraikh, “Jacob Lestshchinsky,” 215–37; Glikson, “Jacob Lestschinsky,” 48–57; Mahler, “Yakov Leshchinsky—der klasiker fun der Yidisher statistik,” 209–17; Alexander Manor, “Jacob Lestschinsky—On His Eighty-Fifth Birthday,” 101–6.

3 Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa.

4 Leshchinsky, The Jewish Worker in Russia.

5 Leshchinsky, Di ekonomishe lage fun Yidn in Poyln.

6 Leshchinsky, Ha-dmut ha-leumit shel Yahadut ha-gola, 216.

7 Transliteration is phonetic except in cases where non-phonetic transliteration has become standard. I corrected minor arithmetic errors, added text in braces and occasionally took liberties to clarify the text and eliminate redundancies. Remaining errors are my responsibility. I warmly thank Anna Shternshis for bringing this translation to the attention of Nick Underwood and Karen Auerbach, and Eliezer Niborski, Claudia Rosenzeweig and Viki Shifris for their advice. Going forward, endnotes in braces are mine. Other endnotes are Leshchinsky’s.

8 {Bontshe Shvayg is the timid main character in the eponymous 1894 story by Y. L. Peretz.}

9 {Leshchinsky adhered to classical political economy’s now antiquated distinction between productive and non-productive labor – essentially, work that produces goods for sale versus work that provides services for sale.}

10 {Congress Poland was established in 1815 as a putatively sovereign state but was under Russian tutelage. It consisted of the eastern part of today’s Poland along with southwestern Lithuania and part of the Grodno district of Belarus. In 1831, it effectively became part of Russia.}

11 {Leshchinsky provided numbered tables with titles, here designated as Tables 1 through 22, and unnumbered tables, nearly all without titles, here designated as Tables A through AO.}

12 Gustav Adolf Schimmer, Statistik des Judentums (Vienna, 1873), 3.

13 {Jewish community organizations responsible for administering religious, legal and communal affairs; sing. kahal.}

14 V. O. Levanda, Poln’y khronologisheskii sbornik’ zakonov’ i polozhenii kasayushchikhsya evreev’ (St. Petersburg, 1874), 101.

15 Materialy dlya geografii i statistiki Rossii, sobrannye ofitzerami general’nago shtaba, Vilen’skaya gub., sostavil’ general’nogo shtaba A. Korev’ (St. Petersburg, 1861), 306.

16 {In Russia before 1827, Jews were doubly taxed in lieu of military service. Beginning in 1827, Jewish communities were obliged to supply an annual quota of military recruits. They had to serve twenty-five years and were compelled to convert to Orthodox Christianity. Required service was reduced to twenty years plus five years reserve duty in 1834, then twelve years plus three years reserve duty in 1855. It was abolished in 1856.}

17 Die Verteilung der Bevölkerung auf der Erde nach Religions-verschiedenheiten, mitteilungen des Stat. Bureaus in Berlin, 1857, 87–109.

18 {Sources for numbered tables are listed on pages 61–2.}

19 {Poznan was largely annexed to Prussia in the late eighteenth century, reverting to Polish rule after World War I.}

20 {Bukovina: an historical region in the eastern Carpathian Mountain range, now divided between Romania and Ukraine.}

21 {Frontier region of southwestern Russia established as a province in 1764; most of it became part of Ukraine in 1918.}

22 Concerning the growth of the Jewish population in Novorossiya and Bessarabia, I have cited precise and conclusive data in my book, Dos Idishe folk in tzifern.

23 {These categories overlap, as they do elsewhere in Leshchinsky’s work.}

24 “Delo o vykhodyashchikh’ iz’-za granitzy v’ Novorossiiskuyu guberniyu zhidakh’,” Zapiski Imperatorskago Odesskago Obshchestva Istorii i Drevnostei, vol. XVII, Otdelenie III (Odessa, 1894), 163–88.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 In Poltava province in 1804, male Jews numbered 2,114. Doubling that number, we have 4,228 Jews or 0.3% of the entire population. In 1840, there were 16,455 Jews or 1% of the entire population. In 1863, the corresponding numbers were 34,220 and 2%. The Jewish population of Kherson province grew much more quickly. See I. Pavlovskii, Statistika evreiskago naseleniya v’ Poltavskoi gubernii (Poltava, 1908); Skal’kovskii, Opit’ statitisticheskago opisaniya Novorossiiskago kraya (Odessa, 1850); Yakov Leshchinsky, Dos Idishe folk in tzifern (Berlin: 1922), 35–8.

28 See Sh. Dubnov, Di nayeste geshikhte fun Idishn folk (Berlin, 1923), Vol. 2, 232; also Yu. Gessen’, Evrei v’ Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1906), 43–5.

29 Skal’kovskii, Opit’ statitisticheskago opisaniya Novorossiiskago kraya (Odessa, 1850), 314.

30 A significant migration from the “Polish” provinces also flowed to Bessarabia. Thus, in 1816, there were about 5,000 Jewish families (20,000 individuals) in Bessarabia, increasing nearly fourfold to 78,751 in 1857. Zapiski Odesskago Obshchestva: Istorii i Drevnostei, Odessa, 1867, vol. 6, pp. 257–8.

31 See J. Lestschinski in Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, vol. 25, no. 1, 1927, 73–5.

32 F. W. F. Schmitt, “Topographie des Flatowver Kreises,” Preussische Provincial-Blätter, vol. 5 (Königsberg, 1854), 450.

33 Dr. A. Heppner and I. Herzberg, Aus der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der Juden in den Posener Landen, 1904, 178.

34 There were 8,152 Jews in the cities of the Netze district in 1800 out of a total population of 35,594 (nearly 23%). See Jacob Jacobson, “Stellung der Juden in den 1793 und 1795 Preuβen erworbene polnischen Provinzen zur Zeit der Besitznahme,” Monatsschrift für Gesichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, July-September 1921, Breslau, 217.

35 J. J. Benjamin, Reise in den östlichen Staaten der Union und San-Franzisco (Hannover, 1862).

36 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (Leipzig, 1850), 45.

37 {About 1.09 hectares or 2.7 acres.}

38 V. N. Nikitin’, Evrei zemledel’tzy’ (St. Petersburg, 1887), 28.

39 Ibid., 56–57.

40 {The Toleranzgebührer was levied between 1747 and 1797 in much of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was based on a German law that obliged Jews to pay a tax in exchange for toleration by the state.}

41 Michael Stöger, Darstellung der gesetzlichen Verfassung der galizischen Judenschaft (Lemberg, Przemysl, Stanislawow, and Tarnow, 1833), 155–9.

42 Ibid., 160.

43 Dr. M. Balaban, Dzieje Zydów w Galicyji i w Rzeczypospolitej krakowskiej 1772–1868 (Lwow, 1914), 41. See also Dr. Avraham Yakov Braver, Yosef ha-sheni v’yehudei Galitzia (Odessa: ha-shilo’akh, 1910), 340.

44 K. Pavlovskii, Kremenchugskaya fabrika suknodeliya dlya evreev’ v’ nachale XIX veka (Poltava, 1915), 4.

45 Ibid., 5.

46 The Poltava Governor-General wrote the following to the factory’s assistant inspector:

To uproot the idleness to which all the Jews in the weaving factory are accustomed, I am as sure as can be that the only and best means is a strict requirement to carry out their duties, which one can achieve not with words but with strong actions involving physical punishment, which I have long permitted with the help of the police. Ibid., 10.

47 Ignoring the considerable number of family members among the employed Jewish workers, all workers were housed in one room, and only after the intervention of the Kremenchug rabbi and local Jewish council were the families allowed to construct little walls and segregate themselves.

48 Of ninety-eight looms in 1806–1808 in Volhynia, Grodno, Minsk, Podolia, Vitebsk, and Kiev provinces, it is unknown whether Jews themselves worked them or whether they were leased out to Christians. See V. O. Levanda and V. O. Levanda, Poln’y khronologisheskii sbornik’ zakonov’ i polozhenii kasayushchikhsya evreev’ (St. Petersburg, 1872), 73–6. In Minsk province, in 1808, Jews owned sixteen factories on the land of noblemen; in Vilna province from 1786 to 1790 they owned five glass factories in the town of Ilya, two leather factories in Gorodneh and two soap factories in Drueh (from 1786 to 1790) and one paper factory; in Bobovneh, three cloth factories. Whether Jews worked in these factories is again not known. Yu. Gessen’, Evrei v’ Rossii, St. Petersburg, 360. The number of Jewish workers in the cloth factory in Khabno, Kiev province, in the 1840s is known. See Funduklei, Statisticheskoe opisanie Kievskoi gubernni, 1852, 14. Funduklei writes the following about the cloth factory in Khabno:

Among the workers were 30 {sic} Jews who worked alongside the Christians. Among them were some who worked steadily for several years and now have their own houses. Among us this is a very rare case of Jews loving physical labor.

Of 362 workers, thirty-one {sic} were Jews, seventeen of whom, including one woman, sorted wool, ten of whom cleaned wool and four of whom sawed wood. The note is taken from page 140 at the end of the book.

49 Pavlovskii, 7–8.

50 Ibid., 8.

51 Moritz Jaffe, Die Stadt Posen unter preuβischer Herrschaft—aus den Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, herausgegeben von Ludwig Bernhard (Leipzig: 1908), 72.

52 Beiträge zur Beschreibung von Süd- und Neu-Ostpreuβen, Erster Band, Erstes Heft (Berlin, 1803), 42.

53 Ibid., 30–2.

54 S. Bershadskii, “Polozhenie o evreyakh’ 1804 goda,” Voskhod’, vol. 3, 1895, 88.

55 Ibid., 89.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid., 91.

58 Joseph Rohrer, Versuch über die jüdischen Bewohner der österreichischen Monarchie, 60–8.

59 Ibid., 93. {The list of proposals begins with number 2.}

60 {See endnote 9, 6.}

61 See our article in Bleter far Idishe demografiya, statistik un ekonomik, no. 6, 81–102.

62 See Yakov Leshchinsky, Di Idishe vanderung far di letzte 25 yor (Berlin, 1927), 40–55.

63 Handwörterbuch d. Staatswissenschaften, vol. 2, Lieferung 37–38, 577.

64 Ibid., 575.

65 {Hermann Tietz (1837–1907): founder of the first German department store.}

66 {War took place between Poland and Soviet Russia in 1919–1920, during which the Red Army reached the outskirts of Warsaw. The Peace of Riga was signed by the combatants in March 1921.}

67 When this essay was already printed, the Forverts (New York) published a series of articles by competent analysts who showed that the clamor concerning the bourgeoisification of the Jewish proletariat in America is greatly exaggerated. In recent years there have emerged many new occupations for Jews, such as construction work, canal building, tinsmithing, and other large branches of work in which significant Jewish working masses more than compensate for the outflow from tailoring. From a series of discussions with leaders of American unions I got the impression that salaried employees comprise not one-third of Jewish proletarian elements but one-half.

68 {In 1897, about 25% of Jews under Russia’s jurisdiction lived in Poland, 69% in the country’s fifteen western provinces, and 6% in the Russian interior. In Table 22, the figures for Russia concern only Jews in the fifteen western provinces; figures for Poland are given separately.}

69 Kamanin’, Arkhiv’ Yugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, vol. 2, part 5 (Kiev, 1890), 72.

70 See Yakov Leshchinsky, “Berdichever Idishe kehila fun 1789 biz 1917,” Bleter far Idishe demografiya, statistik un ekonomik, no. 2; “Tzu der ekon. geshikhte fun Idn in Poyln,” Tzukunft, 1924, 746.

71 Ibid.

72 Opisanie del byvshego Arkhiva Min. Nar. Prosveshcheniya. Kazennye Evreiskie Uchilishcha, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1920), 61; Yu. Gessen’, Istoriya evreiskago naroda v Rossii, vol. 1, Leningrad, 186.

73 Tzaytshrift far Yidishe geshikhte, demografie un ekonomik, Vol. II-III (Minsk, 1928), 763–7.

74 Yu. Gessen’, Evrei v’ Rossii, St. Petersburg, 1906, “Appendix.”

75 {In 1897–1898, the Jewish Colonization Association conducted a survey covering 78% of the Jewish population of the Pale of Settlement (excluding Poland) – some 2.8 million people. See Yakov Leshchinsky, The Jewish Worker in Russia, Robert Brym, trans. (Bloomington: Slavica, 2018 [1906]).}

76 Darstellung der gesetzlichen Verfassung der galizischen Judenschaft, versucht von Michael Stöger, 1833, 200–276. See also Dr. I. Schipper, “Die Galizische Judenschaft in den Jahren 1772–1848,” Neue Jüdische Monatshefte, no. 9/10. All further data are from Stöger.

77 {Russian: under serfdom, obligatory labor on land attached to a manor and retained for use by the owner.}

78 Dr. M. Balaban, Dzieje Zydow w Galizyi i w Rzeczpospolitej Krawkowskiej, 1772–1868 (Lwow, 1914), 139.

79 Josef Stöger, 137.

80 Rohrer, Versuch über die Jüdischen Bewohner der oesterreichischen Monarchie, 64–8.

81 Beiträge zur Beschreibung von Süd- und Neuost-Preuβen, Vol. 1, no. 1, (Berlin, 1803), 49–50; Geographie und Statistik von West- Süd- und Neuost-Preuβen, herausgegeben und bearbeitet von Holsche, Vol 2. (Berlin, 1804), 426–7.

82 Ibid., 49–50.

83 Jacob Jacobson, “Die Stellung der Jüden in den 1793 u. 1795 von Preuβen erworbenen polnischen Provinzen zur Zeit der Besitznahme,” Monatschrift für Geschichte u. Wiss. d. Jud., 1920, 282–6.

84 Beiträge  … .

85 Preuβische Städte im Gebiete des polnischen Nationalitätkampfes, herausgegeben von Ludwig Bernhard (Leipzig, 1904), 23–4.

86 Data on the occupational distribution of Jews in Posen, Prussia and Berlin are provisional. It is possible that final results of the archival research will include small changes in the figures.

87 Urkunden und Akten zur Geschichte der Juden in Wien, herausgegeben und eingeleitet von A. F. Pribram (Vienna and Leipzig, 1918), 120–32.

88 J. Kracauer, Geschichte der Juden in Frankfurt a. M., vol. 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: 1927), 526.

89 Data on Jews are from the archival material mentioned earlier. For data on all craft workers in Prussia in 1816, see Dr. C. Dieterici, Der Volkswohlstand in Preussischen Staat—aus amtlichen Quellen, Berlin, 187, 253–4. Data on the entire population is from Dr. C. Dieterici, Statistiche Uebersicht der wichtigsten Gegenstände des Verkehrs und Verbrauchs im Preussischen Staate, Berlin, 1842, 384–401.