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Abstract
It is commonly thought that the concept of yikhes (Hebrew, yikhus) refers largely or even solely to the notion of noble descent. As late as 1959, the Standard Jewish Encyclopedia defined yikhes in these terms; and a similar understanding of the term can be found in other leading sources. Using extensive field materials collected under the auspices of the St Petersburg Judaica Centre, this essay demonstrates, however, that yikhes has a wide variety of meanings in the present‐day Jewish community of Tulchin (Ukraine), which is not limited to genealogical implications and may completely ignore them. The range of meanings associated with yikhes includes secular learning, “honorable” (non‐manual) profession, “respect” on the part of other community members, ethical qualities, etc. Due to a partial or complete loss of Yiddish, many residents of the town know the word yikhes solely from expressions such as “yikhes in the bathhouse,” where this word has lost its independent meaning. Through an anthropological analysis of yikhes as a reflection of social ideas and practices within a small and relatively circumscribed society, the paper demonstrates both the breadth of tradition the concept reflects and the limitations of the ways it is generally presented and understood in the literature.
Notes
1. Roth, The Standard Jewish Encyclopedia, 1946.
2. Likhtenstadt, “Several Words about Meyukheses,” 98.
3. Stampfer, “Heder Study,” 271.
5. Cohn‐Sherbok, The Blackwell Dictionary of Judaica, 585; Werblowsky and Wigoder, The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, 755.
6. Freeze, “Yikhes,” 2084.
7. Ibid., 2085.
8. I would like to express my thanks to my colleagues from the Petersburg Judaica Centre, at the European University at St Petersburg, as well as all other participants in the field expeditions. Our joint efforts in collecting interviews and discussing them had a crucial importance for this work.
9. Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 74.
10. Rosenthal, “Social Stratification,” 3.
11. Tulchin 2005, recording kept in the Petersburg Judaica Centre, European University at St Petersburg, file Tul_05_085. In all subsequent references to the archive, only the file name will be indicated. Further geographical abbreviations include: “Bal” – town of Balta, Odessa region; “MP” – town of Mogilev‐Podol’sky, Vinnitsa region; and “Ber” – town of Bershad’, Vinnitsa region.
12. According to statistics, between 1910 and 1926 the Jewish population of Tulchin decreased by more than half (from 16,476 to 7708), which is comparable only to the decrease precipitated by the Second World War (from 5607 to 2500 people between 1939 and 1959): Sto evreiskikh mestechek, 334.
13. Tul_05_043.
14. Sometimes people tried to provide explanations of why this memory was absent in their families. Among the two most frequent reasons were official antisemitism in the Soviet Union, when this kind of memory was simply dangerous to keep, and the Shoah, when family history was not the most immediate concern and virtually all documents were destroyed: see, Tul_06_14. However, although neither of these factors may be questioned, they do not fully explain the short span of family memory; oral stories do not necessarily require corroboration though written sources, and official repression of an ethnic culture could lead to quite opposite results.
15. Sto evreiskikh mestechek, 340; Tul_05_063_1.
16. Judging by documentary sources and personal memoirs, at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were 18 synagogues in the town, none of which survived into the post‐1945 period. Only a small group of Jews continued gathering informally in specially rented private houses. By the late Soviet period the situation was described as the following: “Look at Tulchin. No shoykhet [ritual slaughterer]. No rabbi. And much of what should be [is also absent], even kosher food … We grew up during the Soviet period, in a different epoch, and we were cut off from all this. Certainly, in Dnepropetrovsk, in Odessa, in Kiev one could get all this, and everything was observed. And us – what can we observe? Well, we can buy matzo. What else? We don’t even have kosher wine, you see? And meat – one can’t even imagine to have kosher meat”: Tul_06_03.
17. Tul_05_036.
18. Tul_05_043; Tul_05_028.
19. Tul_05_100.
20. Ibid.
21. Stampfer, “Heder Study,” 271.
22. Rosenthal, “Social Stratification,” 6, 7
23. Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 77.
24. Tul_06_07.
25. Ibid.
26. Respect for this true Jewish knowledge may to some extent be comparable to the earlier attitude of the uneducated Jewish majority to the learned elite, and the specific type of dependency that held the more traditional Jewish society together. See Stampfer, “Heder Study,” 272: “There was a general belief among Jews at all times that their fate at the end of days was dependent on the correct fulfillment of the Halacha (Jewish law) in this world. This meant that the unlearned felt dependent on the guidance of people well versed in the law in order to guarantee themselves a good place in the world to come.” This suggestion, however, requires more investigation.
27. The word yikhes may be used to denote a quality possessed by an individual or a family (and in this case one can have – possess – yikhes), or else be metonymically substituted to refer to a person or a family as such (who may be said to be yikhes): Tul_05_041. The informant distinguished only one particular group that was exempt from the succession requirements. These were famous Soviet cinema and theatre actors, whose personal achievements were so high that they rendered the principle fun wonen er kumt aroys (where he comes from) irrelevant.
28. Tul_06_03.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. The new market economy drastically lowered the social status of a number of professions that were associated with yikhes in the Soviet past; teachers and physicians are definitely among them. See MP_07_105: “Nobody takes teachers into account any more – you call this yikhes?”
32. Tul_05_041.
33. Tul_05_045.
34. Tul_05_085.
35. For example, Tul_06_14.
36. Tul_06_12.
37. Tul_05_009.
38. Tul_06_14.
39. Judging by a number of memoir and documentary sources, Jewish communities in this region were divided into two major strata: the higher, balebatim (owners, householders), and the lower, balmeloches (artisans). The first group was also called sheineh yidden (literally, “beautiful Jews”), which, “was not an aesthetic characteristic of physical features but a reflection of the behaviour, manners and knowledge of the sheineh yid ”: Stampfer, “Heder Study,” 271. In the English language there are a number of alternative designations for sheineh yidn, or people of higher standing: “refined,” “honourable,” “reputable,” “men of silk,” “well‐heeled Jews.” The second group was referred to as prosteh, or “commoners,” or else am ha‐aretz (literally, “a man of the earth”): see Kotik, My Memoirs, 400. More about social distinctions between sheineh and prosteh may be found in: Stampfer, “Heder Study,” 271–3.
40. Tul_05_019.
41. Tul_06_07.
42. Tul_06_14.
43. Tul_05_024.
44. Tul_05_023.
45. Tul_05_063_1.
46. It may be that Glicklich is not the real name of the merchant, but, rather, a nickname. What makes this hypothesis possible is the fact that Count Potozkii, the owner of the biggest town attraction, Potozkii Palace, had a nickname “szczęśliwy” (Polish, “the happy/lucky one”), the translation of his name Felix. Since “Glichlich” means precisely the same in Yiddish, it is clear that the Jewish community of Tulchin at the beginning of the twentieth century had their own Jewish Potozky, the richest member of the community, who also had his own palace. Paradoxically enough, at the beginning of 1990s the newly established Tulchin Jewish community tried to get the Glicklich palace for their communal needs. They failed, but today the Jewish communal centre is situated precisely in one of the wings of Potozkii Palace. The Jewish dream has finally come true.
47. An excerpt from Soviet Jewish folklore of 1920s: “Ikh ken alemen dertseiln fun main glik / Vos di sovetishe vlast hot mir gegebn,/Inzhenern zainen maine zin – /Az di zun alein shaint gor in main lebn!” [I can tell everybody about my happiness,/Which was given to me by Soviet power,/My sons are engineers – /And the sun itself is shining in my life!]: see Shternshis, Soviet Jewish Songs Folklore.
48. The maintenance of family yikhes was exclusively important for people of noble origin. Most probably, they were the first to become the object of criticism when their behaviour did not meet societal expectations. This is the key idea in an article written by O. Likhtenstadt in 1861: “[these] descendants of famous scholars or rabbis,” filled with “haughty arrogance” and not having much Jewish learnedness, lived at the expense of their ancestral glory – the “soi disant aristocracy” that should not claim any exclusive place in the society: see Likhtenstadt, “Several Words about Meyukheses,” 98. See also Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 76–7: “Essentially it [yikhes] is a product of learning plus wealth, of learning without wealth, or of wealth so used as to be translatable into the highest common denominator – the fulfilment of divine command. Yikhus achieved through inheritance is proportionate to the number of learned, eminent or notably charitable men in the family. A person describes his own yikhus or that of another by listing the scholars and philanthropists on his family tree.” Sometimes the knowledge of Halakhah was seen as more important than being of noble origin: “The learned mamzer takes precedence over the ignorant high priests” (see Skolnik, Encyclopedia Judaica, 374).
49. It is possible that this relativity is rooted in much earlier ideas about the necessity of dealing with Jewish social isolation, largely constructed by a specific way of life. Secular education was, according to some people, important already for the generation of their grandparents. See, for example, Tul_05_015.
50. Tul_06_10.
51. For example, Tul_05_036; Tul_05_019; Tul_05_003. Interestingly enough, the most detailed account about such people was recorded from a local historian of the town, who is not actually Jewish. See Tul_05_101: “Here [there were] such stories, about prayers … older Jews who still had some remnants of religious consciousness. And they valued it a lot … I don’t know what it is called in Yiddish, but in Russian it is called ‘a possessed person.’ [One could be called that] for his ability to get estranged during the prayer. Not to notice anything around. This person enjoyed particular respect and esteem in the Jewish milieu, among the older people.” In this description one may discern echoes of one of the key concepts of Hassidism, that of dveikut (Yiddish, dveikes), or achieving communication with God (literally, “sticking to God”) through intensive self‐oblivious prayer. The territory under discussion was once a densely Hassidic one, so it is somewhat surprising that no other references to anything related to Hassidism were recorded in our interviews. For a thorough discussion of the notion of yikhes in the early Hasidic tradition see Dynner, Yikhus and the Early Hasidic Movement.
52. Tul_05_043.
53. Tul_05_041.
54. Tul_05_107.
55. Tul_06_14.
56. Tul_05_014.
57. Tul_05_009; also Tul_05_041.
58. Tul_05_087.
59. According to calculations offered by Rosenthal, the pre‐war Polish town of Stozcek balebatim composed about 30% of the Jewish population, where as balmeluches and “scholars” – 69% and 1%, respectively. In this absence of reliable statistics, I cannot give any figures for Tulchin, from before or after the Second World War, but presumably these figures would not be much different.
60. Mendele, The Little Man, 147–8: “As is well known, handicraft is valued low among the Jews. To the same degree as an idler, sitting in the synagogue around the clock, presents an object of pride, a craftsman is a shame for the family. Everybody who considers himself a decent person would rather die of hunger than teach his children a craft.” Paperna, “From the Epoch of Nikolas,” 44: “Kopyl patricians, i.e. balebatim, standing out through their learnedness, wealth, or nobility, despised their poor fellow‐townsmen (craftsmen, coach‐drivers, unskilled workers, etc.), who were much less knowledgeable in Halakhah and not capable of devoting time for prayer and deeds pleasant to God … I often used to hear from my deceased mother: ‘Thank God, we never had a single convert to Christianity or craftsmen in our line.’” See Kotik, My Memoirs, 400: “It was always the craftsmen and the workers who occupied this low status. They came from poverty‐stricken homes and were apprenticed to learn a trade from early boyhood. It was no wonder that they didn’t learn, remained illiterate as well as poor.”
61. Tul_06_03.
62. Tul_06_14.
63. Tul_05_045.
64. Tul_05_101.
65. Tul_05_041.
66. See Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 79: “There were different grades of prosteh yidn … some of them were very prost, they were practically illiterate. Others could learn a little bit so they were less prost, but still belonged to the prosteh.” The gradation may be extremely subtle: “The ones who make the soles on the shoes are considered low prost. Those who make the upper parts of the shoes are already higher.” A certain homogenisation must have taken place after the disappearance of the so‐called professional synagogues, separate for each trade (such as for smiths, carpenters, tailors, etc.). See Tul_05_003; Tul_05_016; Tul_05_037.
67. Tul_05_085.
68. Tul_05_101; also Tul_05_009; Tul_05_071. One factor that must have contributed to the respectful attitude towards artisanal profession in Tulchin, as well as in many similar towns in Ukraine, was that during the Second World War the most highly skilled were not sent to concentration camps, but used locally for various jobs that required professionalism. This improved their living conditions and raised their chances of survival. See Tul_05_003; Tul_05_101; Tul_05_060.
69. Tul_06_14.
70. Tul_06_14; MP_07_037_2.
71. Kotik, My Memoirs, 400, says that wealth could be sufficient for high status, especially among the mitnaggdim: “Every mitnagged gauged his own lineage against that of a fellow‐mitnagged according to two criteria: lineage of wealth and lineage of learning. Here is how it works: he who learns better, or he who has a thousand rubles, thinks himself more respectable than someone who has only one hundred rubles, and he who has ten thousand rubles sees himself as far superior to someone who has only a thousand rubles, and so on.”
72. Tul_05_009.
73. Tul_06_03.
74. Tul_06_26; Tul_05_041.
75. Tul_05_041.
76. See Rosenthal, “Social Stratification,” 1–3. Rosenthal argues that there existed a certain dubiousness of attitude to wealth: on the one hand, answering the question of what was the source of prestige in the Polish town of Stozcek, people unanimously said it was “not money;” on the other hand, naming the most respected members of the community, they invariably pointed out those who were rich, noble and learned. This is explained by the fact that, on the one hand, the value of money was unstable, and on the other, that money was not an end in itself, and gave its owner a chance to perform charitable deeds. See also Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 75.
77. Tul_05_041.
78. Ibid.
79. This completely accords with more traditional attitudes to the newly rich. See Rosenthal, “Social Stratification,” 9: “It was also implied … that a man of the lower class who became wealthy grew bad in the process of attaining wealth.”
80. Tul_06_14.
81. Paperna, “From the Epoch of Nikolas,” 78.
82. Tul_05_015.
83. Rosenthal, “Social Stratification,” 2: “There were no friendships between adults of different classes,” 2.
84. Tul_06_14.
85. Tul_05_015.
86. Ibid.
87. Tul_06_26.
88. Tul_06_26.
89. Tul_06_03.
90. Tul_06_26.
91. As I was told at a different place, that this expression belongs to the sphere of “folk eroticism”: Ber_08_053.
92. Kotik, My Memoirs, chap. 2: it is very telling, that like other memoirists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Kotik mentioned and described the bathhouse immediately after Talmud‐Torah. The association is quite clear, though; the bathhouse was the property of the community and served ritual purposes, since the mikvah was a part of it. Moreover, visiting the bathhouse on the eve of Shabbat may be seen as a certain ritual itself. This, for example, is what Paperna, “From the Epoch of Nikolas,” 46, writes about the functions of shulkleper, a synagogue messenger: “On Saturdays shulkleper stopped at each door in the town and shouted in a loud voice: ‘Idn, in Schul arein!’ [‘Jews, go to the synagogue!’]. On Fridays, strictly at noon he would summon people to the bath house in the same type of cant: ‘Idn, in Bod arein!’ [‘Jews, go to the bathhouse!’].”
93. See MP_04_02_09: Der ruv wet nisht nemen dem beyden [A rabbi will not “take” a bath attendant,” i.e., will not become related to him through marital ties].
94. Tul_06_03.
95. Tul_06_26.
96. Tul_06_03.
97. Tul_05_045.
98. Tul_06_14. This example comes from an interview with the “last representative of Tulchin intelligentsia” who flaunts her ignorance of Yiddish to stress her social distance from the provincial Jews of the local community: see Tul_05_085, Tul_06_14. However, her reaction to the expression yikhes‐tukhes was very emotional, and she was capable of giving its precise definition. While certainly being a slip of tongue that betrayed her knowledge of low folk language, this proves that expressions such as yikhes‐tukhes belong to the minimal vocabulary set known to every member of the Jewish community, even if they do not speak Yiddish any more.
99. In 2006, a similar expression was recorded in the town of Balta, Odessa region: Bal_06_054; Bal_06_055_2: yikhes mit plikhes (literally, “yikhes with bald spots”), the meaning of which was the same as all previous ones: “you think that you have something special, but in reality this does not cost a penny.” The use of rhyme in some of these expressions creates an additional comical effect.
100. See An‐sky, Programme for the Study of Local History, which asks in question 1002, “Do you know any stories and jokes in general about origin?” This lack of correspondence may be expressed in the following habits: drunkenness (Tul_06_12; Tul_05_041; Tul_05_015; Tul_05_043); participation in gossiping and quarrels (Tul_06_14; Rosenthal, “Social Stratification,” 9; Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 148); envy (Tul_06_07; Tul_06_14); swearing, including the use of Russian obscene language, or mat (Tul_05_041; Tul_05_016; Tul_06_03; Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 73, 76, 148; Rosenthal, “Social Stratification,” 8–9). In short, “yikhus oblige,” and in earlier times religious learnedness, was seen as a guarantee of one’s high moral qualities: see Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 74. On envy in particular, see Bastomsky, “Yichus in the Shtetl,” 94, who argues that the Jewish type of competitiveness in nobleness was not of “exclusive” type, i.e., by gaining or increasing one’s yikhes one did not intrude upon other people’s right to do the same: “in Jewish society one did not acquire yichus at the expense of others.” It follows then that envy should be understood primarily in relation to everyday material reality, preoccupation with which was seen as incompatible with the notion of a noble person.
101. Zborowski, Herzog, Life Is with People, 74; Rosenthal, “Social Stratification,” 9.
102. Tul_06_10.
103. Tul_06_14.
104. Tul_06_03.
105. Tul_06_12.
106. See Rosenthal, “Social Stratification,” 7.
107. Tul_06_03.
108. See Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother, 48–9
109. See Le Goff, Is Europe Born out of the Middle Ages?, 88