Economic Origins of Antisemitism. Poland and Its Jews in the Early Modern Period by HillelLevineReview by: John D. KlierThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Jul., 1993), pp. 591-593Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4211369 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 22:45

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and EastEuropean Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavonic andEast European Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.111 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 22:45:43 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS 59I

post-Communist East Central Europe may indeed have taken 'a leap into the unknown', the region 'remains molded by the heritage of its history'. In summing up what this is, he identifies challenges from the West and an ambivalent relationship with the West as an essential element in the region's history; he sees the region's contributions - from Hus and Masaryk, Paul Vladimiri and John Paul II, Miklos Zrinyi and Gabor Bethlen - as having been more spiritual than material, hence the importance of the struggle for freedom. He is, however, careful to note that it 'would be pretentious to maintain that freedom means more to [the peoples of the region] than to other nations of Europe. It is just that history has forced them to defend and to fight for it more frequently than in many other lands.' And he notes that although now the 'price of freedom seems largely economic', freedom is not an absolute in itself, but rather a 'condition of meaningful existence of individuals and society'. The half-dozen maps and seven tables (focusing primarily upon demographic and economic matters) are helpful additions to the text, as are the bibliography (largely English-language materials) and the comparative chronological table. Department of History PAUL W. KNOLL University ofSouthern California

Levine, Hillel. Economic Origins of Antisemitism. Poland and its Jews in the Early Modern Period. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, I99I. Xiii + 27I Pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $33.00: ?I9.95.

IN the late fifteenth century, the Polish state encountered a unique economic opportunity, one of those fortuitous 'small changes', which in similar cases advanced the processes of modernization. The depopulation and devastation of Western Europe in the previous century created special opportunities for the sale of Polish grain at very favourable prices. Hillel Levine describes the failure of Poles to respond to the opportunities presented by this challenge. Instead, Poland's noble landlords created a socio-economic system which obstructed modernization even as it provided ideological rationalization for the penalties of backwardness. The role which Poland's Jews played in these processes is Levine's central theme.

Noble landlords failed to pursue the opportunities for commerce and enterprise provided by the wealth-generating demand for Polish grain on the European market in the sixteenth century. Instead, they developed the 'second serfdom', weakening the state's centralizing power while binding other elements of society, the burghers, Jews, and especially the peasantry, into a new, coercive economic system. Eschewing enterprise, the magnates generated secondary revenues through tolls and taxes which they were able to impose as a consequence of their privileged social position. Rejecting the mercantilist doctrines of the emerging New Monarchies of the West, the Polish gentry evolved a system of autarchy. The estate served as a complete, self-sufficient production unit, an economic perpetual motion machine.

Levine argues that this was a conscious process. Thus, the lords elaborated ideologies designed to justify the second serfdom, especially as it spread to

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.111 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 22:45:43 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

592 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Ukraine. On the local level they idealized conceptions of lord-peasant recipro- city and natural order, philia, further buttressing it by Sarmatianism, a descent myth which legitimized the expansionist claims of the Poles. On the national level, noble ideology celebrated the reduction of royal power for producing a nobles' republic, a Utopia which revelled in its 'golden liberties', under the slogan that 'for lack of order Poland stands'.

Levine chronicles the essential role which the Jews played in this process. They served the lords as agents of peasant exploitation, through the arenda, or lease-holding system. Possessing liquid capital, mobility and connections wit;h a broad commercial network, Jews resolved the flaws in the nobles' idealized system: despite the ideal of autarchy, the lords required money for the purchase of luxury goods from the West to which international trade had accustomed them. The Jews monetarized the estate economy, creating demand through petty trade, and providing a market for surplus peasant production. However desirable in the eyes of the lords, the Jews' activities none the less violated the 'natural order of things'- and ever after engendered extremely ambivalent gentry attitudes towards theJews.

The Jews, firmly embedded in the feudal economy, proved an infinitely pliable instrument for the nobles. As foreign markets evaporated due to competition and Poland's own internal disorder, a new tool for peasant exploitation, the propinacja, or manufacture and sale of strong spirits, emerged. By I764, Levine claims, an extraordinary 37.6% of overall estate revenue derived from propinacja. The gentry liquor monopoly proved a godsend for the decaying second serfdom: it utilized surplus grain and extracted further profits from the peasantry while leaving the peasants stupefied - although it is questionable that this process made them more docile, as Levine implies. The Jew - distiller, wholesaler and tavern-keeper - was the preferred gentry instrument for the propinacja, serving simultaneously as its agent and as scapegoat for the system when its excesses attracted critical attention.

Such a moment arrived in the eighteenth century when, under threat of national ruin, Poles turned to Enlightenment models of political and social reform. TheJews were an obvious target. Unlike the West, where reformers at least pretended to consider the well-being of theJews, Polish reformers blamed the Jews themselves for their degraded position, and their role in Poland's economic crisis. The reform impulse, culminating in the Quadrennial Diet of I 788-92, failed to grapple fully with the fate of the peasants, and still less did it focus on theJews, aside from a few rhetorical flourishes. WhileJews at the time counted themselves lucky to have escaped reformist experiments, Levine laments that this left theJews defenceless before the tyranny of local lords, as well as reduced to the status of non-persons in whom the state took no interest.

If Levine offers suggestive insights to the role ofJews in Poland's economic evolution, less successful is his lengthy exploration of the cultural sources of entrepreneurialism, in which he seeks to evaluate the psychological ability of Protestants, Catholics andJews to respond to the challenge of'small changes'. Levine examines the implications of various modes of scholastic thinking - Realism and Nominalism - only to reject the possibility of establishing concrete links with contemporary Polish - to say nothing of Jewish - thought. As Levine himself admits, his speculation is little more than an

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.111 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 22:45:43 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS 593

agenda for future research. Unsatisfactory too is Levine's treatment of the actions and attitudes developed towards the Jews by the partitioning powers after I 772.

Levine's me'tier clearly lies in the socio-economic life of old Poland. He moves confidently through a maze of complicated economic theory, scattering insights as he goes. Despite the equivocations that mark far too many of his arguments, Levine's work will be of interest to historians of the Polish economy, especially for its elucidation of the vital role played by the Jews. Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies JOHN D. KLIER University College London

Confino, Michael. Societe et mentalites collectives en Russie sous l'Ancien Regime. Cultures et Societes de l'Est, no. 13. Institut d'etudes slaves, Paris, 1992.

432 pp. Notes. No price available (paperback).

THIS book is a collection of a dozen previously published articles by the Professor of Russian history at the University of Tel Aviv. All deal with Russian society of the Imperial era - the peasantry, first and foremost, but also the nobility and the intelligentsia. The author has previously established his authority in the field of Russian social history with two major monographs, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers lafin du xviii siecle (i 963) and Systemes agraires et progre's agricole ( I 969).

Professor Confino is an ardent follower of the French Annales school. The influence of this school in the United States and England has not always been a wholesome one in that it has encouraged a reductionism expressed in concen- tration on social issues and conflicts to the exclusion of the other aspects of historical reality. In the author's skilled hands, however, it becomes a sophisticated method of exploring 'mentalites collectives', i.e. ways of thinking that result from complex interactions between individuals, the social group to which they belong, the economy in which they make their living, and the ideas under whose influence they fall. The quest is for a total picture of the mindset, in which ideas and feelings are interrelated and anchored in economic reality.

An illustration of this methodology is to be found in a long, critical review of Marc Raeff's Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia, originally published in Annales in I967. Professor Raeff's argument held that the oft-noted 'alienation' of nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia had its roots in the loss of social and political utility during the preceding century. Confino criticizes Raeff for isolating one psychological factor in the life of the nobility and fashioning it into a general explanation without taking into account countervailing forces. He does not deny the fact of 'alienation' of the Russian gentry, but insists that before drawing conclusions from it one must ask whether 'the spiritual life and the mental structures attained a stage of routinization, causing a loss of contact with the fundamental problems of human existence'. It is not enough, he argues, to know a group's attitude toward government and society, one must also know how its members 'lived and how they died', how they dealt with 'the mysteries of life'.

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.111 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 22:45:43 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions