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© Brandeis University
NEJS 167b
Author: Dr. Antony Polonsky

A HISTORY OF THE JEWS IN WARSHAW, LODZ, VILNA AND ODESSA

Description of the Course.

The core of this course is an investigation of the transfomation of the Jews of the Tsarist Empire from a pre-modern religious and ethnic community into a proto-nation. As late as the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the entire Jewish world, with its population of a little over two and a quarter million, of whom over a third lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, formed a single transnational unit, linked by a common religious and cultural tradition. During the nineteenth century, European governments, with the support of a sigificant proportion of the Jewish elite, attempted to transform their Jewish populations into citizens, differing from the remainder of their fellow-countrymen only by their religion, which was to be purified of its obscurantist and anti-Christian elements. In Western Europe, where the Jewish communities were small, where parliamentary institutions and constitutional government became firmly established in the course of the century and where political hegemony of the middle class was secured, the process of Jewish integration was, by and large, successful. In Central Europe, where constitutional government was less firmly rooted, the middle class weaker and the pre-industrial social elements, above all the landed aristocracy, more entrenched, the process of Jewish integration was less complete. As a result, in the German Empire, established in 1870, and in the more advanced parts of the Austian-Hungarian Monarchy, the Jews achieved political, but not social integration and were faced from the third decade of the century by renewed questioning of the legal equality they had been granted.

In the areas of mass Jewish population, the more backward areas of Austria-Hungary, Romania and, above all, the Tsarist Empire, the Jewish communities were too large (numbering in 1881 over 7 million), the local middle class too small and constitutional values too weakly established to make possible Jewish integration on a large scale. By the late nineteenth century, in Galicia (Austrian Poland), and in the Tsarist Empire (both in the Pale of Settlement and in the Kingdom of Poland), the majority of the Jews had come to define themselves and to be defined by their neighbours as well as by the governmental authorities as a proto-national group. This was reflected in the dominance of national and autonomist concepts of Jewish self-identification (Zionism, Folkism, Bundism) and by the emergence of modern Hebrew literature and the development of Yiddish as a literary language.

The new Jewish politics was a consequence of urbanisation. Ever since they had settled in Europe, the Jews, because of the medieval prohibition on their owning land, had been predominantly urban. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, they constituted, by the middle of the eighteenth century, nearly half of the urban population . But the towns in which they lived were pre-modern and pre-industrial. They were of two types. In Royal towns, like Warsaw, Krako;w and Vilna, whose prosperity was in decline from the early seventeenth century, the Jews found themselves in constant conflict with the Christian burghers. In noble towns, where the Jews were invited to settle by the dominant aristocracy to settle to provide administrators and services for their estates, their position was somewhat better. These were the shtetlakh, which became the principal area of Jewish settlement right up until the second world war. In the nineteenth century, with the development of industrialisation in the Tsarist Empire, new industrial or commercial centers, like Warsaw, Odessa and Lodz;, began to develop and soon had mass Jewish populations. In Warsaw, for instance, in 1914, out of a total population of 885,000, Jews constituted 38.1?. We shall be concerned in this course to examine the nature of Jewish settlement in these towns, the new political movements which emerged here and the relations between the Jews and the majority population. We will concentrate on the four towns of the course title, but will also look at the communities in St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Riga. In addition, we will look briefly, for comparative purposes, at some of the large Jewish conurbations elsewhere in Europe - Krakow, Lwow, Vienna, Budapest and Berlin.

Required Reading

  1. Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, The Jews in Warsaw, Blackwells, 1991.
  2. Antony Polonsky (eds.)
  3. Israel Cohen Vilna, Jewish Publishing Society Reprint, pb. 1992. POLIN A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies, volume 6 (devoted to Lodz).
  4. Steven Zipperstein The Jews of Odessa, Stanford University Press, 1985.
  5. Patricia Herlihy Odessa: A History 1794-1914, Harvard University Press, 1985.
  6. Xeroxed coursepack

Recommended Reading

  1. Antony Polonsky (ed.) From Shtetl to Socialism: Studies from Polin, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, London and Washington, 1993.
  2. Robert F. Leslie (ed.) The History of Poland since 1863, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pb.
  3. Piotr Wandycz The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918, Seattle, Washington, 1974.
  4. Nicholas Riasonovsky A History of Russia, 5th edition, Oxford Unversity Press, 1993.
  5. M. F. Hamm (ed,) The City in Late Imperial Russia, Indiana University Press, 1986.
  6. Stephen D. Corrsin Warsaw before the First World War: Poles and Jews in the Third City of the Russian Empire 1881-1914, East European Monographs, Boulder, 1989, distributed by Columbia University Press, New York.
  7. Leonardo Benevolo The European City, Blackwell, pb. 1995.
  8. Novels, Poems, Memoirs (I have not cited specific editions)
  9. Israel Singer The Brothers Ashkenazy
  10. Isaac Babel Collected Stories
  11. Irina Ratushinskaya The Odessans
  12. Joshua Soboul Ghetto
  13. Boleslaw Prus The Doll
  14. Israel Rabon The Street
  15. Joseph Roth Hotel Savoy
  16. Wladyslaw Reymont The Promised Land
  17. Alexander Kuprin Gambrinus and Other Stories
  18. Sholem Asch Mottke the Thief God of Vengeance. Three Cities
  19. Chaim Grade Yeshiva. The Agune. Mothers Sabbath Days
  20. Sholem Aleichem The Adventures of Menahem Mendel. The Bloody Hoax
  21. Czeslaw Milosz Native Realm
  22. Isaac Bashevis Singer In My Fathers Court. A Day of Pleasure. Stories of a Boy Growing up in Warsaw. Shosha. Scum. The Family Moskat

 Course Requirements

Week 1
Introduction to the Course
Urbanization and Modernization; The Modernization of the Tsarist Monarchy;
The Character of the Four Towns

  1. †*Articles on Warsaw, Lodz, Vilna and Odessa in The Jewish Encyclopedia, London 1905 and Encyclopedia Judaica, Jerusalem, 1971.
  2. †*Leonardo Benevolo The European City, esp. pp. 160-188.
  3. †*Morton Keller Historical Sources of Urban Personality. Boston, New York, Philadelphia. An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 3 March 1982, Oxford, 1982
  4. †*Vladimir Jabotinsky Memoirs by my Typewriter, in Lucy Dawidowicz (ed.), The Golden Tradition, New York, 1967, pp. 394-401.
  5. †*Abraham Joshua Heschel The Jerusalem of Lithuania in Leyzer Ran (ed.), The Jerusalem of Lithuania, 2 volumes, New York, 1974.
  6. Leyzer Ran Vilna, Jerusalem of Lithuania, Avrom Nokhem Stencel Lecture, Oxford, 1987.

Week 2

Jews in the Towns of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

  1. †*Charter of Boleslaw of Kalisz
  2. †*Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka Jewish Districts in the Spatial Stucture of Polish Towns, POLIN, volume 5, pp.24-39.
  3. †*Abraham Ain 'Swislocz: Portrait of a shtetl', in Irving Howe, Eliezer Greenberg, Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries, pp. 87-108.
  4. Gershon Hundert 'The Role of the Jews in Commerce in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania', Journal of European Economic History, 16 (1987), pp. 245-275.
  5. †*Gershon Hundert 'Some Basic Characteristics of the Jewish Experience in Poland', From Shtetl to Socialism , pp. 19-25, also in POLIN, volume 1, pp. 18-35.
  6. †*Gershon Hundert 'The Implications of Jewish Economic Activities for Christian-Jewish Relations in the Polish Commonwealth', The Jews in Poland, pp. 55-63.
  7. †*Jan Malecki 'Jewish Trade at the end of the Sixteenth and in the first half of the Seventeenth Century', in The Jews in Old Poland, pp. 267-81.
  8. †*Moshe Rosman The Lord's Jews. Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the 18th Century, Cambridge, MA, 1990
  9. Gershon Hundert The Jews in a Polish Private Town. The Case of Opatow in the Eighteenth Century, Baltimore, 1992.

Week 3

Jews in Warsaw and Vilna Down to 1795

  1. †*The Jewish Encyclopedia
  2. †*Encyclopedia Judaica
  3. *Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Antony Polonsky (eds.) The Jews in Warsaw, pp. 1-7. 84-150

    4. Vilna

  4. †*The Jewish Encyclopedia
  5. †*Encyclopedia Judaica
  6. *Israel Cohen Vilna, pp. 1-253, esp. 182-253.

 Weeks 4 and 5

Jews in the Four Towns down to 1881

  1. †*Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Antony Polonsky (eds.)The Jews in Warsaw, pp. 7-31, 151-211
  2. Stanislaw Blejwas Realism in Polish Politics. Warsaw and National Survival in Nineteenth Century Poland, New Haven, Conn, 1984.
  3. †*Stanislaw Blejwas Polish Positivism and the Jews, Jewish Social Studies, 46 (1984). Lodz *POLIN, volume 6, pp. 3-119
  4. †The Jewish Encyclopedia
  5. †Encyclopedia Judaica
  6. Wladyslaw Reymont The Promised Land
  7. Sholem Asch Three Cities

    8. Vilna

  8. †The Jewish Encyclopedia
  9. †Encyclopedia Judaica
  10. *Israel Cohen Vilna, pp. 253-357.
  11. †Michael Stanislawski For Whom do I Toil Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry, New York, 1988, pp. 3-105.
  12. Israel Klausner Vilna, Yerushalayim dlita 1495-1939, 3 volumes, volume 2, Bet Lohamei Hagetaot, 1988.

    13. Odessa

  13. *Steven Zipperstein The Jews of Odessa, Stanford University Press, 1985.
  14. †*Steven Zipperstein 'Remapping Odessa, Rewriting Cultural History, Jewish Social Studies, New series, volume 2, number 2, pp, 21-37.
  15. Alexander Orbach New Voices in Russian Jewry> A Study of the Russian Jewish Press in the Era of the Great Reforms, Leiden, 1980.
  16. Patricia Herlihy Odessa: A History 1794-1914, Harvard University Press, 1985.
  17. Patricia Herlihy 'Odessa, Staple Trade and Urbanization in New Russia,' Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, 21, pp. 121-32.
  18. Patricia Herlihy 'Ukrainian Cities in the Nineteenth Century', in (ed.) Ivan L. Rudnitsky, Rethinking Ukrainian History, Edmonton, 1981.
  19. Lewis Siegelbaum 'The Odessa Grain Trade: A Case Study in Urban Growth and Development in Tsaris Russia,' The Journal of European Economic History, 9, pp.113-151.

Week 6

From 1881 to 1914

  1. †*Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Antony Polonsky (eds.)The Jews in Warsaw, pp. 7-31, 181-277.
  2. Stephen D. Corrsin Warsaw before the First World War: Poles and Jews in the Third City of the Russian Empire 1881-1914.
  3. †*Stephen D. Corrsin 'Warsaw. Poles and Jews in a Conquered City', in M. F. Hamm (ed.) The City in Late Imperial Russia, pp. 123-176.
  4. †*Alexander Guterman 'The Congregation of the Great Synagogue in Warsaw. Its Changing Social Composition and Ideological Affinities.' Lodz, *POLIN, volume 6, pp. 3-119
  5. †Krysztof Stefan'ski The Synagogues of Lodz.

    6. Vilna

  6. Israel Cohen Vilna, pp. 253-357.
  7. Israel Klausner Vilna, Yerushalayim dlita 1495-1939, 3 volumes, volume 2, Bet Lohamei Hagetaot, 1988.

    8. Odessa

  8. Steven Zipperstein The Jews of Odessa, Stanford University Press, 1985.
  9. Steven Zipperstein Elusive Prophet. Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993, pp.1- 169.
  10. Patricia Herlihy Odessa: A History 1794-1914, Harvard University Press, 1985.
  11. Shmuel Katz Lone Wolf. A Biography of Vladimir Jabotinsky, New York, 1996.
  12. †*Frederick W. Skinner 'Odessa and the Problem of Urban Modernization', in M. F. Hamm (ed.) The City in Late Imperial Russia, pp. 209-248.
  13. †*Robert Weinberg 'The pogrom of 1905 in Odessa: a case study,' in John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambrozo (eds.), Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, Cambridge, 1992.

Week 7

Jews in St Petersburg, Kiev, Riga and Moscow

  1. †*The Jewish Encyclopedia
  2. †*Encyclopedia Judaica
  3. Mikhail Beizer The Jews of St Petersburg. Excursions through a Noble Past, Philadelphia and New York, 1989.
  4. †*Michael Stanislawski For Whom do I Toil@ Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry, New York, 1988, pp. 106-229.
  5. Joseph Bradley Moscow. From Big Village to Metropolis, in M. F. Hamm (ed.) The City in Late Imperial Russia, pp. 9-43.
  6. James Bater 'Between Old and New. St Petersburg in the Late Imperial Era', in M. F. Hamm (ed.) The City in Late Imperial Russia, pp. 43-78.
  7. †Michael F. Hamm 'Continuity and Change in Late Imperial Kiev, in M. F. Hamm (ed.) The City in Late Imperial Russia, pp. 79-122.
  8. Anders Henriksson 'Riga. Growth, Conflict and the Limitations of Good Government, in M. F. Hamm (ed.) The City in Late Imperial Russia, pp. 209-248.

Week 8

Jews in Other Urban Centers> Krakow, Lwow, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin

  1. †*The Jewish Encyclopedia
  2. †*Encyclopedia Judaica
  3. William O. McCagg A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670-1918, Bloomington, 1983, esp. pp. 47-223
  4. †*Hanna Kosinski-Witt Review of Andrzej Zbikowski, Zydzi krakowscy i ich gmina w latach 1869-1919, Warsaw, 1994.
  5. Julian Bussgang The Progressive Synagogue in Lwow.
  6. Ezra Mendelsohn 'Jewish Assimilation in L'viv. The Case of Wilhelm Feldman', in Andrei Markovits, Frank Sysyn, Nation Building and the Politics of Nationalism:Essays on Austrian Galicia, Cambridge, MA, 1982.
  7. Thomas Bender,Carl E. Schorske (eds) Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930, New York, 1994.
  8. †*Steven Beller 'The World of Yesterday Revisited: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Jews of Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, Jewish Social Studies, New series, volume2, number 2, pp. 53.
  9. Robert Wistrich The Jews in Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph, Oxford, 1989.
  10. Marsha Rozenblit The Jews of Vienna 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity, Albany, 1983.
  11. Werner Mosse The German-Jewish Economic Elite, 1820-1935, Oxford, 1987.

Week 9

War and Revolution 1914-1921

  1. †*John D. Klier, Shlomo Lambrozo (eds.)Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, pp.293-313.
  2. *Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Antony Polonsky (eds.)The Jews in Warsaw, pp. 278-290.
  3. *Israel Cohen Vilna, pp. 358-88.

Week 10

Jews in the Cities of Poland between the Wars

  1. †*Jacob Letschinsky 'The Jews in the Cities of the Republic of Poland', Yivo Bleter XX, XXI, reprinted in Deborah Dash Moore (ed.), East European Jews in Two Worlds, Chicago, 1990, pp. 102-124.

    2. Warsaw

  2. †*Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Antony Polonsky (eds.) The Jews in Warsaw, pp. 31-43, 279-311.
  3. Edward D. Wynot Warsaw Between the World Wars. Profile of the Capital City in a Devoloping Land, 1918- 1939, East European Monographs, Boulder, 1983.
  4. Isaac Bashevis Singer Shosha

    5. Lodz

  5. †*POLIN, volume 6, pp. 120-261
  6. †*Robert Michael Shapiro Aspects of Jewish Self-government in Lodz, POLIN, volume 8, pp. 206-226.
  7. Lilian Kranitz-Sanderes Twelve Who Survived. An Oral History of the Jews of Lodz, Poland, 1930-1954, New York, 1984.

    8. Vilna

  8. Israel Cohen Vilna, pp. 388-423.
  9. Lucy Dawidowicz From That Time and Place. A Memoir 1938-47, New York, 1989.
  10. †*Abraham Novershtern Yung Vilne The Political Dimension of Literature, in Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, Chone Shmeruk (eds.), The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, University Press of New England, 1989, pp. 383-398.
  11. †*Lucjan Dobroszycki Yivo in Interwar Poland Work in the Historical Science, The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, pp.492-518 .

Week 11

Jews in the Cities of the Soviet Union 1921-41

  1. Maurice Friedberg How Things were Done in Odessa: Cultural and Intellectual Pursuits in a Soviet City, Boulder, 1991.
  2. *Benjamin Pinkus The Jews of the Soviet Union, pp. 49-137.
  3. Nora Levin The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917, New York University Press, 1988, volume 1, chapters 1-19.
  4. Zvi Gitelman Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, Princeton, 1972, esp. pp. 321-442.
  5. †*Chone Shmeruk 'Yiddish Literature in the U.S.S.R., in Lionel Kochan (ed.), The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917, London, 1978, 3rd edition, pp. 232-268.

Week 12 and 13

The Holocaust in the Four Towns
We will attempt to study the process of mass murder and the Jewish response in the four towns comparatively

  1. †*Encyclopedia of the Holocaust
  2. Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Antony Polonsky (eds.) The Jews in Warsaw, pp. 43-9, 312-62.
  3. Israel Gutman The Jews of Warsaw 1939-1943. Ghetto, Underground, Revolt, Bloomington, Ind., 1982.
  4. Joseph Kermish (ed.) To Live with Honor and Die with Honor. Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives "O.S.", Jerusalem, 1986.
  5. Emanuel Ringelblum Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, New York, 1958.
  6. The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, Raul Hilberg, Stanis`aw Staron, Joseph Kermish (eds.), New York, 1979.
  7. Hanna Krall Shielding the Flame, New York, 1989.
  8. Abraham Lewin A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, London, 1988.

    9. Lodz

  9. †*Encyclopedia of the Holocaust
  10. Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed.) The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto 1941-1944, New Haven, 1984.
  11. Alan Adelson, Robert Lapides (ed.) Lodz Ghetto. Inside a Community under Siege, New York, 1987.
  12. †*Philip Friedman Pseudo-Saviors in the Polish Ghettos Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski of Lodz, in Roads to Extinction Essays on the Holocaust, New York and Philadelphia, 1980, 333-352.

    13. Vilna

  13. †*Encyclopedia of the Holocaust
  14. Yitshak Arad Ghetto in Flames The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust, Jerusalem, 1980.
  15. Herman Kruk Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, XIII (1965), pp. 9-78.
  16. Yitshok Rudashevski Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941-April 1943, Beit Lohamei Hagetaot, 1973.
  17. Joshua Soboul Ghetto
  18. Moshe Kleinbaums Report on Issues in the Former Eastern Polish Territories, in Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (eds.), Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939-1946, London, 1990, pp. 275-300.
  19. †*Philip Friedman Jacob Gens Commandant of the Vilna Ghetto, in Roads to Extinction Essays on the Holocaust, New York and Philadelphia, 1980, 365-80.

    20. Odessa

  20. †*Encylopedia of the Holocaust
  21. Randolph L. Braham (ed.) The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry, New York, 1994, particularly pp. 57-116.
  22. Ilya Ehrenburg, Vassili Grossman (eds.) The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, New York, 1981, pp.77-91.
  23. †*Dora Litani The Destruction of the Jews of Odessa in the light of Romanian Documents, Yad Vashem Studies, 6, 1967, pp. 135-54.

Week 14

The Post-war Period. Jewish Life Today in the Four Towns

  1. Jaff Schatz The Generation, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991.
  2. †*Lucjan Dobroszycki 'Restoring Jewish Life in Post-war Poland', Soviet Jewish Affairs, 2, 1973.
  3. †*Stanislaw Janlkowski Memory The New Monuments Commemorating the Stuggle and Martyrdom of the Jews of Warsaw, POLIN, 5, pp. 50-56.
  4. Charles Hoffman Grey Dawn, The Jews of Eastern Europe in the post-Communst Era, New York, 1992.

Note on the reading list.

Readings in the course pack are marked with an dagger (†). In some cases, only part of the material has been xeroxed. Those readings marked with an asterisk (*) are essential. Other references are optional. Students should read widely in the areas they are particularly interested in and in which their class papers fall. All books and articles (where possible) will be placed on reserve in the library.