Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Editors and Advisers
- Contents
- Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry
- Polin
- Statement From the Editors
- SYMPOSIUM: JEWS AND THE EMERGENCE OF AN INDEPENDENT POLISH STATE
- ARTICLES
- DOCUMENTS
- COMMENTARY
- REVIEW ESSAYS
- BOOK REVIEWS
- Nahum Gross (ed.) Yehudim ba-Kalkalah
- Jonathan I. Israel European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism: 1550-1750
- Lucy S. Dawidowicz The Golden Tradition. Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe
- Joseph Weiss Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism (edited by David Goldstein)
- Mathias Bersohn Kilka słów o dawniejszych bozjnicach drewnianych w Polsce
- Magdalena Opalski The Jewish Tavern-Keeper and his Tavern in Nineteenth Century Polish Literature
- Steven J. Zipperstein The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History
- Stephen M. Berk Year of CrisisYear of Hope. Russian Jewry and The Pogroms of 1881-1882
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Heide W. Whelan Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia
- Mary Antin The Promised Land
- John Bodnar The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America
- Michael R. Weisser A Brotherhood of Memory: Jewish Landsmanshaftn in the New World
- Henryk Piasecki Secja Żydowsfca PPSD i Żydowska Partia Socjal-Demokratyczna 1892-1919/20
- Ber Borochov Class Struggle and the Jewish Nation. Selected Essays in Marxist Zionism
- Ehud Luz Makbilim Nifgashim
- Shmuel Nitzan (ed.) Tnu'at Dror be'Galicia
- Ritchie Robertson Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature
- Sander L. Gilman Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews
- Edward D. Wynot Warsaw Between the World Wars: Profile of the Capital City in a Developing Land
- Aleksander Biberstein Zagłada Żydów w Krakowie
- Shmuel Krakowski The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-1944
- Nechama Tec When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland
- W Czerdziestzą, Rocznicp Agonia, walka i śmierć warszawskiego getta; Janina Jaworska Henryka Becka
- Hanna Krall Sublokatorka
- Randolph L. Braham and Bélo Vágó (eds) The Holocaust in Hungary: Forty Years Later
- Les Limes du Souvenir: Mémoriaux juifs de Pologne (presente par Annette Wieviorka et Yitzhok Niborski)
- Leiter to the Editors
- Contributors
- Obituaries
Magdalena Opalski The Jewish Tavern-Keeper and his Tavern in Nineteenth Century Polish Literature
from BOOK REVIEWS
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Editors and Advisers
- Contents
- Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry
- Polin
- Statement From the Editors
- SYMPOSIUM: JEWS AND THE EMERGENCE OF AN INDEPENDENT POLISH STATE
- ARTICLES
- DOCUMENTS
- COMMENTARY
- REVIEW ESSAYS
- BOOK REVIEWS
- Nahum Gross (ed.) Yehudim ba-Kalkalah
- Jonathan I. Israel European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism: 1550-1750
- Lucy S. Dawidowicz The Golden Tradition. Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe
- Joseph Weiss Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism (edited by David Goldstein)
- Mathias Bersohn Kilka słów o dawniejszych bozjnicach drewnianych w Polsce
- Magdalena Opalski The Jewish Tavern-Keeper and his Tavern in Nineteenth Century Polish Literature
- Steven J. Zipperstein The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History
- Stephen M. Berk Year of CrisisYear of Hope. Russian Jewry and The Pogroms of 1881-1882
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Heide W. Whelan Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia
- Mary Antin The Promised Land
- John Bodnar The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America
- Michael R. Weisser A Brotherhood of Memory: Jewish Landsmanshaftn in the New World
- Henryk Piasecki Secja Żydowsfca PPSD i Żydowska Partia Socjal-Demokratyczna 1892-1919/20
- Ber Borochov Class Struggle and the Jewish Nation. Selected Essays in Marxist Zionism
- Ehud Luz Makbilim Nifgashim
- Shmuel Nitzan (ed.) Tnu'at Dror be'Galicia
- Ritchie Robertson Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature
- Sander L. Gilman Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews
- Edward D. Wynot Warsaw Between the World Wars: Profile of the Capital City in a Developing Land
- Aleksander Biberstein Zagłada Żydów w Krakowie
- Shmuel Krakowski The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-1944
- Nechama Tec When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland
- W Czerdziestzą, Rocznicp Agonia, walka i śmierć warszawskiego getta; Janina Jaworska Henryka Becka
- Hanna Krall Sublokatorka
- Randolph L. Braham and Bélo Vágó (eds) The Holocaust in Hungary: Forty Years Later
- Les Limes du Souvenir: Mémoriaux juifs de Pologne (presente par Annette Wieviorka et Yitzhok Niborski)
- Leiter to the Editors
- Contributors
- Obituaries
Summary
Under the system of propinacja in Poland, dating from the Middle Ages, the landlord had the sole right to distil and sell alcohol and continued to have this right even after the Partitions of the eighteenth century. It was abolished in Prussia in 1845, in Galicia in 1889 and in Russian Poland only in 1898. Normally the agent of the szlachcic in the sale of alcohol was a Jew. Under this system the landlord could dispose of part of the grain harvest in the form of alcohol and thus cream off from the peasantry such money as they might earn on their own account. The implication was that he and the Jewish innkeeper had an interest in encouraging the consumption of alcohol and thus of acting in the worst interests of the peasants. In addition, the innkeeper could give credit for those periods when the peasants did not possess money and thus obtain an additional income from the interest he charged on the debts incμrred. This was a situation which the reformers of the eighteenth century deplored as a social evil. In his Przestrogi dla Polski, published in 1790, Stanislaw Staszic had written that ‘aside from lawless serfdom, Jews are the second great cause of laziness, stupidity, drunkenness and poverty among the peasants.’ This was an attitude which a political thinker could adopt in search for measures to reform the Polish Commonwealth. In the nineteenth century, writers tended to look at society as it was. Opalski's book, the fourth in a series of works from the Center for Research on the History and Culture of Polish Jews, does not examine the problem from an economic point of view, but, as the title states, analyzes the attitudes of Polish authors to the role of Jewish innkeepers in the Polish countryside. Her view is that nineteenth-century fiction tended to be silent about the role of the noble in using the tavern as a means of exploiting the peasantry. They accepted the fact that the Jewish innkeeper in fact was part of the community. Often it is difficult to draw a distinction between myth and reality. The innkeeper is sometimes represented as being on the fringe of society, having connections with crime and smuggling.
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- Jews and the Emerging Polish State (Polin Volume Two) , pp. 418 - 420Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2008