A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (26 page)

Kings and nobles also valued these organizations, because they provided an efficient way of collecting taxes. In fact, most rulers required that Jews set up a
kehillah
in their town in order to speed up and simplify tax payments. At first government officials appointed the leaders of almost every
kehillah
. By the 1500s, however, Jews were choosing their own leaders and deciding who qualified for membership.

A
kehillah
was by no means a democracy. The organization was governed by a minority—the most prosperous men in the community and therefore the ones who paid the most taxes. (Women had no communal rights.) The poor, who made up the majority in every community, had no say in the way the
kehillah
was run. Nevertheless, both the rich and the poor understood the importance of a united voice and some measure of security in an insecure world.

By the 1500s, many Jewish leaders realized that working with their counterparts in neighboring communities would enhance that united voice. They began to organize regional associations and, later, a national one. The kingdom of Poland consisted of four provinces; in 1569, a fifth province was added when the Grand Dukes of Lithuania and their descendants became the kings of Poland. Each of the five provinces had its own association of
kehillot
(the plural of
kehillah
). From time to time, the leaders of these groups gathered at annual trading fairs to settle disputes and discuss common concerns.

Some of these leaders were noted rabbis and scholars. In making decisions in disputes that were brought to them, they used a code of Jewish law known as
Shulhan Arukh
. (The words literally mean “set table.”) The
Shulhan Arukh
is a list of laws compiled by Joseph Karo, a Jewish scholar who, after being exiled from Spain in 1492, settled in Safed, a city in what is now Israel. In creating this code of laws, he drew mainly on Sephardic and Middle Eastern traditions. (The word
Sephardic
refers to the Jewish culture that developed in Spain and other lands along the Mediterranean Sea.) Later in the century, Rabbi Isserles added Ashkenazi customs and practices to the code. (The term
Ashkenazi
refers to the Jewish culture that developed in northern and, later, eastern Europe.)

The
kehillot
helped Jews in Poland protect their rights and privileges by insisting that rulers honor their promises. For example, in the 1500s, Jewish leaders in the Polish town of Kowel confronted the general who ruled the town after he ignored the terms of the community’s charter. He responded to their protests by throwing them into a dungeon filled with water and then demanding that the
kehillah
pay a ransom for their release. Outraged, the Jews of Kowel turned to the king of Poland for help. After hearing both sides of the story, the king ordered the general to release the Jewish prisoners and fulfill the terms of the
kehillah
’s charter. The general obeyed.

Kehillot
also fought for the rights of their members in the courts. Many Jews believed it was essential to bring every perpetrator of a crime against Jews to trial. If the victims or their families could not afford a lawyer, the
kehillah
provided the money to pay for one. Rabbis said that even in cases in which the perpetrators were unlikely to be punished, Jews were still obligated to insist on a trial “in order that it should become known that Jewish blood is not free for all.”

In the sixteenth century, as life was becoming more difficult for Jews in western Poland, a new frontier was opening in the east. As Poland expanded its borders, many Polish nobles acquired large estates in the new territories. Those nobles relied on Jews for help in managing their estates and supervising the work of the peasants. In the 1560s, about 4,000 Jews lived in the Ukraine. By the 1640s, historians estimate, more than 50,000 Jews made their homes in 115 separate communities there; some historians place the number of Jews at more than 100,000.

Jews in western Poland lived mainly in cities and towns. In the east, however, Jews lived mainly in rural areas as a result of a new economic system that evolved there—the
arenda. Arenda
is a Polish word for a complicated leasing arrangement in which a noble leases the right to manage an estate or group of estates to an individual or a family. As the following agreement suggests, leaseholders were more than administrators:

We do hereby lease to the worthy Master Abraham, son of Samuel, our estates, villages, and towns, and the monetary payments that come from the tax on grain, beehives, fishponds, lakes, and places of beaver hunting, on meadows, on forests, and on threshing floors
.

We also give him the authority to judge and sentence all our subjects, to punish by monetary fines or by sentence of death those who are guilty or who disobey.
⁶

Abraham and other such leaseholders had political as well as economic power. They served, for example, as both police officers and judges for hundreds and sometimes thousands of peasants whose religion and culture differed from their own and from that of the nobles for whom they worked.

Leaseholders did not receive a salary for their work. Instead the nobles allowed them to keep some of the taxes they collected. A lease-holder could also earn money by subleasing some of his work. Job seekers paid for the right to open an inn or a tavern, collect taxes, or work as a
carpenter or blacksmith. Although many Polish nobles and some Jewish leaseholders like Abraham grew rich from these arrangements, most people earned barely enough to feed their families. In the Ukraine, for example, an estimated 25 percent of the Jewish population at this time was living on charity.

Nathan Hanover, a Jewish scholar who lived in the Ukraine in the 1600s, described the consequences of this new system in which Polish Roman Catholic nobles and Jewish leaseholders governed Greek Orthodox Ukrainians:

[King Sigismund III] was a kind and upright man. He loved justice and loved [the Jewish people]. In his days the religion of the Pope gained strength in the Kingdom of Poland. Formerly most of the dukes and ruling nobility [in the Ukraine] adhered to the Greek Orthodox faith, thus the followers of both faiths were treated with equal regard. King Sigismund, however, raised the status of the Catholic dukes and princes above those of the Ukrainians, so that most of the latter abandoned their Greek Orthodox faith and embraced Catholicism. And the masses that followed the Greek Orthodox Church became gradually impoverished. They were looked upon as lowly and inferior beings and became the slaves and the handmaids of the Polish people and of the Jews…. The nobles levied upon them heavy taxes, and some even resorted to cruelty and torture with the intent of persuading them to accept Catholicism. So wretched and lowly had they become that all classes of people, even the lowliest among them, became their overlords.
⁷

In the spring of 1648, a Ukrainian named Bohdan Chmielnicki led an uprising, uniting those peasants against their Catholic Polish rulers and the “unbelieving” Jews with words such as these: “You know the wrongs done us by the Poles and Jews, their leaseholders and beloved factors, the oppressions, the evil deeds, and the impoverishment, you know and you remember.”
⁸
Chmielnicki was a nobleman and a Cossack. The Cossacks were a Slavic people who lived in the Ukraine and organized themselves into semi-military bands to guard their land and their freedom. They viewed both the Poles and the Jews as invaders and were determined to oust them from the area.

Chmielnicki and his followers did not distinguish between the small number of wealthy Jewish leaseholders and the many thousands of Jews who eked out a living in the Ukraine. Both were attacked with fury. So were Polish nobles and Catholic priests. According to some sources, more than one-fourth of all the Jews in Poland were killed in the attacks, and countless others were left homeless.

Throughout the Ottoman Empire, clothing (including headdresses) indicated a person’s religious affiliation and status in society. The woman in the first image is a wealthy Jew. In the second image, the man on the left is a doctor, and the one on the right is a merchant.

Although the uprising was quickly put down, violence continued as one country after another along the Polish borders took advantage of Poland’s growing weakness. Little by little, over years of turmoil, its land was divided among its neighbors. As Poland disappeared, so did the charters that had once protected Jews. Only one haven still remained for them—the Ottoman Empire.

In the eleventh century, nomadic tribes in what is now Turkey had converted to Islam. Among those tribes were the Ottoman Turks, named after their leader Othman. By the thirteenth century, they were settling just south of the Bosporus Strait. By the mid-fifteenth century, the Turks had created a
huge empire that included much of the old Byzantine and Arab Empires. The turning point had come in 1453, when Sultan Mehmet II, then ruler of the Ottomans, captured Constantinople, the Byzantine capital and the historic center of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and renamed it Istanbul. By the 1500s, he and other Ottoman sultans had expanded the empire until it stretched from the Balkans north to Hungary in Europe, across most of southwest Asia, and as far west as Algeria in North Africa.

In the 1500s, most of the world’s Jews still lived in the Middle East and North Africa—some in the old Arab Empire and others, known as Romaniotes, in the old Byzantine Empire. (Romaniotes are Jews who speak Greek and have Greek-sounding names. Their families had lived under Byzantine rule for more than a thousand years.) In the 1500s and beyond, these Jews were joined by newcomers escaping persecution in Europe. Like Poland in earlier centuries, the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s actively recruited immigrants—particularly wealthy Jews from Spain, Portugal, Italy, and other parts of Europe. Like Poland, the Ottoman Empire needed skilled workers to expand the economy and increase international trade. The sultan even sent ships to transport Jews who were being forced from Spain. These Jews brought with them relatively new technologies such as forging steel and printing.

Some historians estimate that by the 1530s, as many as 50,000 Jews were living in Istanbul. Salonika, in what is now Greece, was home to about 20,000 Jews; it was the only city in the world in which the majority of the population was Jewish. Its harbor was even closed on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath.

In 1550, when the few Jews who still lived in Provence in southern France were threatened with expulsion, they sent representatives to the Ottoman Empire to find out whether it really was a good place for Jews to live. Their representatives were astonished: “We have no words to record the enlargement and deliverance that has been achieved by the Jews in this place.”
⁹
They were impressed because the Ottomans permitted Jews to freely practice their religion, follow almost any occupation, and own property without restrictions. In return, the Ottomans expected absolute loyalty and the payment of a personal tax imposed only on Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities.

As in other Muslim empires, the Ottomans allowed each religious minority to organize its own community. And like Jews in Poland, those in the Ottoman Empire established
kehillot
. The Ottomans also encouraged Jews to participate in the larger society and in nearly every aspect of the economy. The very rich bought and sold goods in London and Amsterdam
and sent agents to trade in Hungary, Poland, and Russia. Some speculated by buying and then selling huge amounts of coffee, sugar, and indigo. As a result, the port of Salonika became a key stop for traders traveling between the Mediterranean countries and central Europe.

However, most Jews in Salonika and other Ottoman cities and towns were neither wealthy nor international traders. Most worked as tax collectors, tanners, carpenters, weavers, shopkeepers, gold- and silversmiths, or in one of countless other occupations. A French diplomat who visited in the 1550s was surprised at how varied their jobs were and the extent of their influence. He was particularly impressed at the size of the Jewish printing industry and the skill of Jewish engravers, artists, and writers.
¹⁰

As in Poland, the reality of life in the Ottoman Empire was more complicated than the Jews from Provence or the French diplomat realized. Like Poland, the Ottoman Empire had an official religion—in this case, Islam. Sultans and other rulers firmly believed that “Islam is exalted, and nothing is exalted above it.” That meant that people of tolerated faiths—
dhimmi
—faced restrictions.

The special taxes Jews and other minorities were required to pay were just one of those restrictions. Some government jobs were open only to Muslims. And the sultan, like his counterparts in Europe, often required that Jews and other minorities wear special clothing, hats, or even shoes to set them apart from Muslims. Muslims wore green, while Jews were required to wear yellow and Christians had to wear blue. Jewish physicians, who were much admired by many sultans, were the exception to this rule; they were required to wear tall red hats. The Ottomans considered it important to know immediately what a person’s place was in society.