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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter brought to you by Braille. I'm Lee Chung-Greco, and this week we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. Today we're speaking with Francois Gene. He's a professor of modern Jewish history at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College, London.
His book is Sources on Jewish Self-Government in the Polish Lands, From Its Inception to the Present. Francois, thank you so much for sitting down with us. My pleasure. So first of all, can you just tell us how this project came about?
Sure. The original idea was one of two young Polish colleagues, Artemar Koski and Marchin Sobon, who suggested a study about Jewish self-government in Polish history and Professor Yajit Tomaszewski and myself were approached whether we would be interested in joining this project. We applied for funds from the Gada English Difthong, which is located in Germany, and got the funding. We found 10 experts for different periods and regions, the majority of whom are from Poland, and the majority of whom are also junior historians.
So this is a very interesting example for a transnational and junior and senior research team, which has worked very well together for a long period of time, identifying the sources, working through the list of sources to include how to translate, how to edit and how to bring it all together. Can you describe how the emergence of Jewish self-government in Poland and Lithuania is the result of this mix of Jewish and non-Jewish legal and political traditions? Yes. The first, before I go into that, I think I should mention that I'm the editor of the volume, alongside Professor Yajit Tomaszewski, who unfortunately is no longer with us.
The authors of the individual chapters in this volume are experts on specific regions and periods of Eastern European Jewish history, and they deal with these aspects of Jewish self-governance in the Polish lands. The emergence of Jewish self-governance goes back to the slow migration of Central European Jewish communities to the east, and while it is often described as a flight of an escape from pogroms and persecutions, this is a very slow progress and initiated not in the least by very generous invitations, or quite generous invitations from princes and monarchs in Eastern Central Europe. These invitations took the form of charters or privileges, which guaranteed Jewish communities certain incentives to settle down and establish these communities. One element of these privileges were quite generous regulations on Jewish self-governance, so that Jewish communities could elect their own board independently from the land law that they could, and that is more important even adjudicate on the basis of Jewish law.
So from the very beginning of Jewish settlement in Eastern Central Europe, rabbinical education from part and parcel of the Jewish presence in Eastern Europe. This is a core element of shaping not only Jewish self-governance, but also forms of autonomy, so that within a framework of a more complex society with non-Jews of various shapes and forms, so to speak, and Jews, Jews had the right to live on the basis of their own legal tradition and could define their own leadership, and that is really the starting point of Jewish self-governance in Eastern Europe. So tell us then what does this term Jewish autonomy mean? Well, I mean, autonomy, the word itself is from Greek and means a self-law, one's own law, so to govern a community or commonwealth on the basis of one's own legal principles.
Autonomy is more an ideal than a reality, because I just described how privileges and charters were the, if you want the outer shell, the outer framework of the settlement of these Jewish communities, why they were internally governed by Jewish law, externally non-Jewish governance would still apply, so autonomy is an ideal. However, within Jewish communities, the rule of Jewish law of the Halah Ha was very far reaching, so the very basis of the community, the bylaws of a community, the bylaws of voluntary associations, the agreements between members of the community were all shaped by Jewish law and not by non-Jewish law. Also, and that is a very important part of what was perceived as a far-reaching autonomy of Jews in Eastern Central Europe, there was until the 19th century very little non-Jewish adjudication of Jews. In case of, for example, civil litigation between Jews and non-Jews, normally a Jewish judge would be involved.
So in contrast to Central or Western Europe, Jews in Eastern Europe had a much stronger control of how they were being governed and adjudicated. So that's a very important point. Another important point is that autonomy as an ideal became also a sort of a fixation, the idea that the Jews in Eastern Europe were quasi-independent, and that needs to be turned down, so to speak. Those were obviously, and this is what the source reader shows, were part of the fabric of the Commonwealth.
So first of all, Poland, of the Polish Crown, then of Lithuania, but also of other Commonwealths such as Hungary and others. So there was a lot of embeddedness in this Jewish autonomy. Well, and that's kind of interesting. You mentioned those shells, so to speak, of governance.
And I know this is something that is a little earlier in history than your book, but it just got me thinking about the concept of Jewish autonomy. It seems like that's something that stretches further back into, let's say, Roman times or something like that. How sort of deeply entrenched in Jewish history and identity is this idea of Jewish autonomy? Well, as an idea, the idea that Jewish communities govern themselves on the basis of their own legal traditions is a very strong idea.
However, there has always been, since time, times, a very clear understanding that as a diasporic community, a Jewish community needs to accommodate the non-Jewish framework. So one of the basic principles of running a community is to respect the law of the land. That's the legal principle of Dinar de Marjutadina, which has shaped the place of Jewish communities across periods and regions. And that's obviously also the case in Eastern Central and Eastern Europe.
I would emphasize the need to look at the degree of self-governance, not as a question of yes or no or black and white, but as a spectrum in which some communities had a far-reaching autonomy and other communities were much more regulated. And as a source reader shows, because the source reader we are discussing today is actually spending a thousand years. And the first document is a comment about a Jew who doesn't want to pay taxes and an internal Jewish source from the year 1025, so early 11th century, and the last source documented is legislation on the establishment of Jewish communities in Poland from 2010. So over these many hundreds of years, the Jewish communities were existing on a very, very diverse political frameworks, contexts, and also the degree of self-governance varied massively or time and place.
So actually, speaking of sources, what's challenging about both the Christian and Hebrew sources from the Middle Ages, and then what can you still glean from them? Well, that's, I mean, if you ask the editor of a volume which brings 10 chapters with 40 to 50 pages of sources to the reader, the first challenge was translation. The sources come from seven languages, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, German, Middle High German, what do I forget? I mean, a wide range of languages.
So the first challenge from a point of view of putting out a volume like that is to find able translators, Latin, obviously, I forgot Latin. So the medieval sources are very often a Latin, Latin chancely texts. So the challenge is here to find a language in the English translation, which is true to the original, but also allows the reader to connect sources from different places and different periods. So that's not a small tally.
That was quite a challenge. And what we can glean from them, if you think about the Middle Ages, the chapter is by Professor Hannah Zaremska from also University. What is really interesting is that the chapter shows that the forms of Jewish self-governance, which I have described, so with far-reaching rabbinical education and far-reaching prerogatives for the individual community leadership, emerged slowly over time. We have the privileges which spell out the right of Jews to establish these institutions, but this was obviously a matter of time to get things running if you want.
The sources themselves off now are from our point of view, not very precise. If a Latin source speaks of episcopal post Yodaiorm of the Jewish bishop, you actually need a lot of expertise as Professor Zaremska has to understand what this episcopal post of bishop actually is. Is this a rabbi? Is this a rich Jew?
We don't know. I hope we found out and you find the right translation in the volume. Do you ever get the sense, though, that it's difficult to understand where the truth is because of where the source is coming from, whether they're Christian or Hebrew. You're obviously getting a skewed point of view from there as well.
I think this is something that you mentioned in the book that that can be a challenge if the sources are Christian or the sources are Hebrew. That's an important point, obviously, for anyone who's engaged in studying history. These points of view are diverse. One element of enabling the reader to come to an understanding of the various perspectives is the very long period of time these sources cover.
So going through the centuries, you get a feeling of what is important to Jewish communities, what they deal with in internal documents, so about regulations, how the community is run, but also how the community presents itself to the outside, how detailed information is. A huge, a huge degree of variation over the centuries. In the beginning, non-Jewish administration, like the landlord or the king or provincial governor, had very, very imprecise ideas of what a Jewish community is. In the course of the, let's say, 17th and 18th century, the understanding of how a Jewish community functions grows very considerably among non-Jewish administrators or people who had responsibility.
And this is something which can be gleaned from these sources. The degree of state interference grows dramatically in the course of the 18th and 19th century, and especially dramatically with the petitions of Poland. Poland is where any other Polish, where in Commonwealth is partitioned in three stages between 1772 and 1795, and the petitioning powers Austria, Prussia and Russia have developed their own ideas of how to deal with a very large Jewish community in their respective provinces. And one, one share element is the extreme curiosity of the petitioning powers.
They wanted to know what the Jewish community was up to, how their income shaped up, what they did with their money, how many much taxes they could raise, and so on and so forth. And the understanding about these matters grew dramatically, and this is very visible in the sources we document in the, in the reader. The reports by Jewish communities get ever more detailed and more, more informative. On the, from the other side, what we also see is that some elements of internal Jewish forms of governance remain very similar.
So you have the emergence of factions, you have the emergence of, of conflicting factions in the community conflicts between the community board and the rabbis between poor segments of the Jewish community and the, and what we can call the Jewish establishment. And these things actually stay the same over many, many generations. And this is also something you can glean from these sources that certain characteristics of a local community will be similar, whether you look at the 16th or 17th century and the 18th or 19th century. So obviously you've talked very broadly about how these Jewish governments interacted with these ruling empires.
I'm wondering if you can hone in on a specific example here. Can you tell us how do they interact with the Russian Empire in the 19th century? Well, I mean, the 19th century is the Russian Empire has is very ambitious in integrating the Jewish communities into the fabric of the empire. And what we can see is that this is actually leading to a very far reaching integration of Jewish administrative administrative, administrative structures into the state administration.
This is more pronounced than, for example, in Polish territories. This has to do with the, with the early, very serious attempts of the Russian Empire to get a hold of Jewish communities. That said, there is still a degree of resilience into each communities to control income streams, for example, around burial or cultural slaughtering, but less so than in those parts of Eastern Europe where the state is less intrusive. So it is also, I mean, part of the story is also the degree of ambition of the state to control communities.
That's Francois Gene. His book is sources on Jewish self-government in the Polish lands from its inception to the present. Francois, thank you again. Thank you.
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