Shtetl
A shtetl , also called a stetl , ( Yiddish שטעטל, shtetl ; Pluralשטעטלעך, shtetlech ; German "Städtlein") is the name for settlements with a high proportion of Jewish population in the area of Jewish settlements in Eastern Europe before the Second World War .
character
Mostly they were villages or small towns, sometimes also parts of the city in which between 1000 and 20,000 Jews lived. Larger Jewish cities such as Lemberg or Chernivtsi , however, were classified as shtot (שטאָט) (cf. German city). The main geographic distribution of the shtetl was eastern Poland , especially Galicia , but also Ukraine , Belarus and Lithuania .
In contrast to the big cities, the Jewish residents were not only tolerated in the shtetl, they were widely accepted regardless of the pogroms that sometimes took place . There they could feel “like in the holy city of Jerusalem”, since these towns weren't ghettos :
“... but essentially as well as by definition the opposite. A town was not the appendage of a Christian community within the ban mile , not a discriminated foreign body within a higher civilization, but on the contrary, a sharply profiled autonomous community with a peculiar culture - this in the midst of poverty and ugliness, and encircled by Enemies of the Jewish faith. The shtetl was a center from which the Slavic villages were peripheral agglomerations , whose inhabitants, mostly illiterate , had hardly any connection to the spiritual. In all its misery , the Jewish town was a small Civitas Dei - spiritually and spiritually astonishing, in some respects lagging behind by centuries, not infrequently repulsive, but still admirable ... The Jews of the ghettos of Venice , Rome or Worms stayed in exiled minority discriminated against their own hometown, while the inhabitants of the shtetl were majority , that is, at home; their non-Jewish neighbors, such as the Polish nobles , might be powerful and rich and look down on them, but the Jews were convinced of their own superiority. In the shtetl there was not a trace of a feeling of inferiority because of belonging to Judaism and therefore not the slightest tendency to cover up one's own being or to become like the others. "
The Ashkenazi Jews of the Shtetlech spoke mostly Yiddish in everyday life . They mostly clung to their religious traditions to a much greater extent than their fellow believers in Central or Western Europe. On weekdays the children learned in the cheder , on the Sabbath and on the Jewish holidays most of the residents were to be found in the synagogue , called “school” in Yiddish, and there were also numerous regulations for clothing and hairstyle.
In their social structure , the Schtetlech were mostly characterized by a broad lower class of poor craftsmen, small traders and day laborers. In the shtetl there was often unimaginable poverty ; the achievements of the Enlightenment and the industrial age had largely passed them by without a trace. Often there was even a lack of heating, sewerage and paved roads. Not least because of the widespread expectation of the end of the messianic period , many shtetl inhabitants bore their precarious material situation with equanimity. Others, of course, emigrated, especially in the second half of the 19th century, and thus contributed to the comparatively high proportion of the Jewish population in the United States today .
While parts of the new Jewish intelligentsia and the Maskilim since the 18th and especially the 19th century viewed the culture and way of life of the shtetl - sometimes with a certain contempt - as backward and a result of the discrimination and ghettoization of the Jews to be overcome, and Yiddish as looked at a backward jargon language, around the turn of the last century some Jewish intellectuals and writers came to appreciate this culture and finally developed a positive, often glorifying image of the Jewish or Yiddish shtetl culture, which is now perceived as "authentic". Many literary monuments were placed on life in the shtetl, in Yiddish ( Scholem Alejchem , Mendele Moicher Sforim , Isaak Leib Perez , Isaak Schtern ) as well as in Hebrew ( Samuel Agnon ) and in German ( Joseph Roth , Karl Emil Franzos ). After the almost complete annihilation of the shtetl and its inhabitants, the positive, often glorifying, often nostalgic view of "the" shtetl culture became popular after the Shoah .
history
The history of the shtetlech goes back to the 12th century when Bolesław III. Wrymouth allowed Jews from Central and Western Europe who had fled persecution to settle in the Kingdom of Poland . Polish-Lithuanian aristocrats ( Szlachta ) tried in the following centuries to settle Jews on their respective lands, in private places. These places were in Yiddish shtetl and bsw. called Miasteczko in Polish. The motivation of the Jews to settle there was that there was greater religious and legal freedom and better economic opportunities. The freedoms granted to immigrants - even for immigrant non-Jews - were in contrast to the lack of freedom also living on the land serf peasants. The Szlachta, in turn, profited by leasing certain monopolies and privileges (such as tax leases ). A top tenant leased these, for example the right to serve alcohol to several owners of inns or taverns. There was something similar for mills, forests, beekeeping and so on.
In the following period there were repeated pogroms in Poland, to which many shtetlech fell victim. After the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795, the Schtetlech belonged either to the Russian Empire or to Austria-Hungary , a few also to Prussia . In the tsarist empire in particular, the shtetl culture came under increasing pressure: for example, Tsar Alexander III forbade it . In the so-called May Laws, Jews are allowed to stay in places with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. The uprisings, revolutions and civil wars of the early 20th century also had an impact, as did the industrialization that is now beginning in Eastern Europe . The Schtetlech were finally completely wiped out by the Shoah of 1939–1945, where most of the Eastern European Jews were killed.
Today there are only parts of Williamsburg , a district of Brooklyn in New York City , and Mea Shearim near the old city of Jerusalem . Here, however, Yiddish is only spoken by a minority. Most residents have spoken Iwrit ( Hebrew ) every day since 1948 .
Selected shtetl (in alphabetical order)
A few more fictional shtetl should also be mentioned: the Chelm corresponding to the German Schilda , the Kasrilevke shtetl from the stories by Scholem Alejchem and Anatevka , the setting for the musical “ Fiddler on the roof ”.
As Schtot to consider, however, are about Wroclaw , Brest , Budapest , Chisinau , Chernivtsi , Gdansk , Daugavpils (Daugavpils), Dnipropetrovsk , Glogau , Iasi , Kaunas , Kiev , Cluj , Konigsberg , Krakow , Lviv , Minsk , Odessa , Poznan , Prague , Riga , Vilnius , Vienna , Vitebsk and Warsaw .
See also
literature
- Barbara Beuys : Home and Hell. Jewish life in Europe for two millennia. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-498-00590-1 , p. 640ff.
- Yaffa Eliach: There once was a world: a nine-hundred-year chronicle of the Shtetl Eishyshok. Boston et al. 1998, ISBN 0-316-23239-4 .
- Dominik Esegovic: From the shtetl to socialism. On the importance of the socialist idea for the shtetlech of Eastern Europe. Grin, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-640-62361-7 .
- Gennady Estraikh, Mikhail Krutikov (Eds.): The shtetl: reality and image. (= Studies in Yiddish. 2). Oxford 2000, ISBN 1-900755-41-6 .
- Sander Gilman : The Rediscovery of the Eastern Jews: German Jews in the East. 1890-1918. In: David Bronsen (ed.): Jews and Germans from 1860–1933. Heidelberg 1979, pp. 338–365 (German version: Sander Gilman: The rediscovery of the Eastern Jews. German Jews in the East 1890–1918. In: Michael Brocke (Ed.): Prayers and Rebels. From 1000 Years of Judaism in Poland. German Coordination Council of the Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation , Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-923840-00-4 , pp. 11–32).
- Heiko Haumann : History of the Eastern Jews . Updated and expanded new edition. dtv, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-423-30663-7 .
- Heiko Haumann (ed.): Air people and rebellious daughters: on the change in Eastern Jewish worlds in the 19th century . (= Lifeworlds of Eastern European Jews. 7). Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2003, ISBN 3-412-06699-0 .
- Eva Hoffman: Shtetl. The life and death of a small town and the world of Polish Jews. Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1997, ISBN 0-395-82295-5 .
- Steven T. Katz (Ed.): The Shtetl: New Evaluations . NYU Press, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-8147-4801-5 .
- Maria Kłańska: From the shtetl into the world. 1772 to 1938, East Jewish autobiographies in German. (= Literature and Life. [NF] Volume 45). Böhlau, Vienna 1994, ISBN 3-205-98024-7 .
- Emil Majuk: Šljachamy Šteteliv. Mandrivky zabutym kontynentom. Lublin 2015, ISBN 978-83-61064-95-4 . (Illustrated guide to the former Stetls of today's Ukraine with maps, addresses / contact details)
- Dan Miron : The image of the Shtetl and other studies of modern Jewish literary imagination . Syracuse 2001, ISBN 0-8156-2857-9 .
- Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 2014, ISBN 978-0-691-16074-0 . (Ukrainian Kiev 2019)
- Ben-Cion Pinchuk: Shtetl Jews under Soviet rule: Eastern Poland on the eve of the Holocaust . Cambridge 1991, ISBN 0-631-17469-9 .
- Leo Prijs: The world of Judaism . Beck, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-406-08461-3 , pp. 173ff.
- Tamar Somogyi: The Schejnen and the Prosten. Investigations into the ideal of beauty of the Eastern Jews in relation to body and clothing with special consideration of Hasidism. (= Cologne ethnological studies. Volume 2). Reimer, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-496-00168-2 .
- Roman Vishniac: Vanished World. Illustrated book. 3. Edition. Hanser, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-446-13841-2 . (with a foreword by Elie Wiesel )
- Stefi Jersch-Wenzel , Francois Guesnet (ed.): Jews and poverty in Central and Eastern Europe. Böhlau, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-412-16798-3 .
- Mark Zborowski , Elisabeth Herzog: The shtetl: the lost world of the Eastern European Jews. 3rd, through Edition. Beck, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-406-35184-0 .
- Gisela Völger, Georg Heuberger: Life in the Russian shtetl: Jewish collections of the State Ethnographic Museum in Saint Petersburg; In the footsteps of An-Ski. Catalog for an exhibition in collaboration with the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. Cologne 1993, ISBN 3-923158-24-5 .
- Rachel Ertel: Le Shtetl. La bourgade juive de Pologne de la tradition à la modernité. Édition Payot & Rivages, Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-228-90629-6 . (French)
Web links
- Life in the Eastern Jewish shtetl.
- Andrea Ehrlich: The shtetl. Economic and social structures of the Eastern Jewish way of life .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ilex Beller: Life in the Shtetl. A Jewish village in 80 pictures . Verlag Leeden, Tecklenburg 1989, ISBN 3-923631-21-9 .
- ↑ Manès Sperber : The water bearers of God. All the past ... dtv, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-423-01398-2 , pp. 18f.
- ^ Jewish Life in Dnipropetrovsk http://www.jpeopleworld.com,/ accessed December 30, 2012.