 I wanna welcome, first of all, I really wanna welcome all of you to our first Bennett Center lecture of the semester. Our speaker this evening is Dr. Glenn Diner, Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies and Chair of Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College. Dr. Diner's book, Yonkels Tavern, Jews, Liquor and Life in the Kingdom of Poland, published by Oxford University Press in 2014. And he's gonna be basing most, if not all of his talk, I think, on his findings in this book. I wanna just begin by saying that his book really is honestly one of the most eye-opening books on Jews in modern Poland that I have read in some time. It is also one of the most accessible. I leave it to Dr. Diner to share with us this evening the fruits of his painstaking research, which, as we'll hear this evening, was rooted in a great variety of historical and literary texts, including case studies, petitions, poems, and Polish romantic short stories. Much of his archival research was available to historians, but apparently nobody bothered to take notice. Moment Magazine described Yonkels Tavern as a landmark volume. And his book sheds light not only on Jews and tavern keeping in 19th century Poland, but also on myths and counter myths concerning Jews, Jewish acculturation in Eastern Europe, the persistence of religious traditionalism, and 19th century governmental attempts to quote, normalize Polish Jews. Let me add here that Yonkels Tavern may be Dr. Diner's most recent book, but it's not his first. His other works include Men of Silk, the Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society, published in 2006, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He also wrote Jews in the Kingdom of Poland, 1815 to 1914, which was Volume 27 in Poland, Studies in Polish Jewry, published in 2014, and he is editor of a book entitled Holy Descent, Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe, published in 2011. Dr. Diner received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Brandeis University, his Master of Arts degree from McGill University in Montreal, and his PhD from Brandeis. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Award, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies, housed at Princeton University from 2010 to 2011, and he is currently a senior NEH fellow at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. Tonight's lecture is being made possible through the great generosity of the Benet-Briff, Abraham Lodge, number 89 of Bridgeport, and I really wanna take this opportunity to formally recognize these wonderful men. I was just, I can't even tell you how honored I was when I was invited to, it's kind of a brunch. It was advertised as a lunch, but we had pancakes, so for me that's a brunch here in Fairfield and they presented the Benet Center for the work that we do here at the university with a check that really made tonight's lecture possible. My thanks as well to Meg McCaffrey, wherever she may be, I don't know, where is, oh, Meg's right back there in the green, the program manager of the Benet Center for all the work that she did in making this evening a reality, and my thanks as well to Corinna, where's Corinna? She's somewhere, there's Corinna in the back, I can't see her, she's somewhere in the room. She'll be selling Dr. Diner's books later after tonight's event, and Dr. Diner will be happy to sign books for you. I'm usually a much more eloquent than I am tonight, and again, I apologize for my voice. Really it's my enthusiasm for Dr. Diner's research and my really wanting to meet him this evening that led me to drive up here from White Plains even though I know I should be home resting my voice. But I wanna thank all of you for being with us and now please join me in formally introducing and welcoming to Fairfield University, Dr. Glenn Diner. I actually thought it was pretty eloquent, so. So this is an unfamiliar part of the world, even those of us who think we know it probably don't know it that well. The result of the iron curtain, the results of the destruction of the Jewish civilization there, so if you have questions while I'm talking, something to be clarified, please by all means, I'm happy to be interrupted. I encourage you to interrupt me. But what I began with, what you see up here, is an image that should for many people be a challenging image. It's a painting by a Polish artist by the name of Józef Chalmoński. And I don't know how well you can see it, but what it depicts here is a common everyday scene in front of a tavern consisting of Catholic peasants dancing. And you'll see over on that side there are Jewish peddlers and traders off to the side. It seems like it's a Jewish holiday being celebrated, but it's a real scene of coexistence. This kind of image is challenging because we're used to something very different. Let's all admit that our image of Jewish life in Eastern Europe is formed in great part by the wonderful play and movie Fiddler on the Roof. And you'll recall that Jews and Christians lived very isolated existences according to that depiction. Even the tavern scene in Fiddler on the Roof, if you recall, it's all Jews drinking in the tavern. And even that aspect is problematic for reasons I'm going to get to as we go on. Here, instead of complete isolation, we see a kind of coexistence, but Chalmerski was interesting in the way he depicted them because they're together and yet they're apart. You'll see the two cohorts, it's almost like they're acknowledging each other without acknowledging each other. If you looked inside, you would most likely see a Jewish tavern keeper as well for reasons I'm going to get to. So this challenge is one image that is of separation of isolation. But the other perhaps even more powerful image that we have of Jewish life in Eastern Europe is, of course, pogroms, the Holocaust, destruction and violence. And once again, we don't see that here. Now Chalmerski did lots of these, he would go through the countryside and depict what he saw. It was the mundane, but he kind of made the mundane lively and vibrant. And he didn't seem to really have an agenda. He's somebody I really trust as an observer. It seems that not all Polish Jewish life was violence and anti-Semitism. Now, of course, there were terrible episodes of violence and they were on the increase as we come into the 20th century. This is from the 1870s. But in a way that almost proves the point, the reason why so many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust is because that's where so many of the world's Jews lived. It was about three fourths of the world's Jewish population by the end of the 18th century, beginning the 19th century. Three fourths of the world's Jewish population resided in Eastern Europe, Russia, Poland and other proximate areas. The reason there were so many Jews living there is because of this. For many centuries, after their arrival in the Middle Ages, fleeing violence further westward, for many centuries, they had managed to carve out a relatively prosperous and secure existence. And really the symbol of that coexistence was the Jewish-run tavern. For reasons I'm going to get into now. But first, we have to deal with the maps. What is Poland? It's an impossible question to answer because Poland keeps changing throughout the ages. At its high point, at its largest geographic area, it was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, hyphenated because it was a commonwealth of two kingdoms that had once been separate, but were now under the rule of a single monarch by 1569. The Jews had become a very important part of this economy and the society as they'd been invited in. They weren't invited in because they were so loved, they weren't even liked that much. But the nobility really owned the vast majority of this land. They needed somebody to run the enterprises, the mills, the tolls, the fishponds, and the taverns and distilleries. And so as Jews are coming to these areas, the nobility is deciding that only Jews can be trusted to run these various enterprises. They're not, however, managing their agricultural holdings, their actual estates. Poland is the breadbasket of Europe. It's a very rural agriculture, agrarian environment. But it's too much for most nobles to allow Jews to actually run the agricultural landed estates. That would make them the lords over the Christians, many who have become peasants, have become serfs at this point. And Jews certainly aren't allowed to own land for fear that they'll buy up all of Poland with their legendary wealth. That's one major reason. But they will allow them to lease their non-agricultural enterprises and that provides a really important economic niche. We can talk really about two overlapping systems of economic symbiosis, mainly between the Jews and the nobles in these centuries. The first you saw in the very first painting is mercantile, trade. Jews seem to form increasingly the vast majority of merchants. Every one from a small-time peddler who would go through the countryside with his knapsack or sack on his back to the large-scale international merchant. The Jews are bringing in goods to areas that lack them. For the nobles, they're useful because they bring in luxuries. For the country folk, they bring in necessities. Jews are constantly on the move and they're distributing goods throughout the countryside. And also services. And many will be agents of the nobility and so on. So that's one system of symbiosis is the Jews are tolerated, even protected because they're the ones who have access to these trade networks. And sometimes, as I mentioned, it could be international. You have a cousin in Istanbul. You have a brother, sister in Western Europe. And so the advantage of being the diaspora group, you create these trade networks. Kinship networks. And networks with your co-religionists. The other major system that I really like to emphasize today is more unique to this area, to Eastern Europe. And that's the leaseholding system. That's the one I just described where the nobility will lease its estates, enterprises, really almost only to Jews if they're non-agricultural ones. And you can see how these systems complement each other because the merchants, when they were doing business, they had to have a place to stay, had to have a place to eat kosher food. And they would travel thanks to all these Jewish-run taverns throughout the countryside and throughout the cities and towns. And it was like a hospitality system. And of course, the Jewish tavern keepers benefited from all the Jewish customers. But their main customers were really locals. The peasantry now serves. The Jewish tavern keeper becomes more and more important because the number one export, really the linchpin of the entire Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth economy is grain, the grain export trade. They were exporting trade throughout Western and Central Europe. That's why they were known as the bread basket of Europe. And anything they couldn't sell or export, they would turn it into vodka. This was rye, so they called it vodka. And you'll notice, if you look at this chart, that the exports aren't steep decline with improvements in transportation, communication. It's gonna be absolutely devastated by the 19th century because of the steamship, which is bringing in lots of cheap grain from here, from the United States. So that grain trade is going to be declining steeply, which means the nobility needs to do something with all that grain. And what they do is they turn more and more of it into vodka. They sell it to their serfs on monopolistic terms in their Jewish-run taverns. It's produced in the Jewish-run distilleries. And that's that whole system that develops. You can see that it's profitable. You have a captive consumer class right there, and they have nothing else to do with their leisure time, except to sit in the tavern and drink. But you can also see how it's not very good for productivity on estates because your entire workforce becomes addicted alcohol. As we call it today, alcoholism. So there's an unstable aspect of this, but really the Jewish-run tavern had become so deeply ingrained in the Polish landscape that the great works of Polish literature inevitably will describe the Jewish-run tavern. The most famous being Adam Mickiewicz's work, Pantadeusz. It's not known to us, but every Polish school child will memorize portions of this epic poem. It means Lord Thaddeus in English. And Pantadeusz has a Jewish-run tavern and a Jewish tavernkeeper named Janko. To quote Mickiewicz from a distance, the rickety old tavern looked like a Jew rocking in prayer, the roof like a hat, the thatch spinning down like a beard, the sooty walls like a gabardine, and wooden carvings emanating like tzitzit down his body. And they don't bother to translate tzitzit either in the original Polish. You can see how for Mickiewicz, the Jewish-run tavern is just etched into the landscape. And I paired it rather arbitrarily with this painting, which doesn't look very Jewish, but you can imagine from the description what Mickiewicz was trying to convey. And then as the heroes enter the tavern, they're met by the Jewish tavernkeeper. It was Sunday, and from church after morning mass, they came to Janko to drink and relax. In everyone's gray cup, sorry, in everyone's cup, gray vodka switched. Round with a bottle, the bar made rushed, Janko the tavernkeeper stood in the midst. And I paired this with a lithograph from the 1870s by somebody named Gustav Pilati, but it gives you the same sense of the Jewish tavernkeeper as really a central figure for local life. We can't describe this as integration, at most it's economic integration, but we do have a symbiotic relationship. Once again, we have a Christian holiday, they're dancing, and the Jewish tavernkeeper is pouring the vodka, and there's a Jewish musician as well who's applying the music. They're reliant on each other, and it turns out really that the tavernkeeper, the Jew, there was one in every town of village, became a kind of mediator, a central figure in local life. If you needed advice, if you needed a loan, if you needed medical remedies or mediation in disputes, even matchmaking, you go to the Jewish tavernkeeper. And these taverns themselves, they were much more than taverns. They were hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues, places of business, country stores. Distilleries were always attached to them too, that's where the stuff was produced, and I could go on and on. They were really kind of a little urban island in these rural environments, and they depended on their Jewish tavernkeeper. In fact, it goes so far that I came to see the Jewish tavernkeeper almost as a kind of a local priest, maybe an antipriest, because every church service, every mass, every wedding, every funeral, began in the church, but then involved a migration en masse to the tavern, where there'd be, if it was a wedding, especially a big celebration, the newlyweds having just been blessed by the priest would now be met by the Jewish tavernkeeper. He'd propose a toast to the young couple. Everyone would drink, and then they'd start dancing, and of course everybody gets inebriated, except, according to these accounts, the Jew who remained suspiciously sober. So you can see he's very much ingrained and yet very much apart, and I think that's the way everyone kind of wanted it in these days. They didn't want too much closeness, but they relied on one another. And as we're gonna see later on, the Jews also relied on the Christians for their own religious observations, observances, sorry. They were very mutually reliant, imbricated. Poland was partitioned at the end of the 18th century, wiped off the map of Europe. Most of it, the green portions, went to the Tsarist Empire, and a lot of it is gonna become famously the pale of settlement. The yellow gold portions, down in the southwest, are going to be taken by the Habsburg Empire, Austria. It's gonna be known as Galicia. The blue portions, a much smaller Jewish population, are going to go to Prussia. So Russia, Prussia, and Austria devour their Polish neighbor, because this was the age of absolutism. And these absolutist monarchs centralized everything, they could raise enormous armies. And the individual Polish nobles who guarded their liberties so ferociously couldn't compete. They were easily bought off, and if they couldn't be bought off, they were invaded, and suddenly Poland is no more. Now this changes everything, but it also changes nothing. Because at the local level, the absolutist monarchs, they don't have extensive bureaucracies, they don't have the ability to really govern, so they have to keep the nobility happy. Number one way they keep them happy, they get to keep their liquor monopoly. It's now the most lucrative commodity in the entire geopolitical region. The entire economy practically is liquor. They're kept happy by keeping their liquor monopoly, and guess who else gets kept in place? They're Jewish tavern keepers. They're lessees. The nobles also run things at the local level. Not only can the absolutist monarchs bureaucracy not be everywhere at once, it seems like they can be nowhere at once, to judge by the archival documents I've seen. Really it's the nobles who are running things. Now I mentioned this danger to the whole economy, this symbiotic relationship, and that is you're placing Jews in a very powerful position as this local arbiter, and they're selling this highly addictive intoxicating substance, which is causing drunkenness. So it's going to, there's always gonna be this underlying tension there, and a lot of resentment too. The technology only complicates things, because the grain trade has been killed by the partitions. There are now borders with enormous tariffs, and it costs more to export, to transport the grain than anything you could ever make back by selling it. So they're turning more and more and more grain into vodka, and with technology, it's getting stronger and it's getting cheaper. Now with the new technology arriving from Western Europe, and the social reformers take note. They describe coming into villages and towns, and seeing peasants just passed out on the roadside, draped over fences in the middle of the day, mothers feeding vodka to their babies to make them stop crying, just terrible scenes of widespread drunkenness and complete lack of productivity, and it's bad, it's really bad. And it doesn't take long for the Jewish tavern keeper to be blamed. Quintessential outgroup is actually making and selling the stuff. It doesn't look good. So here we have just one depiction in a reformist slash anti-Semitic publication, which has a rather satanic looking tavern keeper in the corner, and the peasants are passed out, this one peasant's passed out on the floor. The Jew only cares about his profit. He's remaining sober so as to exploit the peasant, maybe drive up his debts, and so on. And so there emerges a widespread effort to drive Jews out of the liquor trade based on, I suppose, the very logical and yet illogical at the same time, belief that if you get rid of the Jews who are selling the stuff, you'll get rid of the drunkenness problem. Now it's not as if nobody noticed that places in the interior of Russia where there are no Jews, the peasants are getting just as drunk. There were bureaucrats I found who spoke out against this and said, look, you can't, for one thing, you can't blame Jews for drunkenness if there's drunkenness all over the region where Jews don't even live, but number two, this really astonished me. You cannot expect an entire people who is not given the right to own land to be barred from a major area of trade, like the liquor trade. So you see some progressive bureaucrats in these documents, but they're never listened to. That's the problem. No one wants to hear it. It's much easier to blame the Jews because if you don't blame the Jews, you have to blame the nobles who are making the stuff and ultimately profiting from it. They get a lump sum from the Jewish lessee and so they're insured the steady income. Then the Jew gets to keep anything he makes over that amount. That's the way the system worked. Well, Jews are blamed for the alcoholism and they begin to expel Jews from the countryside. In Tsarist Russia in the Pale Settlement, it's about 21,000 Jews are expelled. And it causes real chaos. And the nobles start saying, we have nobody to run our taverns. Our liquor profits have declined. They start clamoring to allow Jews to come back into it. And the expulsion seems to be eventually reversed. It's never taken off the law books. It's still illegal for Jews to sell liquor in the Pale Settlement proper, but everybody now just looks the other way. The boulds on the Western portion is what the Tsarist Empire takes from Napoleon. Napoleon's brief reign over these areas between 1807 and 1814 created something called the Duchy of Warsaw, which was sort of independent Poland. He gave the Poles a certain amount of autonomy. They could at least feel like they had Poland back again. The Tsar takes it over from Napoleon. Remember, Napoleon tries to invade and is defeated and retreats after the burning of Moscow and then Russia takes over these lands. And that bulge on the side, here's another image of it, if you can make out the outline, comes to be known as the Kingdom of Poland. The Tsar is the king of Poland here. So it has its own laws, its own semi-autonomy and it's sort of an awkward arrangement between the Tsarist Empire proper and the Kingdom of Poland where the Tsar is only king. Either way, it's the Tsarist Empire. But the policies are different. Here, they inherit the Napoleonic way of driving Jews out of the liquor trade, which is much smarter. What the Napoleonic regime, yes. Sure, very important question actually. The reason why this area is so important is it contains Warsaw, Lodz, Lublin, other major cities. This is gonna be the heart of the Eastern European Industrial Revolution in this so-called Kingdom of Poland. Okay, so very important. Płock is a mid-sized city and those are pretty much the major ones. If you ever heard of Radom, that's another major city. But in any case, it's a smallish portion of land but it's the most industrialized, the most Western and the most densely Jewish. So to drive Jews out of the liquor trade here, Napoleon creates a Jewish specific concession fee. If you run a tavern and you're Jewish, you have to pay a concession. And then they double it and they triple it and they quadruple it and in this way, they enrich the coffers of the states and get rid of their Jewish tavern keeper problem all at the same time. It's pretty ingenious, at least it seems that way. Now historians, I'm not the first one to discover this document, but historians have looked at this chart that government officials in the new Kingdom of Poland compiled in order to prove just how well the system of driving Jews out worked and it looks impressive. Over 17,000 families are in the liquor trade officially and I emphasize officially at the beginning of the period and by 1830, it's all the way down to 2000. Historians simply assumed it dwindled to nothing. But I found something interesting. Number one, Pantayush, which describes Yonkel the Tavern Keeper is written in 1834, so after it had practically dwindled to nothing. So that's one problem. Another problem with this count is the complaints. The complaints start rolling in. Jews, despite the law, are continuing to sell liquor in taverns everywhere, on the main roads, on the side roads, in the country, in the city, and so on and so forth. They're completely flagrantly violating the law. And as I saw more and more of these, and I'm gonna go through a case study as well, to show this, it became evident to me that several major powers were behind this drive to get Jews out of the liquor trade, reform minded nobles, absolutist monarchs, clergy didn't want Jews selling the stuff, even rabbis didn't want Jews selling the stuff because they had to keep their taverns running on Shabbat, on the Jewish Sabbath. Every major practical, practically every major power group wanted Jews out of it. So how did they survive underground? Well, there was one group that was still invested in Jews as tavern keepers and distillers, and that was the very Christians they were supposedly exploiting. The local Christians protected and concealed their Jewish tavern keepers. Now this is extraordinary because we're used to thinking of Jewish-Christian relations in Poland as being very hostile, but here I find case after case of Christians actually protecting and concealing their Jewish tavern keepers. Why? We're gonna go into it. But what seems to have happened is the entire Jewish liquor trade is just driven underground. It's, I suppose, an open secret. Everybody seems to know that it's going on still, except for the uppermost officials who don't seem to have any clue. And become enraged when they find out. What seemed to be happening in tavern after tavern after tavern was probably at the instruction of the nobleman. The Jewish tavern keeper would remain in this capacity. Remember, he's much more than a tavern keeper. And simply they prop up a Christian who would sell the stuff directly to, they have a Christian bartender, and he becomes the name, he becomes the front of the enterprise. And that seemed to be business as usual. The division is that Jews would deal with the liquor supplies, continue to work as the nobleman's banker, as his clerk, and he'd continue to help the locals in every way they needed. But the Christian officially was running the tavern. Now, how did this whole system come about so naturally, so successfully? And how is it sustained so well, so easily? For that, we need to go into the rabbinic literature. Because those of you who have a familiarity with rabbinic literature will know that this is not the first time that Jews have found a loophole by means of their Christian neighbors. You ever heard of the Shabbos Goi? It was actually the title of a book by Jacob Katz. You'll know that in order to light the stove, or in a semi-emergency, or even non-emergency, there are ways you could have a Christian neighbor help you and do work that was forbidden on the Sabbath. The taverns had to keep running on the Sabbath to be viable economically. But it was also a little bit of a matter of life and death, not to be too dramatic, but if a nobleman or an upper clergyman arrives in town and wants his drink, are you really gonna tell him, I'm sorry we're closed, it's Saturday? So there developed a system much earlier than the period that I'm talking about. Way back, seemingly as early as the 15th century, in the 1400s, as Jews had first gotten into this business of leasing, really forming a fictitious partnership with a local Christian. So that your tavern was still kept running on Sabbath and major Jewish holidays where you couldn't do any work, because you would have a Christian who owned one seventh of the business. And that one seventh, of course, covers Sabbath day, profits. So anytime, and he had to be, if you read the Shulchanaruch, he has to be an actual partner. He has to buy into the partnership, but they get around it, you're allowed to lend him the money at pennies on interest and so on. The whole thing is a legal fiction. They used to get around it, very clever, but it was natural, it was normal. So this is why, when the state suddenly declares Jewish tavern keeping illegal, it's the most natural thing in the world to use local Christians the same way to circumvent state law. And this seems to be what happened, on a very widespread level, except when they got caught. Now, in this case is particularly interesting because it defies all of the normal ethnic alliances we would assume there is. The blue names are Jews, they're Jewish tavern keepers, the red names are Christians. And you'll look at the very top, there's a court case, that Slomo Wolfowitz Blumrozen versus Zelka Vigdorovic and Lord Frantziszek Kishelnitsky, whom I'll call Lord Kay, for the sake of simplicity. What happened was Slomo Blumrozen was the lessy of the tavern, he was the tavern keeper. But to find other stereotypes, he was disorderly, he seemed to have been drunken, he didn't run a good tavern, and Lord Kay decided to terminate his lease. He brought on Zelka, another Jew to run the tavern, and Blumrozen is really angry and he turns to the state officials in the kingdom, and he turns them in. And he accuses this Lord Kay of having Jews run his taverns in all three of the villages that he owns. So he's turned in former, and the state investigates, and they start a whole interrogation, and they interrogate everybody. And the most impressive thing of all is these Christians in the red, all vouch for these Jews who are running the taverns, swearing that this Jew never actually sold liquor. He didn't live in the tavern and so on and so forth. But one of them lets it slip that actually Zelka would deal with the liquor suppliers and do everything but literally sell the liquor. So one by one, these Jews are expelled from the villages, and they have to go to an entirely different area and start all over again. Now we can imagine the future, which is that Lord Kay simply finds more Jews to run his taverns. Questions why? Why? Does he love Jews? Does he even like Jews? Probably not. We have an answer because we have his interrogation. As an owner of a roadside village who must always consider the convenience of travelers, I could not neglect to hire Jews who would continually provide for the needs of traveling Jews, meaning Jewish merchants. And I saw this in many documents. By the way, these are Polish archival documents, mainly in the Polish language, very accessible, very easy to find. It was like skimming the cream off the top. Because the archives just opened since 1989. In any case, it seems that we have the whole mercantile system dependent on these Jewish merchants and the nobles are claiming that it's economic death if you don't have Jewish run taverns because the traveling merchants have nowhere to go. So they're going to avoid your village. They're going to avoid your estates if you don't have hospitality. They need a place to stay on the Sabbath. They need a place to get kosher food, et cetera. So that's the first reason. And the second one, even more important, most importantly, people of this faith, Jews show themselves to be sober. And this work requires sober and suitable people. And for this reason as well, I hired Jews. I tried with all my might to fulfill the will of the regime by not having Jews live there or actually sell liquor. It's interesting. We have a widespread belief in Jewish sobriety. They're not going to drink up all the profits. That's the belief. Jews don't drink. You knew that, right? Unless you go to my synagogue and then you see how much they like their whiskey. But we'll get to that too. But first, I want to show you a couple of other things that absolutely blew me away. First of all, we have a petition signed by all the local Christians protesting the expulsion of this local Jew, Zelka, and swearing that he never sold liquor and promising to give a donation to the court. The regional court as a sort of testament to the fidelity of their oath, in other words, a bribe. A lot of coexistence going on here may be a little bit shady, but still, you know, they're protecting each other, they're getting along. This is only, this is less than 10 miles away from the infamous town of Jedwabne, which almost exactly 100 years later is a scene of a terrible lethal pogrom against local Jews by their Polish Christian neighbors. Now the Nazis are in control at this point. They've just invaded the Soviet Union and taken control of the Jedwabne. But their role is very much in the background. It seems most of the pogrom and the Polish government has now apologized for this and tried to really come to terms with it and Poland as a nation has really tried. But this was the scene of the death of 300 Jewish neighbors at the hands of local Poles. They pushed most of them into a barn and set it on fire, as you can see here. It's caught a photograph. Look how much it changed in 100 years. So we're really looking at a whole system that eventually broke down by the 20th century. And we wanna understand why. How do we get from all this coexistence? Maybe it's mistrustful. Maybe they don't socialize, but they rely on each other. How do we get from there to this? But first, happier times, the myth of Jewish sobriety. Now, as you heard, as Professor Manski mentioned, my first book is a history of Hasidism in Poland and how it became a mass movement. And one of the things I noticed is a really good way of becoming a mass movement is being very permissive towards alcohol consumption. In fact, Hasidism is very interesting in this regard because they work it into the theology. It's what's called an immanentist belief of God where God can be found in anything. God can be worshiped through nontraditional means. Everything becomes a potential mode of worship, including dancing and drinking. As long as you do it with the proper intention under the auspices of a miracle worker known as the Tzadik in Hebrew or Revi in Yiddish. The official term for this is worshiped through corporeality. The material world also contains divinity. God permeates everything and therefore we can use everything in the material world including rye, vodka. And this robust drinking culture is unprecedented in Jewish history. It's developing right at the same time we're talking about early 19th century, mid 19th century, between more and more popular. How on the one hand do you sustain this image of Jewish sobriety? And on the other hand have a movement like this on the rise. Well, in my book I go through a lot of different sources, especially Hasidic sources because a lot of this is prone to caricature and parody. And I don't want to be too trusting but it seems like there was a lot of drinking going on but it would happen in specific times. Usually Jewish holidays, births, deaths, even deaths, divorce and so on and so forth. So it would commemorate certain things. So it wasn't free-drinking the way it was happening in non-Jewish culture and it was happening behind closed doors in the so-called Stiebel, the Hasidic prayer house or at the Hasidic court, the court of the Rebbe. So out of the public eye, imagine the difference in perceptions. You have the tavern which is sort of an open window in which you can see on a daily basis members of the rival faith getting intoxicated, beyond belief. The tavern is like almost like a one-way mirror which you can just see this. And the Jewish tavern keeper seems quite sober to everybody's eye. But then he goes to his Hasidic prayer house and he's doing this. That seems to be the way the whole thing worked. I don't see however drinking being as widespread a societal problem among Jews. You don't see it in the rabbinic sermons. You don't see temperance movements arise the way you do in Christian society. In Christian society, it's a real problem. And it's to the point where I'm not making this up. Priests in their sermons are telling, they're shaming their congregations. Why can't you be more like Jews in this regard? And you gotta realize we're talking about, you know, early modern Poland. It's not a tolerant place, multicultural environment. But they truly believe that Jews have it under control. How great a nation Poland could be, we could rise from the ashes, overthrow the czar. If only we were more like Jews in this regard. This kind of thing is a period in the sermons. Unbelievable. Here's just another depiction of a drunken Hasid. You can see his bottle in his right hand there. Now, as we enter the late 19th century, Jews do begin to acculturate and assimilate. And this has really been the story of the historiography. The image of Jews fighting, volunteering to fight for the Polish cause, risking their lives. The first one is the 1830 uprising. The second one is the 1863 uprising. Jews, especially in cities like Warsaw, are beginning to become colonized, acculturated. They're speaking Polish now. That image is very good for Polish-Jewish relations. It's very nice to know that there were Jews who made the effort to integrate. And the past generation of historians has been really keen to emphasize this. It's been sort of a common ground between Poles and Jews as they examine their very difficult history together. But I have to say, my book, I really had to provide a corrective to this image. This was really a very small percentage, very urbanized elite in larger towns and cities. And really, the way that I refuted this most easily was I discovered this enormous trove that Professor Umanski referred to of petitions, so-called kwitlech, to a miracle worker by the name of Eliyahu Gutmacher from the early 1870s. And each of these petitions is like, it tells a story, it gives you a window into people's lives. And you really see, number one, Jewish tavern keepers are alive and well. There are hundreds of petitions by tavern keepers, but also it's very much that shtetl environment. They still live very cut off from their Christian neighbors very much at odds economically. And yet they're still very reliant on the local noblemen. And some of the petitions are asking Rabbi Gutmacher to intervene with the heavens to change the heart of the noblemen so he'll favor them and so on. So you see that the old system is very much intact. And the evidence of it, just one petition and very crude Yiddish by a very successful tavern keeper, Rebzalman Ben-Gitl, the homeowner, which is a code word for rich, who is known as a great host and philanthropist. I observe the holy Sabbath and the great merit will stand with me when the great Sabbath comes and I will prepare for the Sabbath and festival this Thursday. Although I run a tavern, he's saying, I will observe the Sabbath and the great Sabbath proceeding Passover completely. I have a tavern and take care of things with three Goyim who are my right hand. Hey, these are his Christian fronts for his tavern. They're gonna keep it running on the holidays and the Sabbaths. One who lives there has the name Lepinsky. The other is named Kviatkowski. Usually when people are named, especially if they're non-Jewish, it's meant as a curse. He's implicitly asking the miracle worker to curse. In this case, he seems to be asking for a blessing for his Christian workers. So we still have that old system of mutual reliance of symbiosis very much intact in certain areas, but there are cracks in the system. It's beginning to break down. And the most important pivotal moment, I almost hate to say it, is the emancipation of the peasants. Now, we all want the peasants to be emancipated. We don't want serfdom, it's virtual slavery. It's a good thing, but there's also the law of unintended consequences because what happens when you suddenly emancipate all these serfs, all these peasants? What's the, can anybody predict what the unintended consequence is? Sorry? Sort of, but what do you do to overcome the unemployment? There's still plenty of drinking going on, but what would you do? You're suddenly freed, maybe it takes a generation, the younger generation becomes more enterprising and bold. What would you do? You want to set up your own taverns, right? We suddenly have a collision course. The peasants and Jews are on a collision course. Christians want to set up their own taverns as just one example. Also noblemen, the noblemen are often ruined by emancipation. They've had to give up a land, they've lost their monopolies over the peasants, their free labor, they too sometimes will compete. And so increasing numbers of petitions are like this one. Monaco Moshe Ben Fega is asking for success in the tavern and to repel the Gentile from there, from his town, who arose against Jews and took their livelihood so that the customers will not go to him and that the scent of his drinks will stink so that they can no longer stand his drinks and to cause his downfall for all the Jews and the widows and the orphans need this for he took their livelihood. Inter-ethnic economic competition, the beginning of the end. After this, after the 1870s, you see increased episodes of inter-ethnic tension, the breakdown of the old symbiosis. Anti-Jewish economic boycotts, don't buy from Jews, pogroms begin to snake their way up through Southern Russia, reaching all the way to Warsaw. The first major pogroms are in 1881. The nobility is increasingly impoverished, is migrating to the towns and cities that Jews are deprived of their protectors, the nobles, who would have never let anyone touch their most prized inhabitants. The Jews are their best taxpayers and lessees of their very center prizes. Now there are fewer and fewer nobles to stand in the way and now you have inter-ethnic, inter-religious violence. Really it's one-sided inter-ethnic, inter-religious violence. Pogroms, anti-Jewish boycotts, that's how we get eventually, eventually to Yad Vabna and the scene that I showed. That's how we get really to the kind of tension that you may have heard from your grandparents, the Poland of the 1930s, widespread anti-Jewish economic boycotts, pogroms, hostility and these kinds of things. It's because that old system of economic symbiosis symbolized by the tavern and by the Jewish tavern keeper is now a thing of the past. Thank you very much. And I'm wondering how religious Jews dealt with this. I know from reading your book that also in the taverns were prostitutes. So the taverns that were run by religious Jews, were there prostitutes in those taverns and what was going on there? I would have expected to find more prostitutes honestly. Occasionally I find prostitutes, but it's usually in larger towns and cities. I think that once it's underground and it's technically illegal for Jews to run taverns, there's a disincentive to engage in illegal activity. I'm not trying to claim there wasn't illegal activity. There was. These tavern keepers would help with smuggling it seems. They would serve as fences for stolen goods. They did involve themselves, but it was usually with the complete knowledge and even cooperation of the local nobleman. Now when you get to prostitution, that's a much tougher one. It's just not tolerated in the more rural areas. It's something, if you want that you go to Warsaw and that's really where I see accusations of prostitution. The exception is a couple of cases where one Jewish tavern keeper will turn in another Jewish tavern keeper in order to save his or her skin and the accusation will be well that tavern keeper, I've been so pious and clean and pure and kept run a reputable business, but this tavern keeper has prostitutes and thieves and so I've seen that kind of a thing. I don't know how much to believe it, but that seems to be the case. That semi-legal attitude along with attitudes in the countryside seem to curtail that kind of illegal activity as far as the sources permit me to say. You said something about a boycott, an economic boycott just at the end, I didn't quite get it. Was it an organic boycott or was it an official boycott? And what year was it? Maybe you can elaborate a little bit more about that. Sure, the first boycotts begin in really the 1890s. They are led, it seems, by priests. And the priests are interesting. The priests are notoriously anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish. I mean, this is even built into theology a lot of the time, but they're also against violence. No Christianity preaches nonviolence and depending on how seriously you take it, the clergy would take it very seriously. So they've got a problem. They're against the pogroms, but they're also against Jews supposedly dominating trade and dominating the main venue, the tavern, and causing people to drink. So how do you wage war on this Jewish population? It was really the middle class. They're a virtual middle class. How do you wage war on them without violence? They hit upon the economic boycott. This, we are more civilized than that, so don't engage in pogroms, but don't buy from Jews. They start setting up peasant cooperatives so you can circumvent the Jewish middleman. And they're relatively unsuccessful for a long time, but by the late 1930s, they're devastatingly successful and Jews are practically starving by the 1930s because of these economic boycotts. So that's a short version of this story. Thank you, I'm enjoying this. So aside from the symbiotic relationship that you notice in the economic advantages and the quasi-parody that's there, I'm wondering if in the reviews that you looked at, whether there are opinions that were stated about how the Jews viewed inebriation? Oh, absolutely. So it's funny, so I went into the, I was most interested in the Hasidic attitudes towards inebriation, and I found things like, you're allowed to get buzzed, that's the best translation I could find for it, and still say a blessing. But you cannot say a blessing while you're outright drunk. And so they start to distinguish in a very legalistic, Talmudic way, what is buzzed, what is drunk, when it's appropriate to drink, when it's not, what blessings you say, and so on. But what really came out of all of this was, yes, inebriation is frowned upon, even by Hasidic leaders sometimes, but you still drink, you still drink. You could see this everywhere, just in the questions that the rabbis would ask. What kind of blessing do you say if you're just drinking vodka for medicinal purposes? If you're just drinking vodka before your meal to stimulate the appetite? If you're just drinking vodka after the meal to help with digestion? If you're drinking during the meal, but it's only meant as a toast and not as part of the meal. So they really discussed this stuff. So you can see that vodka had worked its way into all corners of life, and it wasn't just, I suppose, the way we relate to it today, much more so. Extensive literature on vodka. The other thing is the, I don't know if anybody's ever been to a Hasidic and sometimes a non-Hasidic synagogue on Saturdays, on the Sabbath day, where they make the kiddish, the blessing, over vodka rather than wine. So this comes from this time period when wine was simply too expensive. So all kinds, again, all kinds of rabbis discussing, well, can we really say the blessing over vodka is the same thing as wine? And they make the case, several prominent legal authorities make the case that it's so-called Khamer Medina. It's the wine of the land, vodka, because it's considered like wine. It's a luxury, people enjoy it, they even use it as currency. And so it's like wine, yes, you can say, and this is how they develop, yes, you can say the kiddish, the blessing over vodka. But here's the problem. You're talking about a big amount, right? When you say a blessing over wine, it has to be a cup, it has to be an entire cup, you're gonna drink that much vodka? So then they start discussing, which would cause you to be inebriated. Some say, yeah, you have to drink the whole thing, and can you imagine on Saturday morning? So very interesting discussions around this issue. Okay, that's another interesting story. There's so many, potatoes come in, but poor Poland, they're always the latecomers. Potatoes enter in the, really in force in the 1930s, 1830s, sorry. And potatoes are really important for the liquor trade, because the same plot of land can produce a lot more vodka with potatoes. So it's very popular, it catches on. Anybody know what happens in 1847? The Irish, the Black 47, it didn't only happen in Ireland. So the whole potato blight, just as the potatoes are making their way across Polish estates, maybe it was a good thing in the sense that not everyone had adopted the potato yet. But the blight absolutely destroys potatoes, and they revert right back to grain, and no one gets involved with potatoes, again for many, many years. So that's that story. Maybe you could say a little bit about it in your book, you talk about how not all of the Jewish tavern keepers were men, that some of them were women. And I'm wondering if you could share some of that as well. Yeah, absolutely, now usually the setup, I don't know if you've heard about the stereotype the man studies Talmud all day, while the woman schleps in the marketplace. That's a bit of a myth. It happened in the very thinnest stratum of the elite, but usually, most commonly, men and women, that is to say, husbands and wives worked, both of them worked. So they were both breadwinners. And the most typical situation, well there's, I wouldn't say most, atypical situation was in the tavern. Let me preface this by saying, I estimated about 40% of the Jewish population was involved in the liquor trade around the 19th century, 40%, and that may be a conservative estimate, because there's all kinds of stuff that doesn't get recorded. In any case, the typical arrangement is, the husband will deal with the liquor suppliers, the noblemen, he'll often kind of run a taxi service with his horse and cart during the daytime. The wife and the children will deal with the customers. Mainly the wife, she's sort of a junior partner in the enterprise, and you can imagine what that entails, you're dealing with drunken peasants and a lot of these women, really tough, brawny women, grabbing the peasant by the scruff of his neck and tossing him out because he's being unruly. It really became a extraordinary normalcy. But Jewish women worked, and that's what's so fascinating. By the time I got to the kvitlaka, the petitions to Gudmacher, I'm seeing hundreds upon hundreds of petitions either by or about women, and the women are working. They're working in tavern keeping and in virtually every other corner of the economy. It's just, it never gets recorded by census takers, never gets recorded in the archives. So they're a statistically invisible workforce, and that's another thing I tried to correct, because nothing like seeing the messiness of everyday life to correct the myth that the statistics produce. But also, not all of the women who were tavern keepers were married. Right, so the most common petitions, but this is the tricky thing, is when they were married, they didn't tend to author their own petitions, or they would do it along with their husband, and they wouldn't state their occupation. It's the divorces and the widows who are authoring their own petitions, and so an enormous number of tavern keepers are women widows, and divorces, single-handedly running their taverns, which is another thing. Or they'll marry somebody that's often, for economic reasons too, they would marry somebody to help out in the tavern, and it turns out to be a bum, and so she's asking the rabbi Gudmacher to help her divorce the guy, and there's an economic drag, and so on. You see great stories in here. It really changes our perception of women, and it's hard to view women as straightforward victims and marginalized and submissive when you see just how important they are to their family's economies, breadwinners across the board. So that was an eye-opener for me. Did your research cover what the process was and how they handled the product during the Passover period? A little bit, Passover is a time where you cannot consume leaven, and the products like rye and beer products and so on were considered leaven, and so they would do several things. Sometimes they'd just close down the tavern altogether, but you couldn't do that if it's the only game in town. So this is one explanation for the rise of slivovitz. You ever heard of slivovitz? It's plum brandy. You can drink it on Passover. There are vodkas that are called Pesachovic, which are other kinds of vodkas that don't contain this leaven, so you're allowed to drink them. And there are rules for how you sell, sometimes you have to sell off your products completely, sometimes you have other arrangements. The biggest problem when tavern keepers would convert Christianity, and this is something I covered as well in the book, is not that they betrayed their faith or anything like that. Jews stop going to these converts taverns because they're assumed to no longer be abiding by these rules of Passover and so on. And so it's probably the worst thing you could do for business. Now you're paying these heavy concession fees, so the temptation to convert to Christianity is very strong, especially in the countryside where your interactions with non-Jews are much closer and more common. But those who converted to Christianity, I think really regretted it from an economic standpoint because the Jewish patrons just disappeared. And it seems like the better solution for getting around concession fees was simply to prop up a Christian bartender and call him the tavern keeper, which seemed to be a much more common solution to high concession fees. I am curious as to whatever made you go into this particular subject material. Okay, I can't exaggerate this too much, but there was a point after the Hasidism book, I wanted to get away from the topic so as not to be typecast as a scholar. And I just went to the archives, I had the file numbers of pre-war, let's say pre-Holocaust historians, and it turned out the numbers were good still. So much more had survived than we ever dreamed. And so I just start flipping through. These files, I kind of knew what they were about, but as I read, the words vodka, Jews, drunkenness, we're just leaping off the page, practically every page I'm turning, and you have to realize when you're reading the pioneering historical accounts of Poland, Lithuania, Russia, and so on, the narrative is the Jews were driven out of the liquor trade. So I'm thinking, how can we have so much vodka in Jews if they've already been driven out? I have a book now. Because it captures everyday life. It lets us get around the statistics and see what's really happening. And it shows that modernity happens very slowly, especially in agrarian countries. Modernization, urbanization, that's the story that we're accustomed to. If we read East European Jewish history, it happened much more slowly. That older system, even you saw by the 1870s, was very much intact. And that's how I got into it. Plus, it's fun investigating vodka, you know? Gives you an excuse, yeah. Were you reading these documents in Polish? And if so, how long did it take you to become fluent in Polish? So the main languages for studying this are Hebrew, Yiddish, and a Slavic language. I was told when I was crazy enough to want to get a PhD in this field, I was told, well, do you know Polish? You better learn it. And so I started going, it was after 1989, so communism had fallen, Poland was opening up to the West, and I started going every summer to crack out to Jagiellonian University. And with a few other crazy grad students started learning Polish. But you also need Hebrew and Yiddish, and helps to have Russian as well. And I learned it. Whether there's a will, there's a way. You can study from med school, you can do this. Maybe you can share with everyone what your current research is about. Oh boy, we have time for that. Well, a short version, let's make it easier. Short version. Consumed with alcohol. I've decided to go into the 20th century. I've decided to return to Hasidism a little bit. I find that these are the generations who really perished in the Holocaust, and our image of them is very secular. Historians have told us a lot about Zionists and about Bundists, the heroic types who secularize, as well as those who assimilated became colonized. I'm finding that the more religious Jews whom we call traditionalist, Hasidic, other Orthodox Jews have been very neglected by historians. And when I began to investigate this, I found it was extraordinary the vitality of these religious groups, these religious Jews in Poland. Now, I believe I have no ideological reason for doing this. I just wanna figure out what was going on. And what I found was instead of the decline of religion, you know, the rise of secularization, which is the story we always get, these traditionalists rebounded. And what seems to have happened, especially after World War I, is because of Stalin, if you've heard about Stalin's anti-religious campaigns throughout the Soviet Union, where, you know, synagogues are being closed down, rabbis are being forced to resign and even imprisoned, you have really a slow death of religious Jewish life. Well, a lot of these Yeshiva students and teachers and their families began sneaking over the border into Poland. And sometimes entire Yeshivas, like Mir, the most famous one, they just came over the border and beat Yosef and so on. And they reestablished themselves in Poland. And as religious Jews are coming over the border, they're adding to the numbers of religious elites. Now, who's supporting all these? Is anyone want to take a guess? Who's supporting all these religious refugees, I call them? Any guess? The US. The US, American Jews. They may not be two religious themselves, the American Jews, but they want these European Jews to be religious. So there's kind of a proxy, a religious proxy. So I'm seeing millions, I'm not exaggerating, millions of dollars pouring into these Yeshivas and to individual religious functionaries to support both the religious refugees and the native Poles who are studying in them. And so you have almost a rebirth of religious life. It's a little bit artificial because of these external influxes. But whatever you want to call it, it's a real resurgence. So that's going to be the story, but I'd like to take it through the Holocaust because the rescue efforts, believe it or not, that nostalgia that a lot of Americans feel carries on into the Holocaust. And I'm starting to, don't quote me on this yet, but I'm starting to see an actual preference when it comes to rescue for Yeshiva students. And many, many Yeshiva students from Mir, from Lubavitch, Yeshiva and so on are able to get out via Shanghai and other places as a result of these American rescue efforts through the Holocaust. The feeling is, and I've seen this in writing, that they represent the wellspring of Judaism throughout the world. That's the attitude. So we have to save them. And even Rabbi Wayne House's own father who's here in the audience, his own father was one of these Shanghai Jews who's studying the Mir Yeshiva. So that's also part of the story. The lesson here, I think, is that traditionalism, we saw the traditional economic way of life in this talk, but traditional religious observance too is much more resilient, I think, than we realize. And a lot of these orthodox organizations are very well organized, very assertive. They're willing to devote a lot of funds and resources for the survival of their elite. And that's why a more accurate depiction of modernity is heterogeneous. You have, yes, you have these secular Jewish groups emerging, but you also have these vibrant religious groups emerging and they're clashing, but they're also influenced by each other, and that's the story that I'm gonna be telling next. Well, do you mean here in the United States? You're still talking about Brooklyn. No, there are other places, Curious Joel, which is an upstate New York, and I'm sure LA is growing as well. You know, I don't know a lot about the Midwest, so I can't say for sure, but I don't get the sense, it's very, very large. That's a different story. Well, there's Hobot everywhere. The Hobot is always the exception. Yeah, Muncie as well. Well, I wanna thank you so much for being with us this evening. Thank you very much. And thank everyone for coming. Okay. Thank you. And we'll be, Karina in the back will be selling copies of Dr. Diner's book, Yonkel's Tavern. He's gonna sign some copies. And do join us for our next...