This chapter explores how Jewish refugees dealt with the problems involved in starting their lives afresh in the Holy Roman Empire—a dynamic and creative process whose effects were felt well beyond their immediate circle. A key issue the refugees faced in the empire was their feelings of strangeness and sometimes even alienation. Many retained warm feelings toward their previous home, and the foreign environment in which they found themselves was hard to come to terms with. The refugees' feeling of strangeness was also a result of cultural and religious difference within Jewish society. Even when they did find a place to settle down in, the refugees did not always feel at home. However, there may have been deeper issues at work. There were those who ascribed their difficulties directly to their refugee experiences. The chapter then focuses on Jewish economic activity. Most refugees seem to have found themselves in one of two professions: trade, often just peddling, or some form of religious occupation, from the lowly jobs of teachers or slaughterers to highly prestigious rabbinical posts.
{"title":"Starting New Lives","authors":"A. Teller","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvr0qr68.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvr0qr68.31","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores how Jewish refugees dealt with the problems involved in starting their lives afresh in the Holy Roman Empire—a dynamic and creative process whose effects were felt well beyond their immediate circle. A key issue the refugees faced in the empire was their feelings of strangeness and sometimes even alienation. Many retained warm feelings toward their previous home, and the foreign environment in which they found themselves was hard to come to terms with. The refugees' feeling of strangeness was also a result of cultural and religious difference within Jewish society. Even when they did find a place to settle down in, the refugees did not always feel at home. However, there may have been deeper issues at work. There were those who ascribed their difficulties directly to their refugee experiences. The chapter then focuses on Jewish economic activity. Most refugees seem to have found themselves in one of two professions: trade, often just peddling, or some form of religious occupation, from the lowly jobs of teachers or slaughterers to highly prestigious rabbinical posts.","PeriodicalId":364703,"journal":{"name":"Rescue the Surviving Souls","volume":"2011 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125641138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-14DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0027
A. Teller
This concluding chapter assesses whether the fate of the Polish Jewish refugees in each of the three major arenas in which they found themselves was really a single, interconnected refugee crisis or whether there were, in fact, three different crises sparked by a common cause: the mid-seventeenth-century wars of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Underlying all of the differences in the conditions in each of the three regions were numerous commonalities. Perhaps most important was the sense of solidarity that induced Jews to come to the aid of other Jews in distress. The term most commonly used at the time to describe this connection was “brotherhood.” The phenomena examined in this book are indeed, therefore, aspects of a single refugee crisis. The chapter then considers how large the problem was and how well Jewish society dealt with its challenges. It also highlights the effects of the refugee crisis on Jewish society, both while it was happening and in the longer term, and the importance of the crisis for the course of early modern and modern Jewish history in general.
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"A. Teller","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0027","url":null,"abstract":"This concluding chapter assesses whether the fate of the Polish Jewish refugees in each of the three major arenas in which they found themselves was really a single, interconnected refugee crisis or whether there were, in fact, three different crises sparked by a common cause: the mid-seventeenth-century wars of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Underlying all of the differences in the conditions in each of the three regions were numerous commonalities. Perhaps most important was the sense of solidarity that induced Jews to come to the aid of other Jews in distress. The term most commonly used at the time to describe this connection was “brotherhood.” The phenomena examined in this book are indeed, therefore, aspects of a single refugee crisis. The chapter then considers how large the problem was and how well Jewish society dealt with its challenges. It also highlights the effects of the refugee crisis on Jewish society, both while it was happening and in the longer term, and the importance of the crisis for the course of early modern and modern Jewish history in general.","PeriodicalId":364703,"journal":{"name":"Rescue the Surviving Souls","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131730368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-14DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0019
A. Teller
This chapter presents a background of the relationship between German Jews and Polish Jews before 1648. Polish Jews were well aware that their ancestors had originated in the German lands and, long before the refugee crisis brought large numbers of them back there, knew a great deal about Jewish society in the empire. Much of what they knew came from meetings with German Jews, often in pursuit of trade, or from the stories of those who had traveled the relatively short distance to the German lands. Though there was much that separated them, both groups understood that they also had a great deal in common in cultural and religious terms. The meeting of Polish and German Jews in the mid-seventeenth century, for all its economic, social, and religious difficulties, was undoubtedly colored by this sense of kinship and belonging. To understand its significance, the chapter looks at the history of the connections between the two groups of Jews and the ways in which those connections were perceived by each side. In the years after 1648, this history of the connection between German and Polish Jews seems to have created a range of expectations on the part not only of the refugees but also of those in the empire who were to take them in.
{"title":"Background","authors":"A. Teller","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0019","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter presents a background of the relationship between German Jews and Polish Jews before 1648. Polish Jews were well aware that their ancestors had originated in the German lands and, long before the refugee crisis brought large numbers of them back there, knew a great deal about Jewish society in the empire. Much of what they knew came from meetings with German Jews, often in pursuit of trade, or from the stories of those who had traveled the relatively short distance to the German lands. Though there was much that separated them, both groups understood that they also had a great deal in common in cultural and religious terms. The meeting of Polish and German Jews in the mid-seventeenth century, for all its economic, social, and religious difficulties, was undoubtedly colored by this sense of kinship and belonging. To understand its significance, the chapter looks at the history of the connections between the two groups of Jews and the ways in which those connections were perceived by each side. In the years after 1648, this history of the connection between German and Polish Jews seems to have created a range of expectations on the part not only of the refugees but also of those in the empire who were to take them in.","PeriodicalId":364703,"journal":{"name":"Rescue the Surviving Souls","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116249933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-14DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0024
A. Teller
This chapter addresses how, though the majority of the refugees from the Commonwealth who traveled westward ended up in the empire, a significant number made for a place outside it: Amsterdam. The major city in the Seven Provinces, the part of the Netherlands that had broken free of Habsburg control in 1581, Amsterdam had become one of Europe's major trading emporia and a bastion of mercantilism by the seventeenth century. The cosmopolitan atmosphere of the port city supported the development of more tolerant attitudes to strangers and non-Christians, while economic need and mercantilist ideology led the urban authorities to encourage the settlement of groups with wealth and economic skills, regardless of their background. This opened the way for Jews. Though it did not explicitly welcome Jewish settlement, Amsterdam's willingness to tolerate not only the presence of Jews but also the creation of Jewish communal bodies and communal buildings made it something of a magnet for Jews. The chapter then looks at the strength and centrality in Amsterdam Jewish society of the Portuguese Jews, as well as the significance of the Sephardi–Ashkenazi divide in the treatment of the refugees.
{"title":"Amsterdam","authors":"A. Teller","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0024","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter addresses how, though the majority of the refugees from the Commonwealth who traveled westward ended up in the empire, a significant number made for a place outside it: Amsterdam. The major city in the Seven Provinces, the part of the Netherlands that had broken free of Habsburg control in 1581, Amsterdam had become one of Europe's major trading emporia and a bastion of mercantilism by the seventeenth century. The cosmopolitan atmosphere of the port city supported the development of more tolerant attitudes to strangers and non-Christians, while economic need and mercantilist ideology led the urban authorities to encourage the settlement of groups with wealth and economic skills, regardless of their background. This opened the way for Jews. Though it did not explicitly welcome Jewish settlement, Amsterdam's willingness to tolerate not only the presence of Jews but also the creation of Jewish communal bodies and communal buildings made it something of a magnet for Jews. The chapter then looks at the strength and centrality in Amsterdam Jewish society of the Portuguese Jews, as well as the significance of the Sephardi–Ashkenazi divide in the treatment of the refugees.","PeriodicalId":364703,"journal":{"name":"Rescue the Surviving Souls","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121449051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-14DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0021
A. Teller
This chapter details the experience of flight from Poland to Germany and what it meant in real terms to be a Jewish refugee on the roads of central Europe. This is a crucial issue because that kind of forced travel is such a fundamental part of what refugees have to endure that unless it is examined, they themselves cannot be understood. Though the whole refugee experience was fraught with danger and terror, the most difficult moments for many came right at the beginning, when the individuals or small groups of refugees had to evade the enemy troops from whom they were fleeing. Even if refugees managed to evade the hostile soldiers, their lives remained in danger from people acting out of hatred of Jews, simply wanting to rob them, or both. Nighttime was particularly dangerous, especially if Jews were staying at an inn run by a non-Jew. The chapter then highlights the personal chronicle of Yuda ben Ephraim Ḥayim of Piła in Great Poland, who fled to Silesia during 1656 to avoid being attacked by the forces of Stefan Czarniecki.
{"title":"On the Road","authors":"A. Teller","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0021","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter details the experience of flight from Poland to Germany and what it meant in real terms to be a Jewish refugee on the roads of central Europe. This is a crucial issue because that kind of forced travel is such a fundamental part of what refugees have to endure that unless it is examined, they themselves cannot be understood. Though the whole refugee experience was fraught with danger and terror, the most difficult moments for many came right at the beginning, when the individuals or small groups of refugees had to evade the enemy troops from whom they were fleeing. Even if refugees managed to evade the hostile soldiers, their lives remained in danger from people acting out of hatred of Jews, simply wanting to rob them, or both. Nighttime was particularly dangerous, especially if Jews were staying at an inn run by a non-Jew. The chapter then highlights the personal chronicle of Yuda ben Ephraim Ḥayim of Piła in Great Poland, who fled to Silesia during 1656 to avoid being attacked by the forces of Stefan Czarniecki.","PeriodicalId":364703,"journal":{"name":"Rescue the Surviving Souls","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131087597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-14DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0022
A. Teller
This chapter studies refugee settlement in the Holy Roman Empire's eastern regions. The Swedish invasion of Poland began during the first week of July of 1655, sparking a flight of refugees across the Commonwealth's western border to the neighboring region of Silesia. Even before the Swedish army arrived, a group of Jews from Great Poland wrote to the Holy Roman Emperor, the Habsburg Ferdinand III, asking permission to enter his territory. However, the Swedish army got to them before Ferdinand's response, so they were forced to cross into Silesia without permission. Once there, they wrote a second letter to the emperor in which they gave a moving description of their sufferings. The emperor gave them the permission they wanted on August 22. These two documents—the Jews' letter and the emperor's response—deepen one's understanding of the refugee experience in the mid-1650s in a number of ways. The Jews' letter suggests that even in cases where a central authority in the Commonwealth was willing to allow the Jewish refugees to return, there were still hostile local forces trying to prevent them from doing so. Meanwhile, the emperor's response indicates that the refugees' choice to make for Silesia, Bohemia, and Moravia as safe havens was a function not only of those regions' geographical proximity to Poland but of the generous terms of travel and settlement that Jews were granted there.
{"title":"Over the Border","authors":"A. Teller","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0022","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter studies refugee settlement in the Holy Roman Empire's eastern regions. The Swedish invasion of Poland began during the first week of July of 1655, sparking a flight of refugees across the Commonwealth's western border to the neighboring region of Silesia. Even before the Swedish army arrived, a group of Jews from Great Poland wrote to the Holy Roman Emperor, the Habsburg Ferdinand III, asking permission to enter his territory. However, the Swedish army got to them before Ferdinand's response, so they were forced to cross into Silesia without permission. Once there, they wrote a second letter to the emperor in which they gave a moving description of their sufferings. The emperor gave them the permission they wanted on August 22. These two documents—the Jews' letter and the emperor's response—deepen one's understanding of the refugee experience in the mid-1650s in a number of ways. The Jews' letter suggests that even in cases where a central authority in the Commonwealth was willing to allow the Jewish refugees to return, there were still hostile local forces trying to prevent them from doing so. Meanwhile, the emperor's response indicates that the refugees' choice to make for Silesia, Bohemia, and Moravia as safe havens was a function not only of those regions' geographical proximity to Poland but of the generous terms of travel and settlement that Jews were granted there.","PeriodicalId":364703,"journal":{"name":"Rescue the Surviving Souls","volume":"98 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131559110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-14DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0023
A. Teller
This chapter assesses the meetings of the Polish Jewish refugees with the German Jews on the ground in the communities of the Holy Roman Empire. It begins by examining the chapbook Di bashraybung fun Ashkenaz un Polak (The Description of a German and a Polish Jew). Published in Prague sometime in the second half of the seventeenth century, it provides a satirical look at the interaction of the Polish Jewish refugees with the German Jews they met on their travels in the empire. The satirical poem presents this in two large blocks: the first gives the point of view of the Polish Jew and his complaints about his reception in the empire; the second brings the perspective of the German Jew and his opinions of the indigent refugees with whom he is faced. The chapter then determines the extent to which the chapbook was an accurate portrayal of the mid-seventeenth-century reality, considering the Jewish refugees in Frankfurt a.M. and Hamburg, as well as in Vienna.
{"title":"Polish Jews Meet German Jews","authors":"A. Teller","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0023","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter assesses the meetings of the Polish Jewish refugees with the German Jews on the ground in the communities of the Holy Roman Empire. It begins by examining the chapbook Di bashraybung fun Ashkenaz un Polak (The Description of a German and a Polish Jew). Published in Prague sometime in the second half of the seventeenth century, it provides a satirical look at the interaction of the Polish Jewish refugees with the German Jews they met on their travels in the empire. The satirical poem presents this in two large blocks: the first gives the point of view of the Polish Jew and his complaints about his reception in the empire; the second brings the perspective of the German Jew and his opinions of the indigent refugees with whom he is faced. The chapter then determines the extent to which the chapbook was an accurate portrayal of the mid-seventeenth-century reality, considering the Jewish refugees in Frankfurt a.M. and Hamburg, as well as in Vienna.","PeriodicalId":364703,"journal":{"name":"Rescue the Surviving Souls","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115793083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter discusses the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648. The Khmelnytsky uprising was not a single experience for the Jews. This was mostly because there were at least five military forces at work, each of which had a different attitude toward them. For the Cossack armies under Bogdan Khmelnytsky's leadership, the Jews, though a problem, were by no means always high on their list of priorities. The Cossacks' basic grievances were aimed at the Polish authorities—particularly the nobility in the Sejm—and concerned issues of money and status. The second force with which Ukrainian Jewry had to deal was the mass of Ukrainian peasants who joined the uprising once it began to prove successful. The other forces include the Polish nobility, the townspeople, and the Tatar army. In all the chaos of the uprising, the Jews of Ukraine seem to have understood that the different groups they faced threatened their lives in two major ways: through violent attack and through capture.
{"title":"The Khmelnytsky Uprising and the Jews","authors":"A. Teller","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvr0qr68.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvr0qr68.7","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648. The Khmelnytsky uprising was not a single experience for the Jews. This was mostly because there were at least five military forces at work, each of which had a different attitude toward them. For the Cossack armies under Bogdan Khmelnytsky's leadership, the Jews, though a problem, were by no means always high on their list of priorities. The Cossacks' basic grievances were aimed at the Polish authorities—particularly the nobility in the Sejm—and concerned issues of money and status. The second force with which Ukrainian Jewry had to deal was the mass of Ukrainian peasants who joined the uprising once it began to prove successful. The other forces include the Polish nobility, the townspeople, and the Tatar army. In all the chaos of the uprising, the Jews of Ukraine seem to have understood that the different groups they faced threatened their lives in two major ways: through violent attack and through capture.","PeriodicalId":364703,"journal":{"name":"Rescue the Surviving Souls","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134293479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter explores the experience of Jewish captives in the slave market in Istanbul. Despite the best efforts of the Muslim guild merchants to exclude Jews from the slave trade, there were always plenty of opportunities for non-guild merchants, prominent among them Jews, to act as unofficial traders or to broker various deals. Jews thus remained prominent figures in the business. All this meant that when it came to ransoming the captives, there were people in the Istanbul Jewish community with a great deal of experience in buying and selling slaves. Nonetheless, it was not they who led the campaign. That role seems to have fallen to the rabbinic leadership, who took their responsibilities in the field of pidyon shevuyim very seriously. The chapter then considers the challenge of raising the money for ransoming Jewish captives.
{"title":"On the Istanbul Slave Market","authors":"A. Teller","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvr0qr68.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvr0qr68.18","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the experience of Jewish captives in the slave market in Istanbul. Despite the best efforts of the Muslim guild merchants to exclude Jews from the slave trade, there were always plenty of opportunities for non-guild merchants, prominent among them Jews, to act as unofficial traders or to broker various deals. Jews thus remained prominent figures in the business. All this meant that when it came to ransoming the captives, there were people in the Istanbul Jewish community with a great deal of experience in buying and selling slaves. Nonetheless, it was not they who led the campaign. That role seems to have fallen to the rabbinic leadership, who took their responsibilities in the field of pidyon shevuyim very seriously. The chapter then considers the challenge of raising the money for ransoming Jewish captives.","PeriodicalId":364703,"journal":{"name":"Rescue the Surviving Souls","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133069752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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