Shtetl or shtetel is a Yiddish term for the small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. The term is used in the contexts of peculiarities of former East European Jewish societies as islands within the surrounding non-Jewish populace, and bears certain socio-economic and cultural connotations. [1] Shtetls (or shtetels, shtetlach, shtetelach or shtetlekh) [2] [3] [4] were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th-century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, as well as in Congress Poland, Austrian Galicia, the Kingdom of Romania and the Kingdom of Hungary. [1]
In Yiddish, a larger city, like Lviv or Chernivtsi, is called a shtot (Yiddish : שטאָט), and a village is called a dorf (Yiddish : דאָרף). [5] Shtetl is a diminutive of shtot with the meaning 'little town'. Despite the existence of Jewish self-administration ( kehilla / kahal ), officially there were no separate Jewish municipalities, and the shtetl was referred to as a miasteczko (or mestechko, in Russian bureaucracy), a type of settlement which originated in the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and was formally recognized in the Russian Empire as well. For clarification, the expression "Jewish miasteczko" was often used. [6] [7]
The shtetl as a phenomenon of Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe was destroyed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. [8]
A shtetl is defined by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern as "an East European market town in private possession of a Polish magnate, inhabited mostly but not exclusively by Jews" and from the 1790s onward and until 1915 shtetls were also "subject to Russian bureaucracy", [7] as the Russian Empire had annexed the eastern part of Poland, and was administering the area where the settlement of Jews was permitted. The concept of shtetl culture describes the traditional way of life of East European Jews. Shtetls are portrayed[ by whom? ] as pious communities following Orthodox Judaism, socially stable and unchanging despite outside influence or attacks.
The history of the oldest Eastern European shtetls began around the 13th century [9] and saw long periods of relative tolerance and prosperity as well as times of extreme poverty and hardships, including pogroms in the 19th-century Russian Empire. According to Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog (1962): [10]
The attitudes and thought habits characteristic of the learning tradition are as evident in the street and market place as the yeshiva . The popular picture of the Jew in Eastern Europe, held by Jew and Gentile alike, is true to the Talmudic tradition. The picture includes the tendency to examine, analyze and re-analyze, to seek meanings behind meanings and for implications and secondary consequences. It includes also a dependence on deductive logic as a basis for practical conclusions and actions. In life, as in the Torah, it is assumed that everything has deeper and secondary meanings, which must be probed. All subjects have implications and ramifications. Moreover, the person who makes a statement must have a reason, and this too must be probed. Often a comment will evoke an answer to the assumed reason behind it or to the meaning believed to lie beneath it, or to the remote consequences to which it leads. The process that produces such a response—often with lightning speed—is a modest reproduction of the pilpul process.
The May Laws introduced by Tsar Alexander III of Russia in 1882 banned Jews from rural areas and towns of fewer than ten thousand people. In the 20th century, revolutions, civil wars, industrialisation and the Holocaust destroyed traditional shtetl existence.
The decline of the shtetl started from about the 1840s. Contributing factors included poverty as a result of changes in economic climate (including industrialisation which hurt the traditional Jewish artisan and the movement of trade to the larger towns), repeated fires destroying the wooden homes, and overpopulation. [11] Also, the anti-Semitism of the Russian Imperial administrators and the Polish landlords, and later, from the 1880s, pogroms, made life difficult for Jews in the shtetl. From the 1880s until 1915 up to 2 million Jews left Eastern Europe. At the time about three-quarters of its Jewish population lived in a shtetl. The Holocaust resulted in the total extermination of shtetl. [8] It was not uncommon for the entire Jewish population of a shtetl to be rounded up and murdered in a nearby forest or taken to the various concentration camps. [12] Some shtetl inhabitants did emigrate before and after the Holocaust, mostly to the United States, where some of the traditions were carried on. But, the shtetl as a phenomenon of Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe was eradicated by the Nazis. [8]
In the later part of the 20th century, Hasidic Jews founded new communities in the United States, such as Kiryas Joel and New Square, and they often use the term "shtetl" to refer to these enclaves in Yiddish, particularly those with village structures. [13]
In Europe, the Orthodox community in Antwerp, Belgium, is widely described as the last shtetl, composed of about 12,000 people. [14] [15]
Brno, Czech Republic, has a significant Jewish history and Yiddish words are part of the now dying-out Hantec slang. The word "štetl" (pronounced shtetl) refers to Brno itself.
Qırmızı Qəsəbə, in Azerbaijan, thought to be the only 100% Jewish community not in Israel or the United States, has been described as a shtetl. [16] [17]
Not only did the Jews of the shtetls speak Yiddish, a language rarely spoken by outsiders, but they also had a unique rhetorical style, rooted in traditions of Talmudic learning: [10]
In keeping with his own conception of contradictory reality, the man of the shtetl is noted both for volubility and for laconic, allusive speech. Both pictures are true, and both are characteristic of the yeshiva as well as the market places. When the scholar converses with his intellectual peers, incomplete sentences, a hint, a gesture, may replace a whole paragraph. The listener is expected to understand the full meaning on the basis of a word or even a sound... Such a conversation, prolonged and animated, may be as incomprehensible to the uninitiated as if the excited discussants were talking in tongues. The same verbal economy may be found in domestic or business circles.
Shtetls provided a strong sense of community due to Jews carrying faith in God. The shtetl "at its heart, it was a community of faith built upon a deeply rooted religious culture". [18] A Jewish education was most paramount in shtetls. Men and boys would spend up to 10 hours a day dedicated to studying at a yeshiva. Discouraged from extensive study, women would perform the necessary tasks of a household. In addition, shtetls offered communal institutions such as synagogues, ritual baths and ritual butchers.
Tzedakah (charity) is a key element of Jewish culture, both secular and religious, to this day. Tzedakah was essential for shtetl Jews, many of whom lived in poverty. Acts of philanthropy aided social institutions such as schools and orphanages. Jews viewed giving charity as an opportunity to do a good deed ( chesed ). [18]
This approach to good deeds finds its roots in Jewish religious views, summarized in Pirkei Avot by Shimon Hatzaddik's "three pillars": [19]
On three things the world stands. On Torah, On service [of God], And on acts of human kindness.
Material things were neither disdained nor extremely praised in the shtetl. Learning and education were the ultimate measures of worth in the eyes of the community, while money was secondary to status. Menial labor was generally looked down upon as prost, or prole. Even the poorer classes in the shtetl tended to work in jobs that required the use of skills, such as shoe-making or tailoring of clothes. The shtetl had a consistent work ethic which valued hard work and frowned upon laziness. Studying, of course, was considered the most valuable and hardest work of all. Learned yeshiva men who did not provide bread and relied on their wives for money were not frowned upon but praised as ideal Jews.
There is a belief found in historical and literary writings that the shtetl disintegrated before it was destroyed during World War II; however, Joshua Rosenberg of the Institute of East-European Jewish Affairs at Brandeis University argued that this alleged cultural break-up is never clearly defined. He argued that the whole Jewish life in Eastern Europe, not only in shtetls, "was in a state of permanent crisis, both political and economic, of social uncertainty and cultural conflicts". Rosenberg outlines a number of reasons for the image of "disintegrating shtetl'" and other kinds of stereotyping. For one, it was an "anti-shtetl" propaganda of the Zionist movement. Yiddish and Hebrew literature can only to a degree be considered to represent the complete reality. It mostly focused on the elements that attract attention, rather than on an "average Jew". Also, in successful America, memories of shtetl, in addition to sufferings, were colored with nostalgia and sentimentalism. [20]
Chełm figures prominently in the Jewish humor as the legendary town of fools: the Wise Men of Chelm.
Kasrilevke, the setting of many of Sholem Aleichem's stories, and Anatevka, the setting of the musical Fiddler on the Roof (based on other stories of Sholem Aleichem), are other notable fictional shtetls.
Devorah Baron made aliyah to Ottoman Palestine in 1910, after a pogrom destroyed her shtetl near Minsk. But she continued writing about shtetl life long after she had arrived in Palestine.
Many of Joseph Roth's books are based on shtetls on the Eastern fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and most notably on his hometown Brody.
Many of Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories and novels are set in shtetls. Singer's mother was the daughter of the rabbi of Biłgoraj, a town in south-eastern Poland. As a child, Singer lived in Biłgoraj for periods with his family, and he wrote that life in the small town made a deep impression on him.
The 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated , by Jonathan Safran Foer, tells a fictional story set in the Ukrainian shtetl Trachimbrod (Trochenbrod).
The 1992 children's book Something from Nothing, written and illustrated by Phoebe Gilman, is an adaptation of a traditional Jewish folk tale set in a fictional shtetl.
In 1996 the Frontline programme "Shtetl" broadcast; it was about Polish Christian and Jewish relations. [21]
Harry Turtledove's 2011 short story "Shtetl Days", [22] begins in a typical shtetl reminiscent of the works of Aleichem, Roth, et al., but soon reveals a plot twist which subverts the genre.
The award-winning 2014 novel The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk features many shtetl communities across the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. [23]
Many Jewish artists in Eastern Europe dedicated much of their artistic careers to depictions of the shtetl. These include Marc Chagall, Chaim Goldberg, and Mané-Katz. Their contribution is in making a permanent record in color of the life that is described in literature—the klezmers, the weddings, the marketplaces and the religious aspects of the culture.
Yiddish is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originates from 9th century Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages. Yiddish has traditionally been written using the Hebrew alphabet; however, there are variations, including the standardized YIVO orthography that employs the Latin alphabet.
Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, better known under his pen name Sholem Aleichem, was a Yiddish author and playwright who lived in the Russian Empire and in the United States. The 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof, based on Aleichem's stories about Tevye the Dairyman, was the first commercially successful English-language stage production about Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
The Pale of Settlement was a western region of the Russian Empire with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917 in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary, was mostly forbidden. Most Jews were still excluded from residency in a number of cities within the Pale as well. A few Jews were allowed to live outside the area, including those with university education, the ennobled, members of the most affluent of the merchant guilds and particular artisans, some military personnel and some services associated with them, including their families, and sometimes their servants. The archaic English term pale is derived from the Latin word palus, a stake, extended to mean the area enclosed by a fence or boundary.
Otwock is a city in the Masovian Voivodship in east-central Poland, some 23 kilometres (14 mi) southeast of Warsaw, with 44,635 inhabitants (2019). Otwock is a part of the Warsaw metropolitan area. It is situated on the right bank of Vistula River below the mouth of Świder River. Otwock is home to a unique architectural style called Świdermajer.
Chełm is a city in southeastern Poland with 60,231 inhabitants as of December 2021. It is located to the south-east of Lublin, north of Zamość and south of Biała Podlaska, some 25 kilometres from the border with Ukraine. Chełm used to be the capital of the Chełm Voivodeship until it became part of the Lublin Voivodeship in 1999.
Munkatch Hasidism is a Hasidic sect within Haredi Judaism of mostly Hungarian Hasidic Jews. It was founded and led by Polish-born Grand Rebbe Shlomo Spira, who was the rabbi of the town of Strzyżów (1858–1882) and Munkacs (1882–1893). Members of the congregation are mainly referred to as Munkacs Hasidim, or Munkatcher Hasidim. It is named after the Hungarian town in which it was established, Munkatsh.
Nadvirna, also referred to as Nadwirna or Nadvorna is a city located in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast in western Ukraine. It is the administrative centre of Nadvirna Raion. Nadvirna hosts the administration of Nadvirna urban hromada, one of the hromadas of Ukraine. Population: 22,504.
Berdychiv is a historic city in Zhytomyr Oblast, northern Ukraine. It serves as the administrative center of Berdychiv Raion within the oblast. It is 44 km (27 mi) south of the administrative center of the oblast, Zhytomyr. Its population is approximately 73,046.
Galician Jews or Galitzianers are members of the subgroup of Ashkenazi Jews originating and developed in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and Bukovina from contemporary western Ukraine and from south-eastern Poland. Galicia proper, which was inhabited by Ruthenians, Poles and Jews, became a royal province within Austria-Hungary after the Partitions of Poland in the late 18th century. Galician Jews primarily spoke Yiddish.
Bobowa is a small town in Gorlice County, southern Poland. Administratively part of the Lesser Polish Voivodeship, it is situated 18 kilometres west of Gorlice and 83 km (52 mi) south-east of the regional capital Kraków. It was formerly a village, but was granted town status on 1 January 2009. Bobowa is also located on a railway line running from Tarnów to the border with Slovakia at Leluchów. As of December 2021, the town has a population of 3,101.
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is an American historian, philologist and essayist, noted in particular for his studies of the institution of Cantonism, his critique of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's controversial two volume-work about Jews in Russia, Two Hundred Years Together, as well as translations of Jorge Luis Borges' works into Russian. He is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in History Department at Northwestern University where he teaches Early Modern, Modern and East European Jewish history.
A Yiddish World Remembered is a 2002 Emmy-award-winning documentary by Andrew Goldberg that uses archival photographs, never-before-seen archival videos, and survivor testimony to reconstruct the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, which were destroyed by the Holocaust. Oscar nominated actor Elliott Gould narrates.
A miasteczko (Polish:[mjaˈstɛtʂkɔ] or miestelis, was a historical type of urban settlement similar to a market town in the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the partitions of Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the 18th-century, these settlements became widespread in the Austrian, German and Russian Empires. The vast majority of miasteczkos had significant or even predominant Jewish populations; these are known in English under the Yiddish term shtetl. Miasteczkos had a special administrative status other than that of town or city.
The Virtual Shtetl is a bilingual Polish-English portal of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, devoted to the Jewish history of Poland.
The expression 'Eastern European Jewry' has two meanings. Its first meaning refers to the current political spheres of the Eastern European countries and its second meaning refers to the Jewish communities in Russia and Poland. The phrase 'Eastern European Jews' or 'Jews of the East' was established during the 20th century in the German Empire and in the western provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, aiming to distinguish the integrating Jews in Central Europe from those Jews who lived in the East. This feature deals with the second meaning of the concept of Eastern European Jewry- the Jewish groups that lived in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Russia, Romania, Hungary and modern-day Moldova in collective settlement. Many of whom spoke Yiddish.
Jacob Dinezon, also known as Yankev Dinezon, was a Yiddish author and editor from Lithuania. There are various spellings of Dinezon's name in both Yiddish and English transliteration. Early in his career, Yiddish publications spelled his name דינעזאהן (Dinezohn). Later publications removed the ה and spelled his name דינעזאן or דינעזאָן (Dinezon). In English, his name has been spelled Dienesohn, Dinesen, Dineson, Dinezon, Dinesohn, Dineszohn, Dinezohn, Dynesohn, and Dynezon.
This article presents the timeline of selected events concerning the history of the Jews in Lithuania and Belarus from the fourteenth century when the region was ruled by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
The Wise Men of Chelm are dumb Jewish residents of the Polish city of Chełm, a butt of Jewish jokes, similar to other towns of fools: the English Wise Men of Gotham, German Schildbürger, Greek residents of Abdera, or Finnish residents of the fictional town of Hymylä. Since at least 14th century Chełm had a considerable population of Jews.
Kasrilevka or Kasrilevke is a fictional shtetl introduced by Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem. Located "exactly in the middle of that blessed Pale", it is an idealized town of "little Jews", who met their misfortunes with humor and the ultimate belief in justice. It has become an archetype shtetl. Other famous imaginary places of Sholem Aleichem are Yehupetz and Boiberik.