<THE EAST EUROPEAN
SHTETL
In Eastern Europe, Jewish occupations remained at the end
of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century within their
former framework. The shtetl not only developed an
economic structure of its own during the first half of the
19th century under the impact of the expulsion from the
villages, and through the development of a new chain of
economic and social relations with the villages from the
shtetl centers, but also created an ecological pattern of
its own.
The shtetl economy of small shopkeepers, craftsmen,
peddlers, and peddling craftsmen established itself to
become the typical economic set-up for the majority of
Jews in the Pale of Settlement. In its midst, and at the
heart of shtetl life, was the central market place, around
which there stood the main shops and taverns for tea and
alcoholic beverages. Market day was the time of earning
and activity, when the villagers arrived to buy and sell.
For many shtetl Jews their township was actually their
home from Friday through Sunday only, since the rest of
the week they spent peddling or working as itinerant
craftsmen - cobblers, tailors, smiths - in the villages.
[Few rich Jews in the
Russian "upper class" - beginning Jewish proletariat and
extremism]
Social differentiation was much slower in developing, and
up to the 1840s only a sprinkling of Jews had entered the
newly opened free professions. A few Jews enriched
themselves in Russia as large-scale traders and bankers,
or somewhat later, as railroad-building contractors, such
as Samuel *Poliakoff or the *Guenzburg family.
[[After 1917 railroads were constructed by gulag slavery
which was much cheaper, under communist Jewish
governments...]]
By the 1880s, master
craftsmen and journeymen in the Pale together numbered
approximately half a million.
In the incipient industries, as of cloth manufacture in
*Lodz, a Jewish proletariat was beginning to emerge.>
(col. 720)
<In the East, while the typical
shtetl economy and society was developing, the social
distance was widening between the increasingly impoverished
strata of shopkeepers, peddlers, and craftsmen, and toward
the end of this period, some industrial proletariat, and the
relatively narrow group of wealthy bankers, constructors,
and large scale merchants.> (col. 721)
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