Knowledge of Foreign Languages among Eighteenth-Century Polish Jews

Summary

Jews dress in the Eastern fashion. Their costume is composed of a black dress … buttoned from neck to waist, and a broad coat which resembles a monastic habit. They wear their hair short and their beards long. They wear fur-trimmed caps and always walk in slippers, although the climate requires kneeboots. This foreign nation, which grows more abundantly here than elsewhere, dresses like this across the country.

HUBERT VAUTRIN

THIS comment by Hubert Vautrin, an eighteenth-century French traveller, epitomizes the view of Polish Jews as an isolated community lost in a mixture of religious introspection and commercial development, which interacted minimally with its Polish neighbours, not to speak of more distant peoples such as the Germans or the French. Traditional interpretations of the Enlightenment as providing a sharp break with an ignorant and superstitious past strengthen the image. For Poles, the Oświecenie of poets, historians, educators, and political reformers transformed public sentiment, paving the way for the Four Year Diet (1788‒92) and the Kościuszko Insurrection (1794). For Jews the Haskalah abandoned a centuries-old preoccupation with religion and allowed them to become Euro - peans. Moses Mendelssohn's Germany became the centre of the modern Jewish world, while Poland merely provided a reservoir of uninitiated folk who needed to be educated.

This picture requires serious modification. Polish Jews were not isolated in the eighteenth century or in previous centuries. They inhabited an international society of business, medicine, politics, and scholarship. Jews published their works in Hebrew and circulated them across the European continent. Jews also took a major part in international business networks, which carried Jewish merchants to other lands with their Jewish servants and labourers. They travelled to study and practise medicine. Within Poland, Jewish occupations demanded extensive contact with the non-Jewish world, as did the political requirements of maintaining a Jewish communal identity. Jews lobbied the Polish kings, parliaments, and provincial dietines to establish, protect, and expand their residential and com - mercial rights. In the course of the century, Polish Jews developed a significant interest in secular science which foreshadowed the nineteenth-century Jewish stampede out of the ghetto.