Jews and nobles in the late Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: judaism on the edge of modernity

ENShortly before the first partition of Poland (1772), the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth was inhabited by at least 750,000 Jews - between 5.3 and 6 percent of the country’s entire population. Worth noticing is the fact that this community was the greatest Jewish grouping throughout the Diaspora. At that time, unlike in earlier days, most Jews lived on the estates of noblemen and not royalty. The percentage of Jews living on private estates was even higher, as some Jews from the kahals of royal cities were leaseholders of the monopoly on the production and sale of alcoholic beverages (propinacja) in villages of noblemen. In 1765, only 6 out of the 16 largest Jewish communities in Poland (with at least 2,000 inhabitants each) were settled in royal cities. Moshe Rosman estimated that as many as 30,000 Jews lived on the estate of only one magnate family, the Czartoryski family, (counted among the most powerful and opulent alongside the Potocki and Radziwil families) in the 18 century; this number is greater than the entire Jewish population of many a European country. Moreover, this number accounted for approximately 4 percent of the entire Jewry of contemporary Poland. [Extract, p. 79]