adherents of Eastern Orthodox denominations, and Jews. Like the Ottoman
Empire, Poland was a land with multiple religious faiths, ethnicities, lan-
guages, and even alphabets. As in the Ottoman Empire, Jews in Poland were
one of many ethnic minorities and one of several commercial minorities.
The combination of territorial expansion and ethnic diversity benefited
Polish Jews, especially in the newly conquered eastern regions. As early as in
1264, Bolesław the Pious had redefined the status of Jews as “freemen of the
chamber,” a marked improvement over the “serfs of the chamber.” In the
newly conquered regions, Jews were needed to help repopulate, stimulate
trade, and expand centers of commerce. The Polish magnates who owned and
ruled the towns and villages of eastern Poland further expanded the residen-
tial and occupational privileges of their Jewish subjects. The majority of
Polish Jews lived on the estates of one of the magnates and after 1539 were
governed entirely by these magnates.
In western Poland, Polish Jews were largely excluded from major Polish
cities by the urban privilege through which cities elsewhere in Christendom
had been able to exclude Jews: de non tolerandis Judaeis. The lone exceptions
were cities such as Kraków, where the power and influence of the royal crown
were able to set aside this privilege. Even in Kraków, though, Jewish settle-
ment came late. Until the mid-sixteenth century, Jews were allowed to live in
Kazimiersz, a royal-controlled suburb adjacent to Kraków, but not in the city
itself. More than 2,000 Jews lived there by 1578. When Kazimiersz was incor-
porated into Kraków, the Jews of Kazimiersz became residents of Kraków.
The economic and demographic opportunities of Jews in eastern Poland
expanded steadily. Elsewhere in Christian Europe, Jews had been confined to
the lowest echelons of moneylending and commerce, meaning pawnbroking
and peddling secondhand goods. In eastern Poland, as in the Ottoman Empire,
the occupational profile of Jews was broader than elsewhere in both vertical
and horizontal terms. Polish Jews traded in a wide variety of goods. More
important, two areas of the economy were open to Polish Jews that were inac-
cessible to most of their counterparts elsewhere in Christian Europe. Though
excluded from Christian guilds, Jews were allowed to organize their own
guilds. In addition, Jews were often employed by their magnate benefactor as
arrendator (estate manager). This entitled Jews, in addition to collecting taxes
for the magnate, to distill liquor and operate a tavern – a major source of
income. To be sure, Jewish guilds and estate management were no less preva-
lent in Moravia. There, as in Poland, the preeminent position of magnates
with respect to the imperial crown provided Moravian Jews with the same
added economic opportunities as Polish Jews. Hungarian Jews would attain
similar occupational advantages during the resurgence of the Hungarian mag-
nates during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The development of Jewish culture in Poland also mirrored that of
Ottoman Jewry. Like Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire, the waves of
World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750 121