“A Jewish Drunk Is Hard to Find”: Jewish Drinking Practices and the Sobriety Stereotype in Eastern Europe

Indeed, one frequently observes in life how great and even monumental consequences are the product of minute causes. A peasant sows wheat; a miller mills some of it into flour; the rest finds its way to a distillery where it is made into vodka; a portion of both is delivered to Gittel the tavernkeeper; she adds a bit of yeast and water to the flour, kneads it, and rolls it into knishes; in her pantry, thanks to the Phoenicians, who invented the art of glassmaking thousands of years ago, are some glasses; and when the vodka is poured into them, and the hot knishes are put on platters, and these are set before a band of hungry and thirsty Jews, there is no telling what may happen . . .

S.Y. Abramowitsh, The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third

The Jews, according to the Polish noble and social reformer Antoni Ostrowski, “are always sober, and this virtue should be conceded: drunks are rare among Jews.”¹ This seemed to be the consensus among Polish elites during the nineteenth century, the era of the partitions. Only Jews, it was believed, were immune from the current epidemic of drunkenness that had depleted the Polish nation’s strength at a time when strength was most desperately needed. Even prominent Catholic clergy admonished parishioners to learn from the temperance of the country’s Jews. “Although he supports himself by dealing in drinks,” Father Karol Mikoszewski observed, referring to the Kingdom of Poland’s thousands of Jewish tavern keepers, “a Jewish drunk is hard to find.”²

It was not always meant as a compliment. According to many Polish social reformers, Jewish tavern keepers only stayed sober in order to more effectively exploit their naive peasant customers, seeing to it that they ran up their tabs and became drunk enough to swindle.³ A peasant memoirist named Jan Slomka similarly described his neighbors spending hours in taverns “making themselves at home, taking their drink: while the [Jews] got more out of them, exploiting their weaknesses.”⁴ A peasant proverb warned ominously that “the peasant drinks at the inn and the Jew does him in.”⁵ Government officials used these suspicions about Jewish sobriety to justify their efforts to penalize, restrict, and ban Jewish participation in the lucrative liquor trade.⁶

But the positive side to the stereotype probably outweighed the negative. The Polish nobles who actually owned the majority of taverns and distilleries were so convinced of Jewish sobriety that they all but refused to lease them to anyone else. Only Jews, they were conditioned to believe, could restrain themselves from drinking up the product. As a result, when the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian regimes that ruled the formerly Polish lands tried, in turn, to drive Jews out of the liquor trade, most nobles instructed their Jewish tavern keepers to prop up Christian bartenders as “fronts” and carry on business as usual. Over the course of the nineteenth century, officials and social reformers alike grumbled rather helplessly that “Jews everywhere” continually evaded Jewish-specific concessions and bans by hiring Christians to sell their liquor.⁷

From the Jewish perspective, maintaining an image of sobriety was thus critical for the continual awarding of tavern leases.⁸ In addition to this obvious economic advantage, however, the sobriety stereotype helped East European Jews sustain an internal sense of cultural superiority. No matter how marginalized or excluded, Jews could still compare themselves favorably to the daily spectacle of drunken gentile clientele presented in their taverns. Who can forget the pungent descriptions in some of the classics of Hebrew and Yiddish literature—H. N. Bialik’s father’s customers, who “sated themselves amid vomit, monstrous faces corrupted and tongues flowing with invectives” as Bialik imbibed whispered words of Torah from his father’s lips; or S. Y. Abramovitch’s “whole groups of country folk, some of them tottering on their legs, or already fallen; others keeping their feet, though by now on their fourth or fifth round,” in contrast to the “lively Jewish matron” seated...