Demographic Avant-Garde: Jews in Bohemia between the Enlightenment and the Shoah

Chapter 12. Social Status, Professional Structure, and Economic Contributions

CHAPTER 12 Social Status, Professional Structure, and Economic Contributions What did the professional structure of the Jewish population look like and how did it change over time? Why was it distinct from that of the nonJewish population? In what way was it similar to or different from the professional structure of Jewish populations in neighboring countries? These are the questions this chapter seeks to answer. Even in the modern era, the professional choices of the Jewish population were largely path-dependent and influenced by earlier historical circumstances. In the twelfth century restrictions were placed on what kinds of professions Jews could practice, and although these limitations varied over time, the basic rules remained the same. Generally Jews were not allowed to own land, and for many centuries they were permitted only to perform those occupations that Christians were prohibited from doing, such as loaning money for interest, or those occupations that did not compete directly with Christians, such as selling wares door to door and trading in used goods. Other crafts, trades, and services practiced by Jews could produce goods solely for consumption within the Jewish community. However, these circumstances gradually changed. Jews lost their monopoly on the financial business, but their trade in goods expanded. Jewish artisanal production managed to penetrate the Christian market in Bohemia from the sixteenth century, to the displeasure of guild organizations. From 1752 Bohemian Jews were able to own distilleries, butcher shops, or potash companies. It was usually difficult for Jewish craftwork to penetrate the market outside the ghetto, and although in the 1780s Joseph II authorized the sale of Jewish craftwork to gentiles, the power of the guilds prevented Jewish crafts from expanding. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did the situation begin to change, when the guilds began to lose power (they were abolished in 1859). A 146 Demographic Avant-Garde noticeable exception was textile production and manufacturing. There the guilds were already abolished by the mid-eighteenth century and Jews had equal opportunities with gentiles in this sector (Feudenberg 2003). This was because most of the Monarchy’s textile factories were lost with the loss of parts of Silesia to Prussia in the 1740s, and the state needed to replace them. As a result most of the first big Jewish manufacturers in the Habsburg Monarchy engaged in the textile industry. Thus, Jews’ professional choices depended upon what kinds of occupations they were allowed to practice by the sovereign or nobleman they lived under, or by the general population and the church. Since similar restrictive measures were applied more or less across the whole Christian Europe, the specific socioprofessional structure of the Jews became a universal characteristic of their population in most countries in Europe. In Bohemia the December Constitution of 1867 put a definitive end to the legal restrictions placed on the economic activities of the Jews by giving them full civic equality, making the Habsburg Monarchy a relatively liberal space for the free movement of goods, capital, and labor. By the second half of the nineteenth century, individual regions in the Monarchy were in the full throes of industrialization, modernization, urbanization, and economic specialization: in Hungary agriculture and the food industry surged; in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia the textile, engineering, and metallurgy industries and the mining of raw and other materials surged; and Vienna and Budapest became the centers of trade and finance in the Monarchy. Large numbers of people, including Jews, migrated out of the poorer, mostly agricultural regions to towns and industrial regions. After World War I the large, integrated market of the Habsburg Monarchy collapsed and to some degree this had a negative economic impact on all the successor states. The Bohemian lands, where most production was intended for export, lost their traditional Central European markets as adjacent states introduced protectionist policies, and had to re-orientate themselves towards markets in other parts of Europe and the world. In contrast to the macro-economic situation, the social status of Jews in Czechoslovakia after 1918 was very good, their civic rights were guaranteed, and any expression of anti-Semitism was condemned and suppressed by the state authorities.1 As a result the Jews were able to continue their economic activity uninterrupted by the creation of a new state. 1 There were anti-Semitic outbursts in the republic immediately after World War I. These public excesses did not recur later. Chapter 12. Social Status, Professional Structure, and...