Glenn Dynner,Yankel’s Tavern: Jews,Liquor,and Life in the Kingdom of Poland

Reviewed by: Kevin Goldberg, Kennesaw State University, USA

Glenn Dynner’s Yankel’s Tavern surpasses his own 2010 article as the best English-language work on the subject of Jewish tavernkeeping in nineteenth-century Poland. With the goal of moving beyond the so-called ‘secularization narrative’ that continues to dominate the historiography of European Jewry, Dynner tells of Jews that are numerous, uneducated, oftentimes steadfast in their Judaism, yet are not without agency. Dynner privileges commercial interaction between Jews and non-Jews over the tired narratives of integration and acculturation. The payoff for the reader is the emergence of a new way to conceive of Jewish life in rural and urban Poland.

Dynner succinctly but strongly dismisses previous interpretations of the Jewish tavernkeeper as weak, monolithic across time and space, and as dwindling in importance during the course of the nineteenth century. Instead, Jews managed to maintain and even strengthen their hold on leasing taverns, especially in towns and cities. The lord–Jew alliance that has been hitherto employed as the sole lens through which to analyse tavernkeeping is too simplistic to account for the remarkably interactive dynamic comprising noble reformers and traditionalists, government officials, Christian clergy, Christian peasants, Russian operatives, Jewish integrationists, conservative Jewish religious leaders, and, finally, Jewish tavernkeepers and their families. Dynner’s ability to work within this kind of complex environment is impressive.

Despite Dynner’s contrarian approach, he does engage with many themes familiar to historians of East European Jewry. Discrimination, fears of Jewish pollution and Jewish commercial resourcefulness in the face of imminent destitution all have their place here. Dynner stresses that the allure of financial and social profit for both Jews and non-Jews fostered a kind of interethnic symbiosis against the opponents of Jewish tavernkeepers. Methods once used to circumvent intra-Jewish ritual constraints, such as the employment of a non-Jewish ‘frontman’ during the Sabbath, were later used to resist attempts by the state to squeeze out Jewish tavernkeepers. Even the 1844 ban on Jewish tavernkeeping in the countryside, brought about by the somewhat confused cameralist intentions of the Tsarist Congress Kingdom of Poland, proved ineffective in the long run against the swelling tide of Jewish and Christian resistance (Dynner’s employment of these confessional labels in place of socio-economic categories unfortunately blunts the monetarily-driven realities on the ground).

The historical trajectory of Jewish tavernkeepers was framed by the larger political developments around them. The partition of Poland, the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw and the subsequent Congress Kingdom, and the tensions of 1830–31 and 1863 were only the most impactful of these events. Although Dynner downplays the traditional historiographic focus on Jewish urbanization after 1850, the illegality of rural Jewish tavernkeeping after 1844 nevertheless did help set the stage for the rise of urban concessions (legal privileges for owning or running a tavern) for Jews in the following decades. Faced with new challenges, including residential restrictions and more onerous police surveillance, Jewish tavernkeepers once again found ways to survive and in some cases thrive. By deploying a newfound civic-minded reasoning based on emergent discourses of the common good, Jews in Warsaw, Opatów and Chelm (and elsewhere) had courageously appealed to the state in order to lessen discriminatory burdens.

Dynner targets another long-held stereotype. Many historians (not to mention strident ethno-nationalists) have suggested that Jewish tavernkeepers were Muscovite spies or opportunists at-large, always ready to trade secrets for socio-economic privileges. Dynner uncovers a far different story for the period between the 1830 and 1863 uprisings, and even describes a surprising ‘Hasidic polonophilia’ (109) in addition to the support offered by acculturated Jewish tavernkeepers to the Polish national cause. While Jewish criminality certainly looms large in the Polish imagination, Dynner’s archival work reveals that the black-market system was not disproportionately Jewish, nor was it absolutely criminal. And the overwhelming anecdotal evidence against Jewish tavernkeepers for peacetime espionage is hardly borne out in the archive. Dynner convincingly argues for ethnic heterogeneity in the world of smuggling and spying, two (un)patriotic traits often associated with Jewish tavernkeepers.

The final pages of the book interweave (somewhat hurriedly) government directives against drunkenness, peasant strains in the wake of emancipation, the worries of recalcitrant noblemen, and the anxieties of Jewish tavernkeepers. With the help of a remarkable trove of untapped letters written to the miracle-working Rabbi Elijah Guttmacher of Grätz (Prussian partition) during the 1870s, Dynner reveals the inner workings of the tavernkeepers’ world. Amongst the concerns expressed by tavernkeepers in their hundreds of letters to Guttmacher was how to deal with difficult noble lords, worries about profaning the Sabbath, new competition in the liquor trades, unfavourable leases, difficulties in collecting ‘debts among the gentiles’ and the strengthening temperance movement. At the same time, the state’s fears about drunkenness and alleged Jewish perniciousness gave rise to attempts at pushing back Jewish tavernkeeping by opening up – however unsuccessfully – agriculture, the military, and the university to Poland’s Jews.

Dynner’s short monograph is a remarkable achievement. The book is one of those rare academic accomplishments: persuasive yet concise. The frequent turn to literary references makes sense given Dynner’s own elegant, almost effortless prose. There are protagonists and antagonists, evocative settings and fits of sentimentality (intended or not). Any historian of East European Jewry will find much to feast on inside Yankel’s tavern.