Legal Fictions: The Survival of Rural Jewish Tavernkeeping in the Kingdom of Poland

By the end of the eighteenth century, Jews constituted the majority of tavernkeepers in Poland-Lithuania, leasing taverns and distilleries from the nobility. According to most historians, Polish Jews were driven out of the liquor trade over the course of the next century. Yet nineteenth-century archival sources provide evidence of continued Jewish tavernkeeping, both open and surreptitious, in the Congress Kingdom of Poland. Although Jewish tavernkeeping was vigorously opposed by powerful groups in Polish society, one crucial group continued to provide them with cover: the very Christians they were accused of victimizing. The involvement of Jews in this sector of the Polish economy during the nineteenth century points to the endurance of feudal economic relations throughout much of this period of industrialization and modernization.