shtetl

shtetl, Yiddish term referring to small towns in eastern Europe before World War II that had significant Yiddish-speaking Jewish populations. There were many kinds of shtetls, depending on their geographic and political context, but all were characterized by having a concentrated and close-knit Jewish settlement. Shtetls existed across areas that are now the countries of Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania, and southern Latvia. These unique settlements functioned as significant Jewish population centers in eastern Europe from roughly the 16th century until the mid-20th century, when the Jewish communities that sustained them were destroyed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators in the Holocaust. However, the shtetl lived on in Jewish imagination and mythology in the postwar era as a symbol of nostalgia and Jewish identity.

History and legal status

Shtetls had no specific legal or official political designation, apart from any other city or town, and the term did not appear in the legal codes of any of the states that contained them. They varied in size and might be a village, town, settlement, or city in legal documents. However, among Yiddish speakers a shtetl was considered larger than a smaller town (shtetele, a double diminutive), a village (dorf), or a rural village (yishev). The shtetl was contrasted with the much larger city (shtot).

Jews began immigrating to Polish lands in the 13th century as they fled antisemitic persecution and massacres during the Crusades. They came to Poland from Germany, Bohemia, Austria, Italy, and Seljuq Turkey. Prince Bolesław V of Great Poland granted the Jews the Kalisz Privilege (1264), which provided personal freedom, some legal autonomy, and safeguards against forcible baptism. From the 16th century, and especially after the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569), Polish nobility recruited Jews to function as managers of their estates and to develop trading routes. Nobles created new market towns, often on uninhabited land that they wished to develop as new centers of economic activity, and many Jews moved to these towns from older settlements within the Polish-Lithuanian region, as well as from other parts of Central Europe. These newly created towns on private land were one of the main origins of the shtetls. In the 17th century Poland suffered from political turmoil—particularly the Cossack uprising of 1648 and Swedish invasion (see History of Poland)—and in the aftermath Polish nobility again sought assistance from Jews to restart the economy and created more market towns, which contributed to further growth and expansion of the Polish Jewish population in shtetls.

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By the 18th century estimates suggest that roughly four-fifths of the Jewish population worldwide resided in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Within that region, although Jews comprised less than one-tenth of the population, they made up roughly half of the population in shtetls. With the Partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, many shtetls came under Russian, Prussian, and Austrian rule. In the Russian Empire many of the shtetls in formerly Polish-Lithuanian lands became part of the Pale of Settlement, a vast territory of the Russian Empire in which Jews could legally reside.

In 1897, according to a census of the Russian Empire, about one-third of the Pale of Settlement’s nearly five million Jews lived in small towns (Russian: mestechko), which were largely equivalent to shtetls, although the data is somewhat unclear because shtetls were not an official category. Among these small towns recorded in the Russian census, 462 had Jewish majorities and 116 had more than 80 percent Jewish residents.

Based on this data from 1897, it is clear that the shtetl was not a monoculture: Jews lived alongside non-Jewish neighbors, and shtetls had prominent synagogues as well as churches in the central market square. Nor were shtetls the only place where Jews lived in the region. Significant populations lived in major cities across eastern Europe, such as Warsaw, Odessa, Łódź, Vilna (Vilnius), Kishinev (Chișinău), Minsk, and Białystok. The shtetl was a key element of Jewish experience, but it was neither wholly Jewish nor was Jewish life wholly confined to the shtetl.

The murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust effectively eliminated the shtetls, but their decline began earlier. Pogroms—mob attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—resulted in mass deaths and displacement. Increasing urbanization in the early 20th century shifted the weight of Jewish life and identity. By 1939 in Poland, for example, about one-quarter of the country’s Jews lived in five of its largest cities, although about two-fifths still dwelled in small towns. Many Jews, as they were able, emigrated around the world, settling in places such as the United States, Canada, Argentina, South Africa, and Australia. Others, influenced by the growth of Zionism, moved to Palestine. Between 1870 and 1924, more than 2.7 million Jews left eastern Europe’s cities, villages, and shtetls.

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Life in the shtetl

Although shtetls came in various shapes and sizes, they were generally big enough to support the institutions of Jewish communal life, including a synagogue, cemetery, ritual bath, and school. Yet most shtetl communities were also small enough for everyone to know each other by name. Typically hemmed in by surrounding land held by non-Jews, the shtetl often could not expand its physical boundaries and was therefore densely populated by necessity. Most buildings were made of wood, although the wealthiest families might live in brick buildings. There were no building codes, and fires were a common occurrence—and a common theme in Yiddish storytelling.

Economically, Jews in shtetls held a wider variety of occupations than elsewhere in the Jewish Diaspora, where Jews were typically restricted to a few professions. In shtetls Jews might work as shopkeepers, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, carters, or contractors, among other jobs, which bolstered the cultural and economic development of the shtetl. At the same time, the variety of occupations created income inequality and contributed to social division and class conflict among the shtetl’s residents. Shtetls relied on social organizations called khevres (associations) that functioned as mutual aid societies to help with funding for burials, dowries, and Jewish holiday expenses. Shtetl life was also defined by the presence of the market and the activities of market day; as market towns, shtetls formed an important link between cities and the countryside.

Mythology of the shtetl

Although the shtetl as a lived reality of Jewish life ceased to exist after the Holocaust, it took on a new life in literature and diaspora mythology. The transition to myth began while shtetls still existed in the works of literary figures of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala) who turned real experience in the shtetl into a trope through which to probe questions of Jewish modernity and assimilation. Chroniclers of the shtetl in Yiddish literature, such as Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) and Mendele Moykher Sforim (1835–1917), constructed fictional depictions of the shtetl. In their narratives they attempted to reckon with the tensions between Jewish tradition and Western modernity, as well as the drama of maintaining community cohesion in light of pressures to adopt Western European cultural norms and the progressive ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment.

The mythology of the shtetl was later reinvigorated by American Jews in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust as they wrestled with assimilation and identity formation. The shtetl became a concept imbued with nostalgia and remembered as a warm, intimate community, conjured absent of the poverty, pogroms, and fear that were an undeniable reality of shtetl life. A number of works of historiography, anthropology, and literature in the post-World War II era promulgated this myth in the Jewish American imagination. Particularly influential was the 1952 cultural study Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl, by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, which became a popular source for this mythologized and idealized image of the shtetl. It was also a source text for Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist for Fiddler on the Roof (1964)—the story for the musical was based on Sholem Aleichem’s short stories set in shtetls. The portrayal of the shtetl in that award-winning musical and its film adaptation (1971) had a tremendous cultural impact on American Jewish imagination and identity. American writer Ruth Gay described this mythologized shtetl in her article “Inventing the Shtetl,” published in The American Scholar in 1984:

It does not seem in our age as if we need to be reminded of any more Jewish horrors, yet the shtetls of the Pale have suddenly become the envied habitations of shoemaker philosophers; its controversial Chasidic rabbis are all transcendent seers; its women range only from fishwives (with hearts of gold) to virginal maidens (with characters of steel); and everyone speaks in language pithy and unendingly amusing. Along with a lot of simple self-gratification, this panoramic vision contains a lot of condescension.

Since the shtetl was more or less entirely wiped out by the Holocaust, it was easier to collapse the nuance and diversity of shtetl life into idyllic visions of prewar European Jewish communal life. Some scholars have pointed out the difficulty of ascertaining the historical realities of the shtetl and separating them from the accumulated layers of nostalgia and literary creation. Historian Yohanan Petro­vsky-Shtern, in The Gold­en Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe (2014), contends that the historical realities of the shtetl are opaque, in part because they have been obscured by the dust of collective recollections:

After all, “shtetl” as a word is nothing but a cultural artifact, a caprice of collective memory. It signifies a vanished Jewish Atlantis, a yearning for a distant and utopian national culture and for the redeeming traditional values of East European Jerusalem, that “holy community” that we tend to strip of corporeality and then sugarcoat its imaginary residue.