Yes, Hardy, you are coming straight to the point and Chaim Zhitlowsky stated as early as 1892:
"This is a picture of the streets, but it is not difficult to guess what kind of image of filth and poverty he would have drawn for us had he looked inside the ‚wretched, dirty, stinking hovels.‘ Platter’s book was published fifteen years ago, in 1878, and perhaps the people of Czernowitz have become better dressed and more fashionable since then, out of concern that such ‚jolly landscapes‘ not offened the sensibilities of enlightened Western Europeans. [...] The existence of poverty among the Jewish masses provides sufficient evidence that emancipation opened up very few new opportunities for them. The fact is that the life of the masses has remained as it was before. The basic mode of economic existence for the overwhelming majority - the petit- and middle-trader, moneychanger, business agent, tavernkeeper, craftsman, mechanic, teacher, butcher, and spiritual proletarian - is that in the morning they have no idea how they will satisfy the hunger of their large families that night. How do the upper 10,000 employ themselves, then?"
Starting from Julius Platter's "Usury in Bukovina", Chaim Zhitlowsky's tractates „A Jew to Jews“ and „Why Only Yiddish?“ are most enlightening:
http://goo.gl/x1vKMo
It differs somehow from the official historical scholarship, which reads as follows: "Jews from the neighboring provinces streamed in Bukovina where, after Joseph II’s Patent of Toleration, they could develop their cultural life unmolested. All brought with them their religious customs, music, language and traditions. In this miniature replica of the Austrian Empire, German, as the language of administration and of army command, became the lingua franca of the market-place, the theatre, the press and the schools."
That's not wrong at all, but it held true mainly for those Jews, who could afford it.
Edgar Hauster
----------------------------------------
From: hardy3_at_bezeqint.net
To: bconcept_at_hotmail.com; czernowitz-l_at_cornell.edu
CC: sasha_at_raltron.com
Subject: תשובה: [Cz-L] Book of the Month, April 2015: Usury in Bukovina
Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2015 15:05:11 +0300
Elementary reading for all those who believe
that Czernowitz was a Shangri-la of the Jews
of the East - .
It was not.
Hardy
-----הודעה מקורית-----
מאת: bounce-119011644-3499476_at_list.cornell.edu [mailto:bounce-119011644-3499476_at_list.cornell.edu] בשם Edgar Hauster
נשלח: Sunday, April 05, 2015 12:04 PM
אל: Czernowitz Discussion Group
עותק: Sasha Wolloch
נושא: [Cz-L] Book of the Month, April 2015: Usury in Bukovina
Czernowitzers...
It was our fellow member Sasha Wolloch, who drew my attention to Dr. Julius Platter's book "Der Wucher in der Bukowina" [Usury in Bukovina], now available as Book of the Month, April 2015, at our Czernowitz Book Corner:
http://czernowitzbook.blogspot.de/2015/04/der-wucher-in-der-bukowina-usury-in.html
Dr. Julius Platter (1844-1923), a prominent economist, lectured statistics in Czernowitz (1877-1879) and economics in Zürich (1879-1921). No doubt about, his book is also an anti-Semitic tractate, ascribing "Usury in Bukovina" solely to the Jews, but nevertheless it's an most interesting and important contemporary document. His snapshots from Czernowitz, see p. 39 et seqq., such as
"The ideal filthy, ragged man, whose image can be conjured by the average Western European only in his wildest fantasies, really exists here and is visible at every step. You see pants made from twenty or thirty different scraps of material but that still consist mainly of holes; you see frock coats that lack the entire back side and whose owners, unfortunately, are wearing neither waistcoats nor undershirts. I saw completely naked little girls between four and six years of age playing with half-naked boys in the dust of the capital’s streets. But the main fashion one sees are large hordes of men in kaftans, and the sight of these garments alone can ruin even the heartiest appetite."
motivated Chaim Zhitlowsky, the Jewish socialist, phliosopher and vice-president of the Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference of 1908, to try to get to the bottom of Julius Platter's theories.
Enjoy Julius Platter's original text - in German - as well as excerpts out of Chaim Zhitlowsky's tractate "A Jew to Jews" - in English - at our a. m. post!
Edgar Hauster
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Received on 2015-04-05 16:54:28