Given the devastating demographic consequences of the Thirty Years’ War for Central European populations, 1648 is often considered a major turning point towards intense state formation, mercantilist economic programs, and planned population growth. Jewish history is integrated into this broader historical narrative mostly through the figure of the court Jew, Jewish men and women in high courtly positions who paved the way for more tolerable living conditions for their communities. Interdependence between noble aspirations and successful Jewish economic networking is said to have created unprecedented chances for Jewish individuals to integrate into European societies, at first economically and then, with the dawn of Enlightenment, increasingly socially and culturally, which ultimately led to their emancipation and/or assimilation.
Adam Teller challenges and reframes this success story twofold by decentering the focus of European Jewish history eastwards and by shifting it from individual to communal networks. His study ties into a growing body of literature that questions the idea of a uniform Jewish path of progress after 1648 towards modernity and emancipation. Central European Jewish history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so Teller argues, cannot be properly understood without examining the major communal consequences, financial drain, and migratory effects that the East European wars (the Cossack uprising of 1648 and the Northern Wars of 1654–1670) had on the interconnected Jewish populations of Europe and the Ottoman Empire. For all of them, war was not over in 1648, and neither was one of its major challenges: refugee management. The aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, Teller maintains, was not a turning point in Jewish history but a defining moment that consolidated European Jewish economic, communication, and philanthropic networks, and accelerated the formation of transregional Jewish communal identities for decades if not centuries to come.
Since the West European expulsions of the late medieval/early Renaissance period, East European Jews made up the overwhelming majority of European Jews. They remained culturally and economically connected to western European Jewish centers through rabbinic, philanthropic, and trade networks forming a diverse but shared Jewish ethnic identity (Ashkenazim). Following the expulsion of Iberian Jews in the late fifteenth century, the diaspora communities in the Mediterranean (Sephardim), who were largely under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, developed parallel networks that presumably intersected with Ashkenazi networks. One major way, as Teller shows for the first time, was through the rescue efforts and philanthropic support for thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland-Lithuania. He argues that “the need for concerted action on behalf of Polish Jews strengthened the ties . . . and significantly increased the range of intercommunal cooperation” between Ashkenazi and Sephardi centers while bringing them maybe for “the first time into purposeful contact with each other” (3, 4). While Teller is cautious with numbers, he estimates that at least 30,000 Polish Jews were displaced and had to rely on the support and collaboration of Jewish networks like never before.
Teller centers his study around three refugee migration routes: internal migration within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (part I of the book), eastwards through the East European slave trade to the Ottoman Empire (part II), and westwards into the Austrian hereditary lands, the Holy Roman Empire, and the United Provinces of the Netherlands (part III). Throughout his study, the author relies heavily on first-hand accounts from literary, autobiographic, travelogue, and epistolary primary sources. This choice serves well his intention to personalize the refugee experiences, to show the diversity of refugee populations’ experiences, and to shift the attention towards the coping and relief strategies that refugees found amidst their difficult journeys. It most certainly increases the book's readability and makes the suffering, trauma, but also the agency of Jewish refugees more accessible to the reader. This is an approach that one would hope will be a model for future refugee studies of the past and present.
The unsung heroes of Teller's book appear in part II. Here Teller reconstructs the horrific march on foot of Polish captives to the Crimean shores, from where they were shipped to the slave markets of the Ottoman Empire. Unlike most other enslaved East Europeans, Polish Jewish captives had reason for hope: they often were ransomed by local Sephardi communities in Istanbul, who drew on their experience with pirate ransom in the Mediterranean. It can be considered a major contribution of Teller's book to uncover this testimony of generosity and solidarity between the two ethnic minority groups. Too many historians have considered them mostly oblivious if not antagonistic towards each other's fates, overlooking these important interactions that helped create a transregional and transethnic sense of Jewish belonging.
Teller follows several professional emissaries who were sent from Istanbul throughout the European mainland to raise funds for ransoms, elegantly providing the reader with a topography of charity networks through their travel itinerary. Almost always the emissaries' way led through northern Italy, where Venice was the major clearing center. From there, they continued through the urban centers of the Holy Roman Empire, eastern France, up to Amsterdam. Throughout parts I and III of this book, Teller adds nuance and detail to the refugee migration to the West, for which we have better source transmission. He argues that Polish Jewish refugees received a rather harsh welcome and little support in traditional Ashkenazi communities like Frankfurt, in comparison to centers with mixed Jewish populations like Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Vienna. While Teller sees the causes for this in the “narcissism of small differences” à la Freud, there would be more to argue for the precarious and micromanaged Christian surroundings in which Ashkenazi urban communities lived. In combination with their ongoing welfare efforts for the masses of local vagrant poor, it left them little room to maneuver. What Teller convincingly argues, though, is that the Polish refugee crisis created a pattern of difficult reception of East European Jewish refugees in the West that would repeat itself in future centuries and set in motion a process of stigmatization and Othering of East European Jews in the Ashkenazi world.
Teller's book is recommended reading for Central European historians who might not have been aware of the profound Jewish refugee crisis that unfolded and was successfully overcome by concerted Jewish efforts throughout Europe and the Mediterranean in the seventeenth century. The parallels that can be drawn to other forced ethnic refugee migrations, to trauma-coping practices within refugee communities, and to the need for philanthropic collaboration through transregional communal infrastructures could not be timelier for our understanding of the continuities of the seventeenth century as well as our own time.
