A shtetl or shtetel (; (singular); , romanized: (plural); Polish: (singular), (plural); diminutive of , derived from German ) is a Yiddish term for the small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. The term is used in the contexts of peculiarities of former East European Jewish societies as islands within the surrounding non-Jewish populace, and bears certain socio-economic and cultural connotations. Shtetls (or shtetels, shtetlach, shtetelach or shtetlekh) were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th-century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire as well as in Congress Poland, Austrian Galicia, the Kingdom of Romania and the Kingdom of Hungary.
In Yiddish, a larger city, like Lviv or Chernivtsi, is called a (), and a village is called a (). is a diminutive of with the meaning "little town". Despite the existence of Jewish self-administration (/), officially there were no separate Jewish municipalities, and the shtetl was referred to as a (or , in Russian bureaucracy), a type of settlement which originated in the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and was formally recognized in the Russian Empire as well. For clarification, the expression "Jewish " was often used.
The shtetl as a phenomenon of Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe was destroyed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Overview
A shtetl is defined by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern as "an East European market town in private possession of a Polish magnate, inhabited mostly but not exclusively by Jews" and from the 1790s onward and until 1915 shtetls were also "subject to Russian bureaucracy", as the Russian Empire had annexed the eastern part of Poland, and was administering the area where the settlement of Jews was permitted. The concept of shtetl culture describes the traditional way of life of East European Jews. Shtetls are portrayed as pious communities following Orthodox Judaism, socially stable and unchanging despite outside influence or attacks.
History
The history of the oldest Eastern European shtetls began around the 13th century and saw long periods of relative tolerance and prosperity as well as times of extreme poverty and hardships, including pogroms in the 19th-century Russian Empire.
The attitudes and thought habits characteristic of the learning tradition are as evident in the street and market place as the yeshiva. The popular picture of the Jew in Eastern Europe, held by Jew and Gentile alike, is true to the Talmudic tradition. The picture includes the tendency to examine, analyze and re-analyze, to seek meanings behind meanings and for implications and secondary consequences. It includes also a dependence on deductive logic as a basis for practical conclusions and actions.
In life, as in the Torah, it is assumed that everything has deeper and secondary meanings, which must be probed. All subjects have implications and ramifications. Moreover, the person who makes a statement must have a reason, and this too must be probed. Often a comment will evoke an answer to the assumed reason behind it or to the meaning believed to lie beneath it, or to the remote consequences to which it leads. The process that produces such a response—often with lightning speed—is a modest reproduction of the pilpul process.
The May Laws introduced by Tsar Alexander III of Russia in 1882 banned Jews from rural areas and towns of fewer than ten thousand people. In the 20th century, revolutions, civil wars, industrialisation and the Holocaust destroyed traditional shtetl existence.
The decline of the shtetl started from about the 1840s. Contributing factors included poverty as a result of changes in economic climate (including industrialisation which hurt the traditional Jewish artisan and the movement of trade to the larger towns), repeated fires destroying the wooden homes, and overpopulation. Also, the anti-Semitism of the Russian Imperial administrators and the Polish landlords, and later, from the 1880s, pogroms, made life difficult for Jews in the shtetl. From the 1880s until 1915 up to 2 million Jews left Eastern Europe. At the time about three-quarters of its Jewish population lived in a shtetl. The Holocaust resulted in the total extermination of shtetls. It was not uncommon for the entire Jewish population of a shtetl to be rounded up and murdered in a nearby forest or taken to the various concentration camps. Some shtetl inhabitants did emigrate before and after the Holocaust, mostly to the United States, where some of the traditions were carried on. But, the shtetl as a phenomenon of Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe was eradicated by the Nazis.