The structure of the Jewish guilds in Poland, Lithuania, and Belorussia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries

ENMark Wischnitzer (1882–1955) was born in Rovno, Russian Volhynia (today Rivne, Ukraine), and received his doctorate in history from the University of Berlin in 1906. Like Schiper and others of his generation, his career was established in other languages before he turned to Yiddish in the 1920s. He began with historical works in Russian - as author of journal articles, as editor and author of articles in the Evreyskaya Entsiklopedia (Jewish Encyclopedia), and as editor and coauthor of a proposed multivolume history of Russian and Polish Jewry. When he left the Soviet Union for Berlin in 1921, Wischnitzer repeated the same proficiency in German journals and as editor and coauthor of the Encyclopaedia Judaica. In Berlin, he also turned to Yiddish - as general editor of the Yiddish / Hebrew art journals Milgroym / Rimonim, of which his wife, Rachel Wischnitzer, was art director, and as a contributor to Yiddish journals and the Yiddish encyclopedia. In Berlin, he became director of the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, which aided Jews in leaving Nazi Germany. Settling ultimately in New York, he began to publish in English, while continuing to write in Yiddish, and he headed YIVO’s Historical Section between the death of Elias Tcherikower in 1943 and the arrival of Philip Friedman in 1948. One of Wischnitzer’s continuing interests was the history of Jewish artisans and craft guilds.His works on this topic followed the same course as his overall career, with articles in Russian, followed by German and then Yiddish, and finally a posthumous book in English. The article below was the culmination of this work in Yiddish. Its overt purpose is to recover the little-known history of Jewish artisans in early modern Eastern Europe. A tacit purpose is to provide arguments against the antisemitic accusation that Jews had always been an “unproductive” element, engaged solely in commerce and trade, by demonstrating that a significant number of Jews had been artisans, productively engaged in craftwork. [p. 71-72].