News & Features

In Yankel's Tavern: Jews, Liquor & Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford University Press, 2014), Glenn Dynner examines the iconic Polish Jewish tavernkeeper in the Kingdom of Poland.

In nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the Jewish-run tavern was often the center of leisure, hospitality, business, and even religious festivities. This unusual situation came about because the nobles who owned taverns throughout the formerly Polish lands believed that only Jews were sober enough to run taverns profitably, a belief so ingrained as to endure even the rise of Hasidism's robust drinking culture.

As liquor became the region's boom industry, Jewish tavernkeepers became integral to both local economies and local social life, presiding over Christian celebrations and dispensing advice, medical remedies and loans. Nevertheless, reformers and government officials, blaming Jewish tavernkeepers for epidemic peasant drunkenness, sought to drive Jews out of the liquor trade. Their efforts were particularly intense and sustained in the Kingdom of Poland, a semi-autonomous province of the Russian empire that was often treated as a laboratory for social and political change.

Historians have assumed that this spelled the end of the Polish Jewish liquor trade. However, newly discovered archival sources demonstrate that many nobles helped their Jewish tavernkeepers evade fees, bans and expulsions by installing Christians as fronts for their taverns. The result—a vast underground Jewish liquor trade—reflects an impressive level of local Polish-Jewish co-existence that contrasts with the more familiar story of antisemitism and violence.

Buy the book.

Glenn Dynner is Professor of Judaic Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and the 2013-14 Senior NEH Scholar at the Center for Jewish History. In addition to Yankel’s Tavern, he is author of "Men of Silk": The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford University Press), winner of the Koret Publications Prize and finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards. He is editor of Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe (Wayne State University Press); and co-editor of a forthcoming volume of Polin and of Warsaw, the Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 70th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky.

He is interviewed here by Yedies editor, Roberta Newman.

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Attend the program.

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