No Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania: The Jews on the Radziwiłł Estates

<div class="line" id="line-13"> When I was in graduate school, a professor told me that Jews played a necessary yet marginalized role in the early modern period, that of pariah minority capitalists, and that their essential role in the system of credit was evidence of East European backwardness, making it part of the periphery rather than the core of European economic development. In the year 2017, few scholars would hold this view, and Adam Teller&rsquo;s work is one significant nail in the coffin of such a theoretical orientation. Rather than viewing Jews as a distinct group that lived on its own and maintained a limited relationship with the society around it, Teller shows that Jews were an integral part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and wielded significant economic power that could be leveraged into a very strong political position in society. Far from marginalizing them, their economic activity as estate managers of the Radziwi&lstrok;&lstrok; fortunes allowed them to wield power over Jews and non-Jews alike. Jewish managers modernized the estates by maximizing productivity and revenues, and these managers also transformed their own estate, since a new Jewish elite emerged whose status and power was based on wealth rather than the traditional criteria of lineage and scholarship.</div>