Copyright

Leshchinsky, Yankev;

Published On

2023-03-08

Page Range

pp. 45–56

Language

  • English

Print Length

12 pages

3. The heritage of the Jewish factory owner

  • Yankev Leshchinsky (author)
  • Robert Brym (translator)
  • Eli Jany (translator)
Chapter of: The Last Years of Polish Jewry: Volume 1: At the Edge of the Abyss: Essays, 1927–33 (pp. 45–56)

In Western Europe, upstart artisans and rich traders became the first factory owners. In Poland, most early Christian entrepreneurs were landowners, senior state officials, and scions of other rich families. In contrast, few early Polish-Jewish entrepreneurs came from rich families. They came mainly from middle-class, downwardly mobile families. There were few cultural and psychological differences in the backgrounds of early Jewish entrepreneurs and workers. Entrepreneurs were distinguished from workers mainly by their intelligence, energy, and agility. Yet most Jewish owners were reluctant to hire Jewish workers, seeing them as competitive threats.

Contributors

Yankev Leshchinsky

(author)

Robert Brym

(translator)
SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto
https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym

Robert Brym, FRSC, is SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His latest works include Robert Brym and Randal Schnoor, eds, The Ever-Dying People? Canada’s Jews in Comparative Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023) and “Jews and Israel 2024: Canadian Attitudes, Jewish Perceptions,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Études Juives Canadiennes (38: 2024), 6–89. For downloads of Brym’s published work, visit https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym

Eli Jany

(translator)
PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto

Eli Jany is a PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He has translated poems by Sarah Reisen (In geveb, 12 May 2020, https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/three-poems-reisen) and, with Robert Brym, co-translated volume 1 of The Last Years of Polish Jewry and “Jewish Economic Life in Yiddish Literature: Yitskhok Ber Levinzon and Yisroel Aksenfeld,” East European Jewish Affairs (53, 1: 2024), both by Yankev Leshchinsky.