2026 Theses Doctoral

Jewish Commerce: Jewish Merchants, Capital Formation and Financial Governance between Russian Empire and Polish Nation, 1850-1931

Nadel, James B.

This dissertation examines the development of capitalist institutions and investment in Eastern Europe between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through the eyes of the region’s critical population of Jewish merchants. As the Russian imperial economy emerged from the abolition of serfdom, the Tsarist state’s credit apparatus and the Empire’s novel joint-stock banks sought secure commercial lending opportunities to complement industrial development. Lacking substantial capacity, these institutions often tapped pre-existing networks of Jewish commercial intermediaries that had been operating in the Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belorussian territories for decades, and against whose reputation financiers could mitigate risk.

This dissertation argues this Jewish commerce undergirded significant aspects of industrial growth in late imperial Russia by acting as a legible and reasonably reliable asset against which state and private funds could be invested. Making use of commercial letters, bankruptcy proceedings, credit instruments and extant balance sheets, the dissertation reconstructs the lived reality of the thousands of Jewish merchants; from major manufacturers and wholesalers operating in the Empire’s capitals to the lowliest traveling salesman crisscrossing the provincial countryside of Congress Poland. In so doing, it illustrates the ways in which these merchants and traders were able to induce investment from a variety of third parties, the Russian State Bank being the most notable among them.

As a result, the piece answers questions sitting at the heart of the history of capitalism and of the Eastern European Jewish social life. What did it mean to capitalize industrialization in practice following the abolition of serfdom? How and why did Jewish commerce become integral to broader investment portfolios in Eastern Europe? In what ways were these processes shaped by understandings of Jewish cultural and social difference during the period, and in what ways did these processes themselves influence those same understandings? How did state institutions reckon with the risks incurred by this population as it conducted commerce; a commerce tied to and buttressing the financial markets of industrial development within those polities?

Following from this final question, the dissertation goes on to examine how Jewish entrepreneurs experienced the fall of the Empire and the emergence of the independent Polish nation-state. The new Polish state had similar goals related to industrial development as its predecessors, but it also had to contend with an even deeper lack of capacity. Certain Polish officials – seeking to produce a centralized state ex nihilo – viewed Jewish merchants as primary impediments to their direct governance over the relatively uncharted and disconnected provinces of the Polish territories.

The dissertation follows those state actors involved in commercial and financial regulation as they imagined and attempted to produce an investment environment that obviated the risk mitigation activity that Jewish merchants had conducted in the imperial period. For some, this task was the crucible upon which the new state could demonstrate its efficacy as a political enterprise. Indeed, this was not only the case for Polish officials, but for Jewish leaders, activists and politicians as well. These figures also sought to devise financial institutions that would be able to exert some degree of centralized control over the thousands of sthetlekh that dotted the Polish territories. In discussing these political economic projects, the dissertation concludes that the desire for security against risk in commercial capitalism produced new understandings of community, nationality and ethnicity in Eastern Europe.