Abstract
At the end of the nineteenth century in the historiography and popular writing of the three nationalities living in what was then Habsburg Galicia—Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian—there was an ongoing debate about the motif of the alleged leasing of Orthodox churches by Jews in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The motif of the Jews “holding the keys to the church” was intended, in its own way, to justify the anti-Jewish nature of the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648, as well as later rebellions in Ukraine. The problem, however, was that most testimonies of such practices came from literary rather than historical sources. Therefore, the discovery in the archival sources of the character of Zelman Wolfowicz (ca. 1680–1757) from Drohobych, a factor of the starostess Dorota Tarłowa and an informal administrator of the estate, who was sentenced to death for all kinds of economic and criminal offences against the population of the demesne, could have held the key evidence confirming the thesis of the oppression of the Ukrainian people by Jewish leaseholders under the authority of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In Zelman Wolfowicz’s case, no confirmation was found that he ever “held the keys to the church.” Nevertheless, he was associated with this practice by means of a misread and misunderstood folk song, whose hero happened to bear the same name: Zelman. The power of legend, combined with antisemitic stereotypes, has caused both historiography and ethnography to bolster this image while ignoring the source evidence.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Funding
The research leading to these results received funding from the National Research Centre of Poland (NCN) under Grant Agreement No. 2015/17/B/HS3/02850.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Wiślicz, T. Jews “Holding the Keys to the Church” and the Posthumous Career of Zelman Wolfowicz of Drohobych. JEW HIST 37, 101–121 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-023-09447-9
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-023-09447-9