Numismatic Evidence of Jewish Communal Life in Poland

Abstract

Tokens are nongovernmental circulating media of exchange, as opposed to coins and other official currencies, which are an exclusive prerogative of sovereign authorities. As a commercially active minority community within Poland, Jews of course utilized official nationally issued monies, but they also issued and circulated many forms of tokens to serve varied social, religious, charitable, and commercial purposes. Tokens of non-precious metals and paper were issued by principal Jewish communal authorities; by societies active in maintaining services such as burial, ritual slaughter, education, care of the sick and elderly, and the distribution of alms; and by prominent merchants. The relatively small value and humbleness of such objects, and the fact that their acceptability did not extend beyond the town of their issue, has meant that they were rarely saved and preserved in the course of Jewish migration and during the tumult of wars and pogroms. Therefore, unlike obsolete national coinages, such local tokens have remained virtually unknown and have never previously been collected and studied, either privately or by museums. Recently, metal detectorists at sites of former Jewish habitation have uncovered considerable quantities of metallic Jewish tokens which display a remarkable geographic range and variety of form and function. This paper, based largely on such newly discovered material, presents this rich trove of artifacts for the first time, and attempts to describe and situate their functions within the social and economic context of Jewish communal life in Poland prior to the World War II. Numismatics is the study of currencies, generally accepted means of exchange, typically coins or banknotes, issued by sovereign authorities. Jews played a significant role in the production of coinage in Polish lands during the 12th and 13th centuries, when a series of Piast dynasts, Casimir the Just, Mieszko III,2 Przemysław, and others employed 1 This essay is dedicated to the memory of my late father, Nathan W. Rzezak (Ciechanow 1909-New York 1980) and is based on my presentation during the 11th Congress on the European Association for Jewish Studies in Krakow July 2018. 2 Gumowski 1975. SCRIPTA JUDAICA CRACOVIENSIA Vol. 16 (2018) pp. 1–14 doi: 10.4467/20843925SJ.18.001.10815 www.ejournals.eu/Scripta-Judaica-Cracoviensia