Suchergebnisse

The prominent position of Jews in various aspects of the production, distribution and vending of beer, vodka and other grain-based intoxicants in late-eighteenth-century Poland was noted by contemporaries and registers in the meager socio-demographic data available for the period. The Jewish innkeeper, particularly in the Eastern regions of Poland, was an important representative of the Dvorf Yid — the provincial Jew as recorded in memoirs, chronicles and travellers' accounts. In the middle of the eighteenth century, 20 to 30 percent of the Jewish population of Poland was estimated to be involved in some aspect of alcohol production and distribution — what came to be called the Propinacja.

Ideology is a discredited term in some circles. The geopolitical map of the twentieth century is pockmarked with ideologies gone bad. With the Utopian thinking of the Enlightenment came the conviction that "Ideals can transform reality." But ideologies that undermined one repressive order in the name of progress became the zealous gods of another. Ideologists credit their Idea with omnipotence, borrowing the techniques of medieval casuistry) to reduce the more blatant discrepancies between the ideal and real.It is true, streets plastered with slogans and millions of people waving little red books are frightening. But the possibility that the technocrats shall inherit the earth is also somewhat disconcerting. The excesses to which "total" ideologies lend themselves should not blind us to other aspects of the ideological enterprise; bloody revolutions and totalitarian regimes do not exhaust the possibilities.