Jews “Holding the Keys to the Church” and the Posthumous Career of Zelman Wolfowicz of Drohobych

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.