THE PRIVILEGE GRANTED BY VYTAUTAS THE GREAT TO THE JEWS OF BREST IN 1388. NEW ANSWERS TO ALREADY ANSWERED QUESTIONS Based on established opinion in historiography, the article asks what circumstances may have prompted Vytautas, who in 1388 granted the most widespread version of Jewish law, to choose the privilege of Boleslaw the Pious (1264), rather than the chronologically later privilege of Kazimieras (Casimir) the 27 Great (1364 and 1367), to the Jews of Poland; what impact this choice might have had on the formation of the legal status of Jews in the GDL; and whether the interpretations found in historiography are the only ones possible. The prototype for Vytautas’ privilege of 1388, based on historiography and sources, has been identified as the privilege granted no more than a year previously by his cousin Vladislovas Jogaila (Władysław Jagiełło), the King of Poland, to the Jews of Lviv (1387). It was based on the privilege that Kazimieras the Great first granted to the Jews of Kalisz (1364), and later to all of Poland (1367). The reconstruction of the sequence of privileges allows for the proposition that the privilege of Kazimieras the Great was one of the sources of Vytautas’ privilege in 1388, although it had no fundamental differences in the established legal status as compared to the privilege of Boleslaw the Pious (1264). An analysis of the circumstances under which the Jews of Lviv were granted their privilege revealed that Vytautas’ decision to grant the privilege to the Jews echoed the situation in Lviv, when the universal privilege, to which all the Jews in Poland were entitled, was affirmed for the community of a single city as a local privilege. Jogaila granted it to the Jews of Lviv, and Vytautas to the Brest community, thus initiating the privileges to the local Jews of towns in their ancestral lands. The article does not give an unambiguous answer to the question regarding the beneficiaries of the 1388 privilege, although new interpretations based on sources are offered. It has been established that Vytautas’ privilege of 1388 could have been kept in Trakai, and used both by the Rabbanites and the Karaites. The granting of a similar privilege to that of the Brest Jews to the Jews living in Trakai was possible, as Trakai was Vytautas’ ancestral property, and the formation of the status of Jews in accordance with a single pattern would be understandable, practical and rational. At this stage in the research, it should be assumed that the ‘Jews of Trakai’ had the use of Vytautas’ privilege of 1388, or at least its confirmation from 1507, and one copy (a duplicate) was kept there. However, due to the scarce reliable data and new sources, it is not yet possible to say for sure that the ‘Jews of Trakai’ were among the beneficiaries of the privilege. The article concludes that in granting the privilege to the Brest Jews, Vytautas adapted the privilege that Kazimieras the Great granted to the Jewish community of Lviv, which effectively changes the interpretation of the content of his privilege of 1388, and the assessments of its functioning in the legal system of the GDL. A comparison of Vytautas’ privilege with similar privileges granted in Central and Eastern Europe is pointless. The main comparative source which allows us to determine the degree of the privilege’s (in)adaptation is Jogaila’s privilege confirmed to the Jews of Lviv in 1387. A comparison of copies of Vytautas’ privilege has revealed that the provision of the double reward ‘as for a nobleman’, recognised as the exclusivity of the GDL law and the legal status of the GDL Jews, is absent from the earlier copies of Vytautas’ privilege to the Jews of Brest. Neither was the double reward enshrined in the privilege to the Lviv Jews. The reward ‘as for a nobleman’ was first introduced in copies of the privilege pertaining to the circumstances of the First Statute, which are based on the confirmation of the privilege of Žygimantas (Sigismund) the Old as universal in 1507. Thus, it is plausible that the privilege was adapted in the early 16th century, by introducing the term ‘as for a nobleman’. Other differences between Jogaila’s confirmation of 1387 to the Lviv Jews, and Vytautas’ privilege of 1388 to the Brest Jews, were less important in the long run.
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Mar 19, 2024
Vijay P Singh 
Open Access