Jews are typically viewed as urban dwellers. However there was a considerable Jewish presence
in villages from the very beginning of their settlement in Eastern Europe in the 12th century
up until the Holocaust. The presence of a large Jewish population in villages was in fact one
of the most distinctive features of East European Jewry. The colourful personality of Jewish
leaseholders of the production and sale of alcoholic beverages was often depicted in Polish
Russian and Jewish literature of the 19th century but the real knowledge about the East
European rural Jews beyond the stereotypical view is still at large.The book presents the
results of a systematic survey the first of its kind on the rural Jews in the Minsk Guberniya
from its establishment as a major administrative unit within the Russian Empire in 1793 to the
outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The present study is based mainly on systematic
sources which produced for the first time a full picture ofJewish settlement in the
countryside in one particular region of the Russian Empire.
