On Aug 20, 2007, at 9:32 PM, joanna wrote:
> But wait. According to Israel Sahak, slavic anti-semitism had a lot to
> do with the structural position of the jews -- between the
> aristocrat/landowner and the peasants. The jewish rent/tax
> collector was
> beholden to the landowner for his privileges and earned those by
> squeezing the peasants of everything they had.
I believe that's the origin of Lou Proyect's name. - Doug
<http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2004w42/msg00031.htm>
Every once in a while somebody asks me about my family origin, since I have an [un]usual last name. About 10 years ago I discovered that "Proyect" was Yiddish for the counting house of a tax farmer, according to a Czarist directory of Jewish names in the 19th century. It was prevalent in the Slutsk district near Minsk in Byelorussia.
Now, what's a tax farmer you might ask. Tax farming got started in the middle ages as the Kings hired subcontractors to collect taxes from their subjects, who then got a percentage of what they raised. As it turns out, many of the tax farmers were Jews and "Court Jews" at that. These were the more privileged elements of the Jewish population who were involved in various aspects of finance from which Christians were prohibited. Later on, as Christians began to move into these fields, the Jews were muscled out. The rivalry was basically the main factor in the Spanish Inquisition and the explusion of the Jews from England in the 13th century.
Most of the Jews migrated to Eastern Europe where feudal relations persisted into the 19th century. After Jews got involved with tax farming on the estates of Russian and Polish noblemen, pogroms ensued. This was a highly distorted reflection of the class struggle as Israel Shahak pointed out in his study of the 1648 Chmielnicki revolt in the Ukraine contained in "Jewish History, Jewish Religion". I have always wondered if there are very few Proyects around today because pissed off Russian peasants wiped us out during one of these benighted revolts.