Jakab Réka: Bérlőből polgár. Pápa város zsidó közösségének társadalom- és gazdaságtörténete 1748-1848 (Veszprém, 2014)
Korvin). The clear trend towards congregating in a specific part of town demonstrated even by later settlers was evidently influenced by the desirable proximity of the Synagogue, ritual bath and kosher abattoir, all important loci of ritual and daily life. Another factor that played a part in this trend was the desirability of living in a part of town that the Jewish community could more easily enclose in order to be able to celebrate the Sabbath and other religious festivals undisturbed. The majority of the Jewish families who moved to the city did not own real estate. They lived as tenants or sub-lessors mostly in the houses of the Christian bourgeoisie and aristocracy and to a lesser extent in the houses of wealthier Jewish families. Of the 130 heads of household recorded in 1799, 31 owned property and lived in their own house together with their families. The other 99 families lived as tenants or sub-lessors in someone else’s property; of them 20 rented from Jewish landlords and 79 from Christian. The community’s rabbi and teacher at the time also lived in a house owned by a member of the city’s bourgeoisie. With the growth in the numbers of the Jewish community, the number of property owners also grew steadily. At the start of the 19th century, there were a few cases where some of the richer heads of families owned two houses in the city. The richest of the Jews, Abraham Neuman, owned several houses in the Market Square in the 1810s. His less well-to-do coreligionists could only buy property in the city if by doing so they did not increase the overall number of Jewish property owners. In 1835, of the 340 Jewish families in the city, 60 lived in their own property in the centre of the city. The Jews permitted to settle by the Esterházys belonged to the tax- paying portion of the city’s social structure - based on feudal nobility - and were in a status concomitant with that of the cotters. As a factor of the protection they enjoyed from the landlords, the Jews made up a legally separate sector within society and were taxed accordingly. Apart from a state tax (the so-called toleration tax), since they were in a direct contractual relationship with the landowners, they paid taxes to them alone throughout the 18th century. When they settled or bought property, they paid, on an individual basis, what we would today call a one-off charge and they also paid on an individual basis an annual fee (contractually established) for certain licenses (primarily for public houses, abattoirs, monopolies on certain goods, and shops). As well as these individual taxes, the city’s Jews had communal obligations to the landowners in return for the rights he guaranteed the community. The biggest single such payment was the protection tax, the so-called Schutzgeld, that grew steadily in line with the increasing numbers of the Jewish population. They also paid taxes for the right to exercise their life as a community, for example on the Synagogue, 295
