Jakab Réka: Bérlőből polgár. Pápa város zsidó közösségének társadalom- és gazdaságtörténete 1748-1848 (Veszprém, 2014)
intelligentsia of the city. We can also see the names of the wealthiest of Pápa’s Jewish merchants and businessmen on the list of the casino’s shareholders. Salamon Neuman was even elected onto the 12-member committee in 1838. By 1848, the proportion of Jewish members of the casino was roughly on a par with the proportion of Jewish residents in the city. A significant field for the integration of local Jewry was education. An aid to assimilation was the gradual inclusion of Jewish students in Christian schools and primary and secondary education. This process began in the first decade of the 19th century when the monopoly of religious education was broken by interest in the professions and efforts to enter them. The response to this social challenge led to divisions within the Jewish community on the question of education as well. While the cheders continued to function, those families who intended their children for the professions enrolled them in ever greater numbers in the renowned Protestant school. A smaller number of Jewish students were also enrolled in the Benedictine high school. The integration of Hungarian Jews in the period of feudal nobility - exclusion from the guilds notwithstanding - can be seen as significant. Certain areas of economic life became almost exclusively Jewish fields. It is a long- established fact in the scholarly literature that the Jews, banned from the Free Royal Cities and excluded - or rather kept at a distance - from the guilds (overseen by the urban bourgeoisie), could only work in the crafts as tradesmen outside the guilds. Furthermore, their ability to trade within the area of the various civitates was restricted to the period of the markets. The existing prohibitions necessarily forced the economic life of Jews into certain channels; that is, they forced Jews into pursuing a livelihood in fields that were not covered by restrictions, or in avoiding these restriction, gave them an interest in the dissolution of the existing feudal restrictions. In this sense, their economic interests were aligned with the great landowners whose estates had started to produce and trade goods, who played a role in the economic changes of the period and who were similarly bound by the shackles of the existing system and the lack of mobile capital to invest. It was generally the Jewish merchants, taking the place of the Greeks, who ended up buying (and selling on) the agricultural produce of the estates, buying various licenses from the estates and being the movers of the trade in raw materials. For these reasons, their settlement and activities were focussed on the market towns, which served as the centres of these great estates. With the aid of the extant economic documents in the archive of the local estate we looked to see if similar processes were present in the Esterházy estates formed in Pápa in the mid-i8th century as there were in other estates in the country and the Trans-Danubian region. We also examined the extent 301
