Metadata: Magistrate of the City of Lwów/Lemberg/Lviv
Collection
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv
- Holding institution (official language):
- Центральний державний історичний архів України, м. Львів
- Postal address:
- 3a Soborna sq., 79008 Lviv
- Phone number:
- +380 (32) 235-40-63; +380 (32) 235-56-57
- Web address:
- https://archives.gov.ua/Eng/Archives/ca04.php
- Email:
- tsdial@arch.gov.ua
- Reference number:
- F. 52
- Title:
- Magistrate of the City of Lwów/Lemberg/Lviv
- Title (official language):
- МАГІСТРАТ м. ЛЬВІВА
- Creator/accumulator:
- Magistrate of the City of Lwów/Lemberg/Lviv
- Date(s):
- 1356/1938
- Language:
- Latin
- Hebrew
- Yiddish
- German
- Polish
- Ukrainian
- Extent:
- 2,440 storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Scope and content:
-
Materials housed in the fond that pertain to Jewish history include the following sources:
1) Council document logs, including final records of rulings of the Lwów City Council on matters pertaining to Jews; royal (from the late 18th c. on, imperial) privileges, decrees, mandates, rescripts, and proclamations (uniwersały), and similar decrees issued by king- or Sejm-appointed officials known as commissars, regulating the activities of the Lwów Jewish community, and matters related to credit, financial, and property relations between Jews and Christians; materials pertaining to litigation between the city’s Christian and Jewish communities, and between individual Christians and Jews; etc.
2) Ława document logs, which contain, in addition to exclusively judicial materials, also considerable miscellaneous insertions of documents; in particular, the log of the Ława Court of Lwów for 1756-59 contains a commissar’s ruling on a case between the Christian community of the city and the urban and suburban Jewish communities (1759); etc.
3) Document logs, including minutes of board meetings of the “forty men” and sessions of the “ten men” control commission from the 17th and 18th c. – these contain records on the hearing of cases in which Jews were accused of trade and rental violations; records on Jews who converted to Christianity to obtain Lwów citizenship; etc.
4. City guild logs, including, in particular, a register of Jewish jewelers who belonged to a jewelers’ guild (1787-1857).
5. Collections of copies of privileges and decrees of the city of Lwów, in particular, a collection of original documents and certified extracts dedicated entirely to materials on the history of the Jews of Lwów (1592-1744), and including a royal mandate of King John II Casimir Vasa decreeing that, in the future, the city was not to enter into pacts with Jews without royal permission (1652); a promissory note signed by Jews of Lwów pledging to pay a debt in the amount of two thousand zlotys; a ruling of the fiscal court in a case between, on the one hand, a prosecutor (in Polish, instygator), and on the other, the city and the Jews, regarding improvements to the tax regime (1692); royal decrees by the Polish Kings Augustus II and Augustus III restricting the rights of Jews, including decrees suspending their right to conclude pacts, restricting their commercial activities to trade in the four types of goods traditionally allowed to Jews (wax, leather, cattle, and cloth), confiscating other categories of goods from Jews (1710, 1712-14, 1716, 1732, 1738, 1744); etc.
Also housed in the fond are several collections of copies of documents containing privileges and decrees of Lwów, some of which pertain to the city’s Jewish population, including: “The Golden Book of Privileges” (Polish: Złota księga przywilejów; 1356-1789), whose materials include a charter (gramota) by King Casimir IV Jagiellon confirming the rights of Lwów townspeople and Jews to engage in the retail trade of cut cloth (1489); a ruling of King Sigismund I the Old in a dispute between Lwów townspeople and the city’s Jews, in which the king confirmed an earlier order stipulating the kinds of merchandise that Jews were allowed to trade in (1527); a decree by Sigismund I that abolished the right of Jews in the suburbs of Lwów to engage in free trade, but allowed them to trade for another two years to sell off their goods (1527); a ruling by King Sigismund III in a case pertaining to restrictions on Jewish trade in Lwów (1591); “The Golden Book of the Depository” (Polish: Złotą Księgę depozytową), a 1660 compilation on merchandise storage rights in Lwów, which contains a section titled “Privileges and Decrees of the City of Lwów regarding Jews,” as well as commercial pacts agreed to between Lwów townspeople and Jews (1654).
Also housed in the fond are collections of original and copied documents of the state and city authorities from 1422-1642 and 1485-1685 that contain materials pertaining to Jews; in particular, there are individual documents pertaining to relations between the Christian and Jewish communities of Lwów, including trade pacts (1422-1642); records from a dispute between the city, a Jesuit order, and Jews regarding the Nachmanowicz (Golden Rose) synagogue and other real estate in the city (1606–1608); pacts establishing the limits of Jewish trade in the city (these documents contain Jewish seals) (1629, 1654); records pertaining to Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s demands that Jews be surrendered during the siege of 1648; etc.
6) Codices and chronicles, including excerpts and extracts from municipal documents, privately-made extracts from various sources, etc., in particular: a 17th-c. “Codex of the City of Lwów” compiled by Lwów City Council members J. Alembek and P. Hepner – this document contains entries pertaining to Jews, in particular, on the council’s decision to bar mead brewers from buying honey for Lent from Jews (1412); a fire that took place on a Jewish street (1494); a joint Jewish-Christian pooling of resources to maintain the mercenary troops hired to defend the city (1575); issues pertaining to Jewish trade and the drafting of new pacts with the Christian community (1602-1603), etc.; a chronicle by Bartolomey Zimorowicz titled “Triple Lwów” (Latin: Leopolis Triplex; 1665-72), containing entries on events related to the Jewish population of Lwów, including the pogrom of 1664; etc.
7) Also housed in the fond are single- and multi-themed fascicles (collections of documents arranged by registration number) that contain considerable amounts of materials pertaining to Jewish history.
7.1) Among the single-themed fascicles are the following: a collection of materials on the purchase, sale, and lease of structures and land plots by Lwów Jews from 1470-1782, including a record of a lifetime lease of a plot of land on ul. Żydowska (Jewish Street; now Staroyevryeiskaya Street, Old Jewish Street) (1554); a ruling of the Lwów City Council in a case pertaining to a fire that destroyed a site near the synagogue (1567); a contract between the estates of the city of Lwów and the Jewish elder Jacob Gombricht by which a stable and a wax smelter were leased to him and his descendants (1632); information on the Nachmanowicz family and real estate owned by its members, including confirmation by King Władysław IV Waza of a starosta’s decree granting Roza Nachmanowa and her descendants land for the construction of houses (1634), etc.; a set of documents on the restriction of Lwów Jews’ propination rights (that is, their entitlement to make wine and beer, and trade in these beverages), including orders, audits, lists of tavern-keepers, etc. (1734–1787); and a collection of promissory notes and letters of Jewish merchants, in Yiddish and Hebrew (1581-1748).
7.2) Multi-themed fascicles housed in the fond that contain materials pertaining to Jewish history include five voluminous collections with documents of various contents, mainly in the form of copies and extracts, among which the following thematic groups may be provisionally singled out:
7.2.1) Materials on the economic activity of the Jews of Lwów in the 16th to 18th centuries, including a mandate issued by King Sigismund I to the Lwów Magistrate requiring that Jews be allowed to keep their traditional commercial rights (1524), and a mandate by King Sigismund II Augustus expanding the commercial rights of the Lwów Jewish community (1569), etc.; a lawsuit by the Jewish community against the city of Lwów filed in defense of the former’s commercial rights (1589); a letter from Mikołaj Herburt, palatine of the Ruthenian voivodeship, to the Lwów Magistrate in defense of Jewish commercial rights (undated); a complaint submitted by townspeople of Lwów to King Sigismund III against Lwów Starosta S. B. Mniszech regarding the latter’s defense of Jews’ right to trade in vodka (1618); a privilege issued by King Władysław IV that significantly expanded the rights of Jews in the Kingdom of Poland (1633); a decree by King John II Casimir requiring the Jews of Lwów, as well as foreign merchants, to store their goods in specially designated warehouses (1658), and a decree by King John III ordering Jews to cease violating privileges and previous agreements with the city, and to immediately conclude new trade pacts (1679); a protestation filed by the Lwów City Council against Jews, accusing them of obstructing the investigation of a fire in 1616; a protestation filed by the city against Jews, including a demand that a rescript awarded to Jews that had lifted earlier commercial restrictions on them be invalidated (1710); and a protestation filed by Jews against the magistrate and the Lwów community alleging procedural shortcomings in litigation between Jews and the city regarding the latter’s violation of rules on drafting pacts, principles of trade, etc. (1712); a decree by the Radom Tribunal on trade, the leasing of tax-collection, and the oath to be taken by Jews (1721); pacts concluded with Jews on terms of trade (1581, 1592, 1629, 1637, 1654, 1740), as well as other documents pertaining to Jews, including a mandate issued by King Władysław IV to the city ordering that trade pacts with Jews be extended (1636); a response by Lwów Jews to the draft pacts of 1712, including thoughts by representatives of the Jewish community on the economic situation of Lwów at the time; etc.
7.2.2) Documents on taxes and duties paid by Jews, and on their participation in the payment of citywide levies, as well as on the payment of arrears on them, including a protestation filed against Jewish elders for their failure to adequately collect funds for city defense (1626); agreements between Christian inhabitants of the city of Lwów and Jews regarding terms of the gradual payment by the latter of their share of the ransom paid by the city during its siege by Cossacks in 1648 and Tatars in 1649; a royal decree by King John II Casimir ordering the Jews of Lwów to pay arrears owed to the city (1667); summaries of property tax (czynsz) owed from 1648-69 for Lwów homes in which Jews resided; a starosta’s ruling in a suit brought by Lwów townspeople against Jews of suburban Lwów alleging that the latter had failed to pay annual liquor licensing fees (1657); an account register on tax arrears owed by Lwów Jews for 1638-69; a list of Lwów Jews who were in arrears to the city for nonpayment of mandatory commercial license fees, and a chronology of their payments of these debts (1654-85); a promissory note signed by Jewish elders pledging to transfer twelve thousand zlotys to the city treasury (1688); a list of taxes unpaid by the Jewish population for the years 1690-1710; a register of Jews’ expenditures on the maintenance of soldiers from the Russian Empire in November-December 1767, verified in 1782 with the original in Hebrew signed by Chaim Kormasz, the kahal syndic of Lwów; etc.
7.2.3) Materials on the Lwów Catholic community’s efforts to prevent Jews from residing in Christian-owned homes, and to keep Jews from renting warehouses, shops, and other premises from Christians, in particular: a register of Lwów houses sold or leased to Jews (1576-1601); a list of houses in Lwów in which Jews resided (1620); a mandate issued by King Augustus II barring the Christian population of Lwów from leasing living quarters, warehouses, or shops to Jews (1710); a rescript by King Augustus II to the commandant of Lwów, Colonel A. Jaspers (Jaspersky), blaming this official for keeping townspeople from expelling Jews from Christian-owned homes and shops (1710); an appeal submitted by Jews to Austrian Emperor Joseph II (1785) emphasizing the harm that would be caused by an order that Jews be expelled from Christian-owned homes (1785); etc.
7.2.4) Documents on pogroms against Jews and anti-Jewish persecution, in particular, a mandate (communique) by King Władysław IV (1635) to the Lwów Magistrate regarding a case in which Jewish homes had been looted; materials from a trial concerning Lwów’s 1644 pogrom; records pertaining to Lwów’s 1644 pogrom and its aftermath, with an explanatory note by Lwów Mayor B. Zimorowicz (1665); a decree by King John II Casimir ruling against the city of Lwów and in favor of Jews victimized during the pogrom of 1664 (1668); a decree by the castle government regarding the robbery of certain Jews in Lwów’s Kraków suburb (Krakowskie Przedmiejsce), with an appended list of persons detained in this matter (1718); a complaint filed by Lwów Jews against the magistrate and Jesuits in a case regarding the pogrom of 1732, and a complaint filed by Deputy Palatine I. Błażowski to the magistrate regarding violence against Jews (1732); an affidavit by I. Binchevsky, a judge of the deputy palatine’s government of the Ruthenian voivodeship, reading materials on a pogrom against Lwów Jews, and a list of damage caused, into the castle books (1751).
7.2.5) A collection of disparate documents in Yiddish and Hebrew that had previously been among documents of burgraves (king-appointed city managers in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and elsewhere) and subsequently allocated into a separate folder titled “Documenta Hebraica”; this contains marriage contracts, letters of divorce, sales agreements, invoices, lists of goods, financial agreements, orders for various products, promissory notes, private letters, debt collection reminders, court sentences, travel reports, various receipts, etc. (1679-1798).
7.2.6. Fragmentary materials, including excerpts from assessors’ decrees in litigation between the magistrate and Roza Nachmanowa (1627); a list of documents on Lwów municipal business involving Jews for 1591-1641; an excerpt containing information to the effect that A. Izraelevich, the general syndic of both synagogues, had, in the course of attempting to prove his case in court, introduced the General Confirmation of Jewish Rights and Privileges in Greater and Lesser Poland, Signed in Warsaw in 1671 into the castle books (1698); a decree of King Augustus II barring Jews from publicly engaging in religious practice, employing Christians as servants, and engaging in commerce on Catholic holidays (1710); a report by a woźny (bailiff) regarding his visit to both synagogues and with both heads of the Jewish community (referred to in this document as Jewish burgomasters or burmistrzowie) H. Berko and H. Pops to serve these men with a subpoena to appear at a palace court hearing in Warsaw (1714); confirmation of the rights of the Lwów synagogue (the Jewish community) by King Augustus III (1735) and King Stanislaus II Augustus (1768); documents on the Lwów kahal’s appointment of P. S. Novoselsky as its attorney, with the right to represent Jewish cases in courts and defend against accusations (1782, 1784); etc.
8) Materials (in the form either of particular files or fascicle fragments) concerning Jews from other cities, in particular: documents pertaining to court proceedings between Jewish residents of Lublin and the city magistrate (1555); a printed proclamation (uniwersał) by the Grand Crown Vice-Treasurer M. Grabowski requiring Jewish residents of the city of Kazimierz (near Kraków) to sell their goods within three months of the date of its promulgation, and stipulating that failure to comply would result in the confiscation of unsold or newly imported goods (1744); a notification by a municipal court in Wrocław to the Lwów Magistrate regarding the ruling made in the case of a debt owed by a Jew of Tarnopol named H. Wolf to the Wrocław merchant Halecki (1775); etc.
- Administrative/biographical history:
-
The first mentions of the functioning of a magistrate in Lwów date to the 15th century. The magistrate consisted of a rada or council, a self-governing body with some judicial functions) and a ława (endowed only with judicial functions). At the head of the council and, accordingly, the city, was the burgomaster (from the 18th century on called the president), while the ława was headed by the wójt. The city council was originally an elected body, but over time, membership in it became lifelong. Initially, the council consisted of six members, later increased to twelve. The council was in charge of a wide range of issues: it ruled on civil cases; registered deeds of sale and purchase or lease of property; issued citywide regulations on trade and crafts; had oversight of municipal improvements and public safety; took care of the needy strata of the population; granted urban citizenship; approved the charters of city corporations; and, conjointly with the city’s economic-managerial collegium (the lonheria), it managed the city’s finances; etc. The ława, headed by the wójt, heard criminal cases (regarding damage to a person’s property, health, or honor) and also resolved inheritance issues. Some criminal cases were heard conjointly with the council, which would determine the innocence or guilt of a defendant, in the latter event forwarding the case to the wójt-ława court for sentencing. The wójt, along with members of the ławicy (jurymen), the clerk, and the woźny (the bailiff, a court official who mediated between the court and the parties to the proceedings), could form a so-called “office of noble jurymen,” which drew up wills and also dealt with the division of estates, delimiting land plots, conducting forensic examinations, etc. In addition to the council and the ława, Lwów had a representative body of the third estate, a collegium known as the “forty men,” typically consisting of an equal number of merchants and craftsmen. This body monitored the activities of the magistrate as a check against possible abuses of power. Lwów also had a commission to monitor the financial activities of the city council – a “commission of ten men to hold hearings on accounts.” A separate institution was the managerial collegium or lonheria, which dealt with financial and economic issues. The treasury was divided into two “cash offices”: the municipal one proper, and the royal cash office (with the funds of the latter going mainly to fortifications and other purposes related to the city’s defense). The syndic was involved in defending the city’s legal interests. The powers of the magistrate did not extend to the entire territory of Lwów, which also had municipal starostas, who held jurisdiction over territories in which the magistrate had no authority. In the 16th, 17th, and especially 18th centuries, Lwów also saw the formation of jurydyki – administratively independent sections of the city, excluded from citywide jurisdiction.
The dominant positions in Lwów were held by Catholics, who did not allow representatives of other faiths to participate in the management of the city. The Jewish community of Lwów was directly subordinate to the power of the palatine, in practical terms to his deputy. (Deputy palatines were appointed by the king and exercised military and administrative functions.) At the same time, the magistrate had some degree of authority over the Jews of Lwów, due to the fact that their homes were located in territory under the city’s jurisdiction. Moreover, the city council entered into agreements (pacts) concerning Jewish commerce and other issues. The magistrate often took an active part in legal proceedings brought by the city against the Jewish community or individual Jews, owing to lawsuits filed in the royal courts. There were two Jewish communities of Lwów – the municipal one, whose members lived within city walls, and the suburban one. These communities had different legal and social statuses and different economic rights. The interests of the Jewish communities in the courts were represented by the kahal syndic.
After Galicia became part of the Austrian Empire, the Lwów/Lemberg Magistrate continued to perform functions of city government, although after Emperor Joseph II’s decree of 31 August 1786, a reorganization was made that resulted in the limitation of the magistrate’s authority. It continued to operate during the period of the Republic of Poland from 1918 to 1939; in 1936, it was renamed the Lwów Municipal Administration.
- Access points: persons/families:
- Sigismund I
- Sigismund III
- Subject terms:
- Antisemitism
- Antisemitism--Antisemitic measures
- Conversion to Christianity
- Correspondence
- Cossacks
- Crime
- Financial matters
- Financial matters--Debt
- Financial records
- Hospitality industry
- Hospitality industry--Inns
- Jewish languages
- Jewish languages--Hebrew
- Jewish languages--Yiddish
- Jewish oath
- Jewish-Christian relations
- Kahal
- Legal matters
- Marriage and divorce
- Marriage and divorce--Ketubot
- Plunder
- Pogroms
- Privileges
- Professions
- Professions--Jewellers and goldsmiths
- Real estate
- Synagogues
- Taxation
- Trade and commerce
- Trade and commerce--Alcohol trade
- System of arrangement:
- The fond includes two inventories systematized by source types, as well as by subject and chronologically; at the end of the inventories there are indexes and registers of document logs.
- Finding aids:
- Inventories are available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary
