Adam Teller's Money, Power, and Influence is the revised English edition of his excellent study on the economic and social life of Jews on the Lithuanian estates of the Radziwiłł family in the later part of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, published originally in Hebrew in 2005. In six chapters, Teller provides an impressive study of the late feudal economy in the Lithuanian part of the commonwealth.

Drawing mostly on records from the Radziwiłł family archives, Teller shows how Jews became an indispensable part of the late feudal estate system of Poland-Lithuania. Examining the patterns of Jewish settlement on the estates of the Radziwiłł family, one of the most important magnate families in the commonwealth, he argues that the substantial Jewish population growth during the first half of the eighteenth century was strongly influenced by the Radziwiłłs' settlement policy. It was part of the family's overall economic policy, whose main objective was to improve the estates' profitability and the revenue they would generate, so as to increase the family's wealth and political power within the commonwealth. In regard to the urban economy within the estates, Teller demonstrates how Jews became a backbone to the urban economy and connected the network of markets across the vast estates of the Radziwiłł family. The family, moreover, was not only interested in Jews as economic players but also in the urban Jewish communities as generators of taxes and levies.

Chapter 3 proves to be especially enlightening beyond the realm of Jewish history as it provides a description and analysis of the different institutions that the magnates used to run their estates: direct management; mortgage (zastaw); the leasing of entire estates (dzierżawa), which had played an important role during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in the development of new land but proved ineffective in maximizing income; and eventually the leasing of monopoly rights. The last, and in particular the monopoly on the production and sale of alcohol (propinacja), became the most important means of increasing revenue on the estates. This was exactly the niche Jews were able to successfully fill, as the Radziwiłłs “viewed them as the economic actors on their estates best able to maximize their revenues” (69). Chapter 5 then provides a detailed picture of Jews as arendarze, either holding the general lease (arenda) of all monopoly rights on a certain estate, or as sublessees, who leased single taverns in which they sold alcohol. The general arendarz enjoyed a special legal status, though he was often active in trade or other business endeavors as well. Altogether, Teller argues, Jewish businessmen active on the estates reached a level of economic and social power unseen before, and their position was only overshadowed by the extraordinary power and influence of the Ickowicz brothers. Their exceptional story as Jewish estate leaseholders, which is related in chapter 4, also points to the dangers involved in leaseholding for Jews, who, despite and partly because of their economic power, were regarded with at least some animosity or open hostility by many of the estates' inhabitants.

Though Jewish economic history has had its upswing only in the last two decades, Teller's work is part of a longer tradition, rooted in the strong interest of interwar Polish-Jewish historians in Jewish economic history (though often with a Marxist bias), and in the postwar tradition of Jewish economic history in early modern Poland-Lithuania, embodied mostly by the works of Jacob Goldberg, Gershon Hundert, and Moshe Rosman. Especially the latter's work on the relation between Jews and magnates on the Polish estates of the Sieniawski-Czartoryski family (The Lord's Jews [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Center for Jewish Studies, 1990]) provides a foil for Teller, who comes to somewhat different conclusions. Teller pays more attention to village Jews, who usually functioned as sublessees of individual taverns. He thus also tells us the eighteenth-century story of Jewish tavern-keeping, which has been continued by Glenn Dynner (Yankel's Tavern [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014]). Moreover, in regard to the Jewish community Teller argues that the Radziwiłłs' main ambition was to gain economic control over the kahal and to integrate it into the administrative system of the estate, but not to abolish it altogether. Nevertheless, the reader would have wished to see the transition from an old to a new type of communal leadership “whose power derived not from scholarship and family lineage,… but solely from their financial status and connections with non-Jewish society” (58) spelled out in some more detail, though a lack of sources might be an obstacle here.

Beyond the concrete and tremendously important case study of the Radziwiłł estates, the book makes an important contribution to questions concerning the character of Jewish economic activity and of how “a kind of ethnic economy” actually formed and grew (191). This, Teller argues convincingly, has more to do with actual economic choices than with any kind of innate reasons. In his conclusion, Teller discusses in detail how this “extraordinary success story” (187) of Jewish economic activity in the first half of the eighteenth century was possible and thus inscribes the book into the general discussion about Jewish economic activity in early modern Europe. He makes it very clear that Jews on the Radziwiłł estates did not contribute to the emergence of capitalism in any way or introduced particular economic innovations, but rather were the most important reason why the late feudal economic system continued to work for as long as it did.

Altogether, this very well-written book shows us how important it is to understand the economic basis of society and its influence on social and cultural developments. It should not only be an essential read for students and scholars of Polish-Jewish and Jewish economic history, but also of Polish and economic history in general, as it provides one of the best analyses of the workings of the eighteenth-century estate system in the Lithuanian part of the commonwealth, though many conclusions are valid for magnates in the Polish part of the country as well. Additionally, it shows an exemplary case of how an ethnic minority entered and flourished in an economic niche. With the publication of the English edition the book hopefully will find the broad readership it deserves.