Matvy Shestopal: One arenda contract

Matvy Shestopal: One arenda contract

"Concluding agreements with the noblemen, the Jews took arenda contracts not only on the taverns, but on entire cities together with their surrounding villages and the people in them." — Matvy Shestopal

The complete Matvy Shestopal "Jews in Ukraine" is available in Ukrainian from EXLIBRIS at exlibris.org.ua/szestopal/

Hardly Distinguishable from Outright Slavery
Israel Shahak proposed that the Khmelnytsky rebellion of 1648 was against the imposition upon the Ukrainian people of a condition worse than "utter serfdom, hardly distinguishable from outright slavery and certainly the worst in Europe." But exactly what was the Ukrainian situation in those times? What defined it? What made it so oppressive? How close was it to outright slavery?

The answer lies in the arenda contract, the example below demonstrating that it possessed at least the following seven characteristics:

(1) The arenda contract was of fixed and brief duration

The Jewish arendar paid a fixed sum for the arenda contract, and held the contract for a fixed duration — five years in the main example, and three years in a secondary example mentioned lower down. Thus, the arendar was under no obligation to establish a long-term relationship with his subjects, but rather was motivated to pillage them mercilessly so as to recoup his contract price and come away with the largest possible profit within the allotted time. As the arendar foresaw himself upon the expiration of his contract fleeing the devastation that he had wrought, he had no inducement to concern himself with any long-term consequences, such as the pauperization of the people or the ruin of their health or the destruction of their economy or the danger to himself of their fury.

(2) The arenda contract was purchased for a high fee?

The two arenda contracts below — the first presented in full, the second mentioned in passing — were purchased by Jewish arendars for five thousand and twelve thousand Polish gold pieces, respectively. The arendar, then, had to first extract that much from his subjects before he could begin to make a profit. Were these sums large?

In view of the difficulty of estimating the value of a Polish gold piece in 1594, it will for the time being have to be left as a hypothesis that five or twelve thousand Polish gold pieces constituted a great amount, and thus required the Jewish arendar to begin the exercise of his contract by extracting a great amount from the Ukrainians that had been delivered into his hands.

(3) The arenda contract was held by an alien

The arendar was a Jew, and the people delivered into his hands for exploitation were Ukrainians. The Jew shared no roots with the people whom he controlled, lived apart from them, spoke a different language, practiced a different religion, distinguished himself by different dress. All such differences promoted the dehumanizing of the Ukrainians in the eyes of the Jewish arendar, and removed inhibitions to ruthless exploitation.

(4) The arenda contract placed no limit on exploitation

The arenda contract allowed the arendar to extract profit from every imaginable activity using every imaginable means, and to set his profit at any imaginable height. The contract below makes an attempt to itemize all the activities from which profit can be extracted, but tiring of the labor of list construction, and recognizing that a complete listing is still far away, wraps up by granting the arendar the right to take his bite out of "all profitable activities whether itemized here or not." From other sources, we are able to see that there was no activity that a Ukrainian was able to engage in without paying a tax to his Jewish arendar, whether that activity be the catching of a fish in a stream or the baptizing of his child. The arenda contract makes not the least allusion to any limit that the arendar's greed might be bounded by, as for example no limit on the total wealth that could be taken in relation to the contract price (thus, the 5-thousand-gold-piece contract below was indifferent to whether the arendar subsequently extracted 10 thousand gold pieces from the people, or 50 thousand), no limit on the proportion of any product that he could confiscate, and no limit on the duration of labor that he could command.

In his essay The Elders of Zion and the Masters of Discourse, Israel Shamir writes on 22-Nov-2002 (with the capitalization his) that "the Jewish community of 17the century Ukraine has been a collective tax-farmer and leaseholder, extracting from the natives SIX times more taxes and dues per person than a gentile landlord did, wrote a prominent Jewish Ukrainian historian Saul Borovoy in a recently published in Jerusalem book."

(5) There existed no higher power to protect the people

There existed no higher law which could have protected the Ukrainians. There was no constitution, no bill of rights, no labor laws, no tax laws, no health code, no codification of permissible punishments, no law against usury, no ombudsmen, no Amnesty International. As a result, justice was whatever the arendar said it was. No appeal from his judgments to any higher authority was allowed. The Jewish arendar took whatever he wanted, and inflicted whatever punishment he chose. His rule was absolute.

(6) The arendar was free to inflict capital punishment

The arenda contract below uses the expression "karaty horlom," which is "karaty — to punish" followed by the word "horlo — throat" in the instrumental case, such that the two words together would be translated literally as "to punish using the throat" or "to punish by means of the throat."

In the Andrusyshen Ukrainian-English dictionary, under "horlo" we find "karaty na horlo — to impose capital punishment"; "zaplatyty horlom — to suffer capital punishment"; and "horlova sprava — criminal matter (threatening capital punishment)." In the same dictionary under "karaty" we find an expression we have already seen above, but this time with a parenthesized elaboration of its meaning: "karaty na horlo — to inflict capital punishment (by decapitation)."

At the same time, the preferred expression of "capital punishment" in Ukrainian does not make reference to the throat — thus, under "kara," Andrushyshen gives the throatless "pid karoiu smerty — under pain of death," and Podvesko in his English-Ukrainian dictionary gives the similarly throatless "capital punishment — smertna kara."

The conclusion that the above information points to is that in contemporary Ukrainian, use of the word "throat" in expressions relating to punishment denotes capital punishment, but with no indication, or at least very little, of which of various methods of inflicting death is intended. However, this does not answer the question of what "to punish by means of the throat" meant four hundred years ago, at the time of the arenda contract below. One possibility is that use of the word "throat" which is figurative today originated from a use that was literal, such that four hundred years ago, "to punish by means of the throat" meant "to kill by slitting the throat." The further question of who in Ukraine would have been available to slit the throat of a Ukrainian on behalf of a Jewish arendar might lead us into a discussion of Jewish ritual slaughter.

It may be significant as well that the arenda contract fails to stipulate which transgressions can be considered as capital, thus leaving it up to the Jewish arendar to determine for what offences he would slit Ukrainian throats, and how often. It may have some bearing on the question that following the Communist revolution, which would be more accurately called the Jewish conquest of the Slavs, anti-Semitism was designated as a capital offense.

(7) The arendar was not restrained by any ideology

The Jewish arendar was not restrained — not toward his Ukrainian subjects, anyway — by any ideology proclaiming the brotherhood of man or the eschewing of hatred or the virtue of clemency or the sanctity of life or the preference of spiritual integrity over worldly riches. Rather, his religion taught him that he was a superior being, and that non-Jews had been placed on this earth to serve him as beasts of burden and to augment his wealth.

All leading to a predictable end
With such strong inducements to dedicate himself to self-enrichment within the brief period of his arenda contract, with the power placed in his hands absolute, and in the absence of the slightest restraint whether legal or moral upon his greed, it can occasion little surprise that the Jewish arendar plundered the Ukrainian people mercilessly, and that ultimately he brought down upon his head the fate of all those who push the oppressed beyond the limit of endurance — a series of rebellions, the chief of which was the Khmelnytsky War of Liberation of 1648.

The Jewish people today, instead of heeding the lessons of history, have chosen the path of denying the past, a path which binds them to the wheel or repetition, as can be seen in each day's news, where Jews interminably thrust themselves before the world's gaze in their classical roles as exploiters of captive populations and suppressors of wars of liberation.

Thus, too, the information on the present page serves as a reminder that among the several motives for the contemporary Jewish calumniation of Ukrainians is the need to discredit the victim who is rising from near death to point an accusing finger. Today, and for centuries to come, the wars of liberation of the Ukrainian and the Palestinian people against Jewish tyranny will be painted by Jews as their own victimization at the hands of overbearing anti-Semites.

Matvy Shestopal
Matvy Shestopal was a respected and charismatic faculty member at the Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, probably in the faculty of journalism. During ideological wars in the 1960's, he was purged from the University, along with numerous others, and prevented from taking other employment. He died some time in the 1970's. His manuscript, Jews in Ukraine, was hidden by loyal students or coworkers, and published in Kyiv in 1999 — the redemption of his work constituting one of a growing number of realizations in waking life of the Jewish nightmare of near-dead Ukraine rising to point an accusing finger. A middle section from the three pages shown in Ukrainian below is provided in English translation.

One Arenda Contract

Matvy Shestopal

Jews in Ukraine
(A Historical Investigation)

"Oriana"
Kyiv — 1999
ISBN 966-7373-21-5

The Jews, taking also arenda contracts on roads, then set up one or two taverns on almost every kilometer. Concluding agreements with the noblemen, the Jews took arenda contracts not only on the taverns, but on entire cities together with their surrounding villages and the people in them. As an example,

we offer a specimen of such an "arenda contract," granted by Prince Sanhushko.

I, Hryhory Sanhushko Koshersky, and Sophia of Holowchyna Sanhushkova Kosherska, announce in this our arenda contract that on the 10th day of April, in the year 1594, we assigned by arenda contract those of our properties that are itemized below to our illustrious Mr. Abram Shmoilovych, and his wife Rykla Yudynna, and his successors: the town of Koshar with the villages Koshur Stary, Kruhel, Krasnodubia, Horodelets, the Myziv estate and the village of Myziv, the Borziv Cheremshanka settlement, with monies from rent, with pubs, taverns dispensing all sorts of alcoholic beverages, with the honey tribute, and the boyars with all their servants, regardless of whether they own livestock, with their cultivated fields, their labor, their wagons, living in the above-enumerated cities and villages, together with bee colonies, with ponds, mills and their ground grains, which in those above-enumerated cities and villages either exist today or will be built in the future, with lakes, with beaver lands, with fields, hay pastures, pine forests, woods, groves, oak groves, with farm houses, with barns, grain of all kinds sown in the fields, with all profitable activities whether itemized here or not, reserving nothing for ourselves, for five full years, until the 10th of April 1599, for five thousand Polish gold pieces... According to this arenda contract, he [Shmoilovych] is granted by us under seals and with signatures of our own hands, the right to own, to use, and to take for himself all manner of profit, and also all those we have placed in his power, to judge, to deliberate over and to punish the guilty and the disobedient according to the gravity of their transgressions, and to impose the death penalty.

The town of Koshar is today the city of Kamin-Kashyrsky, the district center of the Volynksy region. In the History of Cities and Villages of the Ukrainian SSR, it is mentioned that: "In the year 1595, H. Sanhushko granted Kamin-Kashyrsky in an arenda contract to A. Shmoilovych for 5 years in consideration of 5 thousand gold pieces. The arendar mercilessly oppressed the villagers, forcing them to carry out significantly greater obligations."

That is why Prince Oleksandr Pronsky granted an arenda contract "to the illustrious Mr. Abram Shmoilovych, the Jew Turiysky and their successors, the city and citadel of Lokach with the villagers, farmhouses, and with all the profitable activities, to belong to him, for three full years,

in consideration of 12 thousand Polish gold pieces." The contract also bestowed upon the new owner the right "to judge all subjects, to punish the guilty and disobedient according to their transgression, without possibility of appeal to us, and also to inflict the death penalty."

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