What Kosher Food Did They Have?
On the Main Line has posted some very interesting sources about the way in which some Jewish travelers ate kosher food on their journeys. I would add the following from this exhibit (see under “Jews and the Liquor Trade”),
By the end of the eighteenth century about 80 percent of rural Jews in Poland-Lithuania were involved in the sale and production of liquor. According to available data, Jews comprised 94 percent of urban and at least 78.7 percent of rural tavern keepers among seven towns and fifty-one villages in Bielsk County (Podlaskie District) during this period. A centerpiece of the reform initiatives of the Prussian, Russian, and Austrian monarchs who annexed the Polish lands during this period was the elimination of the rural Jewish liquor trade, which they attempted by means of escalating concession fees and outright expulsions. Surprisingly, few rabbinic or Hasidic leaders protested these draconian measures. It appears they themselves were uncomfortable with the tavern keeping profession.
One might also want to read this selection from a famous responsum of the Maharshal (no. 72) about the lack of an obligation to cover one’s head, in which he pointed out, what was in his eyes, quite a hypocrisy.
And now I will reveal to you the disgrace of the Ashkenazim. Surely one who drinks forbidden wine (yein nesech) in a Gentile motel and eats fish cooked in their vessels and is acting strict when he believes the inn keeper that they haven’t cooked any food in this vessel, [they] are not suspected of anything and nobody doubts them, and they are treated with respect if they are rich and bossy. But one who eats food that is definitely kosher yet with an uncovered head, they are treated as if they have left the fold.