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Jewish Spaces 163of life was very different in these various places. In a famous essay the GermanJewish sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) has described thepsychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street,with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up adeep contrast with small town and rural life . . . The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminatingcreature a different degree of consciousness from that required by rural life,where the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habituallyand more evenly.Simmel highlighted some of the specific features of life in the big city: its intellectualquality, its dependence on production for a national and internationalmarket, its extreme division of labour, and the requirement of punctuality which itimposed on those who earned their living here. These characteristics made socialrelationships qualitatively different from those in small towns. The city atomizesits inhabitants and isolates them from each other, which makes them both moreindifferent to each other and also more prone to conflict. At the same time, itaffords its denizens an unprecedented freedom from the ‘trivialities and prejudiceswhich bind the inhabitants of a small town’. 1This chapter examines the specific conditions in which Jews lived, first in smalland market towns and then in the large towns whose emergence was such a characteristicfeature of nineteenth-century Europe.THE SHTETL IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURYWhen it comes to the nineteenth century, we have nothing that compares with thedetailed studies of Rosman and Hundert on Jewish small towns in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries. The legal situation of the Jews in these towns changedsignificantly. The abolition of serfdom and feudal conditions, first in PrussianPoland and then in Galicia, the Congress Kingdom, and the Pale of Settlement,did away with the rights of the noble owner of the small town. With the exceptionof the tsarist empire, where the laws restricting Jewish rights of residence weretightened after 1881, Jews could now live in any part of any town. Throughout thisperiod Jews remained a key element of the rural economy and retained their role asintermediaries between the estate and the village. However, social stratificationbecame more extreme in the Jewish small town, as some profited from the commercializationof agriculture and the new links with the outside world while otherswere impoverished by the disappearance of their traditional occupations.We are dependent, above all, on fiction for our understanding of what washappening in this period. The maskil Israel Aksenfeld provides a very vividdescription of Jewish small towns in the closing years of the Napoleonic period inhis novella Dos shterntikhl (The Headband):1Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’.