Bessarabia: Jews and the wine trade
The Jews of Bessarabia did not merely trade in wine; they owned vineyards, contrary to a common assumption.
The common picture of Pale of Settlement Jews as middlemen cut off from the land does not hold for Bessarabia. Here Jews grew grapes themselves.
The share of farmers among Bessarabian Jews rose from 3% in 1839 to 12.5% in 1858. Nineteen Jewish agricultural settlements were founded between 1836 and 1853. By the late nineteenth century Jewish farms were notably specialised in vines, tobacco and orchard fruit, and some six hundred Jews owned vineyards in the Chișinău and Orhei districts, supplying mainly the Russian wine market, which lacked sufficient suitable land of its own.
The pre-revolutionary Jewish Encyclopedia puts it plainly: Bessarabia stood out among Russian governorates for viticulture, and large numbers of Jews were employed in it, as in tobacco growing. The governorate's chief exports were grain, fruit and wine, and until the middle of the nineteenth century local commerce was largely in Jewish hands.
Legal restrictions were nonetheless real, though targeted rather than total. Jewish participation in producing and selling alcohol in Bessarabia was limited as early as 1818. From 1839 there were prohibitions on settlement in border zones. Within the fifty-verst border strip, only those registered before the 1858 edict could live. The May Laws of 1882 were applied harshly by local authorities, to the point of declaring towns to be "villages" where Jews could not settle.
Economic pressure at the end of the century was such that after ORT was founded in 1880, Bessarabian Jewish farmers were among its earliest beneficiaries, receiving help with seed, tools and equipment.
All of it vanished between 1940 and 1945. Modern Moldovan winemaking grew out of the Soviet industrial model and is not directly connected to the pre-war structure.