You're welcome:) (The propination and related arendator system are practically the stock of both Jewish folklore and all of Jewish records from Eastern Europe - so while only a few nerds know the terms, the vague situation is as familiar to your typical Hasidic kid as Cinderella is in the West)

Everyone's great-n-grandpa was an ‘arender’ whom the local ‘puritz’ (szlachta landowner) threw into his dungeon for falling behind in rent payments... and the math says that these stories are an *underestimate* of how many arendators there were

I was actually surprised, when I started getting into the documents for my professional reasons, how authentic this part of the storytelling was - I always thought the tavern-keeping village Jew was a Hasidic folktale trope exaggerating a relatively rare profession.

But no. In the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, even a century after it was dissolved, the ratio of taverns to people was about 1:~200 (give or take a factor of 2) and the tavern-keepers were disproportionately Jewish - for centuries

My favourite (rather obscure) Hasidic story in this genre is the Jewish tavern keeper who's tavern is losing money because it's located on a route of decreasing importance as industrialization or something proceeds - and his Rebbe blesses him that things should improve ...

... and they do, when an icon in the village church starts manifesting some miraculous liquid and becomes a local pilgrimage site. The Jewish tavern keeper has several successful years of business, and then informs the Rebbe that he's retiring now and moving into town. The icon stops working, the...

... village and its tavern shrivel into insignificance again.

Fascinating theological implications in this little story

My cynical assumption was just that the rabbi was a real G and set up some kind of water pumping system in the statue

Given how many Catholics make money off of spurious stories of miracles, it's only fair for other religions to get in on the hustle

Lol