A family business

VI

The largest purveyor of tea in the world in the Nineteenth Century was the Wissotzky Tea Company, who not only traded in tea but owned many of the plantations where it was grown and some of the ships in which it was brought to market. 

The story of tea in Russia starts in 1636, when the Chinese Emperor sent to the Tsar of the time what were considered "useless leaves." Eventually, the proper use was found for them, and a regular overland "Tea Route" was established from European Russia across Central Asia and into China. Tea became and remains the national drink of Russia. The overland Tea Route reached its peak usage in 1824.

The story of Wissotzky Tea also starts in 1824, with the birth of one Kalman Wolf Wissotzky. Kalman Wolf came from a poor family of merchants and he was a religious student even after he got married.

Somehow Kalman the young religious student managed to relocate to Moscow, where he adopted a Greek version of his name, Kalonimus (a not-uncommon practice amongst Jews of that era), and became a dealer in tea in 1843. The first China tea clippers began sailing that same year.

A Russian middle class developed in the mid-19th Century. By the 1860s, Wissotzky Tea was the largest tea merchant in the world. Much of the tea carried by the great clippers was tea destined to bear the Wissotzky brand (one of their logos is a clipper ship). Over the next forty years Kalonimus Wissotzky became the preeminent tea trader in the Russian Empire and the licensed tea purveyor to the Russian Imperial Family.

He sent his family members to open branch offices in Warsaw, Paris, London, Jaffa, Toronto and New York. Via his London connections, he purchased tea plantations in India and Ceylon, and began working with Chaim Weizmann, the poet and political activist Ahad Ha'am (who was one of his employees) and other early Zionists to establish a Jewish National Home in the Ottoman Levant.

After the brutal Kishinev pogrom in 1903, Wissotzky began to doubt that Jews had a future in Eastern Europe, and he began slowly moving his operations to Western Europe. 

Kalonimus Wolf Wissotzky passed away in 1904, but the family continued on in the tea trade and thrived, despite bitter anti-Jewish prejudice.

A popular Russian ditty of the early 1900s sneered at the Jewish influence in the Empire, small as it actually was:  

"Tea of Wissotzky, sugar of [Lazar] Brodsky [a major Russian-Jewish sugar baron], Russia of Trotsky [the Russian-Jewish Bolshevik leader]".

The tea business grew ever larger until the Russian Revolution in 1917. Several Wissotzkys were held as hostages in Russia after the Revolution, forced to work for the Soviets de-constructing the company they'd built.

It perhaps is an indicator of just how stupid the Bolsheviks really were that they depended on the very people who had a stake in perpetuating the business to take it apart piece by piece. It took the Bolsheviks three full years to nationalize the company, giving some idea of how large and complex the enterprise was. During this period, the family managed by hook and by crook to successfully complete the transfer, begun by Kalonimus, of a significant proportion of the company's operations and assets outside of Russia. Poland became the new center of gravity for the company's Eastern European operations after the Revolution.

In 1936, with the growing threat of Naziism overhanging Europe, the Eastern European operations of Wissotzky Tea moved to Mandatory Palestine (now Israel), where the company eventually established its chief headquarters, after 1948. Offices remained in London and other cities.

Since then, the company has diversified, and it has expanded into the Americas. It remains a family-owned business.