Izrael Kalman Poznański (1833–1900)

Izrael Poznański was a textile industrialist known as one of the ‘Three Kings’ of Polish cotton alongside his rivals Karl Wilhelm Scheibler and Ludwig Ferdinand Geyer. He was one of the leading figures in the rapid growth of Łódź as a great industrial city.

Poznański’s family were textile merchants who moved within the Russian Empire to Łódź when he was an infant. At this time Łódź had a small population but it was growing as a result of state encouragement of industry. Inward migration created a multicultural society of Poles, Germans, Russians and Polish Jews like the Poznańskis. While still a teenager Poznański became a rag dealer and then set up a weaving workshop. At the age of 17 he married Leonia Hertz, the daughter of a wealthy Warsaw merchant. At 19 he took over his family’s textile trading firm and expanded it into manufacturing. He bought up land gradually with long-term plans to build a huge steam-powered weaving mill for cotton. He opened it in 1872 with 200 looms brought from Britain.

By 1879 he employed over 400 people but he had ambitions to grow his business further. He expanded it by stages, adding a dye works, a finishing plant, a spinning mill and more weaving shops, and nearby a starch works, a foundry and mechanical workshops. He bought a large estate next to the factory at Nieznanowice in 1884 where he built a vast neo-baroque palace for his family that also contained offices, warehousing, a winter garden and a ballroom. In 1889 he floated the business as ‘I. K. Poznański Cotton Products Joint Stock Society in Łódź’. The red-brick factory complex covered over 30 hectares. A few years after Poznański died, the company employed 6,800 people.

Poznański was a tyrannical employer who insisted on long working days of up to 16 hours, gave little thought to the safety of his workers and dealt harshly with strikes. However, late in life he turned his attention to charitable projects. He funded two hospitals, orphanages and schools for the poor, a technical school, a Jewish charitable fund, a synagogue and both Catholic and Orthodox churches. Łódź by the time he died was one of the most important textile centres in Europe.