...This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Jews in Poland and Russia in the years between 1881 and 1914. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, the situation of the Jews in the tsarist empire began to deteriorate rapidly. This was partly a result of the government's growing...

...This chapter assesses how, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the conflict between Poles and Germans in Prussian Poland became increasingly acute. By 1900, the area was a stronghold of the National Democrats (Endecja), the most zealous defenders of the Polish character of the region...

... of serfdom and feudal conditions, first in Prussian Poland 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 exception of the tsarist empire, where the laws restricting Jewish rights of residence were tightened after...

... of the Jews. Antisemitism became the stock-in-trade of the tsarist authorities, who fastened on imaginary Jewish conspiracies as the explanation for the crises which threatened the empire. In the Kingdom of Poland and in the Prussian partition, Polish political life was now dominated by the Endecja which came...

...This introductory chapter provides an overview of Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov schools she founded in interwar Poland. Bais Yaakov had been controversial among Orthodox Jews at the outset. Even after it had become a fait accompli, discussions about its legitimacy continued, and continue...

...This chapter examines Yung Vilne (Young Vilna, 1929–1940). In the decade preceding the outbreak of the Second World War, a group of young, unknown Yiddish poets, writers, and artists helped turn Vilna into the dominant Yiddish cultural centre in Poland. These young men and women, the majority...

... first examines the persistence of antisemitic and other ethnic stereotypes in Europe and particularly in Poland. It then turns to the history of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ in Poland and of how Polish communism gradually assimilated the ‘teachings’ of this slander. From there, the chapter...

...This chapter takes a look at Rafael F. Scharf's collection of writings. The writings concern the author's own relationship to Poland, various aspects of the history of the Holocaust, and, the subject closest to the author's experience, Kraków. The chapter shows how this book can reveal much about...

... that regulated it. This Ban has been seen by historians as a key determinant of the singularity of Ashkenazi Jewish culture. Hence, analysis of its fate in Poland is a most appropriate means of examining how far Polish rabbis adhered to the Ashkenazi legal tradition. In sixteenth-century Poland, there were two...

...This chapter describes the occurrences of accusations of ritual murder against Jews between 1500 and 1800 in the territories of Poland. In that period, these lands constituted the ‘main centre and reserve of world Jewry’. The marked increase in ritual murder trials in the mid-eighteenth century...

... and circulated them across the European continent. Jews also took a major part in international business networks, which carried Jewish merchants to other lands with their Jewish servants and labourers. Within Poland, Jewish occupations demanded extensive contact with the non-Jewish world, as did the political...

...This chapter highlights four review essays. It looks at a debate between Tomasz Gąsowski and the late Artur Eisenbach on the latter's book on Jewish emancipation in Poland. Eisenbach's reply represents probably his last publication. Meanwhile, Chone Shmeruk reviews two books on Isaac Bashevis...

...This chapter describes the early years of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg's (1884–1966) life amid the backdrop of the final decades of the nineteenth century. Within this milieu, the Jews in Russia, Poland, and Lithuania were coming to grips with a number of new movements and philosophies. Although...

...This chapter provides the obituary for Jerzy Tomaszewski, who died on 4 November 2014 at the age of 84 and was one of the principal figures in the revival of the study of the history of the Jews in Poland. It mentions that Tomaszewski was born in Radomsko, a town between Łódz´ and Czestochowa...

...This chapter recalls the emergence and dissemination of academic and popular writing of Polish Jewish history by university-trained Jewish historians in interwar Poland, tracing the development of the field from its early beginnings in the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War...

...This book highlights the historical scholarship that is one of the lasting legacies of interwar Polish Jewry and analyses its political and social context. As Jewish citizens struggled to assert their place in a newly independent Poland, a dedicated group of Jewish scholars fascinated by history...

... of unimaginable horror deep in Poland, and instead suggests that it was located on a territory fully integrated into the Third Reich prior to 1945. The chapter also shows how the ever-expanding complex of camps, factories, and ‘model town’ in Auschwitz became home not only to thousands of SS men...

...This chapter reconstructs the names of the office holders of the Council of Four Lands. The Council of Four Lands consisted of representatives of the Jewish communities of Crown Poland. It was not a truly autonomous body, as its members more often represented their noble patrons than...

... boards self-government models Kingdom of Poland Jewish community Jewish Community of Warsaw In the hundred years from 1815 to 1915, the Kingdom of Poland saw radical structural, organizational, and political changes in the functioning of Jewish self-government. The traditional kahal...

...This chapter discusses how the calls for national and cultural autonomy played out in the interwar years in Poland. The achievement of national sovereignty in Poland and the immediate necessity of establishing the state's frontiers exacerbated the tendency to view Poland as a national project...