Front Matter

Abstract

Introduction François Guesnet (bio) and Antony Polonsky (bio) O ḥevruta o metuta (Without community, there is death) Babylonian Talmud, Ta'anit 23a Since their exile in Babylon in the sixth century bce, Jews have sought to create institutions to organize community life and the practice of Judaism in the diaspora. This volume investigates the nature and functioning of the system of Jewish self-government created in the medieval Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It then examines how this system was partially abolished and transformed under Stanisław August (r. 1764–95), the last king of Poland–Lithuania, and subsequently by the governments of Prussia, Austria, and Russia which partitioned Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. Under the influence of the principles of the Enlightenment, all these rulers sought to drastically limit the operation of Jewish self-government, which was held to prevent the desired transformation of the Jews from an autonomous community into citizens or, where the concept of citizenship did not exist, into useful subjects of their respective rulers. The volume reflects on the successes and failures of Jewish communities to safeguard religious, charitable, and other institutions from state interference in the nineteenth century and their participation in organs of municipal self-government which developed first in the partitioning powers and then in independent Poland. Finally, it explores how, with the emergence at the end of the nineteenth century of new political ideas of Jewish autonomy, attempts were made to create a modernized system of self-government. While useful attempts have been made to understand forms of Jewish local organization under conditions of extreme duress, persecution, and mass murder during the German occupation of Poland and eastern Europe in the Second World War and the Holocaust, this volume does not look beyond the fateful year of 1939.1 ________ Few other features have shaped the trajectory of east European Jewish history as much as the extent and continuity of Jewish self-government. Among its most important features is the role it played in implementing the constantly changing interpretation of Jewish legal traditions and how its institutions reflected the embeddedness of the Jewish community in the administrative, political, and economic fabric of early modern states, most notably Poland–Lithuania. The differentiated and complex structure of responsibilities in the individual community—most prominently in the form of the board of governors or kahal—and the sophistication this showed in [End Page 1] shaping relations with the Crown, nobility, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jews' neighbours, had a long-lasting impact on Jewish political culture. So too did the supracommunity structures of regional councils and the two most prominent national councils, the Council of Lithuania and the Council of Four Lands. The existence of institutions allowing the Jews to govern themselves in western Christendom was partly the result of the fact that medieval and early modern states lacked the resources to administer all aspects of society. Furthermore, Jews were both a pariah group, tolerated in an inferior position, and a corporation with the legal right to govern themselves as did all medieval corporations, whether those of an estate, like the nobility, or of a specific group, like the burghers of a particular town. In this context it should be stressed that freedom in the Middle Ages had a 'local rather than a universal character'.2 The words 'liberty' and 'freedom' generally appeared in the plural form as in the 'rights and liberties' of a town, province, or estate which were granted by the sovereign and carefully recorded in charters. The rights and obligations of an individual were derived from participation in a given community—the abstract idea of 'human rights' was alien to medieval thinking and only emerged in the eighteenth century. The Jews could thus be seen, despite their pariah status, as being in the same position as other groups in society, possessing rights which were guaranteed by charters, whether general or limited to a specific region or town or to the institutions through which Jewish self-government was exercised. In this respect, the Jews clearly emulated the 'institutional and legal patterns developed by the non...