Gal-Ed: On the History of the Jews in Poland by David s> Engel (review)

Abstract

556 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003 purposesof guidance on a pop-up. Bykeyingin any one of the many hundreds of keywords given on the pop-up, the user can come up with a list of all chartersrelevantto his or herline of interrogation.Upon furtherenquiry,the useris also given a very briefdescriptionof each relevantdocument and, with the press of a key, its thumbnail. A single sweep of the mouse transformsthe thumbnailinto an almost real document, on your very own computer screen, which can be enlargedand even printedout. This is not only tremendous fun but also makes the Royal Books an unexpectedly important source. By using the pop-up index as a guide to personal names, one can, for instance, find a huge number of sixteenthcentury and later referencesto familieswhich are thought to have expired in the MiddleAges. Likewise,it ispossibleto track,decade by decade, the history of individual properties, or to read the full texts of treaties and of hitherto unpublishednegotiations with provincial diets. In short, what was previously an almost useless source has by the ingenuity and diligence of its engineers, programmers and historical consultants been transformedinto an object of easy plunder and information. Of course, in order to use these disksone has to have some grasp of Hungarian 'computer-speak'.One also has to know Latin and to be ready to have a go at reading older calligraphicstyles,not all of which are immediatelypenetrable. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies MARTYNRADY University College London Engel, David (ed.). Gal-Ed.OntheHistoryofthejews inPoland.Gal Ed Society for Historical Research on PolishJewry, i 7. School of Jewish Studies, Tel Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, 2000. 212 pp. + I 78 pp. Notes. Bibliography .Index. Priceunknown. A distinct aura of generational shift surroundsthe yearbook Gal-Edfor the year 2000. With this issue, a long-serving member of the editorial board, Emanuel Melzer stepsdown, and a whole section is devoted to the memory of the late founding editor, Moshe Mishkinsky,the renowned historian of the Jewish labour movement in Eastern Europe. Most of the members of the passing generation were natives of the region that they studied, and deeply imbued with its cultural ethos. There is clear concern among the senior generation that their successorsretain their commitment 'to underscore the great variety and multilingualityof PolishJewish culture, in the hope that doing so will encourage the scholarswho are assuming centre stage today to broaden their familiarity with many different topics and types of sources'. Consequently, and in contrastto its friendlyrivalPolin,Gal-Edeschews issues devoted to a single topic, publishes documentary materials in their original language, and retainsitsbi-lingualEnglish-Hebrewformat. It is difficultto review a scholarlym6lange, but a few general observations on the contents of the currentvolume are in order.The explorationof radical Jewish politics in Eastern Europe remains a special emphasis, with articles devoted to the Bund and the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hazair (by Roni Gechtman, Mitityahu Minc and Eli Tzur). Polish-Jewishrelations are REVIEWS 557 also well traced, as in Sabina Lewin's examination of Jewish secondary schooling in the tsarist-ruledKingdom of Poland and in the inter-warPolish state. She pays special attention to the effect of external political and social forces on the tempo of the processofJewish polonization. PiotrWr6beloffers a content analysisof the officialnewspaperof the PolishGovernment-in-Exile, Dziennik Polski.Wr6bel demonstratesthat the paper was a major conduit for information about the evolving mass-murder of East European Jews. This articlelinksnicely with Natalia Aleksiun'sreview of Polish historiographyon the Holocaust from I945 to I998. Literarystudiesare well representedby Michael Steinlauf's study of Mark Arnshteyn, the bi-lingual (Polish and Yiddish) playwright and actor. The theatre, as Steinlauf demonstrates,functioned as a 'borderland'where Poles and PolishJews interacted in a unique way. Special attention should be paid to Hana Shlomi's study of the resettlement of Jewish repatriantsfrom the Soviet Union to Lower Silesia. This is a contribution to a topic that is beginning to attractscholarlyattention:the 'ethnic cleansing' that took place in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. The settlement discussed by Shlomi should be seen in the context of polices that culminated in Operation Vistula in 1947, the wholesale deportationof 'alien' elements of the population of south-easternPoland. Gender...