Social and Religious Change, 1750–1914

Abstract

This chapter details how the period between 1750 and 1914 saw significant urbanization in north-eastern Europe. In the towns of Warsaw, St Petersburg, Moscow, Lviv, Kraków, and Poznań, a new Jewish way of life came into being. Jews earned their living in changed ways, Jewish communal institutions were transformed under the impact of government policies aimed at Jewish integration and the new needs created by the burgeoning of an industrial society, and, in those states where constitutional norms existed, Jews participated in municipal government. Jews also built modernized synagogues and schools and founded monthly, weekly, and eventually daily Jewish newspapers, which also provided a living for Jewish writers in Hebrew and Yiddish. Ultimately, too, it was in these new conurbations that a new pattern of interaction between Jews and non-Jews was created. The Jewish popular culture that emerged in the four decades before the First World War was an international phenomenon that accompanied the emigration of Jews in large numbers from the lands of former Poland–Lithuania to western Europe, the Americas, and even the Antipodes.