Statement from the Editors

Abstract

To launch a new annual into a world which seems over-saturated with academic journals would seem a foolhardy and even superfluous undertaking. Yet we believe that Polin is a unique venture and we are convinced that it has a weighty task to fulfil. Polish Jewry was one of the largest and most important Jewish communities in the world. By the late seventeenth century, nearly three-quarters of the world's Jews lived within the borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Polish Jewry provided the basis for the religious tradition of much of the Jewish world, and the territories of the former Polish states were also the source for those movements - Zionism, Socialism, as well as Orthodox ones - which were to transform the Jewish world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As late as 1939, Poland still contained the second-largest Jewish community in the world, while the largest, that in the United States, derived to a considerable extent from the Polish lands. It was the great Jewish historian Salo Baron who described American Jewry as 'a bridge built by Polish Jews'....