(What Was Once) The World's Largest Jewish Community

Abstract

Israel Bartal. The Jews of Eastern 1772-1881. Translated by Chaya Naor. Jewish Cultures and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Pp. vi + 203.Gershon David Hundert. Jews in Poland-Lithuania in Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity. S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Pp. xix + 286, maps.Magda Teter. Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in Poet-Reformation Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xxxiii + 272.ChaeRan Freeze, Paula Hyman, and Antony Polonsky, eds. JewLth Women in Eastern Europe. Polin: Studies m Polish Jewry 18. Oxford and Portland Ore.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2005. Pp. xiv C470.TAKEN TOGETHER, these four books suffice for a crash course in history of Polish Jewry from early modern period until shortly after World War I. They offer specialists and nonspecialists alike an understanding of newest trends in historiography of the Jews of Hastern Europe, who are still often relegated a sidebar m master narrative of modern Jewish history and too frequently only appear within it in relation their destruction. In fact, these four books demonstrate conclusively that this narrative must be rewritten. The seminal impact of partitions of Poland (1772, 1792, and 1795) as dividing line between early modern and modernizing Polish Jewry is asserted directly by Israel Bartal and assumed implicitly by Hundert's and Teter's work and by numerous essays in Polin anthology. We do well therefore address issues of two books that are squarely in early modern period and then continue with a discussion of two books whose focus is nineteenth century.Lucid, vivid, and brimming with archival detail and description, Gershon Hundert's book is a bold, sophisticated, revisionist analysis of eighteenth-century Polish Lithuanian Jewry that culminates years of scholarly work. Focusing on (what was once) largest Jewish community in world, Hundert seeks nothing less than a redefinition of term modernity. He rejects conflation of Westernization, the progressive integration of Jews into society at large and exchange of particularistic Jewish values, m varying degrees, for a more universal worldview, with modernization (p. 1) and seeks anchor study of modern European Jewry in continent's east rather than m narratives of small Jewish communities comprising tiny proportions of total populations of countries in which they lived and of total number of Jews in Kurope (p. 233). The term modernity is merely chronological, and Hundert defines it as roughly past two centuries. Purging term modernity of its conventional meanmgs and teleology (namely, political enfranchisement, religious transformation and secularization, dissolution of Jewish autonomy, and migration), Hundert offers up mstead AnnoLdte geological terms underscore significance of Polish Jewry's unique mentalite, hoping to identify on a magmatic level of Jewish experience, that is, elemental continuities that persist from early modern period almost present (my emphasis, but see pp. 3 and 234).Hundert makes an elegant and convincing case for singular culture of eighteenth-century Polish Jews. Due their enormous numbers, indispensable role in economy, and sense of cultural superiority, Polish Jews created and lived a sense of their own importance, what Hundert calls a social-psychological translation of concept of chosenness (p. 4). This mentalite drew from spiritual well of Ilaside Asbkenaz-the medieval German Jewish pietists1 -which was transmitted Poland as Ashkenazic Jews moved eastward, and deepened m Commonwealth, vast state formed by union of Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania m 1569. …