Nineteenth-Century Poland Research Articles

Westernizing Arabian Horses

This article reviews Western approaches to the regulation of Arabian horse breeding as it shifted west and globalized, focusing on the period between 1880 and 2020. The move to “preserve” the Arabian horse within a Western framework is central to this history, but different approaches have been adopted over time. I consider examples from nineteenth century Poland, England, and Russia as contexts for understanding how debates about and approaches to producing “purity” unfolded in the Arabian horse industry in the twentieth-century United States and continue today in the global context of Arabian breeding framed by the Word Arabian Horse Organization (WAHO).

Człowiek czy zwierzę? O dyskusjach wokół rodowodu ludzkości w polskim czasopiśmiennictwie drugiej połowy XIX wieku

Celem artykułu jest zobrazowanie dyskusji na ziemiach polskich na temat rodowodu ludzkości, których inspiratorem był Charles Darwin i kontynuatorzy jego myśli. Teoria ewolucji zmieniła sposób myślenia o człowieku, który traktowany był dotąd jako „korona stworzenia”. Główną oś niniejszego tekstu stanowi analiza recepcji prac Darwina poprzez pryzmat sporów nad rodowodem człowieka, tym samym więc rozwój nauki na ziemiach polskich w XIX wieku. Problematyka ta znalazła swoje odzwierciedlenie w naukowej (a także popularyzującej wiedzę) polskiej prasie doby zaborów. Przełom w myśleniu o człowieku polegał na odejściu od koncepcji kreacjonistycznej, uznającej wolę Stwórcy w powstaniu świata oraz na zakwestionowaniu dogmatu niezmienności gatunków. Pod wpływem teorii Darwina, nie bez polemik, wywiedziono wniosek o decydującej roli czynników naturalnych w powstaniu świata ludzkiego i jego zróżnicowania. Najbardziej kontrowersyjną tezą było uznanie pokrewieństwa człowieka z małpą. Budziła ona sprzeciw sfer konserwatywnych. Sam Darwin nie wyprowadzał tak bezpośredniego rodowodu. Natomiast jego następcy kusili się o często kontrowersyjne koncepcje, które również znalazły odzwierciedlenie w polskim czasopiśmiennictwie poprzez recepcję nauki zachodniej. Należy zaznaczyć, że pisma popularnonaukowe były ważnym źródłem informacji ze świata nauki i wywarły znaczący wpływ na postrzeganie teorii ewolucji pośród masowego odbiorcy. Często uprzystępniały one wiadomości na temat teorii Darwina oraz przedstawiały stan badań. Czyniły to w sposób wyważony i kompetentny. Ich autorami byli uznani polscy uczeni. W rezultacie więc, to całokształt dostępnych informacji zadecydował o upowszechnieniu teorii Darwina pośród polskiego społeczeństwa.

Circus shows in nineteenth-century Poland as pseudo-Olympics

ABSTRACT The so-called pseudo-Olympics include all kinds of events organised before 1896 that referred in varying degrees to the traditions of the ancient Olympic Games. Sports historians who have studied the subject of pseudo-Olympics focus mainly on the sports games and cultural festivals initiated in the seventeenth century, which, in terms of their organisation, programme and nomenclature, imitated the games held in ancient Olympia. At the same time they often ignore various circus performances, many of which used Olympic themes and can also be classified as pseudo-Olympics. The forerunner of such performances in Europe was the English circus, which became a pattern to follow for French and German circuses. The latter had the greatest impact on the development of circus art in nineteenth-century Polish territories. Staged circus productions were examples of performance forms that popularised the Olympic tradition in a more or less conscious manner.

The “Vanishing Indian” and the Vanishing Pole: From a Middle Ground to a Logic of Elimination in the European and Global Periphery, 1840–1880

This article examines the use of the “Vanishing Indian” and “Doomed Race” extinction narratives in the writings of Henryk Sienkiewicz, Paul Edmund Strzelecki, and Sygurd Wiśniowski with respect to the Indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, and New Zealand. It locates these writers in the context of mid-late nineteenth century Poland, at the periphery of Europe and of empire, arguing that they demonstrated an ability to detect and critique the injustices of colonialism and sought out a rhetorical “middle ground” between Poles and non-European victims of empire in their work. However, their sympathy was in tension with Poland's historic role as a regional metropole, the need to assert their status as White Europeans, and the lure of settler colonialism. The “middle ground” they sought to create ultimately gave way to a “logic of elimination” that neutralized this tension, justifying colonialism to themselves and to other agents of empire.

Territorialisation and Incarceration: The Nexus between Solitary Confinement, Religious Praxis and Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Poland and Lithuania

Modern prisons are viewed in this paper as highly specific configurations, providing a critical infrastructure for the forging of a new relationship between subjects and the imperial state. The comparison of three rather different temporal and spatial practices of territorial incorporation makes it possible to describe the introduction of modern statehood in nineteenth century Poland and Lithuania as a long-term process, including a radically changed legal framework. It was accompanied by the ongoing codification of penal law by all three partitioning powers, which is outlined in the first part of this paper. The article offers a deep analysis of the establishment of new practices of incarceration in remote places (vis-à-vis the imperial capitals) as an inherent part of a changing relationship between centre and periphery within the Prussian, Russian and Habsburg Empires. They were among a broad range of new bureaucratic practices fostering the territorialisation of statehood. By enlarging the presence of selected actors in remote parts of the Central European Empires, they established a direct and bidirectional relationship between the representatives of the state and its subjects. By analysing the way in which the partitioning powers re-used monasteries as infrastructures for the introduction of new penal practices in the early nineteenth century, this article offers a better understanding of the long-term structural changes. A two-step argumentation follows the functional logic of the relationship between religious spaces designed for introspection and spaces for solitary confinement. As a consequence of the reform discourse, new prison complexes were erected in the second half of the nineteenth century. They produced a highly institutionalized and structured space for the reconfiguration of the relationship between the subject and the state. An ideal version of this relationship was described in normative documents, such as prison instructions. In analysing them, this article focuses on the state-led implementation of religious practices, as they played a major role in the redesign of this relationship following the establishment of new prison complexes.

Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust by Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg

Reviewed by: Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust by Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg Shawn M. Reagin Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust. By Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. 192. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-1501715266. In the summer of 1941, while Soviet control of Poland deteriorated and before the German army established its own control after the official declaration of war in June, some local Polish civilians attacked their Jewish neighbors. One of the more famous lines from Jan Gross's seminal book Neighbors (Princeton University Press, 2001) paints a horrifying portrait of the anti-Jewish pogrom in the town of Jedwabne: "one day, in July 1941, half of the population of a small East European town murdered the other half—some 1,600 men, women, and children" (7). Gross's overarching argument that the Holocaust against the Jews is inseparable from Nazi rule over every other European civilian caused (and still causes) much discussion in Holocaust literature. Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg enter this debate with their new book Intimate Violence. Kopstein and Wittenberg begin with an historical overview of ethnic relations in the Polish borderlands. They begin their inquiry with antisemitism in nineteenth-century Poland and the debates on how Jewish emancipation during the interwar years was recast as "partisan struggles over state ownership, economic redistribution, and the proper limits of minority autonomy" (19), then consider how the outlook for Jews grew increasingly ominous with the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the death of the Polish Chief of State Józef Piłsudski in 1935, and finally the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. They next investigate a handful of different localities to better understand a peculiar statistic regarding anti-Jewish violence in Poland: in only 9 percent of Polish towns where Jews and non-Jews lived together did a pogrom take place. The central question Kopstein and Wittenberg ask is: why did pogroms occur in some localities but not others? Their conclusion is quite simple: competing nationalisms in certain towns where non-Jews saw potential political rivals was one of the main causes for the anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland. Indeed, pogroms occurred more often in areas with large populations of Jews who advocated for political or national equality; such ethnic violence "is situational rather than inherent" (3). This is supported by extensive datasets compiled from censuses from 1921 and 1931 and election data from 1922 and 1928. Kopstein and Wittenberg are forthcoming [End Page 394] with the acknowledgment that their sources are incomplete. The pogroms occurred under the fog of war in 1941 in an area Timothy Snyder has aptly called the "blood-lands." The treatment of civilians (both Jewish and non-Jewish) was incredibly harsh in this area. Additionally, much of the Jewish population that survived the pogroms was eventually deported to extermination camps, leaving few or no survivors to testify about the 1941 pogroms. The demographic data, combined with German and Soviet reports, non-Jewish memoirs, and testimony from survivors and perpetrators of the pogroms offers great insight, but is unfortunately limited in several ways and may never be able to offer the full story. Nevertheless, Kopstein and Wittenberg apply their data to several different towns to reach their conclusions. They examine Białystok and Polesie in northeastern Poland, where Poles lived alongside Jews and a handful of Belarusians; Volhynia, Lwów, Stanisławów, and Tarnopol, where Ukrainians lived next to a Polish and Jewish minority; and, to offer a comparison with Poland, certain parts of Lithuania and Romania. Additionally, Kopstein and Wittenberg use their datasets to dispel certain myths about the 1941 pogroms. For instance, many have claimed over the years that they were a response to a communist-Jewish collaborative conspiracy. However, this is not supported by the quantitative data (88). And although antisemitism is often accepted as a necessary precondition for the pogroms, the data suggest some kind of causal relationship, but not a strong one. Perhaps the most significant historiographical contribution of Intimate Violence is its discussion of Jan Gross's Neighbors. Although Jedwabne...

블룬츨리의 『근대국제법』 서문과 문명론적 국제법 관념— 폴란드와 한국의 근대적 맥락에 대한 비교사적 접근

블룬츨리의 『근대국제법』 서문과 문명론적 국제법 관념— 폴란드와 한국의 근대적 맥락에 대한 비교사적 접근

Cykle pokoleniowe w czasie i przestrzeni = Generation cycles in time and space

There are many different domains of science whose elaborated theoretical concepts assume that development (understood in terms of the definite succession of processes and transformations (Taylor and Flint, 2000; Domański, 2005) is of a cyclical nature. Among these concepts, the one entailing generation cycles looks most convincing. Thus, in the view of co-authors William Strauss and Neil Howe (1991, 1997), social change is driven by generation cycles of 15-25 years’ duration, albeit coming together into phases some 80 years long termed saecula. M. Alexander in turn maintains that a saeculum corresponds to one Kondratieff cycle, and has also designated 36-year paradigmatic cycles identical to those found for the New York Stock Exchange. The latter are shown to comprise approximately two Strauss-Howe cycles. It is in turn Wojciech Białek (2009) who has applied the term “generation cycle” to these cycles of roughly 36 years’ duration, given that this length of time concurs with geneticists’ recently established average difference in age between consecutive generations (Tremblay and Vezina, 2000). Where the historical experience of Polish society is concerned, the existence of a 30-40 year generation cycle governing political and cultural life would not represent a truly new discovery. Norman Davies (1984, 1995) notes that: “There is no doubt that the wheel of political fortune in nineteenth-century Poland revolved with a regularity beyond the bounds of mere coincidence”. In his opinion, therefore: “strong credence must be given to the idea that the regular alternation of the two dominant ideologies was closely associated with the rise and fall of successive generations”. (…) “Neither Romantics nor Positivists could ever enjoy a run of more than three or four decades before disillusionment and failure destroyed their supremacy, and gave an opening for the revival of their opponents”. The cyclical character of definite processes observed under both Polish and American conditions in fact emerges as of a universal nature, finding its analogies throughout the world, though first and foremost within the European cultural circle. It is also possible to speak of its far reaching synchronicity, encompassing change on both local and global scales. This is witnessed by successive culminations of cycles with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the revolutionary surges of the 1830s and 1840s, the events of the 1860s and 1870s, the turbulences and wars of the early 20th century (notably World War I), then World War II, the great transformations of the 1980s, and the recently observed increase in political tension in various parts of the world (e.g. t e Middle East, Ukraine, etc.). In the economic sphere the symptoms are shifts in the business climate, which can even be calculated by reference to quantitative indicators. Then, in the sphere of culture, it is possible to denote successive periods in literature and the arts. In the political sphere in turn, events that shape the state or territorial order are to be observed readily. The present article thus seeks to propose the existence of a universal and synchronous 36-year generation cycle, which manifests itself in real symptoms in the world of politics, and for instance in the cyclicity seen to characterise intensit of change on the political map of Europe.

Descriptive Instrumental Music in Nineteenth-Century Poland: Context, Genre, and Performance

Descriptive instrumental works composed in nineteenth-century Poland do not easily fit classification as consumer music, as they fulfilled important patriotic and commemorative functions. While these pieces, like descriptive works composed elsewhere, employ topical gestures and melodic quotations, in the Polish works, patriotic songs are used intertextually to construct coherent historical or allegorical narratives of the nation through music. In Jankiel’s “Concert of Concerts,” an excerpt from the epic poem Pan Tadeusz, the poet Adam Mickiewicz describes a performance of such musical narrative of events in Polish history. Thus Mickiewicz apotheosized the then-popular descriptive pieces and inspired future compositions in the same genre. These pieces cross generic boundaries and interact in unexpected ways with the canonic repertory, offering insights into compositional techniques and strategies used by composers such as Fryderyk Chopin and illuminating modes of listening familiar to their audiences.

Karol Estreicher (1827–1908) and his Bibliografia polska: Negotiating a National Bibliography in Nineteenth-Century Poland

Karol Estreicher (1827–1908) compiled Bibliografia polska [Polish bibliography], an extraordinary retrospective national bibliography of the body of written works of Poland. Chronologically covering the entire history of printing in Poland up to 1900, it consisted of three distinct parts: the nineteenth century; a universal chronological bibliography of Polish publications; and pre-nineteenth century, conventionally called Bibliografia staropolska [Bibliography of old Poland]. So far a total of 56 volumes of Bibliografia polska have been published. That total includes the 35 volumes that constitute parts 1, 2, and 3; the four volumes that, covering 1891–1900, were published outside the framework of the three parts; and the seventeen volumes that constitute the second edition of part 1, the nineteenth-century bibliography. It was an exhaustive but also complicated bibliographic opus. A prolific writer and literary scholar himself, Estreicher devoted—with remarkable endurance and resilience—50 years of his life to its making. Much of the complexity of his bibliography reflected the cultural and intellectual roots of the author and the way he interpreted the meaning of his project.

Poland. A Modern History, by Anita Prazmowska

Though at times a little redolent of the lecture theatre, this is a lively and compelling chronicle of Polish political history from the partitions of the late eighteenth century through to Poland’s recent accession to NATO and the European Union—the nineteenth century is covered in the introduction, with nationalist flashpoints such as the 1863 rising glossed and the different conditions imposed on Poland by the partitioning powers summarised. Poland’s achievement of independent statehood is closely examined, the post-1918 military and political struggles that established the country’s new borders tracked and the major participants in those processes assessed. Some attention is paid to the ethnic complexity of territories claimed by Poles as Polish, but the opportunity to problematise Poland and Polish identity itself—significant political conundrums facing early twentieth-century Europe—is not taken. Notably absent from the bibliography is Brian Porter’s When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (2001; rev. ante, cxvi [2001], 256–7). Instead, this account is largely predicated on the assumption that the Polish nation is an historical given, whose claims are straight forwardly the proper stuff of historical study. How these claims were reconciled with those of the new nationalities—and non-national identities—evident in territories once thought to be Polish deserves more careful consideration, not least because none of the potential ‘Polands’ on offer at the time satisfied everybody and it was inevitable that the new Polish state was going to be left with unfriendly neighbours and dissatisfied ‘national minorities’. James E. Bjork’s Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (2008; rev. ante, cxxv [2010], 1029–31) suggests ways in which the picture offered here could be nuanced.

Beyond the Legality Principle: Sacher-Masoch’s Economies of “Jewish Justice”

In Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s short story “Frau Leopard,” one of the author’s many popular tales of Jewish life, a town’s local anti-Semite gets his comeuppance after he falls in love with the beautiful Jewish widow of the title. He thereby enters into a system of desire, displacement, and revenge that Sacher-Masoch, in one of the tale’s three subtitles, curiously names “Jewish Justice.” Although Sacher-Masoch’s vision of Jewish life in nineteenth-century Poland is clearly no more than pure fantasy, the story’s farcical plot nevertheless constitutes a real engagement with the questions of law, justice, fairness, contract, retribution, and citizenship that also lie at the core of both Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, a discussion about the latter of which also marks the turning point of Sacher-Masoch’s own tale. In direct contrast to both the drama and the political treatise, Sacher-Masoch’s exoticizing and eroticizing of Jewish culture, or rather of minority and marginalization per se, act as a way to bypass normative demands in favor of perverse pleasure, and from this to attempt an answer to the problem of how to exercise justice in the absence of transcendent authority.

Prince Adam Czartoryski as a liminal figure in the development of modern nationalism in Eastern Europe at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

In Polish history, Prince Adam Czartoryski is almost universally regarded as one of the most important Polish statesmen and patriots of the first half of the nineteenth century. In Russian history, on the other hand, he is remembered chiefly as the Foreign Minister of the Russian Empire, and a close personal friend of Tsar Alexander I. How did Czartoryski reconcile his commitment to the Polish nation with his service to the Russian Empire (a state which occupied most of Poland)? This paper will attempt to place Prince Adam's friendship with Alexander, and his service to Imperial Russia, in the broader context of national identity formation in early nineteenth-century eastern Europe. It will be argued that the idea of finding a workable relationship between Poland and Russia, even within the framework of a single state for a “Slavic nation,” was an important and forgotten feature of Polish political thought at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By answering the question of precisely how Czartoryski was able to negotiate between the identities of a “Polish patriot” and “Russian statesman,” the paper will shed light on the broader development of national identity in early nineteenth-century Poland and Russia.

Tomasz Kamusella: The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe

On an earlier occasion (Spolsky 2004), I complained about what I labeled linguicentrism, the tendency to deal with language policy as though only language mattered. This authoritative study of Central European language policies over the centuries is a welcome example of the approach that I argue for, an account of the close relations between changing sociolinguistic ecology and the political and religious history of the communities. It concentrates on four major languages, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and Slovak, tracing the growth and standardization of each from origin to ‘‘the short twentieth century’’. It sets this against a background that gives more information than many other sources on all the other languages involved in the ecology, including obviously German and Russian but also Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic, Albanian, Romani, Greek and Tatar, to mention just a few. Whatever else, this volume is a rich repository of data from several centuries of the history of European languages, and will serve as a first book of reference on the languages included. The close tie between religious (in earlier years) and nationalist (from the nineteenth century) ideologies and language policy—status, form, and teaching—is constantly emphasized. There are key analyses that might surprise many of us: for instance, that ‘‘nation’’ in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Poland referred to a small elite group of nobles who preferred to speak French or German, and the extent to which the emerging status of vernacular languages depended on the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. There are also exhaustive accounts of the development, modification, and status of the many scripts in which these languages were written, and of the religious and national significance of the scripts. There is ample information also on the language activists—grammarians, purists, and lexicographers—and their contributions to the codification of the varieties.

Celtic Countries from the Perspective of Polish Romantics and Exiles

In this piece on the Polish Romantic travellers confronted with Celtic cultures and countries, I have tried to show the way they reacted and how their imaginations worked. Probably some of their reactions were not different to those of all other Celtophiles. The special role of the Czartoryskis’ cultural patronage needs to be highlighted. In the nineteenth century Poland, nobody ever attempted to gather so many books about Celtic history and culture again, even after the emergence of Celtic Studies as an academic discipline later in the nineteenth century. The predictable result was that, with time, knowledge of Celtic cultures diminished among the Polish writers. The literary revival in early twentieth century Ireland, associated with Yeats and his contemporaries, did not elicit widespread reaction from Polish librarians and academics. This failure to respond to new developments in Ireland is probably to be explained in terms of the economic and socio-political conditions in the divided Poland of that time. One of the many negative results of the partitions at the end of the eighteenth century was that a large number of important Polish writers moved abroad, as well as that their relations and impressions were affected by this emigration. Being a political émigré was not always helpful in so far as the exploration of new cultures was concerned, both from the point of view of the psychological trauma of being away from home and of various everyday constraints. Generally, it was personal interests and earlier studies, and not finances or place of living that influenced some Polish authors’ choice to write on Celtic themes.

Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica/Radzin Hasidism (review)

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. 400 pp. $45.00. The Izbica/Radzin hasidic dynasty, founded by R, Mordecai Joseph of Izbica (1800-1854), was of the most creative and controversial hasidic groups in nineteenth-century Poland. Mordecai Joseph's teachings, contained in the Mei ha-Shiloah, introduced new perspectives on determinism, messianism, and antinomianism that reverberate to the present. His grandson, R. Gershon Henokh of Radzin (1839-1891) was the most important figure in Izbica/Radzin Hasidism after Mordecai Joseph. He was a prolific and erudite author and editor, editing and publishing the writings of his father and grandfather. Gershon Henokh's own writings covered four main areas. His Sidrei Tehorot (of which only two volumes were published) sought to create a Gemara for those tractates in the Order of Tehorot that had no Gemara. His second interest was the rediscovery of the tekhelet (the blue thread of the zizit). The majority of rabbinic authorities rejected this discovery, and only his own followers wore his tekhelet. He also wrote a number of traditional style hasidic commentaries on the Pentateuch that expanded on the teaching in the Mei ha-Shiloah. Fourth was a small work, ha-Hakdama ve ha-Petikha (Introduction and Preface), a preface to his father's commentary on Genesis, Bet Ya'akov al Sefer Bereshit. Magid concentrates on the last two areas of Gershon Henokh's work in this monograph, ignoring the first two areas. This work is divided into three parts. The first part, chapters 1-3, is devoted to a close reading and analysis of the ha-Hakdama ve ha-Petikha. Magid sees it as the programmatic foundation of Izbica/Radzin Hasidism. He also argues that it is one of the first attempts, internal to Hasidism, that seeks to place Hasidism in the trajectory of meta-halakhic Jewish literature, incorporating both medieval Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah (p. xii). These claims serve to justify the attention devoted to this fairly small text. It may indeed be a systematic attempt, but treatises are rare in Hasidism, and hasidic interest in Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed is virtually non-existent. Magid's analysis is interesting, but he fails to demonstrate the importance and influence of the ha-Hakdama ve ha-Petikha beyond Gershon Henokh's own writings. The second part, chapters 4, 5, and 6, examines Gershon Henokh's understanding of free will and determinism as they emerge from his exegesis of the major biblical figures in the book of Genesis from the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to the perfection of the biblical personality in the figure of Jacob, who integrates and unites the human and divine will. …

For Susan Sontag, 1933–2004

“Your corrections are biting, maternal, just. Your example is luminous.” These words float on the page in susan sontag's last novel, In America, near the end of the book (349). The reader isn't surprised by the indirection of the address, the fused “you” of the narrator's voice looped through the character's. Sontag has been present from the first pages, in which she finds herself traveling through time to nineteenth-century Poland, into a drawing room at a party. She moves about pleasantly dislocated, examining her statuesque characters caught in a tableau vivant as she is about to set them free. They will be freer than Sontag's four grandparents likely were when coming from Poland to America, yet this small group of fictional friends will be swept up in the centripetal power of a charismatic personality with exceptional talent, the historical actress Maryna Z. Now, as the novel is about to close, Maryna is poised to be the inspiring, compelling director of her own small repertory company in America. We have come to trust her completely. The praise for her efforts, those words about correction and example, comes from somewhere over the stage lights out of the depths of some metaphysical, darkened theater but also from inner admonishment and fair-minded assessment. This is how she must be, our Sontag-Maryna; this is what art requires, this is what is needed.

Hasidism, Shtadlanut, and Jewish Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland: The Case of Isaac of Warka

The paper examines political activities of R. Isaac of Warka, the best known Hasidic intercessor in Poland, against the background of both Jewish tradition of shtadlanut and the political environment of the nineteenth-century Congress Poland. It focuses on the strategies, tactics and tools of this activity, which, I clam, differed from those employed by the shtadlanim in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The thesis of the paper is that these new forms of political activism were made possible only by the changed political system of nineteenth-century Poland. I claim that this political system and the policy of the Polish government both contributed to the unique form of the Polish Hasidism resulting from Hasidic responses elicited in part by Polish social policy. The sources for the paper are mainly archival documents of the governmental origin, including a series of Isaac of Warka's petitions to the government, government's responses, internal ministerial correspondence etc. These sources has never been utilised before. They shed a new light on the social and political history of the Hasidic movement in Poland.

Polish liberal thought before 1918

Based on solid research, this erudite study is a first attempt at presenting a comprehensive analysis of nineteenth-century Polish liberalism. Polish liberal tradition has generally been considered weak or even nonexistent. Janowski, on the other hand, argues that nineteenth-century Poland inherited a strong protoliberal tradition from the nobility-based democracy, and that in the mid-nineteenth century, liberalism was a dominant trend in Polish intellectual life, even if it rarely appeared in its pure form and did not create political movements separating liberal aims from patriotic ones. The author maintains that the definition of liberalism in Central Europe should not be based on the Anglo-Saxon model, in view of the weakness of the middle classes and, in the case of partitioned Poland, the lack of independent statehood. This explains why there was a marked etatist trend among liberal thinkers, who saw the creation of a strong state as a tool of modernization. Janowski sees his subject in a broad comparative perspective, taking into account the historical experience of other nations of Central Europe. His innovative interpretation may be the starting point for new debates in the ongoing discussion on the different perceptions of liberalism.

Thy Kingdom Come: Patriotism, Prophecy, and the Catholic Hierarchy in Nineteenth-Century Poland

Few sentences have been more troublesome over the centuries than the second line of the Lord's Prayer: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." 1 Many Christians have taken comfort in the promise that an earthly kingdom of God was approaching, and some have turned this hopeful conviction into a moral imperative, building a variety of political and social projects upon a theological foundation. When faced with a world that bore little resemblance to anyone's idea of a divine realm, they have assumed the responsibility of actively creating the kingdom of God. Christianity has generated such revolutionary utopianism from its earliest moments, but those in positions of clerical authority have almost always tried to repress the idea that faith could serve as the inspiration for radical political change. Within the Roman Catholic tradition in particular, theologians have attempted to domesticate the unsettling implications of the belief that God's kingdom was imminent.