Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century

by Hundert, Gershon David

• ISBN13: 9780520238442
• ISBN10: 0520238443
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

Missing from most accounts of the modern history of Jews in Europe is the experience of what was once the largest Jewish community in the world--an oversight that Gershon David Hundert corrects in this history of Eastern European Jews in the eighteenth century. The experience of eighteenth-century Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not fit the pattern of integration and universalization--in short, of westernization--that historians tend to place at the origins of Jewish modernity. Hundert puts this experience, that of the majority of the Jewish people, at the center of his history. He focuses on the relations of Jews with the state and their role in the economy, and on more "internal" developments such as the popularization of the Kabbalah and the rise of Hasidism. Thus he describes the elements of Jewish experience that became the basis for a "core Jewish identity"--an identity that accompanied the majority of Jews into modernity.

Author Biography

Gershon David Hundert is Professor of Jewish Studies and History at McGill University.

Table of Contents

List of Maps	xi
List of Tables	xiii
Preface	xv
A Note on Place-Names and Transliteration	xvii
List of Abbreviations	xix
Introduction	1	(210)
1. The Largest Jewish Community in the World	21	(11)
2. Economic Integration	32	(25)
3. The Polish Church and Jews, Polish Jews and the Church	57	(22)
4. The Community	79	(20)
5. Was There a Communal "Crisis" in the Eighteenth Century?	99	(20)
6. The Popularization of Kabbalah	119	(12)
7. Mystic Ascetics and Religious Radicals	131	(29)
8. The Contexts of Hasidism	160	(26)
9. Hasidism, a New Path	186	(25)
10. Jews and the Sejm	211	(22)
Afterword	233	(8)
Select Bibliography	241	(28)
Acknowledgments	269	(2)
Index	271