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In the well-documented case of Balta in the Podolia governorate, when the community of Jews was attacked in a second wave of pogroms in the following year and the rioters had a free run of the Jewish quarter for three days in April 1882, nine men and women were killed and over 200 injured, some very severely. In sum, the pogroms in southern Russia in the early 1880s were the Hep! Hep! riots of Germany in 1819 writ very large; and it is, before all else, because the wave was so large and because it extended over several years that there is much to account for and explain. There were cases of efforts by Jews to defend themselves in an organized fashion being systematically broken up by the troops or by the police, and of punishment being meted out to them for their impudence.

This chapter covers the prominence of the Jewish Question in the political debates of the last years of the Commonwealth, as well as in the later journalism of the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland regarding interests in hasidim. It analyzes the cradle of Polish Hasidism, Podolia and Volhynia, the south-eastern borderlands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where from the 1740s to 1760 the putative creator of the group, Israel ben Eliezer, also known as the Besht was active. Though Hasidism appeared in the lands of central Poland as early as the mid-eighteenth century, the governments that controlled these territories between 1772 and 1830 did not become aware of it until nearly the end of that period that the existence of hasidic groups became an issue in Jewish politics. It explains how the lack of official interest in Hasidism was caused by the very complicated general history of the states of central and eastern Europe at the start of the nineteenth century. The growing wave of interventions in issues related to Hasidism and the fact that the question of the legality of Hasidism became tied up with the issue of religious fraternities.

This chapter describes the development and relative prosperity of Podolia during the Besht’s lifetime in the three Podolian locales with which his life is most closely associated. First is his reported childhood home and birthplace, Okopy, and second is his later residence, Tluste. The third locale is the place where he spent most of his public career, Miçdzyboz. The chapter provides an understanding of the context of the Besht’s public and private life in Miçdzyboz and gives new criteria for linking and assessing the sources about him. Hundreds of documents relating to Miçdzyboz in the late seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth century have been preserved in the archive of the families that owned the town, the Sieniawskis and Czartoryskis. It explains how some of the archival sources facilitate understanding of the circumstances in Miçdzyboz and within its Jewish community during the period the Besht lived there.

Chapter 18 analyses the nature of the union after 1447. It challenges the traditional view that, with no separate grand duke during Casimir IV’s long reign (1447–92), the union was purely personal, arguing that the principle of election and the union treaties bound the two realms together in a real union. It considers the arguments between Poles and Lithuanians over the nature of the union between 1447 and 1453, and Oleśnicki’s failure to win Lithuanians over to their view that Lithuania had been incorporated into Poland in 1386. The Lithuanians maintained their vision of a union of equal and separate realms, and after 1453, Poles and Lithuanians agreed to differ on the matter, and in the dispute over Podolia and Volhynia.