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After 1385 Poland and Lithuania were linked in a dynastic union which was transformed into a conscious political association by the Union of Lublin of 1569. As a result of this association, the Polish tax system was introduced into Lithuania with only relatively minor changes. The revenues and expenditures of the two parts of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita or Res Publica) were kept separate, but both states frequently financed the same political ventures. This chapter presents the results of research based on a comparison between the fiscal systems of the kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and demonstrates the revenue balance between the two states in times of war. In particular, it draws upon materials found in Russian archives: among their holdings are documents from the Lithuanian Chancellery known as Metryka Litewska, which include data on the income and expenditure of the Lithuanian treasury. In general, however, the sources for Polish fiscal history are much more extensive than for those of Lithuania and for this reason the emphasis of the chapter is on Polish developments.

This chapter examines how the Jews of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth constituted the eastern region of emancipation. Jews enjoyed royal privileges in Poland from the thirteenth century. From the sixteenth century, local magnate-issued privileges replaced these as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth increasingly became a decentralized nobles' republic. Through an alliance with the magnates, Jews gained collective privileges in private market towns that gave them parity with Christian burghers. The number of Jews who enjoyed such privileges, and thereby constituted a parallel burgher estate, grew dramatically in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in the Ukraine. However, the brutal partitioning of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century would disrupt efforts at reform and complicate the transition from parity of privileges to rights.

This chapter examines the Jewish intercessor (shtadlan) of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, long the target of opponents’ bile and consistently defended by die-hard advocates. It addresses several fundamental questions regarding the shtadlan, his activities, and his role as a communal functionary. In doing so, the chapter attempts to draw a more well-rounded picture of the shtadlan, but also shed more light upon the relationship between Jewish communities in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the various powers that ruled the Commonwealth. Conclusions drawn from this analysis of the Jewish community are compared with the experiences of other communities, Jewish and non-Jewish, within the Commonwealth and elsewhere. This analysis is used to determine whether the shtadlan was a phenomenon particular to a specific space, time, and culture, or rather was representative of a more general pattern of political organization and behaviour practised in different Jewish communities throughout the ages.

After evoking the trials of the Roman Catholic Church at the end of the eighteenth century, the introduction briefly explains the nature of the Polish‐Lithuanian Commonwealth. It then reviews the work of the Four Years’ Sejm and its historiography, focusing on the sejm's under‐researched ecclesiastical reforms, and setting them in the contexts of both Catholicism and Enlightenment. In comparing the Commonwealth with Joseph II's Habsburg Monarchy and Revolutionary France,the question is posed of the relationship between the form of government and political outcomes, To this end a methodology for the study of political history is developed, drawing on the works of Sir Lewis Namier, Maurice Cowling, and Quentin Skinner. The sources for both the high politics and political culture of the Polish Revolution are discussed, leading to six premises for the analysis of political decision‐making in republican and parliamentary polities.

Chapter 8, ‘The Golden Age’, compares the periods which the historians saw as the most successful eras in national history. For Lelewel, this period was to be found in the days of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Daukantas venerated the early, pagan period in the history of Lithuania, and in a more extended sense, the era before the Union of Lublin (1569). Palacký identified the pinnacle of Czech history with the Hussite movement in the fifteenth century. Kogălniceanu associated the golden age with moments of unity in Romanian history, in particular with the reign of Michael the Brave in the late sixteenth century. Horváth saw contemporary Hungary, the Reform Age (1823–48), as an exceptional era. The chapter demonstrates that the scholars reached nearly identical conclusions when defining the attributes of the golden age: these included individual and collective freedom, a tolerant environment and national unity.

This chapter assesses how, in the 1760s, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth failed to enact reform for its Jews aside from abolishing the Council of the Lands. Jews mobilized to an unprecedented extent to face the challenges of the Four-Year Sejm (1788–92). With the first partition of Poland, the three autocratic powers—Russia, Prussia, and the Habsburg Empire—began to divide the Commonwealth's Jews. For all three powers, the privately owned magnate town was an alien phenomenon: what had been the source of many Jews' extensive privileges now started to become a long-term liability. The first partition did yield legislation that, if implemented, would have conferred some of the best political statuses in Europe. Joseph II introduced equality with other subjects for Galicia's Jews, though he hedged it with formidable restrictions. Meanwhile, Catherine II tried to make Jews full-fledged members of towns. Joseph's and Catherine's legislation belonged to the 1780s' acme of Enlightened absolutist reform.

This chapter studies Professor Jacob Goldberg's book, Haḥevrah hayehudit bemamlekhet polin-lita (Jewish Society in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). This latest book by Goldberg, a scholar who focuses on the history of Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the early modern period, consists of fourteen articles. The articles were published in various periodicals and collective works, mostly in Polish, with some in English and German. The texts are also translated into Hebrew. The book contains an index of persons and an index of places; place names are given in both Hebrew and Polish. The great value of this book is that it collects in one volume texts that are widely dispersed and (for linguistic reasons) inaccessible and makes them available to Israeli scholars and students interested in the history of Jews in old Poland. The texts illustrate many important aspects of Jewish life in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

This Introduction situates the imagination of witchcraft in early modern Poland using the image of the crossroads: the witch combines elements taken from elite culture and from local folklore, from the center and periphery of European culture. The chapter also locates this study in time and space: it is a study of witchcraft and witch-trials in the Korona, the Polish part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

The fortunes of the Commonwealth and the Church in the eighteenth century are sketched via the career of Kajetan Sołtyk (1715‐88), successively bishop of Kiev and Cracow, who in 1767 was deported to Russia for his defiance of Catherine II, subsequently became mentally ill, and was controversially confined. The king's brother, Michał Poniatowski, who ran the diocese of Cracow after 1782, sought to unite it with the primacy and archbishopric of Gniezno. The sejmiks of August 1788 encouraged the opposition and worried King Stanisław August. The instructions called for the army to be expanded, and for as much as possible of the burden to be placed on the clergy. This led the papal nuncio Ferdinando Saluzzo and the primate to consider how best to defend the Church at the forthcoming sejm. The instructions are compared with the cahiers de doléances drawn up for the Estates General in France in 1789.

The book makes three main interventions. First is the use of Jewish economic history to understand both the development of Jewish society and its relations with the surrounding world. The methodology of New institutional economics, emphasizing the connection between economic and cultural factors, is employed. Second is the study of the Jews’ economic roles in the specific context of magnate estates in eighteenth-century Poland-Lithuania. In this late feudal setting, Jews achieved enormous financial success, which they translated into improved social status and even power. This process is at the heart of the analysis here. Third is the history of the Radziwiłł family and its estates in Lithuania. From a low point at the beginning of the period, the family reached the pinnacle of its power at the end. This rise was based on increased estate incomes, the importance for which of Jewish economic activity is examined here.

This chapter discusses anti-hasidic criticism in the last years of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Opposition to hasidism is almost as old as the hasidic movement itself. However, it was not the supporters of the Jewish Enlightenment ideology, the maskilim, but representatives of the rabbinical elite who were the first to begin an organized wave of opposition. Their hasidic opponents therefore called them ‘mitnagedim’ (opponents). The first maskilic voices to criticize the hasidic movement were heard at almost the same time as those of the mitnagedim, or perhaps, as some historians suggest, slightly earlier. The chapter then explores the anti-hasidic criticism of Salomon Maimon, Mendel Lefin, and Jacques Calmanson. Calmanson was the first advocate of the Haskalah associated with central Poland and Warsaw to speak out on the hasidic question. The history of subsequent maskilic polemics on the subject of hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland is, broadly, the history of the reception of the works by these three authors.

This concluding chapter assesses whether the fate of the Polish Jewish refugees in each of the three major arenas in which they found themselves was really a single, interconnected refugee crisis or whether there were, in fact, three different crises sparked by a common cause: the mid-seventeenth-century wars of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Underlying all of the differences in the conditions in each of the three regions were numerous commonalities. Perhaps most important was the sense of solidarity that induced Jews to come to the aid of other Jews in distress. The term most commonly used at the time to describe this connection was “brotherhood.” The phenomena examined in this book are indeed, therefore, aspects of a single refugee crisis. The chapter then considers how large the problem was and how well Jewish society dealt with its challenges. It also highlights the effects of the refugee crisis on Jewish society, both while it was happening and in the longer term, and the importance of the crisis for the course of early modern and modern Jewish history in general.

This chapter is devoted in its entirety to an analysis of hasidic political activity as a reaction to the policies directed at Hasidim. It describes the actions of Rabbi Isaac of Warka, the best-known hasidic political activist in nineteenth-century Poland, as a case study for the direct and indirect hasidic involvement in elite politics. The chapter focuses on the nature and mechanisms of hasidic political activism and how little is known of how that activism was perceived within the hasidic world. It identifies the technical characteristics of hasidic political activism and its relationship with the forms of Jewish political involvement in the pre-modern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. This chapter also outlines how much modern hasidic politics were inherited from earlier forms of shtadlanut and other traditional Jewish politics, as well as how it adapted to modern circumstances.

This chapter looks at 29 book reviews. The first set of books discusses hasidism in Poland; the history of the Jewish population in lower Silesia after the Second World War; the Jewish communities in eastern Poland and the USSR; Jewish emancipation in Poland; and the memoirs of Holocaust survivors. The second set of books examine the Holocaust experience and its consequences; the ethical challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima; the history of the Jews of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eleventh to eighteenth centuries; and Russia's first modern Jews. The third set of books assesses the Kishinev pogrom of 1903; the history of feldshers in general and Jewish feldshers in particular; the diplomacy of Lucien Wolf; the Berlin Jewish community; the aspects of Jewish art; magic, mysticism, and hasidism; and the Jewish presence in Polish literature. The fourth set of books explores the depictions of Jews by Polish artists, both Christian and Jewish; the history of co-operation between the Polish government and the New Zionist Organization; and the origins of Zionism.

One of the oldest established Muslim minorities in Central Europe is that of the Tatars, whose history dates back to the fourteenth century. They settled in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth mostly as mercenaries brought to fight the enemies of the country. This chapter recounts how, in return for military service, Tatars were granted land together with a social status similar to that of the local nobility. They were also granted the right to practise Islam, erect mosques etc. Subsequently, they remained an integral part of the social and military structures of the country. It was therefore natural that during the Danish cartoons affair, the state authorities in Poland supported Muslim protests against publishing the cartoons. This chapter argues that the historical role of the Tatars was the reason for their continued strong acceptance as an integrated and active citizens by present-day Polish society and by the state authorities.

This chapter illustrates the design of the eastern European wooden Torah ark from that has several characteristic elements, such as tall height, variety in form, and richness in iconography. It describes the vast geographical diffusion of the numerous arks built during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Jewish communities in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It also talks about the scattering of the Jewish population over many settlements that resulted in the establishment of several synagogues and construction of Torah arks against the background of wider historical processes. The chapter recounts events that affected the pattern of Jewish settlement that shaped the political, social, and cultural life of the population of eastern Europe. It reviews the establishment of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569 and the Cossack-peasant uprising headed by Bogdan Chmielnicki in 1648.

This chapter investigates the conditions in Jewish society in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The place of hasidism in the religious history of the eighteenth century ought to be reconsidered not only in light of the questions about the schismatic groups in the Orthodox Church raised by Ysander, but also in light of the general revivalist currents in western Europe. The social historian cannot explain hasidism, which belongs to the context of the development of the east European religious mentality in the eighteenth century. Social history does, however, point to some significant questions that ought to be explored further. One of these is the role of youth and generational conflict in the beginnings of the movement, and not only in its beginnings. A realistic recovery of the situation of the Polish-Lithuanian Jewry in the eighteenth century shows that neither the economic nor the security conditions were such as to warrant their use as causal or explanatory factors in the rise and reception of hasidism.

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.