Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity / Edition 1

by Gershon David Hundert

Overview

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. In doing so, he focuses on the relations of Jews with the state and their role in the economy, and on the more "internal" developments, such as the popularization of 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. The experience of these Jews shows that modernization is characterized more by continuity than change. Taking such a view, Hundert offers a nuanced, sophisticated, and refreshing challenge to the now conventional notion that identifies modernity exclusively with changes in Jewish culture and society that came in response to an overwhelmingly Gentile culture and society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900520249942
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/16/2006
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	305
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Gershon David Hundert is Professor of Jewish Studies and History at McGill University. He is the author of The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatów in the Eighteenth Century (1992), the coauthor of The Jews in Poland and Russia: Bibliographical Essays (1984), and the editor of Jews in Early Modern Poland (1997) and Essential Papers on Hasidism: Origins to Present (1991).

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
1.	The Largest Jewish Community in the World	21
2.	Economic Integration	32
3.	The Polish Church and Jews, Polish Jews and the Church	57
4.	The Community	79
5.	Was There a Communal "Crisis" in the Eighteenth Century?	99
6.	The Popularization of Kabbalah	119
7.	Mystic Ascetics and Religious Radicals	131
8.	The Contexts of Hasidism	160
9.	Hasidism, a New Path	186
10.	Jews and the Sejm	211