Overview

Following tremendous advances in recent years in the study of religious belief, this volume adopts a fresh understanding of Jewish religious life in Poland. Approaches deriving from the anthropology, history, phenomenology, psychology, and sociology of religion have replaced the methodologies of social or political history that were applied in the past, offering fascinating new perspectives. The well-established interest in hasidism continues, albeit from new angles, but topics that have barely been considered before are well represented here too. Women’s religious practice gains new prominence, and a focus on elites has given way to a consideration of the beliefs and practices of ordinary people. Reappraisals of religious responses to secularization and modernity, both liberal and Orthodox, offer more nuanced insights into this key issue. Other research areas represented here include the material history of Jewish religious life in eastern Europe and the shift of emphasis from theology to praxis in the search for the defining quality of religious experience. The contemporary reassessments in this volume, with their awareness of emerging techniques that have the potential to extract fresh insights from source materials both old and new, show how our understanding of what it means to be Jewish is continuing to expand.

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9781906764760

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Reviews

'The insights brought to the knowledge of the Orthodox and especially Hasidic tradition are considerable and always based on the use of unpublished documents. The contribution of No. 33 of the journal Polin is therefore essential in its field.'Daniel Tollet, Revue des études juives

'The insights brought to the knowledge of the Orthodox and especially Hasidic tradition are considerable and always based on the use of unpublished documents. The contribution of No. 33 of the journal Polin is therefore essential in its field.'Daniel Tollet, Revue des etudes juives

Author Information

François Guesnet is Professor of Modern Jewish History, University College London. He is chair of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies and secretary of the European Association for Jewish Studies and has held research fellowships and visiting teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Oxford, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dartmouth College, Potsdam University, Vilnius University, and the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. He is the editor, with Jerzy Tomaszewski, of Sources on Jewish Self-Government in the Polish Lands from Its Inception to the Present (2022). Antony Polonsky is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University, and Chief Historian of the Global Educational Outreach Project at the Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Warsaw (2010) and the Jagiellonian University (2014), and in 2011 was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Polonia Restituta and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Independent Lithuania. His many publications include The Jews in Poland and Russia, 3 vols. (Littman Library, 2010–12), which in 2012 was awarded the Pro Historia Polonorum prize of the Polish Senate for the best book on the history of Poland in a non-Polish language written in the previous five years. Ada Rapoport-Albert, who died in 2020, was Professor of Jewish Studies and head of the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. Marcin Wodziński is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław.

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