Overview

Few features have shaped east European Jewish history as much as the extent and continuity of Jewish self-rule. Offering a broad perspective, this volume explores the traditions, scope, limitations, and evolution of Jewish self-government in the Polish lands and beyond. Extensive autonomy and complex structures of civil and religious leadership were central features of the Jewish experience in this region, and this volume probes the emergence of such structures from the late medieval period onwards, looking at the legal position of the individual community and its role as a political actor. Chapters discuss the implementation of Jewish law and the role of the regional and national Jewish councils which were a remarkable feature of supra-communal representation in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The volume reflects on the interaction between Jewish legal traditions and state policies, and offers an in-depth analysis of the transformation of Jewish self-government under the impact of the partitions of Poland–Lithuania and the administrative principles of the Enlightenment. Co-operation between representatives of the Jewish and non-Jewish communities at the local level is discussed down to the interwar years, when Jewish self-government was considered both a cherished legacy of pre-partition autonomy and a threat to the modern nation state.

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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.

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