Social and Cultural Boundaries in Pre-Modern Poland

Description

Boundaries - physical, political, social, religious, and cultural - were a key feature of life in medieval and early modern Poland, and this volume focuses on the ways in which these boundaries were respected, crossed, or otherwise negotiated. It throws new light on the contacts between Jews and Poles, including the vexed question of conversion and the tensions it aroused. The collected articles also discuss relations between the various elements of Jewish society - the wealthy and the poor, the educated and the uneducated, and the religious and the lay elites, considering too contacts between Jews in Poland and those in Germany and elsewhere. Classic studies by such eminent scholars as Meir Balaban, Jacob Goldberg, and Moshe Rosman provide a foil for new research by Hanna Zaremska and David Frick, as well as Adam Teller, Magda Teter, Elisheva Carlebach, Jurgen Heyde, and Adam Kazmierczyk. Taken together, the contributions on this central theme help redefine the Jewish history of pre-modern Poland. As ever, the New Views section examines a wide variety of other topics. These include accusations of ritual murder in nineteenth-century Poland; the Russian Jewish integrationist politician Mikhail Morgulis; the attitude of Boleslaw Prus towards Jewish assimilation and his relationship with the Jewish journalist Nahum Sokolow; women in the Mizrahi movement in Poland; Polish patriotism among Jews; the impact of the first Soviet occupation of 1939-41 on Polish-Jewish relations; how the war affected the views of Julian Tuwim and Antoni Slonimski; the shtetl in the work of American Jewish writers Allen Hoffman and Jonathan Safran Foer; and the initial Polish response to Jan Gross's "Fear." Contents Note on Place Names Note on Transliteration Part I. Social and Cultural Boundaries in Pre-Modern Poland Introduction: Borders and Boundaries in the Historiography ofthe Jews in the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth Hugo Grotius and the Blood Libel Trials in Lublin, 1636 The Boundaries of Memory: A Central European Chronograph from 1665 The Authority of the Council of Four Lands outside Poland-Lithuania Telling the Difference: Some Comparative Perspectives on the Jews' Legal Status in the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Holy Roman Empire The Role of the Jewish Community in the Socio-Political Structure of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth The Jewish Economic Elite in Red Ruthenia in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries Crossing the River: How and Why the Jews of Kraków Settled in Kazimierz at the End of the Fifteenth Century The Rubinkowski Family: Converts in Kazimierz Jews in Public Places: Further Chapters in the Jewish—Christian Encounter in Seventeenth-Century Vilna ‘There should be no love between us and them’: Social Life and the Bounds of Jewish and Canon Law in Early Modern Poland Part II. New Views Blood and the Hasidim: On the History of Ritual Murder Accusations in Nineteenth-Century Poland Integration and its Discontents: Mikhail Morgulis and the Ideology of Jewish Integration in Russia Bolesław Prus and the Assimilation of Polish Jews Dialogue or Monologue?: The Relationship between Jewish and Polish Journalists in Warsaw at the End of the Nineteenth Century Gender, Zionism, and Orthodoxy: The Women of the Mizrahi Movement in Poland, 1916—1919 Patriotism and Antisemitism: The Crisis of Polish Jewish Identity between the Wars The Nazi Murder of the Jews in Polish Eyes: Views in the Underground Press, 1942 - 1945 The Spring that Passed: The Pikador Poets’ Return to Jewishness Resisting a Phantom Book: A Critical Assessment of the Initial Polish Discussion of fan Gross 's Fear Imagined Diaspora: The Shtetl in Allen Hoffman’s Small Worlds and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated John Doyle Klier Glossary Notes on the Contributors Index