Paradisus Judaeorum

Poland: Paradisus Judaeorum *

GERSHON DAVID HUNDERTMCGILL UNIVERSITY

S amuel Eliezer ben Judah Halevi Edels (1555-1631) suggested that aS metaphorical reading of a talmudic tale (attributed to Rabbah bar BarHanah) would be an appropriate characterization of his contemporaries inPoland; three centuries later Benzion Dinur, Professor of Jewish History atthe Hebrew University, believed that Edels's approach to the story remainedrelevant.' In the original rabbinic text, Jews were sailing in search of a place toland. In Edels's adaptation, they wander in the sea of exile, be 'imkei metsulotyam hagalut. In both stories they find a great, flat, fertile plain and settle there.Thinking they had found terra firma, they forgot they were in exile: sevurimhem deyabashta hava veleika galuta. And I agree that the self-confidence of theactors in the tale, and the diminished awareness of living in exile of those inthe interpretation, are characteristic of the Jewish experience in Polish lands.In the words of one mystic, Phinehas of Korzec (1726-91), 'in Poland, exile isless bitter than anywhere else'.2My subject here is Polish Jewry in the last centuries of the Polish Common-

wealth, which came to an end with the partitions of Poland in the last decadesof the eighteenth century.3 When I, as a historian, try to recover that historicalperiod, I confront a number of obstacles or existential problems that frustratemy efforts to see the evidence clearly.The first of these is the desire to see one's ancestors in a favourable light.

There is a reluctance to recognise impiousness in the generations of the pastand a natural tendency to romanticize, even to sanctify, the historical record.And it should be stressed that the majority of Jews in the world today aredescended from Polish Jewry.A second, more difficult, obstacle is the Holocaust. Our knowledge of the

end of the story forms a sort of distorting prism, impeding our vision of whatcame before. One must, however, attempt to avoid the fallacy of seeing all of

' This is the text of the Martin Goldman Lecture delivered at Yarnton Manor, 10 October1996. The editors of JJS have decided to print it here with only minor changes.

I 'Darkah hahistorit shel Yahadut Polin', in Benzion Dinur, Dorot ureshumot (Jerusalem:Mosad Bialik, 1978), 199. Edels, known by his acronym MaHaRShA, discusses this in Hidusheihalakhot ve'agadot on Baba Batra 73b.

2 As quoted from Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College, MS 62, by Abraham Joshua Heschel,The Circle of the Baal Shem Tov: Studies in Hasidism, ed. S. H. Dresner (Chicago, 1985), 40.And see M. J. Rosman, 'A Minority Views the Majority: Jewish Attitudes towards the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Interaction with Poles', in Antony Polonsky (ed.), From Shtetlto Socialism: Studiesfrom Polin (London and Washington, 1993), 39-49.

3 For surveys of the literature on the subject, see: Gershon Hundert and Gershon Bacon,The Jews in Poland and Russia: Bibliographical Essays (Bloomington, 1984); Gershon Hundert,'Polish Jewish History', Modern Judaism 10 (1990), 259-70; Joseph M. Davis, 'The Cultural andIntellectual History of Ashkenazic Jews, 1500-1750', Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 38 (1993),343-90; Stephen D. Corrsin, 'Works on Polish Jewry, 1990-1994', Gal-Ed 14 (1995), 131-233;Gershon Hundert, 'Bibliography of Polish-Jewish Studies, 1993', Polin 9 (1996), 305-18.

JOURNAL OF JEWISH STUDIES

East European Jewish history as leading inexorably to the Nazi genocide. Onemust try to gain access to the earlier periods directly. Ultimately, it is true, theJews were lost in the sea, but many centuries elapsed before that happened,centuries of life and of creativity.The third problem or obstacle is what might be termed the conventional

wisdom of contemporary Jews, which has it that the terms Pole and anti-Semite are synonymous; indeed, as a former Prime Minister of the State ofIsrael so memorably phrased it, that Poles receive anti-Semitism with theirmothers' milk. It is this conception that I wish now to contest. Whatever itsaccuracy in the context of twentieth-century Poland, it is a fundamental dis-tortion of Jewish experience in the Polish Commonwealth of the sixteenth,seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.A central theme of this paper will be my attempt to diffuse some of the

darkness, lachrymosity and sense that the experience of Jews in Poland wasof unending pogrom and persecution. I shall argue that this is a story charac-terized by light and not darkness, by life and not death. If one had to choosea single word to reflect the experience of Jews in Poland, it would be vitality.That and an indomitably positive sense of self. The Polish Jewish communitywas vibrant, creative, proud and self-confident: sevurim hem deyabashta havaveleika galuta, they thought they were on dry land and not in exile. Theirneighbours knew this as well, referring to Poland as Paradisus Judaeorum,rajem dla Zyd6w. The full expression went: 'Poland is heaven for the nobility,hell for the peasants and paradise for Jews'.4 This is hyperbole of course, but Iam emphasizing the brighter side as a corrective to the predominant popularimage of the Jewish experience in Polish lands, which seems to me altogethertoo dismal and to be profoundly coloured by events in the twentieth century.

This is my primary goal; my secondary purpose is to complicate your per-ception of the Polish Jewish experience. We are speaking of a huge and diverseJewish community which was for much of its history the largest in the dias-pora. The lives lived by members of such a large community manifested thevariety of which the human spirit is capable. Let me illustrate briefly.More or less in the centre of Poland, not far from Lublin, is the small town-

let of Kock (known in Yiddish as .Kotsk). In appearance it differs little fromthe way it looked a hundred or even two hundred years ago. The woodenhouses, the marketplace and the rutted, unpaved roads are much the same.One can find there two sacred sites, both related to remarkable Polish Jews.But, of those who might consider going on a pilgrimage to Kock, very fewwould know about both the personalities whose memory is linked to the place.A few hundred metres from the centre of the town is a plaque marking the

spot where Berek Joselewicz, a Jew from Warsaw, fell in battle against theAustrians in 1809. He is best remembered as the young man who organized aJewish regiment of light cavalry to fight with the forces led by Tadeusz Kos-ciuszko in defence of Polish independence in 1793. Kosciuszko was a Polishsoldier who had fought in the American War of Independence and returned to

4 See Janusz Tazbir, 'Images of the Jew in the Polish Commonwealth', Polin 4 (1989), 18-30,and the references there.

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POLAND: PARADISUS JUDAEORUM

Poland in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Joselewicz had witnessedthe revolutionary events in France and also returned to Poland inspired bywhat he had seen. He organized Jewish forces that participated in the defenceof Praga in Warsaw and that were decimated by the Russians under Suvarov.5Not far from the small plaque commemorating Joselewicz, almost in the

centre of the town, is a house that once belonged to Rabbi Menahem Mendel,known as the rebbe of Kotsk. He died in the mid-nineteenth century afterspending about twenty years in his room virtually cut off from the outsideworld and his hundreds of followers. A theological radical, his teachings andcommitment to the selfless pursuit of truth were uncompromising rejectionsof spiritual superficiality.6My purpose in conjuring up for you the image of one small town with two

such distinct sets of associations is to emphasize the variety and complexityof Polish Jewish life.

I shall proceed by trying to describe what I think are three main strandsin the complex web of the historical experience of Jews in Poland-Lithuania.These are: (1) the sheer size of this Jewry; (2) that this was an ancient androoted community; and (3) that this was an Ashkenazi community in its cul-ture, language and politics. In addition, in my published work I have insistedon the need to understand Polish Jewry in its context, and at least three di-mensions of Polish history in general were, to my mind, vital in their effect onJews.

Firstly, the Polish Commonwealth was a multi-national, multi-ethnic andmulti-religious state. Even in the eighteenth century, ethnic Poles were not amajority in Poland-Lithuania. In addition to Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Be-lorussians, Germans, Armenians and Tartars, there were Italians, Dutch,Scots, Jews and others. The late Professor Salo Baron, one of the greatesttwentieth-century historians of Jews, formulated a historical law to the ef-fect that Jews fare better in lands where they are not the only minority, andwhere there are several so-called non-autochthonous groups. Such conditionsreduce the visibility, the exposure and thus the vulnerability of Jews.7

Secondly, there is the relatively late development of towns and the fact thatthey were founded and populated in the twelfth-fourteenth centuries substan-tially by immigrants from German and Bohemian lands. In the subsequentdevelopment of the parliamentary system in Poland, the towns and their res-idents were excluded, at the same time preferring to remain outside the insti-tutions of national politics. There did not develop in Poland, for a long time,a middle class with a consciousness of its own identity transcending its localplace of residence. It was because of this that Christians in the cities were rela-

5 Majer Balaban (ed.), Album pamiqtkowy ku czci Berka Joselewicza pulkownika wojsk pols-kich (Warsaw, 1934); Emanuel Ringelblum, Zydzi w powstaniu kosciuszkowskim (Warsaw, 1938).

6 Abraham Joshua Heschel, Kotsk: in gerangl far emeskayt (Tel Aviv, 1973), and Hes-chel's evocative comparison of Menahem Mendel of Kotsk with his near contemporary, SorenKierkegaard: A Passion for Truth (New York, 1973). See also J. Levinger, 'Imerot otentiyot shelharabbi miKotsk', Tarbiz 55 (1986), 109-35.

7 Salo W Baron, 'Changing Patterns of Antisemitism', Jewish Social Studies 37 (1976), 15;G. Hundert, 'On the Jewish Community in Poland during the Seventeenth Century: Some Com-parative Perspectives', Revue des etudesjuives 142 (1983), 349-72.

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tively ineffectual in their struggle against Jewish competition. Political powerwas restricted to the Crown, the gentry and the great magnate-aristocrats.

Thirdly, during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the rel-ative power of the magnate-aristocrats increased at the expense of the Crownand the gentry.8 Jewish 'foreign policy' in other times and places had beenpredicated on the forging of alliances exclusively with the Crown or with thehighest authority in the State. In the Polish Commonwealth it became nec-essary to adjust that strategy to conditions of increasing decentralization ofpower. By the eighteenth century, between half and two-thirds of Jews livedin cities, towns and villages belonging to magnates.9

Let us return next to those three strands I mentioned earlier: size, durationof residence, and Ashkenazi character.

Size

In 1500, Jews formed less than one half of one per cent of the Polish pop-ulation. By 1672 the proportion was roughly 2.5 per cent, and by 1765, al-most 5.5 per cent.10 Most historians agree on only one number, and that isthe figure for 1764-5 established by Raphael Mahler: 750,000.11 The propor-tions show that the Jewish population was growing substantially faster thanthe general rate of increase. Almost three-quarters of Jews lived in the east-ern half of the Commonwealth in a broad north-south belt from Lithuania,through Belorussia to Ukraine and Ruthenia. And two-thirds of Polish Jewslived in towns, one-third in the countryside. A significant proportion of vil-lage Jews, however, was only temporarily rural and maintained residences intowns, or returned to towns after the expiry of the economic contract that hadbrought them to the villages. That contract, of course, was usually a licencefrom the lord of the estate entitling the Jew to distil and brew alcoholic bev-erages. The point I would stress at the moment, though, is the predominantlyurban character of the Jewish community in a society that was otherwise evenmore overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. The consequence of this concen-tration in the towns was that half the urban population of Poland was Jewish.

Thus, in the context that I have been describing, I should like to suggestthat the use of the term 'minority group' to describe Jews in the Polish Com-monwealth is singularly inappropriate. In the eighteenth century at least, a

s Andrzej Kaminski, 'The Szlachta of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and their Gov-emnment', in Iwo Banac and Paul Bushkovitch (eds.), The Nobility in Russia and East CentralEurope (New Haven, 1983), 17-45.

9 Moshe J. Rosman, The Lords' Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-LithuanianCommonwealth during the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge MA, 1990); Gershon D. Hundert, TheJews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatow in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1991).

10 Estimates of the total population of Poland before the first partition in 1772 range be-tween 12.3 million and 14 million. W Czapliniski and T. Ladog6rski (eds.), Atlas historycznyPolski (Warsaw, 1989); Irena Gieysztorowa, 'Ludnosc, Encyklopedia historii gospodarczej Polskido 1945 r. (Warsaw, 1981), 430.

l i R. Mahler, Yidn in amolikn Poyln in likhtfun tsifern (Warsaw, 1958); Shaul Stampfer, 'The1764 Census of Polish Jewry', Bar Ilan 24-25 (1989), 41 147 (Gershon Bacon and Moshe Ros-man (eds.), Studies in the History and Culture ofEast European Jewry).

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significant proportion of Jews lived in towns where there was a Jewish major-ity, and an even larger proportion can be said to have lived in towns wherethere appeared to be a Jewish majority because much of their Christian pop-ulation was urban only in the geographic sense and pursued agrarian occu-pations. Most of the shops and stalls in the marketplace, and of the inns andtaverns, would have belonged to Jews. In other words, most Jews resided incommunities that were large enough to support daily life in a Jewish universe.Their experience was not that of a minority. In the eighteenth century thesethree-quarters of a million Jews were Yiddish-speaking and lived in accor-dance with the rhythms of the Jewish calendar and, for the most part, thedemands of halakhah. Certainly, the vast and heterogeneous cultural universeconstructed by this Jewry was based on elements drawn primarily from itsown traditions.

This is not to say that Jews were physically or even socially isolated. Themost dramatic contacts between Jews and Christians were indeed hostile ones.Jews were the objects of continuous animosity on the part of significant ele-ments of the population. There was venomous defamation by Catholic clergy,and sometimes violent persecution in the form of either riotous popular vi-olence or judicial torture and murder on the baseless pretext that Jews haddesecrated the Host or murdered a Christian child to employ his blood for re-ligious purposes. Recent research has identified sixty-seven accusations of rit-ual murder during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of which abouttwo-thirds led to trials with accompanying barbarous tortures and judicialmurders. 12

In the present context I should like to recall a point made by Jacob Gold-berg. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the group that lostmore lives than Jews because of irrational persecution, by a factor of at leastten, was that of women executed on charges of witchcraft.13 Most Jews onmost days in most places in the Polish Commonwealth had as much confi-dence in their personal security as their Christian neighbours in the towns.As I mentioned, the Jewish population was growing significantly faster

than the general rate of increase. In the early seventeenth century, a hostileobserver-Sebastian Miczynski, a professor at the Jagiellonian University,apparently commissioned to write an anti-Jewish book by the Cracow citycouncil-noted:

na wojnie zaden nigdy nie zgini, ani w powietrzu umrz, ... do tego w lat dwunastusi,e zeniq i tak ... wszetecznie si,e mnozq('none of them dies in war or of the plague ... moreover they marry when theyare twelve ... and so multiply rampantly')14

12 Zenon Guldon and Jacek Wijaczka, 'The Accusation of Ritual Murder in Poland, 1500-1800', in Gershon Hundert (ed.), Jews in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania: Polin, vol. 10 (London,1997).

13 J. Goldberg, 'The Changes in the Attitude of Polish Society toward the Jews in the Eigh-teenth Century', in Antony Polonsky (see n. 2), 50-63.

14 Sebastian Miczynski, as quoted in Janusz Tazbir, 'Zydzi w opinii staropolskiej', in his SwiatPask6w (L6dz, 1986), 220.

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Demographers agree that Miczynski's explanation is incorrect and that thisfaster rate of growth was due not to a higher birth rate, but to a lower deathrate. Since infant mortality was lower among Jews, the proportion of youngpeople among Jews was expanding throughout the period. In conditions ofrelative instability and change, the natural conflict between generations some-times assumes more dramatic forms. I am not the first to suggest that manyof the religious, social and political movements of the period should be seen,partly, as manifestations of generational conflict."5

Duration ofJewish Residence

Polish Jewry, and its neighbours, had the sense that this was a rooted andpermanent community. Jews had come to live in Polish lands as early as theeleventh and twelfth centuries, and their legends of origin betray a positivesense of the antiquity of their residence. Best known is the tale associatedwith a pun on the Hebrew word for Poland, Polin. A group of exiled Jews issupposed to have crossed the Polish border and to have heard a divine voicesaying to them, poh lin, 'dwell here'. Other traditions played on a differentversion of the name of the country, parsing it poh lan Yah, 'here dwells theLord'.As early as the fifteenth century, a leading rabbi could say of Poland that

it was, 'from of old, a refuge for the exiled children of Israel'. In the samecentury, the Polish chronicler Jan Dlugosz recorded the legend of Esterka, theJewish mistress of Kazimierz Wielki, king of Poland (1333-1370). She is saidto have used her influence over the monarch to persuade him to invite Jewsto settle in Poland and to grant them extensive rights and privileges. Dlugoszadded that the king had four children by Esterka: two boys and two girls. Theformer were raised as Christians, the latter as Jews.16

In retelling this story, Dlugosz evidently wished to cast an aspersion on thelegitimacy of the Jews' privileges, but whatever the historicity of the detailsof the story-to this day the burial place of Esterka can be found in severalPolish towns-it tells us a good deal about fifteenth-century attitudes to Jewsin Poland. The tale also clearly conveys other messages:

-that Jews had resided in Poland for a long time;

-that their residence in Poland was regarded as permanent; Jews wereapparently perceived as a fixed and continuing part of the social land-scape;

15 Gershon Hundert, 'Shki'at yirat kavod bekehilot beit Yisra'el bePolin-Lita', Bar-llan 24-25 (1989), 48; Gershon Hundert, 'The Conditions in Jewish Society in the Polish-LithuanianCommonwealth in the Middle Decades of the Eighteenth Century', in Ada Rapoport-Albert(ed.), Hasidism Reappraised (London, 1996), 46 and the references there.

16 Gershon Hundert, 'Some Basic Characteristics of the Jewish Experience in Poland', inAntony Polonsky (ed.) (see n. 2), 19-25. On the impact of the Esterka traditions on Polish andJewish literature in more recent centuries, see Chone Shmeruk, 'Hamaga'im bein hasifrut hap-olanit levein sifrut yidish al pi sipur Esterkah veKazimir hagadol melekh Polin', in his SifrutYidish beFolin (Jerusalem, 1981), 206-80.

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-that Jews had extensive rights and privileges;-that Jews were protected by the Crown.

The detail that the girls were raised as Jews is particularly telling. Such athought would not have been thinkable in Western Europe of the fifteenthcentury, and the fact that Dlugosz left this aspect unremarked might well re-flect that a higher level of legitimacy was ascribed to the Jewish presence inPoland than in Western Europe.

Thus, both Polish Jews and their Christian neighbours shared the sensethat Jews were permanently settled in their land. The legendary etymologiesof Polin and Polanyah betoken a Jewish understanding of their residence asdivinely ordained. It is very striking that this huge Jewry, resident in Polishlands for so many centuries, produced no messiahs. There were messiahs inSpain, Italy, Yemen and elsewhere, but none in Poland, although there is acontinuing debate among scholars about the appeal in Poland of messianicmovements that arose elsewhere.17 The great movement of religious revivalthat arose in Poland at the end of the eighteenth century did not have a mes-sianic character. Its emphasis was on personal, not national redemption. TheBaal Shem Tov himself, putative founder of Hasidism, is supposed to haveinterpreted the petition korvah el nafshi ge 'alah ('draw near to my soul to re-deem it') as a prayer for the individual's soul, nafshi davka ("'my soul", inthe singular'), and not nafsheinu ('our souls'). Each person has to seek theredemption of his own soul.18To return to the question of duration-when did Jews first come to Poland?

Probably the first Jew to see Poland was a diplomat from Spain during thetenth century called Ibrahim ibn Jakub. He provided the first report ofPolandto the civilized world and to his monarch. By the early eleventh century therewere some Jewish communities in Poland, but we do not know whether thesebecame permanent settlements. We also have archaeological evidence indicat-ing the presence of Jews in the western parts of the country in the twelfth andthirteenth centuries. Hundreds of silver coins with Hebrew inscriptions werediscovered more than a century ago. The first charter, or privilege, to Jews inPoland was issued by Boleslaw the Pious in 1264. It included no restrictionson Jewish rights of residence or economic activity. In fact the legal status ofJews improved continuously during the ensuing centuries.

Migration of Jews to Poland continued during the fourteenth, fifteenth andsixteenth centuries, chiefly from contiguous lands in the west: Czech, Ger-man and Bohemian territories. By the sixteenth century there were probablysome 50,000 Jews in Poland. Their situation surprised a visiting papal diplo-mat who reported as follows in 1565: 'In these principalities one still comes

17 Gerson D. Cohen, 'Messianic Postures ofAshkenazim and Sephardim', in M. Kreutzberger(ed.), Studies of the Leo Baeck Institute (New York, 1967), 114 56. And see Gershon Hundert,'No Messiahs in Paradise', Viewpoints: The Canadian Jewish Quarterly 2:2 (Fall 1980), 28-33, fora more extensive, though unannotated, discussion of this point.

18 On Hasidism, the most recent summary of 'the state of the field' is to be found in AdaRapoport-Albert (ed.), Hasidism Reappraised (London, 1996). See the extensive bibliographythere, pp. 465-91. See also Gershon Hundert (ed.), Essential Papers on Hasidism (New York,1991).

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upon masses of Jews who are not disdained as much as in some other lands.They do not live here under pitiful conditions and do not engage in lowlypursuits. ... But rather, they possess land, engage in commerce, and devotethemselves to study, especially medicine and astrology. ... They possess con-siderable wealth and they dwell not only among the respectable citizens, butoccasionally even dominate them. They wear no special marks to distinguishthem from Christians and are even permitted to wear the sword and to goabout armed. In general, they enjoy equal rights.' 19 The Jewish badge wasnever worn in Poland.The royal charters and privileges mentioned earlier guaranteed Jews not

only residential and occupational rights, but also, after some negotiation inthe fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a kind of autonomy that in some waysapproached self-government. As Simon Dubnow wrote: 'From the days of themedieval centres in Babylon and Spain, no other land had such a large con-centration of Jews and such wide latitude for autonomous development.'20Indeed, Polish Jewry developed the most elaborate and ramified institutionalstructures in European Jewish history: from artisan guilds, voluntary soci-eties, communal governments and regional assemblies to a national councilor parliament usually called the va'ad arba aratsot ('Council of Four Lands').In these institutions the Jews saw, as an eighteenth-century memoirist put it,ge'ulah ketanah ume'at kavod ('a fragmentary redemption and a little hon-our').21

Ashkenazi Character

Here, however, I am anticipating my third strand, namely the Ashkenazicharacter of this community Although in the early centuries of the MiddleAges a few Jews may have come to Polish lands from Byzantium and fromKievan Rus, the overwhelming majority came from the west, from Ashkenaz.The expulsion ofJews from the Iberian peninsula had no significant impact inPoland. Only a very tiny number of Spanish exiles came to Poland, mainly viathe Ottoman Empire or Italy. There was one Polish nobleman who attemptedto reserve Jewish residence in a new town he was building for Sephardim, anda dozen or so Sephardi families were settled there. Soon enough, though, the

19 'On trouve encore en ces provinces une grande quantite des Juifs, qui n'y sont pas meprises,comme en plusieurs autres endroits. Ils n'y vivent pas miserablement des 1aches profits, des usures,et de leurs services, quoiqu' ils ne refusent pas ces sortes de gains, mais ils possedent des terres,s'occupant au commerce, et s'appliquent meme a 1'tude des belles lettres, particulierement a lamedecine, et a I'astrologie. Ils ont presque partout la commission de lever le droit des entrees,et du transport des marchandises. Ils peuvent pretendre a une fortune assez considerable, et nonseulement ils sont au rang des honnetes gens, mais quelque fois meme ils leurs commandent. Ilsn'ont aucune marque qui les distingue des chretiens; il leurs est meme permis de porter l'epee,et d'aller armes. Enfin ils jouissent du droit des autres citoyens.' Gratien, Vie du Cardinal Com-mendoni, transl. Flechier (Paris, 1614), 190, as quoted in Tadeusz Czacki, Rozprawa o Zydach iKaraitach, ed. Kazimierz J6zef Turowski (Cracow, 1860), 51.

20 Gershon Hundert, 'On the Jewish Community' (see n. 7), 349-72.21 See M. Vishnitzer (Wischnitzer) (ed. transl.), The Memoirs ofBer ofBolechow (1723-1805)

(London, 1922), 40.

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community became indistinguishable from the rest of Polish Jewish society.22Polish Jewry was Ashkenazi in every respect. The migrants brought their

culture with them: their language (which developed into Yiddish); their po-litical strategies and behaviour; their autonomous institutions; their liturgicaland halakhic traditions; and their spiritual values.Solomon Luria (known by his acronym as MaHaRShaL), a sixteenth-

century Polish rabbi, claimed descent from the medieval German Jewishpietists known as Hasidei Ashkenaz. This was more than just a biological de-scent. The writings of those pietists became for Polish Jewry the models ofthe most lofty spiritual values. Indeed, I would claim that the teachings ofHasidei Ashkenaz were fundamental in shaping the world-view, the mentalite,of Polish Jewry for centuries.23 Recently, Professor Israel Ta-Shma has con-tended in a series of articles that groups of Hasidei Ashkenaz actually movedto Poland in the thirteenth century.24 In any case, the influence is, to my mind,undeniable. In essence, the teachings of these pietists can be reduced to fourcardinal points. Firstly, there is a stress on personal humility. Here I woulddare to disagree with Gershom Scholem who spoke of 'the ataraxy of thecynic'. What we see is, rather, a sort of violent passivity in refusing to respondto humiliation. Secondly, there is a negative valuation of hana'ah, of physical,this-worldly pleasure, in the hope of increasing one's reward in the next world.Thirdly, one sees a stress on retson habore or din shamayim, that is, the needto go beyond the simple requirements of the halakhah. And fourthly, there isan interior focus, a constant preoccupation with the purity of one's soul-afixation, that is, on yirat shamayim, the fear of God, which was understoodto be the fear that one was not sufficiently constant or intense in one's love ofGod. All this leads, and led in the case of Polish-Lithuanian Jewish culture, toa certain passivity in the face of history, a certain abdication from collective,national, political action. It perhaps explains why, for example, Polish Jewryproduced no messiahs.

It did, however, produce enormous cultural creativity. The eight or ninedecades of material prosperity and relative security that ended in the middleof the seventeenth century saw the appearance of a galaxy of towering in-tellectual figures who worked mainly in the fields of halakhah, exegesis andhomiletics. The list of prominent halakhists, commentators and preachersfrom this period is long, including Moses Isserles, Joel Sirkes, Meir Lublin,

22 Jacob Shatzky, 'Sefardim in Zamoshch', Yivo bleter 35 (1951), 93-120; Janina Morgen-sztern, 'Notes on the Sephardim in Zamos, 1588-1650', Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Histo-rycznego 38 (1961), 69-82.

23 Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, 'Shorshei hamahshavah shel hakhmei Polin', in his Hagut vehan-hagah (Jerusalem, 1959), 11-17; Jacob Elbaum, Teshuvat halev vekabalat yisurim: iyunim beshitathateshuvah shel hakhmei Ashkenaz uPolin, 1348-1648 (Jerusalem, 1992). On Hasidei Ashkenazthere are a considerable number of studies; see, for example, Yosef Dan, Torat hasod shel hasidutAshkenaz (Jerusalem, 1968); Ivan Marcus, Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of MedievalGermany (Leiden, 1981); idem (ed.), Dat vehevrah bemishnatam shel hasidei Ashkenaz (Jerusalem,1986). And see below, n. 24

24 Israel M. Ta-Shma, 'Letoledot hayehudim bePolin bame'ot hal2-hal3', Zion 53 (1988),347-69; idem, 'Yedi'ot hadashot letoledot hayehudim bePolin bame'ot hal2-hal3', Zion 54(1989), 208; idem, 'On the History of the Jews in Twelfth-Thirteenth-Century Poland', in Ger-shon Hundert (see n. 12).

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Solomon Luria, Ephraim Lgczyce and many others who produced enduringcontributions to the canon of high culture. There were great academies inLublin and Cracow, in Brzesc (Brisk) and Lw6w, in Ostr6g and other townsthat attracted students from all over Poland and from territories further west.As Hayyim Hillel Ben-Sasson has shown, the rabbinic class of the period gen-erally reflected the values of the cultural and economic elite from which it wasdrawn. These rabbis taught, for example, a virtually predestinarian doctrine,to the effect that the wealth and authority of the learned was an indication ofprovidential, divine blessing.25

While the rabbinic members of the class were teaching and writing, theywere also, together with their brothers and cousins, trading and, to a lim-ited extent, banking. They hired Italian architects to build their houses forthem. The communal governments they led were elaborately organized andoligarchic, and fulfilled all the functions of a municipality and more. Thecourts over which they presided resolved disputes according to halakhah orby arbitration. Taxes, direct and indirect, were assessed and collected. Weightsand measures in the marketplace were supervised; the water supply was main-tained; there was the equivalent of police and of personnel for fire preven-tion and the maintenance of hygiene in the streets. There were various pro-visions for the welfare of the poor, including a sometimes misnamed 'hospi-tal', midwives and a doctor salaried by the community. All relations with thegovernment and with Christians in general were supervised, including loans,partnerships and other business dealings, with a view to protecting collectiveinterests. The community imposed sumptuary laws regulating, among otherthings, how many people could be invited to a festive occasion and how muchjewellery women could wear. The right to live in a town and the right to marryrequired the assent of communal officials.26The national council or parliament of Polish Jews, the Council of Four

Lands, appeared in the second half of the sixteenth century. The exact dateis uncertain because the minute books of the Council have not survived. Itwas a sort of bi-cameral parliament, with a lay assembly and a council ofrabbis. The two 'houses' collaborated on the formulation and execution oflegislation. This parliament met twice annually in normal times, usually atthe great fairs in Lublin and Jaroslaw. The rabbinic council also functionedas an appellate court, while the chief preoccupation of the lay assembly wasthe apportionment of the burden of taxes owed the Crown among the regionsand communities. Continuous complaints from the nobility, that this systemoflump-sum payment of what was intended to be a capitation tax meant greatlosses to the income of the treasury, led to the Council of Four Lands beingdisestablished by the Polish government in 1764. The census whence we de-rive our best information about the number of Jews in the Commonwealthwas compiled at that time. The memoirist who described the Council of FourLands as 'a fragmentary redemption and a little honour' suggested that the

25 Ben-Sasson, Hagut vehanhagah (see n. 23).26 Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis, transl. B. D. Cooperman (New York, 1993). For additional

references, see Hundert and Bacon (see n. 3), 17 20.

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subsequent partitions of Poland were divine retribution for the disestablish-ment of the Council of Four Lands.27At least until the middle of the seventeenth century, the leaders and the

rabbis were generally drawn from the same thin stratum at the top of Jewishsociety. This, one may add, was in line with traditions established in earliercenturies in Ashkenaz, and was seen by contemporaries as right and just.The middle years of the seventeenth century saw the worst disaster in Eu-

ropean Jewish history to that date. In the years following 1648-gezeres takhvetat-Jews were attacked and murdered in successive waves of UkrainianCossacks and peasants, the Russian army and Polish forces, during what Pol-ish historiography refers to as the potop, the period of the deluge. Thousandsof Jews lost their lives, while others fled westward, anticipating a movementthat would become a veritable flood in subsequent centuries. The Jewish pop-ulation, however, as Weinryb and others have stressed, recovered quite quicklyfrom these blows. Major centres of Jewish settlement were re-established pre-cisely in the regions of the Cossack attacks, except for the eastern part ofUkraine, which was annexed by Russia and where Jews were forbidden toreside.28During the seventeenth century and thereafter, a long series of

developments-including the introduction of printing by moveable type, theenormous popularity of kabbalah and demnographic, economic and politicalchanges-led to a substantial complication of the configuration of the Jewishelite and the emergence of striking manifestations of popular religious con-sciousness. The learned rabbis who led the community in spiritual matterswere joined by masters of esoteric lore known as ba'alei shem. These becamea professional group distinguished by a knowledge of secret divine names andexpertise in the realm of practical kabbalah. Sometimes they were also rab-binic scholars, but rabbinic scholarship was not an indispensable qualifica-tion. The point that needs to be stressed is that these ba'alei shem enjoyed rel-atively high status and were very much part of normative communal existence.There are convincing indications that their services were used by members ofall strata in the Jewish community.29

I should like to provide one illustration of the new non-spiritual elite, andone illustration of a manifestation of popular religious consciousness. In thecase of the elite, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the wealthy mer-chants were joined by powerful arendars who leased various portions of estateincome from their magnate patrons. Of these, undoubtedly the most notori-ous were the brothers Ickowicz, Shmuel and Gedaliyah. Solomon Maimon'sautobiography refers to them as tyrannen. A recent article in a leading Pol-ish historical journal called them Jewish potentates. They attempted, among

27 M. Vishnitzer (see n. 21), 149-51. See the comments of M. J. Rosman (see n. 2), 39-49.28 Bernard Dov Weinryb, A Social and Economic History of the Jewish Community in Poland

from 1100 to 1800 (Philadelphia, 1973), 195-9.29 Emanual Etkes, 'Mekomam shel hamagiyah uva'alei haShem bahevrah ha'ashkenazit be-

mifneh hame'ot ha-17 ha-18', Zion 60 (1995), 69-104; M. J. Rosman, Founder ofHasidism (Cali-fornia, 1996), 11-26.

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other things, to place their relatives in important rabbinical posts, most fa-mously in Cracow. In his letters to them, their patron Marcin Radziwill ad-dressed them as he would other noblemen: waszmos andjego mosci pan. Be-tween 1727 and 1747, when a group of large estates was leased to them, thenumber of villages doubled, as did the income generated by those lands. Butthere were strident complaints against their high-handed methods and arbi-trary cruelty, not only from peasants but from petty gentry and Jewish sub-lessees, all of whom were subject to their authority. The consequence was anuprising led by the petty gentry and the peasantry against these Jewish op-pressors in 1740. Woszczyflo, the leader of the revolt, presented himself in aproclamation as the grandson of Bogdan Chmielnicki (Khmel'nyts'kyj) andhead of the armies for the defence of Christianity and the destruction of theJewish people. His movement, he insisted, was not directed against the gov-ernment or against the magnates: this was a rumour started by Jews. He wasopposed only to Jews who were denying Christians the possibility of makinga living: they attacked, murdered and robbed Christians; they lease churches,he said, and no child can be baptized without their permission. The revoltwas put down by Radziwil's forces. The Jewish community of Amtshislav ob-served an annual fast day followed by a communal Purim in memory of howthe revolt was suppressed before Woszczyllo's movement could reach them.The communal minute book explEined the attacks as an outburst ofjealousyof the Ickowicz brothers, which led the rebels to attack the people to whichthese great men belonged.30

It needs to be added that the overwhelming majority of Jewish leaseholdersor arendars leased no villages or estates, but only rights to manufacture, dis-tribute and sell alcoholic beverages. The income generated from the produc-tion and sale of alcohol reached 30 and even 40 per cent of the total revenuesof estates in the eighteenth century.3' In the eastern half of the country in par-ticular, this sector of the economy was managed by Jews. The lion's share ofthe profits, however, went to the magnates.

Figures like the Ickowicz brothers in Lithuania, Kantorowicz in Cracowand others were significant not because they were great in number but becauseof their power, gained through close links with the magnates. In part, thetension and strife that characterized the Jewish communal governments inthe larger towns in the eighteenth century were a consequence of the rise ofthis new elite.

I move now to an illustration of popular religious consciousness. Here Ishould say that I am partly following the work of an architectural historian

30 Teresa Zielifiska, 'Kariera i upadek zydowskiego potentata w dobrach radziwillowskich wXVIII wieku', Kwartalnik Historyczny 98 (1991), 33-49. See also Jacob Goldberg, 'Wladza dom-inalna zyd6w-arendarzy d6br ziemskich nad chlopami w XVII XVIII w.', Przeglqd Historyczny81 (1990), 189-98; Israel Halpern, 'Gezerot Woszczyllo', in his Yehudim veyahadut bemizrahEiropah (Jerusalem, 1968), 277-88; Adam Teller, 'Sefer hazikhronot shel Shlomoh Maimon:behinat meheimanut', Gal-Ed 14 (1995), 13-22.

31 J6zef Kasperek, Gospodarczafolwarczna ordinacji Zamojskiej w drugiejpolowie XVIII wieku(Warsaw: PWN, 1972), esp. Table 59, pp. 162-3.

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at the University of Wisconsin, Thomas Hubka, not all of which has beenpublished.32

Beginning late in the seventeenth century a novel architectural type ofwooden synagogue began to be built in the southeast regions. This was char-acterized by elaborate, high, multi-tiered roofs, a wide, domed interior withhidden sources of light, and richly coloured, figurative decoration that drewon the iconography of Jewish folk and midrashic traditions. Such buildingswere constructed in prospering small and middle-sized towns. The interiordecoration, at least, was the work ofa school of itinerant Jewish artists includ-ing Yehuda Leib, Dawid Friedlander, Eliezer Zussman of Brody, and Hayyimben Yitshak Segal of Sluck.33 The architects of the buildings are unknown.While it is true that these buildings obviously reflect the vernacular architec-ture of the region, the particular combination of elements that characterizesthem, and especially the domed interior, makes them unique.

These structures created an intense and emotive spatial setting for prayer,and reflected a striking and novel concern with the visual on the part of Pol-ish Jews. Equally striking, and for the time being unexplained, is the fact thatthis particular form had all but disappeared by the end of the eighteenthcentury. This date would correspond to the spread of Hasidism, but thereis no obvious causal link between the two phenomena. It is possible also thatthe appearance of these wooden synagogues was related to the various novelforms of popular religiosity related to the wide diffusion of kabbalah. Be-tween 1670 and 1770, for example, there appeared sixteen different editionsof the kabbalistic (and Sabbatian) compendium Hemdat yamim, and twenty-two editions of the abridged version, and five of the complete text, of Sheneiluhot haberit, a work substantially responsible for the introduction of kab-balistic doctrines formulated in Safed to East Central Europe. In addition tothese classic works, as Ze'ev Gries has stressed, large numbers of books ofconduct informed by kabbalistic teachings were produced in those decades.34These were essentially inexpensive pamphlets, written in accessible languageand guiding the reader through prayer services and rituals associated with thelife cycle. What was being forged was a multifarious popular religiosity suf-fused with kabbalistic ideas. These ideas may well have influenced both theiconography and the architecture of the synagogues that were built preciselyin that era, but more research on this subject must be carried out before con-clusions can be reached. For now, the point I wish to make in connectionwith the wooden synagogues is this: although there was little or no attempt atdecoration of the exterior, the sheer monumental size of these buildings indi-cates a readiness on the part of Jews to demonstrate a vivid physical presence

32 Thomas Hubka, 'Beit hakneset beGwozdziec-sha'ar hashamayim: hashpa'at sefer hazo-har al ha'omanut veha'adrikhalut', Eshel Be'er Sheva 4 (1996) ('Hamitos beyahadut', ed. Havi-vah Pedayah), 263-316; idem, 'Jewish Art and Architecture in the East European Context: TheGwozdiec-Chodor6w Group of Wooden Synagogues', in Gershon Hundert (see n. 13).

33 Ignacy Schiper, 'Malarstwo Zydowskie (1650-1795)', in I. Schiper, A. Tartakower and A.Hafftek (eds.), Zydzi w Polsce odrodzonej (Warsaw, n.d.), 324-8; Jozef Sandel, Yidishe motivn inder poylisher kunst (Warsaw, 1954).

34 Ze'ev Gries, Sifrut hahanhagot (Jerusalem, 1989), 45, 82-3, 90-2, 98-102.

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348 JOURNAL OF JEWISH STUDIES

that projected considerable self-assurance and security. We can read them as aform of symbolic speech announcing that yabashta hava veleika galuta, 'Thisis dry land and not exile'.

I began my remarks with Edels's version of a rabbinic tale, but I did not re-port the end of the story. In the talmudic account, that broad plain of fertileland turned out not to be dry land at all, but the back of a great beast. Aftera while, the hearth fires in the Jews' homes disturbed the slumbering monsterand it awoke, reared up and threw them off. After so many centuries of rel-atively secure and confident life on what they thought was dry land, PolishJewry discovered that they had not been on land at all, but 'in the heart of thesea of exile', be imkei metsulot yam hagalut.

Paradisus Judaeorum

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