Antony Polonsky’s The Jews in Poland and Russia is a survey of Jewish history and culture in Poland, Russia, Galicia, and Prussian Poland from the earliest arrival of Jews in the fourteenth century to the present. The two volumes reviewed here tell the story from 1350-1914, and a forthcoming volume will cover the period from 1914 to the present.

The first volume starts with a general survey of Eastern European Jewish culture and society in the medieval and early modern periods, ca. 1350-1750, showing the continuities and changes in Jewish life in the period. The first of the five chapters of this section covers Jewish-Christian relations; the second, the “structure of Jewish autonomous institutions,” that is, the various institutions within the Jewish communities through which the communities governed themselves; the third chapter, “Jewish Places,” then describes the places where Jews lived; the fourth, “Jews in Economic Life,” then examines the economic activities of Jews; and then the fifth chapter, “Religious and Spiritual Life,” looks at both the way traditional religion shaped Jewish life and at the various religious movements that were important in the period, such as Sabbatianism, the movement founded by the messianic leader Sabbatai Zevi, and the early stages of Hasidism. This first section of the book closes with a chapter on “The Polish-Lithuanian Background” that looks more closely at the situation of Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The next section of volume one looks at the attempts to integrate, assimilate, or acculturate Jews into the cultures of Poland and Russia from 1750-1880. This is an important period as it is the time when the partition of Poland occurred, thus dividing the Jews of the kingdom among three different countries, Prussia, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, and it is also the period in which religious movements like Hasidism and Reform Judaism became widespread. Polonsky first examines the treatment of Jews in Prussia, followed by Galicia, a part of Austria-Hungary, then the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland, and finally Tsarist Russia. Jews had been invited to settle in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and though there was some local anti-semitism, it was a prosperous place for Jews. Following the partition they were divided among the three powers, Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. In the first two, Jews prospered and could assimilate to a greater degree than in the Russian empire. Russia was the worst in terms of anti-semitism: all of the Tsars in the period covered by these two books, for instance, were vehemently anti-semitic and allowed many anti-Jewish laws and pogroms to occur.

The second volume, dealing with 1881-1914, begins with five chapters that continue the story of Jewish interaction with the Russian, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian empires. The story changes little in this time, with Prussian Jews and Galician Jews (Galicia was part of Austria-Hungary) continuing to have a better legal status than the Jews of Tsarist Russia. The sixth chapter, “Jewish Spaces: Shtetls and Towns in the Nineteenth Century,” returns to cultural description. This is an important chapter as Polonsky, drawing on recent revisionist scholarship on Jewish settlements in the nineteenth century, shows that much of what is commonly thought about where Jews lived is wrong. The majority of Jews did not live in shtetls, but in larger towns and cities, which means that many common beliefs about Jewish settlements must be revised. He follows this with a chapter on modern Jewish literature wherein he examines primarily Hebrew and Yiddish literature, but also includes Jewish writers in other languages, such as German, Polish, and Russian. Writers in these latter languages are often forgotten in scholarship on Eastern European Jews so it is very useful to have the survey of writers in these languages. The next chapter looks at Jewish religious life in the period, another time of great change in religious life. This is followed by a chapter on the lives of Jewish women in Eastern Europe. As with Jewish settlement patterns, what is commonly believed about the status of Jewish women is in need of revision in light of the work of recent scholars. The book concludes with a chapter that surveys Jewish mass culture in the period. The late-nineteenth century saw the development of Jewish mass culture, with newspapers, popular theater, and literature in the various languages, but especially Hebrew and Yiddish, developing rapidly. This mass culture was influenced by the mass culture of other groups in the empires, and by mass culture from further abroad. Jewish mass culture, however, was not a merely passive recipient of influence: its influence was also felt in the mass cultures it was in contact with, which includes American mass culture.

Each of the books has a very useful glossary of the various unfamiliar terms in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Polish, and Russian encountered in the books.

Although Polonsky only draws to a limited extent from folklore and folklife studies, there is information in every chapter relevant to the study of Eastern European Jewish folklore and folklife. It is also an excellent synthesis of recent research on Eastern European Jewish culture and history. As such it fills a definite need for an accessible introduction to the current scholarship and thinking about the Jews of Poland and Russia. The two volumes of The Jews in Poland and Russia should be on the reading list of anyone interested in the history and folk cultures of Eastern Europe, whether they work specifically with Jewish history and folk culture, or with the other regional cultures.

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[Review length: 913 words • Review posted on January 23, 2012]