The Jews Of Poland

The Jews of Poland tells the story of the development and growth of Polish Jewry from its beginnings, around the year 1200, when it numbered a few score people, to about six hundred years later, when it totaled a million or more people. This books records the development of this Jewish community. It attempts to capture the uniqueness of each period in the history of this community. In recounting the saga of Polish Jewry, the book endeavors to see Polish Jews as human beings acting and reacting humanly to the exigencies of life with courage and weakness, high ideals, beliefs, and sacrifices, on one hand, and human frailty, passions, and ambitions, on the other.

Annotation A history of Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the eighteenth century which argues that this largest Jewish community in the world at that time must be at the center of consideration of modernity in Jewish history.

Winner of the Montreal Jewish Public Library's J. I. Segal Prize Originally published in 1991. In the eighteenth century, more than half of the world's Jewish population lived in Polish private villages and towns owned by magnate-aristocrats. Furthermore, roughly half of Poland's entire urban population was Jewish. Thus, the study of Jews in private Polish towns is central to both Jewish history and to the history of Poland-Lithuania. The Jews in a Polish Private Town seeks to investigate the social, economic, and political history of Jews in Opatów, a private Polish town, in the context of an increasing power and influence of private towns at the expense of the Polish crown and gentry in the eighteenth century. Hundert recovers an important community from historical obscurity by providing a balanced perspective on the Jewish experience in the Polish Commonwealth and by describing the special dimensions of Jewish life in a private town.

This classical historical work describes the rise of Jews as a nation and the crucial role that the Polish-Jewish community played in its development.

A very readable and comprehensive overview that examines the realities of Jewish life while setting them in their political, economic, and social contexts.

A revealing account of Polish cooperation with Nazis in WWII—a “grim, compelling [and] significant scholarly study” (Kirkus Reviews). Between 1942 and 1943, thousands of Jews escaped the fate of German death camps in Poland. As they sought refuge in the Polish countryside, the Nazi death machine organized what they called Judenjagd, meaning hunt for the Jews. As a result of the Judenjagd, few of those who escaped the death camps would survive to see liberation. As Jan Grabowski’s penetrating microhistory reveals, the majority of the Jews in hiding perished as a consequence of betrayal by their Polish neighbors. Hunt for the Jews tells the story of the Judenjagd in Dabrowa, Tarnowska, a rural county in southeastern Poland. Drawing on materials from Polish, Jewish, and German sources created during and after the war, Grabowski documents the involvement of the local Polish population in the process of detecting and killing the Jews who sought their aid. Through detailed reconstruction of events, “Grabowski offers incredible insight into how Poles in rural Poland reacted to and, not infrequently, were complicit with, the German practice of genocide. Grabowski also, implicitly, challenges us to confront our own myths and to rethink how we narrate British (and American) history of responding to the Holocaust” (European History Quarterly).

National Jewish Book Award Finalist: “A fresh and delightful portrait of Jewish renewal in Poland . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice Since the end of Communism, Jews from around the world have visited Poland to tour Holocaust-related sites. A few venture further, seeking to learn about their own Polish roots and connect with contemporary Poles. For their part, a growing number of Poles are fascinated by all things Jewish. In this book, Erica T. Lehrer explores the intersection of Polish and Jewish memory projects in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz in Krakow. Her own journey becomes part of the story as she demonstrates that Jews and Poles use spaces, institutions, interpersonal exchanges, and cultural representations to make sense of their historical inheritances.