The Jews in Poland and Russia ─ 1881-1914

Moshe Rosman presents a cogent and critical argument for the considerations that must be brought to bear on the writing of Jewish history today. By highlighting in one book the issues raised by postmodernism, How Jewish is Jewish History? considers the questions that Jewish historians must confront if their work is to be taken seriously by mainstream intellectuals, or indeed by educated Jews interested in understanding their own cultural and historical past.

The major cultural, ideological, and social changes that have occurred in Europe in the past century have generated widespread reassessment of European history in terms of its presuppositions, its methodologies, its directions, its emphases, and its scope. This timely volume looks at the Jewish past in the spirit of this reassessment, It points to a new framework for the study of Jewish history and helps to contextualize it within the mainstream of historical scholarship.

The family and the community, which were in a very real sense the core institutions of east European Jewish society, underwent very rapid change in the nineteenth century. The essays in this volume look at the past through the prism of the lives of ordinary people, with results that are sometimes surprising, and always stimulating. The topics they treat are varied, but the concern to explain what lay behind the visible reality is common to all of them.

In Three-Volume History, Antony Polonsky provides a comprehensive survey---socio-political, economic, and religious---of the Jewish communities of eastern Europe from 1350 to the present. Until the Second World War, this was the heartland of the Jewish world: nearly three and a half million Jews lived in Poland alone, while nearly three million more lived in the Soviet Union.

Although the majority of the Jews of Europe and the United States, and many of the Jews of Israel, originate from these lands, their history there is not well known. Rather, it is the subject of mythologizing and stereotypes that fail both to bring out the specific features of the Jewish civilization which emerged there and to illustrate what was lost. Jewish life, though often poor materially, was marked by a high degree of spiritual and ideological intensity and creativity. Antony Polonsky recreates this lost world---brutally cut down by the Holocaust and less brutally but still seriously damaged by the Soviet attempt to destroy Jewish culture. Wherever possible, the unfolding of history is illustrated by contemporary Jewish writings to show how Jews felt and reacted to the complex and difficult situations in which they found themselves.

This second volume covers the period from 1881 to 1914. It considers the deterioration in the position of the Jews during that time and the new political and cultural movements that developed as a consequence: Zionism, socialism, autonomism, the emergence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Jewish urbanization, and the rise of popular Jewish culture. Galicia, Prussian Poland, the Kingdom of Poland, and the tsarist empire are all treated individually, as are the main towns of these areas.

Volume I covers the period 1350-1881; Volume 3 covers 1914-2005.

Antony Polonsky is Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies, an appointment held jointly at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Brandeis University. Before this he taught at the London School of Economics, and he has been a visiting professor at the University of Warsaw, the Institute for the Human Sciences, Vienna, and the University of Cape Town; a visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies; and Visiting Senior Associate Member of St Antony's College, Oxford. He is the editor of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, a yearbook also published (since 1993) by the Littman Library, and the author or co-author of several books, including Politics in Independent Poland (1972), The Little Dictators: A History of Eastern Europe since 1918 (1975), The Great Powers and the Polish Question, 1941-1945 (1976), The History of Poland since 1863 (1981), and The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland (1981).

Professor Polousky is vice-president of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies and of the American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies. He is a member of the International Council of the State Museum in Auschwitz, of the International Advisory Board of the Mordecai Anieliewicz Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Warsaw, and of the Executive Committee of the National Polish American-Jewish American Task Force, and an Associate of the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University. In 1999 he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.