Customer Reviews

Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity

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Please don't be put off by uninformed reviewers- I find these last critiques quite unhelpful. Hundert's work is the consummation of a career dedicated to bringing our understanding of the East European Jewish past out of a conceptual ghetto by taking the Polish context seriously and tracing the development of a Jewish social and economic niche in Polish towns and cities. At the same time, Hundert details inner Jewish life, covering every conceivable dimension of Polish-Jewish civilization during the 18th century- religious, communal, economic, cultural (especially print culture), social, etc. It provides an interesting description of the spread of kabbalah, the rise of Hasidism, and the emergence of a Polish Jewish bourgeoisie. Most importantly, Hundert draws attention to the demographic significance of Polish Jewry, which constituted about 3/4 of the world Jewish population by the 18th century! Admittedly, it can be dense at times; but would you prefer a sleek but superficial account? The persistent reader is rewarded with a rich exposition of East European Jewish life, which was decimated during WWII.

It is well worth reading but I wish it was longer and more detailed. And, would it be so terrible if it were discovered that changes to Jewish religious practice in 18th Century Poland were borrowed or influenced from sources outside the Jewish religion? Maybe one day we will know more.

The subtitle is misleading: this thorough discussion of the non-integration of Jews in the Polish Republic for several centuries does not reveal the genealogy of modernity at all. It reveals why a modernized and nationalized Poland in the later nineteenth and twentieth century would not be able to tolerate such a large undigestible blob in its midst.