[The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization]
Kategoria: Książki / Literatura obcojęzyczna
the Pro Historia Polonorum Prize for the best book on the
history of Poland published in a foreign language
between 2007 and 2011 (a prize established by the Polish Senate and
awarded...
Pełen opis produktu 'Jews in Poland and Russia: A Short History' »
For many centuries Poland and Russia formed the heartland of the
Jewish world: right up to the Second World War the area was home to
over 40 per cent of the world's Jews. Nearly three and a half
million Jews lived in Poland alone, with nearly three million more
in the Soviet Union. Yet although the majority of the Jews of
Europe and the United States, and a large proportion of the Jews of
Israel, originate from these lands, and many of the major movements
that have characterized the Jewish world in recent times have their
origins there, the history of their Jewish communities is not well
known. Rather, it is the subject of mythologizing that fails both
to bring out the specific features of the Jewish civilization that
emerged there and to illustrate what was lost in its destruction:
Jewish life in these parts, though often poor materially, was
marked by a high degree of spiritual and ideological intensity and
creativity.Antony Polonsky re-creates this lost world - brutally
cut down by the Holocaust and seriously damaged by the Soviet
attempt to destroy Jewish culture - in a study that avoids both
sentimentalism and the simplification of the east European Jewish
experience into a story of persecution and martyrdom. It is an
important story whose relevance reaches far beyond the Jewish world
or the bounds of east-central Europe, and Professor Polonsky
succeeds in providing a comprehensive overview that highlights the
realities of Jewish life while also setting them in the context of
the political, economic, and social realities of the time. He
describes not only the towns and shtetls where the Jews lived, the
institutions they developed, and their participation in the
economy, but also their vibrant religious and intellectual life,
including the emergence of hasidism and the growth of opposition to
it from within the Jewish world.By the late eighteenth century
other factors had come into play: with the onset of modernization
there were government attempts to integrate and transform the Jews,
and the stirrings of Enlightenment led to the growth of the
Haskalah movement that was to revolutionize the Jewish world.
Polonsky looks at developments in each area in turn: the problems
of emancipation, acculturation, and assimilation in Prussian and
Austrian Poland; the politics of integration in the Kingdom of
Poland; and the failure of forced integration in the tsarist
empire. He then shows how the deterioration in the position of the
Jews between 1881 and 1914 encouraged a range of new movements -
Zionism, socialism, and autonomism - as well as the emergence of
modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. He also examines Jewish
urbanization and the rise of Jewish mass culture. The final part of
the volume deals with the twentieth century. Starting from the
First World War and the establishment of the Soviet Union, it looks
in turn at Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union up to the Second
World War. It then reviews Polish - Jewish relations during the war
and examines the Soviet record in relation to the Holocaust.The
final chapters deal with the Jews in the Soviet Union and in Poland
since 1945, concluding with an epilogue on the Jews in Poland,
Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia since the collapse of
communism. This is an abridged version of a three-volume hardback
edition which won the 2011 Kulczycki Book Prize for Polish Studies
(awarded by the American Association for Slavic, East European, and
Eurasian Studies) and also the Pro Historia Polonorum Prize for the
best book on the history of Poland published in a foreign language
between 2007 and 2011 (a prize established by the Polish Senate and
awarded by the Polish Historical Association).
