Table of Contents

Introduction - Ada Rapoport-Albert and Marcin Wodziński

PART I: THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Leah Horwitz’s Tkhine Imohos: A Proto-Feminist Demand to Increase Jewish Women’s Religious Capital - Moshe Rosman

‘A girl! He ought to be whipped’: The Hasid as Homo Ludens - David Assaf

Individualism, Truth, and the Repudiation of Magic as the Tsadik's Prerogative: Pshiskhe-Like Elements in the Theology of Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kosov - Benjamin Brown

Table Talk and the Bond of Reading: A Jewish Broadsheet for Meals - Avriel Bar-Levav

PART II: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Shtrayml: An Ethnographic Tale of Law and Ritualization - Levi Cooper

The Narcissism of Small Differences? On Rituals and Customs as Hasidic Identity-Markers - Gadi Sagiv

The Vilna Talmud as a Reflection of Changing Patterns of Study - Edward Fram

Popular Religion and Modernity: Jewish Magical Books in Eastern Europe in the Nineteenth Century - Uriel Gellman

Hasidic Performance as a Reconstruction of Biblical Life - Daniel Reiser

Preserving a Synagogue: Cultural, Material, and Sacred Values - Sergey R. Kravtsov

The Laws of Moses and the Laws of the Emperor: Austrian Marriage Legislation and the Jews of Galicia - Rachel Manekin

A Forgotten Network? New Perspectives on Progressive Synagogues in Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland - Alicia Maślak-Maciejewska

PART III: 1914–1939

To Enlist the Enthusiasm of the Young: Orthodox Jewish Non-Political Responses to the Challenges of Interwar Poland - Gershon Bacon

The Scroll of 19 Kislev and the Construction of an Imagined Habad Lubavitch Community in Interwar Poland - Wojciech Tworek

At the Centre of Two Revolutions: Beit Ya’akov in Poland between Neo-Orthodoxy and Ultra-Orthodoxy - Iris Brown (Hoizman)

PART IV: HOLOCAUST AND POST-HOLOCAUST

Gerer Youths in the Holocaust: A Representative Blind Spot in Holocaust Research - Havi Dreifuss

The Afterlife of Religion: Orthodox Memoirs of the Holocaust and the Haredi Spiritualization of Modernity - Naftali Loewenthal

Being and Becoming: Polish Conversions to Judaism and the Dynamics of Affiliation - Jan Lorenz

PART V: NEW VIEWS

Foul-Weather Friends: Reinterpreting Jewish–Christian Urban Interaction in the Final Decades of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth - Curtis G. Murphy

The Vilna Pogrom of 19–21 April 1919 - Szymon Rudnicki

Jewish Medical Activity in the Ghettos under the Nazi Regime: Characteristics and Broad Historical Context - Miriam Offer

About the Author

François Guesnet is Professor of Modern Jewish History, University College London. He is chair of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies and secretary of the European Association for Jewish Studies and has held research fellowships and visiting teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Oxford, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dartmouth College, Potsdam University, Vilnius University, and the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. He is the editor, with Jerzy Tomaszewski, of Sources on Jewish Self-Government in the Polish Lands from Its Inception to the Present (2022). Antony Polonsky is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University, and Chief Historian of the Global Educational Outreach Project at the Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Warsaw (2010) and the Jagiellonian University (2014), and in 2011 was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Polonia Restituta and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Independent Lithuania. His many publications include The Jews in Poland and Russia, 3 vols. (Littman Library, 2010–12), which in 2012 was awarded the Pro Historia Polonorum prize of the Polish Senate for the best book on the history of Poland in a non-Polish language written in the previous five years. Ada Rapoport-Albert, who died in 2020, was Professor of Jewish Studies and head of the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. Marcin Wodziński is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław.

Reviews

'The insights brought to the knowledge of the Orthodox and especially Hasidic tradition are considerable and always based on the use of unpublished documents. The contribution of No. 33 of the journal Polin is therefore essential in its field.'Daniel Tollet, Revue des études juives