Historical Beginnings

This chapter focuses on the foundations of the study of Polish Jewish history in the second half of the nineteenth-century. It argues that modern interest in Jewish history in Poland emerged at a time of acute political crisis, as members of the Polish elite studied the rise of Poland as a regional power in the early modern period and its subsequent collapse at the end of the eighteenth century. The chapter examines the emergence of scholarly writing on the history of Jews in the Polish lands and the ideas that drove the development of this new field. It tracks the ways in which non-Jewish Polish writers such as Tadeusz Czacki, Wacław Aleksander Maciejowski, and Władysław Smoleński engaged with the subject of the Jewish past in the Polish lands. The chapter demonstrates how their programmes, questions, and biases spurred Polish Jewish authors, such as Aleksander Kraushar and Ludwik Gumplowicz, to bring a historical dimension to their public discussions about the place of the Jews in the Polish lands and to their agenda for recasting Jewish relations with the surrounding society.