LibGuides: Polish-Jewish Studies: Books

Search terms and LCSH subject headings

Jews-Poland; Jews-Poland-History; Jews-Poland-Sources; Jews-Poland-Bibliography; Jews, East European; Jews, East European-History

Call Numbers

The best place to look for books is in the library catalog. However, if you do find yourself shelf browsing, look for books that start with these Dewey call numbers:

305.8924

909.04924

943.8009424

Foundational Works

Majer Bałaban

From the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe: Majer Bałaban was a founder and architect of modern Polish Jewish historiography and the first to synthesize both Polish archival sources and Jewish communal records and rabbinic responsa.” Throughout his career he continued to pursue his bibliographical research, culminating a comprehensive list of works related to Polish Jewish history and the history of Jews in neighboring lands. In 1928 he founded the Institute for Jewish Studies and, in the same year began lecturing on Jewish history at the University of Warsaw where he was “the only person to hold a university post in Jewish history in Poland between the two world wars.” Bałaban’s contributions to Polish-Jewish studies are legendary and his work is considered foundational to the field.

Below is a compilation of books authored by Majer Bałaban that are held by the UIUC library:

Dzieje Żydów w Krakowie i na Kazimierzu, 1304-1868 (1912-) - Majer Bałaban
Call Number: 325.25693 B18D
2 volumes. A monumental work by Majer Balaban, founder and architect of modern Polish Jewish historiography and the first to synthesize both Polish archival sources and Jewish communal records and rabbinic response. This work is one of earliest publications concerned with the history of Polish-Jews specifically in city of Krakow and its historical district of Kazimierz. The first volume deals with the years 1304 to. 1655. Volume two covers 1656 to 1868.

Historja i literatura żydowska : ze szczególnem uwzględnieniem historji Żydów w Polsce - Majer Bałaban
Call Number: 296.09 B18h
Volume 2 of 2. This book explores the history and literature of the Jews with a specific empahsis on the Jews of Poland.

Studja Historyczne (1927) – Majer Bałaban
Call Number: 325.25693 B18s

Die Judenstadt von Lublin (1919) – Majer Bałaban*
Call Number: 943.8 B18J
German. This book concerns the Jewish quarter in Lublin, Poland.
*Also available as an e-book, please see the Digital Collections tab for more information or click here.

Other Foundational Works

History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (1918) - Simon Dubnow
Call Number: 296 D946vef2000
Reader’s Guide to Judaism: “a classic survey of Polish Jewish history. The first historian of the Jews to write extensively about Eastern Europe, Dubnow saw the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the premier center of world Jewry in its time. His first volume traces the origins and growth of that center, its decline after the Cossack massacres of 1648 and 1649, and the absorption of its largest part into the Russian empire between 1772 and 1825. ... [the narrative] emphasizes the function of autonomous Jewish communal institutions. The second and third volumes focus almost exclusively on the relations between Imperial Russia and the Jews, with Polish Jewry discussed mainly from the perspective of Polish-Jewish relations.”

Surveys

Jews in Poland and Russia by Antony Polonsky
ISBN: 9781874774648
Publication Date: 2010
3 vols. This “magisterial, comprehensive treatment [...] can serve as an authoritative reference for research and teaching on innumerable aspects of Eastern European history” and presents “an eloquent and refreshing narrative and compelling analysis” (review in Slavonic and Eastern European Review). The first volume covers 1350-1881, the second 1881-1914, and the third 1914-2008.
The Jews of Poland by Bernard D. Weinryb
ISBN: 082760016X
Publication Date: 1972
This social history emphasizes demography, economics, and social structure. After an overview of Jewish life during the Middle Ages, it covers legal status and Jewish views of Poland, and devotes the last third to Messianism and Hasidism. Recommended by Reader’s Guide to Judaism.

Other Works

The Economic Role of Jews in Medieval Poland: the contribution of Yitzhak Schipper by Jacob Litman
ISBN: 0819142441
Publication Date: 1984
This volume summarizes for an English audience the work of the foundational Polish historian Yitzhak Schipper.

This is a very partial listing of important works of Polish-Jewish history, organized in rough chronological order of the time periods considered.

Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century by Gershon David Hundert
ISBN: 0520238443
Publication Date: 2004
“Hundert's study is a useful source for those seeking a reliable guide to the history of eighteenth-century Polish Jewry. Based on archival research in Poland and Ukraine as well as on a broad literature, it offers its readers a thoroughly developed survey of the specific features distinguishing Jewish life in early modern Poland from that in the rest of Europe.” Hundert advocates no less than "a revision of the understanding of modernity in Jewish history" (Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 3). Published by University of California Press.
The Lords' Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth During the Eighteenth Century by M. J. Rosman
ISBN: 0916458180
Publication Date: 1990
“This excellent monograph is a detailed study of one of the central facets of Jewish history in Eastern Europe and of the overall history of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth-the relations between the Jews and the great magnates of Poland. Using intensive research in the archives of the great Sienawski-Czartoryski family, Rosman paints a finely tuned but, nonetheless, broadly evocative picture of the central role played by Jews in the eighteenth century latifundia of the Polish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian lands.” (Review from Slavic Review)
The Emancipation of the Jews in Poland, 1780-1870 by Arthur Eisenbach
ISBN: 0631178023
Publication Date: 1991
Translation of a Polish work published in 1987, by one of the last of the generation of Polish historians who made their start between the wars.“Fundamentally, this is less a history of Jews in the lands of partitioned Poland in the nineteenth century than it is a description of the changes in the social, economic, and especially the legal conditions affecting Jews in those lands during the century between roughly 1780 and 1870. Within these limitations, this is a valuable book, all the more precious for its frequent quotation from primary sources unavailable to English readers.” (Review from American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 3)
The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars by Israel Gutman (Editor)
ISBN: 0874514460
Publication Date: 1989
This volume collects papers from a 1986 conference at Brandeis. “The work is a focused and well-integrated whole [...] The editors and contributors have wisely eschewed the cosmic question of whether or not inter-war Poland was a golden or heroic age for the Jews in favour of more mundane and answerable questions about Jewish life. The six sections consider the Jews as both a self-contained phenomenon - the section on religious life is especially pertinent here - and as a vital component of a broader society, where terms such as traditionalist, assimilationist, Zionist or socialist are only shorthand for a far more complex reality.” (Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 69, No. 2)
The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars by Ezra Mendelsohn
ISBN: 0253331609
Publication Date: 1983
“Provides an indispensable analysis and survey of interwar Jewish history and Jewish-Gentile relations in Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic States. It is a subject of daunting complexity and many pitfalls. To do it justice demands a simultaneous command of Jewish and non-Jewish historical issues and literature. Mendelsohn's landmark achievement provides a convincing conceptual framework for understanding Jewish history during this period.” (Review by Samuel Kassow, Russian Review, vol. 45, no. 1)
The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-1944 by Shmuel Krakowski
ISBN: 0841908516
Publication Date: 1984
“This work is an English-language translation of the author’s Leḥimah Yehudit be-Polin neged ha-Natsim, 1942-1944. (The Jewish Struggle in Poland against the Nazis, 1942 – 1944) published in Tel Aviv in 1977. Certainly few scholars and readers concerned with Polish affairs read Hebrew, and this translation can only be welcomed for the mountain of original and important research it brings us from both Polish and Israeli archives. Working through primary and secondary materials in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English, the author has used transcriptions of interviews with numerous former partisans and eye-witnesses to the events he describes. Dr. Krakowski has undoubtedly produced a volume which historians of modern Poland and of World War II must read, consider, and digest.” (review by John Stanley from The Polish Review)
In the Shadow of Auschwitz by David Engel
ISBN: 0807817376
Publication Date: 1987-01-01
"In the Shadow of Auschwitz, examines the attitude of the Polish government-in-exile towards Polish Jewry in the wake of the Holocaust. The Poles often have been accused of inexcusable passivity, and even complicity, with regard to the German extermination of three million Polish Jews. Engel does not dwell on this issue, but examines an equally important historical questions, namely, the position taken by the government-in-exile with regard to the Jews, and whether that position may have affected the German’s ability to implement the “final solution.” (Review from the New York University Journal of International Law & Politics)
Who Will Say Kaddish? A search for Jewish identity in contemporary Poland by Larry Mayer (Text); Gary Gelb (Photography)
ISBN: 0815607199
Publication Date: 2002
“By the eve of the Holocaust, Poland was home to the second largest Jewish population in the world. By war's end, its Jews had been decimated and their once-vibrant culture all but destroyed. The authors of this book revisit their roots to research a rumor that Jewish life is being rekindled in modern Poland. What they discover are three generations of Jews -- Holocaust survivors and their offspring -- with differing historical perspectives. A sociocultural portrait -- through interview, photography, reportage, and personal memoir -- of the Jewish resurgence that has taken place since the fall of the communist regime in 1989. Who Will Say Kaddish? shows how each group explores the issue of "Jewish" identity for themselves and for Poland at large.” (Bowker/Syndetics)
The Jews in Poland by Antony Polonsky; Chimen Abramsky; Maciej Jachimczyk
ISBN: 0631148574
Publication Date: 1986
“The Jews in Poland, a collection of papers given to the International Conference on Polish-Jewish Studies in 1984 by recognized and distinguished experts, is the first publication of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies recently established in Oxford. It is concerned less with Jewish origins in Eastern Europe than with the expansion of the Jewish community as part of the Polish system in the great days of the Commonwealth and afterward in the period of decline and ultimate resurrection.” (English Historical Review, Vol. 102, No. 405)

Full Text Digital Books

Die Judenstadt von Lublin – Majer Bałaban (via Hathi Trust)
German. This book provides information about the Jewish quarter in Lublin, Poland.
*Also available in a hardcopy through the library. For more information please see the Books tab or click here.