 | Jews and their neighbours in Eastern Europe since 1750 Relations between Jews and their neighbours in eastern Europe have long been perceived, both in the popular mind and in conventional scholarship, as being in a permanent state of conflict. This volume counters that image by exploring long-neglected aspects of inter-group interaction and exchange. In so doing it broadens our understanding of Jewish history and culture, as well as that of eastern Europe. Whereas traditional historiography concentrates on the differences between Jews and non-Jews, the essays here focus on commonalities: the social, political, and economic worlds that members of different groups often shared. Shifting the emphasis in this way allows quite a different picture to emerge. Jews may have been subject to the whims of ruling powers and influenced by broader cultural and political developments, but at the same time they exerted a discernible influence on them - the social, cultural, and political spheres were ones that they not only shared, but that they also helped to create. This model of reciprocal influence and exchange has much to offer to the study of inter-group relations in eastern Europe and beyond. Israel Bartal has been a visiting professor at Harvard, McGill, the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, and Moscow State University. He served as the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University between 2006 and 2010 and is the chair of the Historical Society of Israel. Among his publications are Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (with Magdalena Opalski); Polin, volume 12 (co-edited with Antony Polonsky), which focuses on the Jews in Galicia, 1772 - 1918; and The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772 - 1881. Antony Polonsky is Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is the author of The Jews in Poland and Russia (3 volumes), published by the Littman Library, Politics in Independent Poland, The Little Dictators, The Great Powers and the Polish Question, and co-author of A History of Modern Poland and The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland. Scott Ury is a senior lecturer in Tel Aviv University's Department of Jewish History, where he also serves as director of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism. His work has appeared in Jewish Social Studies, Polin, the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, and other academic forums. He has also co-edited a special edition of the European Review of History on Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and the Jews of East Central Europe. His latest book is Banner and Barricades: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry. |
