Missing from most accounts of the modern history of Jews in Europe is the experience of what was once the largest Jewish community in the world--an oversight that Gershon David Hundert corrects in this history of Eastern European Jews in the eighteenth century.

The experience of eighteenth-century Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not fit the pattern of integration and universalization--in short, of westernization--that historians tend to place at the origins of Jewish modernity. Hundert puts this experience, that of the majority of the Jewish people, at the center of his...

A comprehensive view of the history, beliefs and practices, and sociology of the Hasidic movement founded by Israel Baal Sheen Tov, this simultaneously provides a reflection of the development of the scholarly understanding of Hasidism from the 18th century to the present.

A comprehensive view of the history, beliefs and practices, and sociology of the Hasidic movement founded by Israel Baal Sheen Tov, this simultaneously provides a reflection of the development of the scholarly understanding of Hasidism from the 18th century to the present.

Seventeen scholars furnish insights into 800 years of Polish-Jewish relations including post-Holocaust Poland, in which approximately 10,000 Jews remain today of a population that numbered about three quarters of a million in the latter 18th century. Hundert (history and Jewish studies, McGill U.) a