A Reply to Tomasz Gąsowski

Summary

I SHALL adopt the position of sine ira et studio regarding the review of my work by Tomasz Gąsowski, whom I do not know personally. I have only read a few of his book reviews that touch on problems of Jewish history and culture. I had the impression both that he was competent to evaluate complex social and cultural processes—particularly those of the nineteenth century—and that he was able to present information about a publication reliably to readers. To err is human. Gąsowski's current review of my book is not accurate in those sections where he discusses the source base and methodological principles that I used to study this complex problem, one that covered a large territory over a long time.

My monograph is the first attempt to present the nearly century-long process of the civic and political emancipation of one group of inhabitants: the Jewish community. I examined this issue not only in the aristocratic Commonwealth and the later three partitions, but in the wider European context as well. To date, no extant work has undertaken an analogous task on the emancipation of other groups, such as peasants and townspeople, and the divisions among them. A reviewer should take this into account and appreciate the magnitude of the task. Mr Gąsowski, however, completely missed this, and instead points out omissions, inaccuracies and errors. Naturally, this makes discussion difficult.

Gąsowski reproaches me for not explaining in my work ‘a larger theory of emancipation, indispensable to understanding Eisenbach's argument’, although he then admits that ‘material on this issue can be found in a few places in the book’. This material was not merely a collection of reflections that the reader must put together himself. In the first chapter, entitled ‘Research Principles’, I explained extensively not only the scope of the term ‘emancipation’, but the wider methodological principles of the subject under examination. Moreover, I wrote widely about the views on emancipation among Jewish, French, and German historians.