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from BOOK REVIEWS
Almost all historians, while proceeding with their ‘serious’ academic research, encounter a number of small, apparently insignificant snippets of information about people, happenings, and episodes in history. Yet they rarely have the time or the ‘nerve’ to investigate closely and write about these discoveries. The once common practice of publishing short comments, contributions or popular essays is rapidly becoming a part of history itself.
Isaac Lewin should be listed among those historians for whom no problem is too small to investigate. His book on the Jewish Community in Poland is made up of 16 essays, of which over a third treat such minor, hardly noticed events and phenomena. They are, in fact, like little pearls, or - to use the author's own words - golden crumbs (p. xii) often telling us more about the atmosphere, everyday life and spirit of the past than do larger works.
The articles in this volume may be divided into three groups: general ones giving historical narratives of certain periods of history, more detailed studies of various problems connected with the Jewish community in Poland, and short comments of the sort we have described on various episodes and occurrences in the Jewish experience in Poland.
Articles within the first group (eh. I, II, XI, XII, XVI) cover the whole of the history of the Jews in Poland, from their coming to this part of Europe down to 1939. In fact they could form a separate, very general and synthetic account of this history. In this volume, they form links between the other more detailed and specific studies. A characteristic of these general chapters is the large importance attached in them to the problems of Jewish cultural development in Poland, which the author sees as an outstanding contribution of Polish Jews to world Jewry's culture and tradition. This cultural heritage is often underestimated. Thus, Jonathan Israel's valuable monograph, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism (Oxford, 1981), devotes very little space to these problems.
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