Jacob Litman, The Economic Role of Jews in Medieval Poland by Jakub Basista

Summary

Were one to judge the contents of this book by its title one would be greatly misled. The subtitle - ‘The Contribution of Yitzhak Schipper’ brings us a little closer, although it is not entirely to the point. In fact, what Jacob Litman has given us is an account of Y. Schipper's research on the history of Jews in the Middle Ages.

Schipper was an eminent Polish-Jewish historian of the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century (until the outbreak of the Second World War). The idea of Jacob Litman's dissertation was to investigate Schipper's research and results published mainly in the Polish and Yiddish languages, and to present them to English-speaking readers, who - in the author's view - have no other way of learning about them. Yet neither the topic itself, nor its presentation by the author is able to convince one of the necessity of such a study.

Litman takes up two themes in his work: Schipper's contributions to Jewish history (chapters 2-7), and a very general sketch of the historian's life and activities. Chapters 2-6 describe the main results of Schipper's academic research on Jewish activities in the Middle Ages. Litman describes the circumstances in which these works were born and presents their arguments. His narrative is precise and exact, but it is only a summary, and rarely does he discuss the ensuing debate in the fields covered by Schipper - it is enough for him to mention Baron, Halpern, or Mahler if they agree with Schipper and include his results in their own studies. Thus we learn nothing, or almost nothing new about the problems that were discussed by Schipper and his contemporaries over 40 years ago. It is as if the debate on the topics taken up by Schipper has ended with his death. Litman does not seem to notice that Schipper's most convincing and solidly-based source results are soundly established and have become an unquestioned part of historical knowledge. On the other hand, his more doubtful conclusions, which even in his own time raised questions about their accuracy, since they were not based on sufficient evidence and were more the product of a ‘national’ historiography, typical of those days, raise the same doubts today.