From the community to the nation: Jews of Eastern Europe

The book of Professor of the Jewish University in Jerusalem Israel Bartal is dedicated to the history of Eastern European Jewry in the period from the sections of Poland at the end of the 18th century and to the wave of pogroms that broke out in the southern regions of Russia in the early 1880s. The focus of the researcher is a complex and multifaceted process of social integration and cultural adaptation of Polish-Lithuanian Jews in three absolutist monarchies dividing among themselves the territory of the Polish Crown: Russia, Prussia and Austria. The Book of Israel Bartal is the chronicles of the life of a major ethnic minority, which possessed a unique culture and a developed autonomous socio-political organization, which was faced with the power of a centralized state. However, the Jewish Society of Eastern Europe in this formational period is not represented as a passive participant in integration processes initiated by the central government, but as an active society, aware of its integrity and striving to rethink it in a new socio-historical context. Such an approach allows the presented to the Israeli scientist to present the main social processes and movements in the Jewish Society of the XVIII-XIX centuries in the new world. - such as Hasidism and Education, Socialism and Orthodox, the struggle for emancipation, migration and urbanization - and consider them as the most important factors for the transformation of Eastern European Jewry from the medieval corporation into a modern political nation