Tokens are nongovernmental circulating media of exchange, as opposed to coins and other official currencies, which are an exclusive prerogative of sovereign authorities. As a commercially active minority community within Poland, Jews of course utilized official nationally issued monies, but they also issued and circulated many forms of tokens to serve varied social, religious, charitable, and commercial purposes. Tokens of non-precious metals and paper were issued by principal Jewish communal authorities; by societies active in maintaining services such as burial, ritual slaughter, education, care of the sick and elderly, and the distribution of alms; and by prominent merchants. The relatively small value and humbleness of such objects, and the fact that their acceptability did not extend beyond the town of their issue, has meant that they were rarely saved and preserved in the course of Jewish migration and during the tumult of wars and pogroms. Therefore, unlike obsolete national coinages, such local tokens have remained virtually unknown and have never previously been collected and studied, either privately or by museums. Recently, metal detectorists at sites of former Jewish habitation have uncovered considerable quantities of metallic Jewish tokens which display a remarkable geographic range and variety of form and function. This paper, based largely on such newly discovered material, presents this rich trove of artifacts for the first time, and attempts to describe and situate their functions within the social and economic context of Jewish communal life in Poland prior to the World War II.

R. Hayyim Volozhin, the main disciple of the Vilna Gaon, set up the Volozhin Yeshiva in 1802. Unlike his mentor, R. Hayyim was not interested in perpetuating the animosity between Hassisdm and mirthnagdim, welcoming Hassidic students in his yeshiva. Despite this, R. Hayyim had a major ideological dispute with the Hassidic world. This is obvious from the collections of questions and answers we have from him, the sheiltot, in which he spells out his differences with Hassidism. His Nefesh Ha-Hayyim, his only autographic work published posthumously, was both a polemic on Hassidism as well as an alternative Judaic-Kabbalistic world view to Hassidism. R. Hayyim’s polemic strengthens the point of view that the Vilna Gaon and his students were more ideologically than politically opposed to Hassidism.

The article discusses the process of the introduction in Galicia of a new law regulating the relations between Jewish communities and the authorities of the territorial administration. Unlike in the Galician provinces, where the Josephine patent of 1789 continued to be applied, certain Jewish communities in the cities here had developed new statutes previously, leading to partial changes in the elections for community councils. The first was the Krakow community (1870), whose Orthodox rabbi Szymon Schreiber (Sofer) attempted to withdraw the implemented changes, designing his own version of the new statutes (1882). The struggle over the form of the new law ultimately culminated with the Viennese government’s issue of relevant regulations in 1890.

Rola was the first periodical in Poland of an unequivocally anti-Semitic profile. An essential element of its ideological programme was combatting Jewish assimilation. According to Rola, processes of assimilation were responsible for generating a new type of Jew – liberal, assimilated and unprincipled – and therefore much more perilous to Polish national interests than the model of a traditional, Orthodox Jew.

The article focuses on the issue of Jewish bourgeoisie’s artistic patronage in Łódź at the the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The selected time range (1890–1907) covers the period of both the city’s rapid development and flourishing of culture and artistic life until the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution. What’s characteristic of the Jewish bourgeoisie patronage in Łódź, is the tendency to finance projects that not only created a sense of community in a multiethnic city, but also emphasized the significant but distinctive role of Jews among townspeople. In this article, the issue of patronage is discussed on selected examples, taking into account shaping of public space and private initiatives in both architecture and fine arts.

Between the years 1918 and 1939, philanthropic associations played a major social role in L’viv, as did in other large Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe. The aim of this research paper is to present and discuss selected Jewish associations providing assistance to children, students in secular schools and youth studying at universities. It has to be pointed out that their high level of activity was an expression of the modernization processes taking place among the Jewish population and, clearly, the enhancement of these processes.

The author of the following article analyses development of the construct Ostjuden in the language of German anti-Semites in 1920–1932. For this discourse analysis, two main primary sources were chosen: the daily newspaper Völkischer Beobachter and archives of parliamentary debates of the Reichstag. Immigration and the presence of Eastern European Jews in Germany after the World War I played an important role in the anti-Semitic propaganda and speeches of right-wing politicians. Within the period of the Weimar Republic, the construct Ostjuden underwent certain semantic changes. Use of the term and its connotations in the anti--Semitic discourse were examined and are presented in this article.

This article discusses the housing situation of Holocaust survivors returning to post-war Kraków and Łódź – cities which were home to two of the largest pre-war Jewish communities in Poland, and which were not destroyed during the Second World War. The author indicates and describes factors which shaped the housing situation, including wartime and post-war displacements, the plunder of Jewish property during and after the war, Polish legislation regarding its restitution, as well as the post-war housing policy of the Polish state. Personal literary accounts by Jewish people reveal not only the creation and functioning of ‘camp families,’ but also the peculiar, neighbourly communities full of tensions, misunderstandings and, sometimes, violence.

In my paper entitled Seeking a return to Poland. The case of “Gomulka Aliyah” immigrants in Israel (1956–1960) I describe the emigration of Polish citizens of Jewish origin to Israel in the second half of the 1950s. From October 1956, when Wladyslaw Gomulka came into power in Poland, it became possible for Polish Jews to relocate in to Israel. Leaving Poland was not obligatory for Jews in that period, but a rise in anti-Semitism and disappointment with the communist regime in Poland led a number of Polish citizens of Jewish origin to make the decision to emigrate. In the period of 1956 to 1960 approximately 50,000 Jews went to Israel. However, after few months of living in the New Homeland, some of the new immigrants from Poland were seeking to return. Difficult living conditions, an unfamiliar language, and unemployment led Polish Jews to request repatriation. That was in most of the cases impossible, as most of them had given up on Polish citizenship while immigrating to Israel.

After World War II, the Communist regime took over power directly after the liberation of Poland in 1945. Jewish survivors, having stayed in the country for a certain period of time, tried to revive their multilingual cultural life. Literary works of writers in that community are a fascinating testimony of their struggles: how to be loyal to the Socialist state (condition sine qua non to take part in the official cultural life) on the one hand, and on the other how to express their feelings, thoughts and convictions which they could not and did not want to ignore. Their struggles can be observed on the sample of the three most important motifs of postwar Polish-Yiddish literature: the Holocaust, Communism itself, and Polish-Jewish relations. The article discusses selected literary works of the most prominent Polish-Yiddish writers, whose main character or lyric subject is the ‘new Jewish man’ shaped according to the Communist principles. The author attempts to answer the question of what the most important features of a personality formed by Communist doctrine are, and also to learn about the circumstances of the communist world in which that literary hero lives. Close reading of the programmatic literary pieces of some Communist writers also enables observing whether and how Polish Jewish Communists managed to find a compromise between the mutually exclusive Communist internationalism and their attachment to Yiddish-language culture, and how they reacted when information of Stalinist crimes came to light and their party comrades turned the blade of antisemitism against them. The ambitious project to build a new model of secular progressive Yiddish culture (the so-called ‘nusekh Poyln’), failed to bring the expected results. In spite of concerted attempts to meet the unrealistic demands of Socialist Realism, it soon transpired that Polish-Yiddish literature under Communism was unable to deal with the lack of space afforded by Communist ideology for mourning its murdered nation or with the spasms of unease that were the reaction to the periodic antisemitism in the non-Jewish environment.

The article is devoted to a brief biography, scientific achievements and views of Meir Korzennik, a writer, publicist and Ph.D. laureate of the Jagiellonian University, as well as a teacher and tutor of Jewish youth. The study describes his doctoral thesis on the reception of Montesquieu in Poland, and addresses the legal category of orphan works.

Dr Przemysław Dec (1969–2018) was a lecturer at the Department of History of Judaism and Jewish Literature in the Institute of Jewish Studies of the Jagiellonian University for more than a decade. He was a passionate Qumran scholar and charismatic teacher. He died prematurely in September 2018. The Jagiellonian University has lost an exceptionally talented Hebrew philologist and lecturer on ancient Judaism.

The text reviews the first evaluation of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical project in light of the Black Notebooks by Peter Trawny, the editor of those notebooks. Trawny poses questions about the status of the Black Notebooks and their place within the entire body of Heidegger’s works. The book deserves the attention of ordinary readers and specialists, offering a platform for further discussion.