Monastery chronicles from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth provide valuable insight not only into the history of individual orders and the Polish clergy in general, but also into the history of mentality, daily life and religious and ethnic minorities. Although references to Jews are rather sporadic in such chronicles, they are nevertheless quite diverse and concern almost all aspects of Jewish activity in Poland and abroad. Therefore, they can serve as an excellent complement to other sources in the field, including Jewish ones, and those of various secular institutions and offices. It should be noted, however, that the credibility of the information contained in monastery chronicles is always  dependent on the distance in time and space between the chronicler and the described events and should—if possible—be verified against other documentary sources from the same period.

The purpose of this article is to show the Jewish involvement in the tolln collection in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The following aspects are explored: the legal position, the financial involvement, and conditions of the everyday work of the Jewish toll collectors, as well as the conflicts connected with this profession. The author based her research upon mostly unknown primary sources, including Lithuanian Treasury documents and different court acts. Upon examination of those sources it becomes clear that the Jews played a significant role in the tax collection in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in that period. What is more, not only members of the economic elite were involved in the cooperation with the state treasury.

Benedykt Chmielowski (1700–1763), a Catholic priest, the author of the New Athens encyclopedia (extended edition: Lwów, 1754–1756) included in his polyhistorical work plenty of information on issues related to Jews. The article discusses these issues and connects their specificity with the character of different parts of the work in which Chmielowski placed them as well as with the detected and secret sources of his knowledge about Jews (especially books by early modern scholars) and the ways he dealt with those sources. The author of the article also shows Chmielowski’s writing strategies, placing New Athens in the tradition of baroque encyclopedism—a literary production typical of the previous epoch.

An unprecedented event took place in the Russian Empire in the second half of 1738. On the main square of St. Petersburg, a Jewish merchant, Boroch Leibov, and a Russian navy captain-lieutenant, Aleksander Voznitsyn, were burned alive at the stake. Voznitsyn had met Leibov while staying in Moscow. Impressed by the teachings of his new acquaintance, he decided to convert to Judaism. The reason for this decision was probably the mental illness of the captain or his unconfirmed family ties with the fifteenth-century Heresy of the Judaizers. Based on the Sobornoye Ulozheniye decree, both of them were sentenced to public burning for withdrawal from the Orthodox faith and blasphemy, in the case of Voznitsyn, and for persuading an Orthodox man to withdraw from his faith, in the case of Leibov. The trial of Boroch and Voznitsyn was widely reported in the whole Russian Empire and became the cause of rapid changes in the policy toward the Jews. Both Empress Anna Ivanovna and, after 1740, her successor, Elizabeth Petrovna, signed a number of decrees ordering the Jews to leave the borders of the Russian Empire.