autonomies. The Commonwealth’s Jews governed themselves with a hierarchy of
communal institutions paralleling the county and national levels of noble self-
government of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. A local assembly or kahal governed
all aspects of a community’s internal life (public safety, education, courts, and
justice) and interacted with local authorities; representatives met at regional levels
and sent spokesmen to the biannual Polish Parliament (Sejm) to advocate for Jewish
interests.
Protected by official policy, Jewish communities lived a stable, prosperous
existence in Polish and Lithuanian lands. Colleges of higher learning (yeshiva)
were founded in the 1500s andflourished into the mid-1600s (Lublin, Cracow,
Poznan, Vilnius). Here Hebrew law, ethics, mystical contemplation, and Talmudic
commentary were taught and researched, while the language of popular culture was
Yiddish. The sixteenth century was a high point of Ashkenazic Talmudic learning:
learned rabbis—Moses Isserles (1520–72), Solomon Luria (1510–73), and
Mordecai Jaffe (d. 1612)—published codifications of Jewish law and legendary
Talmudic analyses. Vilnius was called the“Jerusalem of the North”for its Jewish
presses, schools, and community.
Jews were initially urban communities of merchants and artisans, but when the
Rus’palatinates became part of the kingdom of Poland in 1569, Jews followed
Polish noblemen to work as bailiffs, tavern keepers, mill-owners, and managers on
magnate estates. The Jewish population in Volhynia grew by 400 percent from
1569 to 1648 (from 3,000 to 15,000); in the Kyiv and Bratislav palatinates, by
1648 19,000 and 13,500 Jews lived, respectively, where only a few thousand had
lived in 1569. By the mid-eighteenth century two-thirds of the Commonwealth’s
Jews lived in urban communities and one‑third in villages. The population steadily
grew with the demographic rise of the era. By about 1500, Jews comprised
10,000–20,000 people; by 1600, 80,000–100,000; by 1650 150,000–170,000;
on the eve of the partitions, about 800,000, a good 10 percent of the Common-
wealth’s population, the fourth largest ethnic group in the Commonwealth and the
largest Jewish population in the world.
Since Jews had been forbidden to settle in the Hetmanate after Russian control
tightened there (decrees of 1717, 1731, 1740, 1742, 1744), the Russian empire
had few Jews until the partitions. Some Jews were allowed to settle in Novorossiia
in the 1760s, but the partitions brought a major Jewish presence to Russia. In
1772 over 50,000 Jews of the Grand Duchy came into the empire, and another
half million to 700,000 in the 1790s, concentrated in Right Bank and ethnic
Lithuania. By the early nineteenth century, as Alexei Miller noted,“More than
half of all European Jews ended up in the Russian empire.”This took place at a
time when Catherine II was advocating Enlightenment religious tolerance, and
Russia had not had a medieval tradition of“blood libel” and anti-Semitic
pogroms. Nor was the Orthodox Church officially anti-Semitic in the early
modern era. But anti-Semitism and economic resentments had persisted since
they were exacerbated in the seventeenth century by economic depression and
political turbulence sparked by the Khmelnytsky rebellion. Working for noble-
men as leaseholders for distilling and selling liquor, Jews were distrusted by
Western Borderlands in the Eighteenth Century 123