Non-Reformation Europe: the Jews of Poland
Jews who lived in those parts of Europe that were less affected by the
Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Wars of Religion, and the rise of abso-
lutism followed a different course of development from the sixteenth through
the eighteenth century. The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans largely insu-
lated southeastern Europe from the ravages of religious wars. Hungary is a
case in point. The Jews of Hungary, after a brief revival under Matthias
Corvinus during the second half of the fifteenth century, declined steadily
under his successors. The Ottoman conquest of the eastern two-thirds of
Hungary in 1526 brought a major reprieve for Hungarian Jews. Ottoman
rule muted the impact of the Reformation, which had begun less than a
decade before the Ottoman conquest, and fostered a sense of ecumenicism
between Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists – all of whom were equally
second-class Christians under Muslim rule. This ecumenical mood extended
in part to Jews. In 1623, Gábor Bethlen, the Calvinist prince of Transylvania,
gave the Jews of Alba-Iulia a charter that was more generous than most
Christian charters. No less indicative of the favorable situation of Hungarian
Jews under Ottoman rule was the Jewish community of Buda, where
Ashenazic and Sephardic communities coexisted and prospered for much of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Yet the most vivid measure of the disparate situation of Jews in Reformation
and non-Reformation Europe was the rise of Polish Jewry during the sixteenth
and the first half of the seventeenth century. Initially invited to Poland from cen-
tral Europe by the Duke Bolesław the Pious in 1264, Polish Jewry was built
primarily by immigration of Jews from Ashkenazic central Europe. (The theory
that Polish Jews were the descendants of the Khazars has been summarily
refuted.) By 1648, Polish Jewry would emerge as the largest, most prosperous,
and most culturally creative Jewry in the world, rivaled only by the Jewish com-
munities of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, parallels between Poland and the
Ottoman Empire during this period fostered certain comparisons between the
emergence of Polish Jewry and the rise of the Ottoman Jewry. As in the Ottoman
Empire, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of conquest and
expansion for the Kingdom of Poland, which conquered Ukraine and the Baltic
Peninsula and expanded eastward into Russia. The union between the Kingdom
of Poland and the Duchy of Lithuania in 1569 created the Polish–Lithuanian
Commonwealth, the largest European state until 1772. The Polish–Lithuanian
Commonwealth, moreover, was the great defender of Catholicism during wars of
religion and from the Ottoman invasion. In 1683, the Polish army saved Vienna
from a Turkish siege.
The ethnic diversity of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth increas-
ingly paralleled that of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was a
Muslim state with substantial non-Muslim minorities. Poland was a Catholic
country with substantial enclaves of non-Catholics, including Lutherans,
120 World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750