Jews who immigrated to Poland from central Europe turned culturally
inward, expanding the religious culture they had brought with them rather
than fashioning a new one. Just as Ottoman Jews increasingly spoke Ladino,
a Jewish language imported from the Iberian Peninsula, the language of
Polish Jews was Yiddish, a Jewish dialect of German imported to Poland by
Jewish immigrants from central Europe. It is noteworthy that neither Polish
nor Ottoman Jews fashioned a Jewish dialect of the local vernacular: there was
no Judeo-Polish or Judeo-Turkish. In both cases, the ability of Jewish immi-
grants to transplant a vernacular across hundreds of miles was made possible
by print culture.
Jews in Poland and the Ottoman Empire continued to trade. Illustrative in
this regard was the rabbinic career of Ephraim Cohen of Vilna. Born and edu-
cated in Vilna, he accepted a rabbinic post as the Ashkenazic rabbi of Buda,
Hungary, during the 1660s. Under his guidance, the Ashkenazic Jews of
Buda had a close relationship with the Sephardic community. Cohen himself
sent his son to study in Salonika, attesting to the interaction between
Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews. In one responsum, Cohen was asked whether
an Ashkenazic Jew could fulfill the obligation to pray while in a Sephardic
synagogue, and vice versa. Cohen answered emphatically: yes.
Alongside the similarities between Polish and Ottoman Jewry were two
important differences: the supracommunal organization of Polish Jewry from
the mid-sixteenth century on, and the greater diversity of Ottoman Jewry,
which included Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Italian, and Romaniot Jews. Jewish
communal organization in Poland developed to a greater degree than anywhere
else, epitomized by the emergence of two supracommunal organizations: the
Council of Four Lands (Va’ad Arba Arzot) in the Polish part of the common-
wealth, and the Council of Lithuania (Va’ad Lita) in Lithuania. The Council of
Four Lands grew out of informal meetings of communal elders at the semian-
nual commercial fairs of Lublin, where they would discuss common problems,
challenges, and successes in communal administration. Eventually these meet-
ings were formalized in a supracommunal council, whose centers were in Lublin
and Kraków.
The council was made up of leading lay leaders from across Polish Jewry. It
was at the top of a supracommunal hierarchy that consisted of individual
communities governed by regional councils, each of which was overseen by
the high council. The council performed four types of functions: legislative,
judicial, administrative, and cultural. It legislated rules for electing commu-
nal leaders and for appointing and dismissing communal rabbis, and issued
regulations regarding commercial practices between Jews and between Jews
and non-Jews.
The council also issued prohibitions, such as a ban on leasing a magnate’s
estate without the knowledge of the local Jewish community, and injunctions
to obey royal edicts, such as the ban on settling illegally where Jews were not
122 World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750