permitted. In addition, the council had a coterie of shtadlanim, which could
be dispatched to Warsaw or Kraków in times of emergency, and took charge
of providing royal officials and members of the ruling dynasty with bribes
and gifts. More importantly, the council acted as the highest Jewish court of
appeals, settling disputes between individual communities. In addition, the
council regulated the spiritual and religious life of Polish Jewry, assuring that
books were published only with the permission of a noted rabbi, and that the
laws of Kashrut and the Sabbath were dutifully enforced and observed. The
council imposed safety restrictions, such as a taboo on Jews drinking wine in
inns where Christians congregated. The crowning achievement of the Council
of Four Lands was the Statues of Kraków (Takanot Krako), which were pub-
lished in 1595. These statutes addressed any and every aspect of Jewish life,
on an individual and a communal level.
In a larger sense, the supracommunal organization of Polish Jewry was
instrumental in the dissemination and expansion of Jewish culture in Poland.
The first major rabbinic figure in Poland, Jacob ben Joseph Polak (1460/70 –
after 1522), was born in Bavaria and had studied in a yeshiva in Regensburg.
After marrying Esther Fischel, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish tax farmer in
Kraków, he founded the first yeshiva in Poland. His student Shalom Shachna
(d. 1558) was the first major talmudic scholar in Poland, and became the
head of the Lublin yeshiva.
True to its Ashkenazic roots, Polish Jewish culture was primarily religious
in nature, but in the broadest sense. The curriculum of Polish Jewish educa-
tion included biblical commentary, liturgical poetry, rabbinic responsa,
non-religious Hebrew poetry such as that of Immanuel of Rome (but never
Dante), philosophical works such as those of Maimonides (but never Aristotle),
and Kabbala. The leading intellectual of sixteenth-century Polish Jewry, and
the embodiment of its cultural development, was Moses Isserles (1530–72),
also known as the ReMA. Isserles was a student of Schachna, from whom he
received a first-rate training as a talmudic scholar, biblical commentator, and
Kabbalist, and was the author of numerous responsa. His major work, the
Mapah, mentioned earlier, capped a career as a prolific rabbinic scholar. In pro-
viding a comprehensive, user-friendly code of law for Polish and other
Ashkenazic Jews, Isserles’s Mapahcomplemented the Statutes of Kraków in
bringing to fruition what the Tosafists had begun centuries earlier: the devel-
opment of an all-encompassing religious life for Ashkenazic Jews.
A telling measure of the complexity and richness of Polish Jewish culture
was the extensive literature written for Jewish women. The most rudimentary
part of this literature was made up of handbooks written for women, such as
Benjanim Slonik’s Seder Mitzvot Nashim (The Order of Women’s
Commandments). This text dealt predominantly with the laws of ritual
purity, but began with a series of instructions that reflected the author’s ide-
alistic image of the Jewish woman as wife, mother, and homemaker.
World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750 123