Over the last generation, historians have reevaluated the place of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a whole and in their individual communities. From the view, popularized by Dubnow, of Jews largely as victims of an alien, hostile environment, desperately attempting various strategies of survival, historians of our generation have come to regard Jews as not only in Poland but of Poland and inextricably linked to the social, economic, and cultural processes of the country.

Hundert, a major proponent of the new approach, entitled a chapter “Jews and Other Poles” and insisted that to Polish Jews “Poland was as much theirs as their neighbors'.” This does not mean, however, that the Jews were perfectly integrated in an American ideal-type pluralist society. Hundert was quick to point out that while Jews felt at home in their communities, “there is no question that animus and tension were the governing qualities in relations between Jews and Christians. The historical issue is how this animus was expressed in relations between particular people and groups of people at particular times and in particular places.”

In Miȩdzybóż, as in other privately owned towns, the Jews were promised physical safety, basic freedom of religion, the right to maintain autonomous institutions, and a broad field of economic enterprise. In return, they were obligated to pay taxes of various sorts, assume other obligations (such as guard duty, fire prevention, and participation in public works projects), and remain peaceable and law-abiding. The owners, the Czartoryskis, would also go beyond this basic framework in an effort to ensure that the Jewish community—and with it the economic foundation of the town—remained financially viable and capable of supplying revenues.

An example of this occurred in 1739. In August of that year, Jan Swirski, the podwojewoda (deputy governor) of Podolia, informed August Aleksander Czartoryski that he had attended the recent meeting of the Jewish council of the district of Podolia where elections for Jewish district elders were held and the tax apportionment for the Jewish communities of Podolia was made. Swirski assured the magnate that he had been instrumental in the renewed election of the same—presumably acceptable to Czartoryski—elders as before and “did not allow the least increase in the taxes of the territories” belonging to Czartoryski.