AFTER THE ASSASSINATION of Alexander II in 1881 the situation of the Jews in the tsarist empire began to deteriorate rapidly. This was partly a result of the government's growing disillusionment with the effectiveness of its policies of transforming the Jews into useful subjects. In part, too, the deterioration was caused by the growing revolutionary threat and the social tensions which this engendered.

In this new situation the goal of integration and transformation of the community through education and Russification also became increasingly discredited within Jewish circles. Instead of religion, it was now ethnicity that was seen by many as the chief marker of Jewish identity, while others came to perceive socialism, with its promise of a new and equal world, as the ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’.

From the tsarist empire this ‘new Jewish politics’ spread to the Kingdom of Poland and to Galicia, where integrationist policies, although more successful than in the tsarist empire, had also encountered considerable resistance and were now questioned by both the Jewish and the non-Jewish community. The new politics even had an impact in Prussian Poland, the one area of former Poland–Lithuania where the Jews had apparently been transformed into German citizens.

In this volume I will examine first the crisis of Russian Jewry. I will then analyse the impact of the crisis on the situation and attitudes of Jews in the Kingdom of Poland, in Galicia, and in Prussian Poland. The volume concludes with an investigation of other phenomena which, over the whole period from 1750 to 1914, transformed the lives of the Jews of eastern Europe: urbanization, the emergence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, changes in the character of Jewish religious belief, improvements in the position of women, and the emergence of a modern Jewish popular culture.