To speak of basic characteristics is to generalize and to generalize is to endanger the truth. None of the six constructs or schemata which will be suggested here is absolutely true in the sense that one could not prepare lists of exceptions to each, as well as dozens of quibbles and qualifications. This understood, it is proposed that these six constructs are essential filaments in the web of the historical experience of the Jews in the Polish Commonwealth. In other, paradoxical words, it is being asserted here that these are the fictions by which the truth can be discovered.

The first item on the list will be also the most objective. As Professor Salo Baron has taught us, one properly opens the description of a Jewish community with a discussion of numbers. For much of its history the Polish-Jewish community was the largest in the world. Indeed, even today, their descendants include most of the Jews in the Soviet Union and North America and about half of the Jewish population of the State of Israel. Furthermore Polish Jews comprised a very substantial proportion indeed of the population of the Polish Commonwealth as a whole. It may be that during the 18th century nearly a majority of the town-dwellers in Poland Lithuania were Jews. Recent work on the demographic history of Poland, however, has called into question virtually every estimate of the population of historical Poland. Church records of births, baptisms, weddings and deaths, which are the most objective and reliable sources of information, are least useful in computing the Jewish population. Estimates of Jewish numbers have been based mainly on fiscal records, especially the hearth taxes, which are notoriously unreliable. Further, there is no agreement whatsoever as to how many Jews lived in each dwelling. As a result, estimates of the mid-17th century Jewish population, for example, range between 170,000 and 450,000. Virtually all Jewish historians have accepted Raphael Mahler's carefully calculated figure of 750,000 Jews in Poland Lithuania in 1764-5. Recently, however, even Mahler's methods have been called into question. Furthermore, there is a large number of equally important subsidiary questions about demographic history which remain unresolved, most notably the rate of expansion of the Jewish population during different periods.