The reviewer confronted with the work of Joseph Marcus finds himself in a difficult position. This book is such an unusually ambitious undertaking, and its historical scope so broad, that no single reviewer is capable of completely evaluating all the chapters adequately. However, those chapters which this reviewer is able to assess (primarily the chapters dealing with political history), arouse in him not only respect for the sheer wealth of facts but also surprise at the remarkable number of often simple mistakes, as well as a certain impatience with the peremptory nature of some of the judgements. We can only hope that the remaining chapters avoid these faults.

Marcus's book consists of an introductory section in which he sketches the thousand-year history of the Jews in Poland and gives basic information concerning Poland's history between the two world wars; a section on social history (this is the longest and most specialized section, where the author discusses the problems of social structure, national income, social groups, social institutions, education, demography, housing conditions, social politics, economic politics and the wealth accumulated by Polish Jews); finally, there is a section on political history with an extensive chapter on Jewish political parties, three chronological chapters, and two chapters dealing with various related issues such as emigration and the preparations for war. The whole is supplemented by notes, appendices, a bibliography and an index of names and institutions.

The first chapter of the introductory section makes a structural mistake as attempting to squeeze a thousand years of Jewish history in Poland onto 12 pages is equivalent to dosing the reader with history in a pill. Since Marcus's work is an academic study for specialists on the subject, these 12 pages could have been omitted, thereby avoiding some basic inaccuracies. For example, Marcus writes that in the years 1764-6, 600,000 Jews constituted 5.5 per cent of the population, yet by 1791, 900,000 Jews constituted 10.2 per cent of Poland's population. He cites Rutkowski on this, although Rutkowski discusses only the situation in 1791. Marcus pays no attention to the fact that because of the first partition, the population decreased considerably. This affected the Jews, many of whom lived in the southern regions annexed by Austria.