From community to nation: the Jews of Eastern Europe

The book of Professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem Yisrael Bartala devoted to the history of East European Jewry in the period of partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century to the wave of pogroms that erupted in the southern regions of Russia in the early 1880s, the center of attention of the researcher is a complex and multifaceted process of social integration and cultural adaptation of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry in three absolutist monarchies, divided among themselves the territory of the Polish crown: Russia, Prussia and Austria.
The book of Israel Bartala is a chronicle of the life of major ethnic minorities, has a unique culture developed and Autonomous socio-political organization, which faced the power of the centralized state. However, the Jewish society of Eastern Europe in this formative period is represented not as a passive participant of integration processes initiated by the Central government, and society as active, aware of his integrity and seeking to reinterpret it in a new socio-historical context.
This approach allows a prominent Israeli scholar to present new light on basic social processes and movements in Jewish society of the XVIII-XIX centuries - such as Hasidism and the Enlightenment, socialism and Orthodoxy, the struggle for emancipation, migration and urbanization - and consider them as the most important factors in the transformation of East European Jewry from medieval corporations in a modern nation state.