By the beginning of the Second World War, Yitzhak (Ignacy) Schiper was a recognized authority on Polish Jewish history. We know now that in the very midst of the war, while incarcerated in the Warsaw ghetto, Schiper kept up his research and continued to write, persisting up to the very end.

A description of Schiper at that time appears among Emanuel Ringelblum's notes from the Warsaw ghetto, and brief and imprecise remarks about Schiper's wartime writings are also to be found in two memorial volumes, one in Hebrew and one in English, which were published in Schiper's honour. Ringelblum, who knew Schiper quite well, mentioned that Schiper had been working on several studies. One was a comprehensive work on the Khazars and their role in the earliest phase of Jewish settlement in eastern Europe-a topic which had occupied him in the years before the war. 'His other work written during the present war,’ Ringelblum wrote, ‘was a history of hasidism in the nineteenth century. This work was based on records of the Jewish community of Warsaw and on Polish archival material. These two works, together with a manuscript on Jewish autonomy and a number of other very valuable items, have been lost.'

It now appears that most of Schiper's manuscript on hasidism did in fact survive. Two of the original three bulky notebooks into which Schiper had copied his completed work were discovered several years ago by a young student of Hebrew at Warsaw University, Zbigniew Targielski. The two notebooks contain a total of 330 pages of Polish text, which Targielski has now published with his own introduction. I should like to take this opportunity to express heartfelt thanks to Mr Targielski for identifying and rescuing the manuscript, as well as for permitting me to use material from what was, at the time of writing, his as yet unpublished introduction. Schiper's monograph is a brand plucked from the fire, a remnant of the fine historiographicalliterature produced by Polish Jewry, and testimony to the author's refusal to abandon the historian's mission even in the face of disaster and destruction.