THIS ESSAY is an attempt to describe the occurrences of accusations of ritual murder against Jews between 1500 and 1800 in the territories of Poland. In that period these lands constituted the ‘main centre and reserve of world Jewry’.

THE SIZE OF THE JEWISH POPULATION

It is not easy to determine the exact numbers of the Jewish population in the territories of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania for the periods covered in this study, but its size can be estimated from extant tax records. Estimates of the Jewish population in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth put it at 500,000 for the mid-seventeenth century, and over one million by the end of the eighteenth century; that is, in the mid-seventeenth century about 30 per cent of world Jewry made its home in Poland–Lithuania, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was home to 44 per cent. Nevertheless, the true size of the population is still open to debate. The amount collected by the per capita tax, a tax first assessed by the Sejm in 1563, is the main basis for determining the size of the Jewish population in the second half of the sixteenth century. The original resolution required payment of 1 zloty from every Jewish person regardless of sex or age, although the indigent were exempted. In Poland in 1569 revenues from the tax were 6,000 zloty, and in 1578 they were 10,000 zloty.

Several different demographic estimates were based on the same amount of Jewish taxes. Schiper estimated that there were 75,000 Jews in Poland and 25,000 in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. S. W. Baron, on the other hand, believed that in the second half of the sixteenth century 150,000 Jews lived in the territories of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Even this estimate was further inflated to 300,000 by Z. Sułowski, who later reduced it to 120,000. Comparing data from the tax registers and other sources, M. Horn concluded that because Russian Jews often evaded paying taxes, an estimate based on 3.3 inhabitants for each zloty collected was more accurate. Extrapolating from Horn's findings, H. Samsonowicz recently concluded that there must have been about 20,000 Jews living in Poland in the sixteenth century, based on the collection of over 6,000 zloty in taxes.