Over the last few years there has been increasing interest in the history and culture of the Jews who lived on Polish territory. The rapid growth in the number of publications on this subject written in various places is another indication of this interest. Consequently there is a need for a more efficient way of providing information about what research has been undertaken and is in progress. International conferences have a role to play in this but the historian needs a research tool readily at hand. What I have in mind is a collected edition of sources, an inventory of the surviving monuments of Jewish culture, and a bibliography of existing literature. 1986 saw the publishing of the first bibliography of the history of the Jews in Poland from 1772 to 1939 since that of Majer Bałaban and his students. The aim of the authors was to collect material illustrating various aspects of Jewish-Polish relations over a period of almost two centuries. These problems are clearly of great importance in the history of the Polish and Jewish peoples. Two earlier bibliographies worth mentioning here, published by Kaplan and by Hundert and Bacon, only touched on this problem. Thus this new publication should be warmly welcomed, both for the idea behind it and for the authors’ effort in at least partly filling a large gap.

The book under review is the result of Jerzy Lerski's long-standing interest in the history of the Jews in Poland. He was born in Lwów in 1917, and studied law at the Jan Kazimierz University, where he was a leader of the Polska Młodziez Demokratyczna organization (Polish Democratic Youth organization). After the campaign of September 1939 he came to Great Britain. In February 1943 he returned to occupied Poland as an emissary of General Sikorski's government. While there, he was very concerned about the situation of the survivors of the Jewish nation. He returned to London after a year, and in December 1944 he became personal secretary to the Prime Minister Tomasz Arciszewski. After the war Lerski graduated in law at the Polish Faculty at Oxford University and lectured in history and political science at universities in Pakistan, Japan and Ceylon. He is now an emeritus professor of San Francisco University and an author of several studies on Polish-American relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.