This useful volume, entitled The Jewish People in the Polish Nation, includes six papers by noted specialists on eighteenth-century Jewish and Polish history from a conference that took place in Warsaw in 1992. One paper is in English and five are in Polish.

The English-language article by Gershon David Hundert, ‘Population and Society in Eighteenth-Century Poland’, boldly challenges two generally accepted ideas. First, Hundert argues that rapid Jewish population growth stemmed primarily from the relative prosperity that allowed early marriage and provided the conditions for children to survive. Hundert slides into the related topic of class struggle within the Jewish community, suggesting that instances of apparent class conflict between rich and poor Jews really represented conflicts between patrician factions that mobilized the lower classes to help them.

Jerzy Michalski painstakingly re-examines ‘Parliamentary Reform Bills concerning the Position of the Jewish People in Poland in the Years 1789‒1792’. He challenges Eisenbach's recent critique of Polish reform, concluding that the Polish parliament would have given Jews civic and political rights if the 1792 Polish–Russian war had not ended the Four Year Diet.

Jakub Goldberg provides an original study entitled ‘The First Political Movement among Polish Jews: Jewish Plenipotentiaries during the Four-Year Diet’. Communal representatives from all parts of the Commonwealth gathered in Warsaw to counteract the Christian middle-class lobby, and they developed their own ideas about how to integrate Jews into the Polish constitutional system. Goldberg traces the evolution of Jewish ideas and notes the group's organizational difficulties, arguing that their activities demonstrated the political maturity of eighteenth-century Polish Jews.

Stanisław Grodziski analyses the ‘Legal Position of Jews in Galicia’ between 1772 and 1790. He finds that Maria Theresa's and Joseph II's reform measures Germanized Galician Jews to a considerable degree and gained their loyalty. However, Grodziski argues, the Habsburgs failed at their primary goal, which was to assimilate the Jews, who took advantage of new possibilities for social and economic advance while steadfastly refusing to abandon their identity.