This brilliant work by Jerzy Topolski, an internationally renowned Polish historian and historical methodologist, is the second volume in the great series entitled The History of the Polish Nation, State and Culture currently being produced by a team of historians at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. This book analyses the causal processes at work in the history of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Topolski treats Polish history in an integral manner, taking account of the complex issues affecting all the national groups living in what was formerly Commonwealth territory. As an outstanding scholar, he is well aware that a synthetic approach to the history of Poland in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, incorporating the guide-lines for research methodology that he himself has advocated as well as the very wide range of conclusions arrived at in this book, requires inclusion of all national groups. The author treats the history of Polish Jews as an integral part of Polish history, presenting their circumstances as a part of the social, economic, and political changes occurring in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. He deals with all of the basic aspects of the history of Polish Jews during the period, including demography, professional structure, and the attitudes towards the Jewish community of Polish society and the various ethnic groups living in the Commonwealth, as well as such issues as local Polish Jewish self-government (kehila) and central self-government (the Council of Four Lands), culture, language, and hasidism. Indeed Topolski devotes much more space to the Jews than to the remaining national groups and in no other published synthetic account of Polish history have issues connected with the Jewish community been given so much attention.

Topolski underlines the significance of the fact that the largest Jewish com - munity in the world at that time was to be found in Poland. He bases his population statistics on available estimates and concludes that as a proportion of the population the Jewish community rose from 0.6 per cent in 1576 to 4.5 or even 5 per cent in 1648.