This sumptuous volume, the first in a two-part series, is devoted to depictions of Jews by Polish artists, both Christian and Jewish, as well as by several non-Polish artists who worked in Poland. Its splendid reproductions range from the Middle Ages to the present, although most of the works are from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book has four principal sections. The two larger sections portray the religious dimension of Polish Jewry (Jews at prayer, images of synagogues) and the role of Jews in Polish life (including images of Jews in various economic roles, Jews participating in the struggle for Polish independence, and portraits of Jewish artists and intellectuals). The other two sections contain anti-Semitic images (including a horrifying eighteenth-century depiction on page 106 of Jews torturing a Christian child for ritual purposes) and depictions of the Holocaust.

Some of the material presented by Rostworowski can be found in the pioneering work of Halina Nelken, Images of a Lost World: Jewish Motifs in Polish Painting (London, 1991)—both Nelken's book and the one under review derive from ex - hibitions first held in Poland. But Żydzi w Polsce is a more ambitious and more in clusive study. It clearly belongs to a popular contemporary genre, the rep - resenta tion of the ‘other’, much as images of Arabs were popular in nineteenthcentury France (for example, numerous works by Delacroix), and American blacks are now equally popular among art historians, as evidenced in the remarkable book by Peter H. Wood and Karen C. C. Dalton, Winslow Homer's Images of Blacks (Austin, Tex., 1988). There is another, more specific context for this book: it is the investigation of Polish–Jewish relations via the medium of the arts. Works in this category include Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal's book Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (see review), on the image of the Jew in Polish literature and of the Pole in Jewish literature; and Alina Cała's Wizerunek Żyda w polskiej kulturze ludowej (Warsaw, 1992; English version: The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture (Jerusalem, 1995)), on the image of the Jew in Polish popular culture.