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SHORT NOTES

Marcin Wodziński, Władze Królestwa Polskiego wobec chasy-dyzmu. Z dziejów stosunków politycznych [The Attitude of the Authorities of the Congress Kingdom of Poland to Hasidism: A History of Political Relations], Wrocław 2008, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 283 pp., bibl., index, sum. in English

On the basis of archivcs in Poland, Vicnna and Jerusalem, as well as diaries and various published materials, the author presents the relations between the authorities of the Kingdom of Poland (established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815) and the Jewish population in the country in 1815-30. He is interested in the functioning of Jewish communes and the scope of their competence in questions referring to religious cult and politics, as well as in the debate on the modernization of Polish Jewry, as a contribution to a debate which had been going on sińce the middle of the 18th century.

Wodziński records the activities of three main forces: the authorities of Congress Poland, the conservative Hasidic movement, and the Jewish enlightenment movement, which turned out to be the weakest factor in everyday practice and in intellectual debates. The confrontation between Jews and the bureaucratic government led to the victory of the Hasidic movement, which became the dominant factor in Jewish life in Polish territories (not only in Congress Poland) in the remaining years of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th. The book is a specific treatise showing how a movement fighting for democratization (the Haskalah) suffered a crushing defeat in its struggle against an undemo-cratic State, while benefits were derived by a formation which declared itself to be a religious, anti-modern movement and kept referring to sacred things in politics. (MA'/)

Jan Wnęk, Krakowskie środowisko historyczne 1815-1860 [The Cracow Historians’ Milieu 1815-1860], Kraków 2008, Oficyna Wydawnicza Impuls, 316 pp.

The author deals with a period which is relatively little known in the history of Cracow and its university, the oldest educational institution of this type in Poland. The time-frame he has chosen includes two completely different stages in the city’s history: the period of the independent Republic of Cracow established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and abolished after the fali of Cracow Uprising of 1846, and the first fifteen years after the city’s incorporation into Polish Galicia. Whereas in the first period the city and its university were the most important enclave of a practically unhampered Polishness and one of the main intellectual centrcs of divided Poland, the years after 1846 witncssed a marginalization of the city and the germanization of its structures. This trend was brought to an end by the reforms introduced in the Habsburg monarchy in the 1860s and at the beginning of the 1870s.

Wnęk says that in 1815-60, 26 historians worked in Cracow or were closely linked to the city. Among them were professional researchers as well as amateurs,