PART I. POLAND AS A PLACE OF REFUGE FOR JEWS
Polish Princes' offer of protection from persectution
Social structure and self-administration of the Jews
Jews as intermediaries between town and country
Golden age for the Jews in Poland?
PART II. EAST EUROPEAN JEWRY AS A 'CULTURAL PATTERN OF LIFE' IN EASTERN EUROPE
Consequences of the catastrophe
Messiah in Poland: Shabtai Tsevi and Jacob Frank
Popular piety of Hasidism
Contacts between Jews and non-Jews: Jewish peddlers and innkeepers
Jews in the partitions of Poland
Reaction of the Jews to the new political, intellectual, and religious conditions
Tsarist empire and the Jews
East European Jews outside Tsarist rule
PART III. THE CRISIS OF THE JEWS IN EASTERN EUROPE A NEW IDENTITY
Transformation of the traditional intermediary function
'Expulsion' and 'restructuring'
Transformation of the occupational structure and new intermediary activities
Competition to oust rivals from the market and anti-Semitism
Haskala: the Jewish enlightenment
Assimilation and acculturation
'Necktied' and 'kaftaned' Jews
By way of an example: Jews in Warsaw and Łódź
Men and women in Jewish society
Everyday religious customs
Synagogue and community organizations
Increasing conflicts with the non-Jewish world
Socialism, Zionism, new Jewish identity
Immigration as an attempt to find a new homeland
Center of East European Jewry: Galicia and Bukovina
Positive model with contradictions: Hungary
Different attitudes to the emancipation of the Jews in Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria
'Ritual murder': the case of Bohemia and Moravia
PART IV. ATTEMPTED ANNIHILATION AND NEW HOPE
Jews in the Russian Revolution and in the Soviet Union
East European Jewish nationality and new waves of anti-Semitism: the Jews in Poland between the two world wars
Precarious situation in individual East European countries
Attempted extermination of the Jews
Jews in postwar Poland: new suffering and new hope
AFTERWORD: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MEMORY
