Popis: |
Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis is an impressive collection of twenty five scholarly essays devoted to Warsaw and its Jewish community, from the earliest (mostly illegal) Jewish settlements in the Polish capital in the sixteenth century to the destruction and reconstruction of the Jewish community in the twentieth century. The book is divided into two parts: Part I ("The Rise of the Metropolis") discusses over four centuries of Jewish history in Warsaw prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Part II ("Destruction of the Metropolis and Its Aftermath") presents new approaches to the tragic events of the post-1939 era. As the editors argue in the introduction to the volume, Warsaw's status of 'the first true metropolis in diasporic Jewish history' was not only about the numbers of Jews living there, but also about the diversity of the Jewish community (p. 2). This element became one of the recurring themes in almost all essays discussing the pre-war period. |