Gershon David Hundert is Professor of Jewish Studies and History at McGill University. He is the author of The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatow in the Eighteenth Century (1992), the coauthor of The Jews in Poland and Russia: Bibliographical Essays (1984), and the editor of Jews in Early Modern Poland (1997) and Essential Papers on Hasidism: Origins to Present (1991).

"Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century provides a wide-ranging synthesis of the current scholarship on Polish-Lithuanian Jewry. Gershon David Hundert's control of the secondary literature is magnificent: he incorporates the findings of over a century of research up to and including the most recent works in every relevant language. Only a handful of scholars in the world today could approach this level of mastery." - Benjamin Nathans, author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia "Gershon David Hundert's Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century is likely to be viewed as the standard scholarly survey of the topic of 'classic' Polish Jewry for years to come." - Moshe Rosman, author of Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov"

• List of Maps List of Tables Preface A Note on Place-Names and Transliteration List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. The Largest Jewish Community in the World 2. Economic Integration 3. The Polish Church and Jews, Polish Jews and the Church 4. The Community 5. Was There a Communal "Crisis" in the Eighteenth Century? 6. The Popularization of Kabbalah 7. Mystic Ascetics and Religious Radicals 8. The Contexts of Hasidism 9. Hasidism, a New Path 10. Jews and the Sejm Afterword Select Bibliography Acknowledgments Index