It is self-evident that the course of the Besht's life was affected by the geopolitical and sociocultural-economic milieu in which he lived. Yet the Ba'al Shem Tov has often been portrayed in popular works with only superficial attention to his surroundings, as if his life transcended time and space. The interest in connecting his activities and teachings to later history has frequently obscured the relationship of the Besht to the place and period in which he actually lived. In more historically oriented scholarly writing there were attempts to relate the patterns of his life to conditions in Poland and its Jewish community in a general way. A clearer perception of the country and the region within it where the Besht lived can help to establish the parameters of his existence and contribute to an understanding of the range and nature of his activities.

THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN COMMONWEALTH

The Besht lived his entire life (1700-1760) during the period when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as Poland was then called, and the Duchy of Saxony were united in the person of common rulers, the two Wettin kings, August II (1697-1731) and August III (1733- 1763). The fact that Polish kingship was acquired by the ruler of a foreign country is emblematic of the general limitations of Poland's polity in determining its own fate through the eighteenth century.

Poland had entered the seventeenth century as a contender for the position of dominant power in northern Europe. Since the time of Casimir the Great (1333-1370), the Commonwealth had been expanding its borders in all directions. In 1610, a Polish army stood at the gates of the Kremlin, poised to conquer Muscovy, Poland's political institutions were evolving democratic forms, with a parliament (Sejm) and king elected— after a fashion—by the nobility, which numbered approximately 10 percent of the population. It was both relatively and absolutely the largest electorate in Europe at the time. The agrarian economy was booming as the international grain trade turned Poland into the breadbasket of western Europe.

This vast state of some ten million inhabitants in 1648 comprised— in addition to its 40 percent ethnic Poles—Ukrainians (Ruthenians), White Russians, Lithuanians, Letts, Estonians, Germans, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Scots, and Jews. Its non-Roman Catholic religions included several varieties of Protestantism, Eastern (“Greek”) and Armenian Orthodoxy, Ukrainian Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism.