WHEN READING CONTEMPORARY scholarship on Jewish cultural history, it often seems to me that it has developed two ‘meta - solutions’ that are applied to virtually any question. These are ‘influence’ and ‘pluralism’. That is, if the question is why Jewish family life is organized in a particular configuration, or why Jews eat specific foods, or how certain institutions of communal governance evolved, or what is the basis for Jewish prayer rituals, or any of a multitude of issues, the answer almost invariably relates to the influence of the surrounding culture, the existence of competing and co-operating Judaisms, or both.

Later in this chapter I will examine some problems posed by the Jewish pluralism paradigm. With regard to the metasolution of influence, there is a firm article of faith shared by practically all of today's Judaica scholars that, in all times and places, pre-modern or ‘traditional’ Jews lived in intimate interaction with surrounding cultures to the point where they may be considered to be embedded in them and, consequently, indebted to them in terms of culture. This contrasts with an older conception of Jewish culture which represented Jews as living in at least semi-isolation from the non-Jewish world, animating their lives with an original, autonomous and authentically Jewish culture that functioned according to its own dynamic. In the following sections my first objective is to demonstrate, by using the example of Polish Jewish cultural history, that there are more than these two possible approaches to the history of Jewish culture, and that these two themselves should be understood in a more sophisticated way. I will assert that the first approach (universal cultural influence, in its incarnation as hybridity theory), when applied mechanically, unimaginatively, and uncritically can be as ideological, dogmatic, and inappropriate as the second (Jewish cultural autonomy) often has been. Next I will contemplate the metahistories implied by the various approaches to Jewish cultural history and their relationship to intellectual presuppositions for engaging in Jewish studies in the academy.

Conceptions of Polish Jewish Culture

There have been four distinct historiographical approaches to writing the Jewish cultural history of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the early modern period.