The Jews in Poland and Russia (published in three volumes, Oxford, 2010, 2012) represents the fruit of twenty-five years of study, research, and reflection. It incorporates a large amount of material that has become newly available during that time. It also includes extensive treatment of Jewish literary activity in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and German, with quotations from works that might otherwise have remained largely unknown and which illustrate how individuals reacted to the enormous and often traumatic changes that Jewish society was undergoing. Because of the highly controversial matters it dealt with I felt that it was necessary to justify and document my views fully.

The three volumes that have already been published will remain the full treatment of my understanding of the issues raised by the long history of the Jews in Poland and Russia. At the same time I realize that the scope of this work inevitably limits its audience. In this one-volume edition I have attempted to produce a summary which I hope will reach a wider readership and encourage students to devote their attention to east European Jewish history. To increase its accessibility I have limited the amount of annotation, changed the footnotes to endnotes, and included a glossary of unfamiliar terms. I hope in this way to bring to a wider public the complex nature of the Jewish accommodation to the modern world as it took place in eastern Europe, the way in which relations between the Jews and their neighbours developed over the last two centuries, and the tragic fate of the Jews in the ‘short twentieth century’.