There is a misleading dryness in the title Gershon David Hundert chose for his study of Opatów's Jews in the eighteenth century. The title hints at a narrow, highly specialized study in local economic history. So do the seventeen tables listing taxes, incomes, debts, and other economic indicators. Some books do not live up to what their titles promise. Hundert's title does little to prepare the reader for the broadness of the study's intellectual horizons and Braudelian richness of the social landscape it reconstructs.

Indeed, the significance of this ‘case study’ goes far beyond the unpaved Jewish street of Opatów and the town's market-place. Unique in some respects, the Jewish community of Opatów represented a variation of a pattern typical of Polish Jewish history of the early modern period. In the eighteenth century more than half of the world's Jews lived in PolandLithuania. Most of the Jews in that Commonwealth lived in nobility-owned ‘private’ holdings like Opatów, making up at least half of the total urban population. Put in a broad perspective of Gentile-Jewish interaction, Hundert's complex and multi-dimensional reconstruction of Jewish life in Apt (as Opatów was called in Yiddish) greatly enhances our understanding of this historical pattern.

At the heart of the study are economic and power-relations between Jews and their landlords. Rejecting the view that their relationship was based on the nobleman's whim and caprice, Hundert sees it as a rational expression of a long-term economic strategy. Seeking to promote the economic well-being of the town as well as to increase his income, the landlord defended Jewish interests. Although hardly an alliance between equal partners, this commonalty of interest usually prevailed over religious prejudice. It also determined other power-relations: between the town's Jewish and Christian burghers, between Jews and the clergy, and within the Jewish community. While some magnates sought to strengthen Jewish communal institutions as a means of maximizing their revenues, the very duality of power undermined the effectiveness of such efforts. Characteristically, the town's owners, first the Sanguszkos and later the Lubomirskis, were not particularly successful in their efforts to reduce the flood of appeals to their courts from the rulings of the Jewish courts.