The publication of Jewish Themes in English and Polish Culture is the result of a four-year scholarly co-operation between the Department of English Literature and Culture and the Department of Studies in English Drama and Poetry at the University of Łódź and the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. In the course of the project, Polish scholars visited the University of York and read papers there, and their British colleagues lectured in Łódź. The resulting volume contains ten articles: six written by Polish scholars and four by British scholars. The articles are remarkably varied in scope; they deal with fiction, poetry, and drama, and explore literary themes from such diverse periods as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century. One paper transcends the literary domain and discusses how a handful of well-known motifs from literature were reworked in painting.

The volume opens with Jacques Berthoud's article, entitled ‘The Figure of the Jews in English Renaissance Drama’. The author discusses Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, and seven lesser-known plays written between 1584 and 1627. He notes the absence of fully developed portraits of Jewish characters, which he sees as a consequence of the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. However, as Berthoud asserts, The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice were excellent compensation for this thematic void: the two plays ‘are alone able, in the enormous output of English, French, Italian, and Spanish Renaissance drama, to do justice not to Jewish life as such, but to its meaning as a constituent but resistant presence at the centre of Christian society’ (p. 33). The Merchant of Venice is also discussed by Andrzej Wicher, who offers a comparative analysis of models of prejudice in Shakespeare's play and Chaucer's ‘The Prioress's Tale’. Wicher's point of departure is the incorporation of Jewish stereotypes into the folk-tale tradition. This tradition abounded in all sorts of malevolent creatures that schemed against man, and Jewish characters came to substitute for those creatures.