To launch a new annual into a world which seems over-saturated with academic journals would seem a foolhardy and even superfluous undertaking. Yet we believe that Polin is a unique venture and we are convinced that it has a weighty task to fulfil. Polish Jewry was one of the largest and most important Jewish communities in the world. By the late seventeenth century, nearly three-quarters of the world's Jews lived within the borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Polish Jewry provided the basis for the religious tradition of much of the Jewish world, and the territories of the former Polish states were also the source for those movements - Zionism, Socialism, as well as Orthodox ones - which were to transform the Jewish world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As late as 1939, Poland still contained the second-largest Jewish community in the world, while the largest, that in the United States, derived to a considerable extent from the Polish lands. It was the great Jewish historian Salo Baron who described American Jewry as ‘a bridge built by Polish Jews'.

Today, when organized Jewish life barely survives on Polish soil, it is vital for Jews to preserve the memory of a world from which so many of us are descended and from which we derive so many of the vital springs of our being. Among Poles, too, there is a new willingness to investigate the past of a people who for ten centuries lived in close proximity to them and whose history constituted an integral part of the development of the Polish lands. The founder of Hasidism, Israel Baal Shem Tov, observed that, ‘forgetting leads to exile, remembering is the path to salvation.’ Our aim is to preserve and enlarge our collective memory, to investigate all aspects of our common past. We believe that there should be no taboo subjects and no topics which are too sensitive to be discussed. Our columns are open to all those of good will. We ask only that they write honestly and with respect for historical facts. We do not believe in a definitive historical truth, still less a Jewish or a Polish historical truth. In these pages, we meet, as in life, not as representatives of groups or ideological camps, but as individuals.