Publication of this work is cause for celebration in the scholarly community because a great wealth of rich and hitherto unknown primary source material is now available to students of the history of the Jews in early modern Poland-Lithuania. The original texts of sixty-three privileges granted to Jewish communities in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries are published here on the basis of manuscript sources, most of them for the first time. Each privilege is presented in its original language, carefully edited, and introduced with a brief summary in English of its contents. Twenty-four of the privileges concern private towns and were issued by the hereditary owners, while thirty-nine privileges concern royal cities and are signed by the monarch or by royal officials. The geographical distribution of the towns represented in the collection is also quite balanced as reflected in the excellent map included in the volume. There are privileges for sixteen communities in Little Poland, nineteen in Great Poland, nineteen in Ruthenia and Ukraine, along with three in Lithuania, five in Podlachia and one in Mazovia. The volume includes three indices: of persons, each briefly identified; of place names, each briefly located; and of subjects. The latter index, which is extremely detailed, refers only to the texts of the privileges and thus the entries are in Polish, Latin and German. There is a brief Hebrew Preface and an extensive Introduction in English.

Professor Goldberg stresses that the community privileges were both more extensive in scope and more important politically than the general charters of Polish Jewry. The growing decentralization of power in the period of the Polish Commonwealth meant that Jews in royal towns were ‘increasingly subject to the authority of the starostas, while the Jews in the privately owned towns were under the even broader authority of the hereditary rulers'. Jewish communities, beginning in the sixteenth century, began to see the need for a local privilege as ‘self-evident’, even if the text merely repeated the contents of the general charters. More often, however, the privileges reflect local conditions and are thus the more valuable as source material. There are, though, some elements which are common to virtually all of the privileges. These have to do mainly with the universal acceptance of Jewish juridical autonomy.