Theater of History
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Scale model, On the Jewish Street gallery, prepared by Arnaud Dechelle, EventCommunications, 2010
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was created from the inside out. Before there was a museum, before there was a building, before there was a collection, there was a plan for the exhibition. The story - the thousand-year history of Polish Jews - came first. All else followed. The museum and the story it tells in the Core Exhibition will be an agent of transformation. Polish visitors will encounter a history of Poland that is not a national history, not a history of the nation, as Dariusz Stola, POLIN Museum's director from 2014 to 2019, has observed. Jewish visitors will discover a history of what was once the largest Jewish community in the world and a center of the Jewish world - an estimated 70 percent of Jews today, more than 10 million people, are thought to descend from this territory. All visitors will encounter a Poland about which little is known and much misunderstood, a place that was one of the most diverse and tolerant in early modern Europe, a place where a Jewish minority was able to create a distinctive civilization while being part of the larger society.
As a result of the Holocaust, 90 percent of the 3.3 million Jews living in Poland before 1939 was murdered, and the world they created in Poland was destroyed with them. Those who survived, whether in hiding, concentration camps, or the Soviet Union, returned to a Poland that lay in ruins. What had been the largest Jewish community in the world was now one of the smallest, and a country that had been one of the most diverse, was now one of the most homogeneous. The hundreds of thousands of tombstones in more than one thousand Jewish cemeteries, the many empty synagogues and other Jewish communal property testified not only to Jewish absence but also to a vibrant Jewish presence that had been a defining feature of Poland itself. That history - a thousand years of continuous Jewish presence in this part of the world - faded from view, largely overshadowed, understandably, by the Holocaust.
All the more reason that it was important to bring the history of Polish Jews, all thousand years of it, to life in Poland, the place where the story took place. In 1994, the City of Warsaw designated the location for the future museum - it would face the Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes - in Muranów, Warsaw's prewar Jewish neighborhood and the heart of the Warsaw ghetto. Until POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews opened its doors to the public in 2013, one honored in Warsaw those who perished by remembering how they died - at the monument. Today, we can honor them, and those who came before and after, by remembering how they lived - at the museum.
While the chasm created by the Holocaust can never be repaired, the exhibition and the programs it inspires can build bridges across the rupture. Those bridges could reconnect Jews abroad to their own histories in Europe. They could reconnect people living in Poland today to the Jewish past of their own towns and cities - and to the descendants of the Jews who once lived there.
Beginnings
In 1993, Grażyna Pawlak, development director of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland at the time, visited the newly opened United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Encouraged by Jeshajahu Weinberg, director of that museum and person responsible for its permanent exhibition, she envisioned an exhibition and then a "museum of life" that would present the thousand-year history of Polish Jews. If there was a Holocaust museum in Washington, there should be a museum of the history of Polish Jews in Warsaw. The last thing Poland needed was a Holocaust museum - the whole country was already a Holocaust museum. As the epicenter of the genocide, Poland's landscape has been forever scarred by the machinery of death, first and foremost the death camps created by the Germans in this place.
The Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland inaugurated the museum project in 1994. It was not until 2005 that the agreement to establish the museum was signed by the Association, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and the City of Warsaw. They formed a unique public-private partnership for a cultural enterprise in Poland. According to the agreement, the public partners were to pay for the building and oversee its construction, while the private partner, the association, would produce the exhibition and raise the money for it - this too was unprecedented in Poland.
In the intervening years, plans for the exhibition moved forward under the inspired leadership of Jerzy Halbersztadt, who directed the project from 1996 and who was director of the museum from 2005 until 2011. Event Communications, a design firm in London specializing in multimedia narrative exhibitions, worked with a team of historians in Poland between 2000 and 2004 on a master plan for the exhibition. They based the master plan on the Outline of the Historical Program and the vast database of objects, images, and documents that the Polish team had developed specifically for the exhibition. Event's lead designers were Steve Simons and Steve Lumby, later joined by Arnaud Dechelle. Kathy Jones was Event's head of interpretation. The master plan for the exhibition was given to the architects who participated in the competition for the building.
The architectural competition for the museum's building, which was held in 2005, was the first successful international competition for a public building in Poland. The winner, Rainer Mahlamäki, delivered a building that effectively accommodates the core exhibition and communicates the mission of the museum. POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is one of the largest museums dedicated to Jewish history in Europe - its interior is 16,000 square meters, with about 12,000 square meters of usable space, of which 4,217 square meters are dedicated to the core exhibition.
The minimalist exterior, its geometric form clad with glass panels on which is written the word Polin in Hebrew and Latin letters, echoes the shape of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes and stands in a respectful relationship to it. The architectural drama is on the inside. Organic forms undulate from the lowest to the highest reaches of the building, and light streams through the massive glass windows. The result is a house of light, reflection, transparency, and openness, with vistas right through the building to the monument at one end and the memorial park at the other. With its soaring volumes and warm sandy surface, the interior is ruptured - there is a chasm across which there is a bridge, a fitting metaphor for the history of Polish Jews, whose history was fractured by the Holocaust. The bridge serves also as a metaphor for the museum, whose mission is to create bridges across time, continents, and people. To set a glass building on a site of genocide is a strong statement; indeed, it is an expression of hope in the face of tragedy.
Once the museum was founded and the architect selected, it was possible to move from the exhibition's master plan to the next stage. Halbersztadt intended from the outset that the academic team responsible for shaping the exhibition's content would be international and multidisciplinary. In 2006, he invited me to lead the development of the Core Exhibition. Together, we created an academic team of scholars from Poland, Israel, and the United States whose fields included history, sociology, social psychology, literature, and anthropology, among others. A curatorial team of art historians and other scholars supported them. This team worked on the exhibition from beginning to end. The intellectual coherence of the result is to their credit. In 2011, when the time came to produce the exhibition, responsibility shifted from Event Communications to Nizio Design International, directed by Mirosław Nizio, with creative director for the project, Piotr Antonów.
Floor plan of the exhibition, 2012
1. Forest
2. First Encounters, 960-15003. Paradisus Iudaeorum, 1569-1648
4. The Jewish Town, 1648-1772
5. Encounters with Modernity, 1772-1914
6. On the Jewish Street, 1918-1939
7. Holocaust, 1939-1944
8. Postwar Years, 1944-to the present
Journey of a Thousand Years
The Core Exhibition is divided into seven historical periods beginning in the tenth century, coming forward to the present, and opening out to the future. As originally planned, the exhibition begins with a poetic forest. Visitors descend a grand staircase and enter the "Forest," space of historical imagination, of time before time, inspired by legends that Jews told themselves about how they came to Poland and why they stayed. According to legend, Jews fleeing persecution in German lands came east. A slip of paper, according to one version, pointed to "Polaniya," a Hebrew name for Poland, which they interpreted as meaning "Here God dwells." They arrived in a forest where they heard the word "Polin," another Hebrew name for Poland, which they interpreted as "po-lin," "Rest here." In some versions, a cloud broke, an angel's hand pointed the way, and they heard a voice say "po-lin." According to the version retold by Nobel Prize laureate S. Y. Agnon, Jews entering the forest discovered tractates of the Talmud carved on the trees; in other versions pages of the sacred texts floated down. According to this legend, it was divinely ordained that Jews should come to Poland and stay here until Elijah announced the coming of the Messiah and led them to the Promised Land.
As visitors step into the medieval gallery, "First Encounters," they cross the threshold between legend and history. The earliest mention of Poland appears in the travel account of Ibrahim ibn Yakub, a Jew from Cordoba sent by the Caliph as part of a diplomatic mission across Europe in the tenth century. The privilege confirmed by Bolesław the Pious in 1264, also known as the Statute of Kalisz, established the fundamental conditions for Jewish settlement - religious freedom, communal autonomy, protection from harm, and the right to engage in certain occupations, even granting some of them a role in the minting of coins. One of the most precious objects in the entire exhibition is just such a coin, a one-sided bracteate, with Hebrew letters. Many of the towns established in Poland according to German town law, most famously on the model of Magdeburg, made a place for their Jewish residents - a "Jewish street" and locations for a synagogue and cemetery. The template for Jewish life was established in this period and lasted for centuries.
By around 1500, Jews were living in more than one hundred places with Jewish communities in more than half of them. Estimates of the Jewish population at the end of the period vary from a low of 5,000 to a high of 30,000. They brought with them their Ashkenazi culture, whose center was in the Rhineland. By the end of the medieval period, the center of the Ashkenazi world had begun to shift from German lands to Poland. How did this happen? This is the story told in the medieval gallery, which encompasses the first six centuries of our story, more than half of the thousand-year history of Polish Jews.
The gallery that follows, "Paradisus Iudaeorum," is set in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Established in 1569, the Commonwealth became the largest, most diverse, and most tolerant country in Europe - it encompassed not only today's Poland and Lithuania, but also Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, and parts of Estonia, Slovakia, Moldova and Russia. What made this age "golden" for Jews were the rise of rabbinical authority and learning and the high degree of Jewish communal autonomy. Jews also played a vital role in the agricultural economy of the Commonwealth, especially as managers of assets on noble estates.
The Commonwealth became home to the largest Jewish community in the world and a center of the Jewish world. By 1765, according to the poll tax census and other sources, Jews were living in more than 1,100 locations, and the Jewish population had expanded to an estimated 750,000 - half the Jewish population in the world was living in this territory. But was this country the "Paradisus Iudaeorum" that critics of the Commonwealth claimed? Did Jews have it "too good," as one of many complaints about the social order claimed? A "Wall of Words" stages the debates around this question. Through quotations - in their original language, in Polish and English translation, and in fonts from the period - visitors can experience firsthand the many voices in the story. This principle animates the entire exhibition.
Visitors next pass through a dramatic "corridor of fire," which is dedicated to the Khmelnytsky uprising in 1648-1649, during which Cossacks massacred Polish nobility, Catholic clergy and Jews, holding them responsible for the misery of the peasants. A period of recovery concluded a century marked by war.
Scale model, Postwar Years gallery, prepared by Arnaud Dechelle, Event Communications, 2009
Visitors then enter the "Jewish Town," a gallery whose setting is inspired by the small private towns where Jews formed a large percentage of the population and created a distinctive way of life during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The two centers of this gallery are the marketplace, set against large projections of the Commonwealth's rural landscape, and the synagogue. A truly unique feature of this gallery - indeed, of the exhibition as a whole - is the 85-percent scale reconstruction of the exquisite painted ceiling and timber-framed roof of the synagogue that once stood in Gwoździec, near Lviv. It was specially created for this exhibition with Handshouse Studio using traditional tools, materials, and techniques, as was the bimah, the platform for the reader's desk. Around the synagogue are presentations of new spiritual trends and their religious leaders, who arose in response to crises of religious and communal leadership - Hasidism and the Ba'al Shem Tov, modern Torah study and the Vilna Gaon, and the Jewish Enlightenment, represented here by Mendel Lefin.
With the partitioning of the Commonwealth by the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian and Russian Empires, which began in 1772 and ended in 1795, the story of Jewish "Encounters with Modernity" begins. A presentation of the Jewish wedding explores how efforts to transform Jewish life affected ordinary people in their everyday lives. Organized responses to the challenges of modernity are presented in displays dedicated to the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), the modern yeshiva, and Hasidism, which expanded rapidly in this period thanks to its wide appeal and the charisma of its leaders. A multimedia railway station, the setting for presenting the onset of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and migration, is followed by displays dedicated to the role of such textile magnates as Israel Poznański, whose meteoric rise in Łódź stands in stark contrast to the desperate situation of Jewish workers in nearby Bałuty. A presentation of the small but important group of Jews who identified themselves as "Poles of the Mosaic faith" introduces visitors to those who believed in the promise of integration. Pogroms in the 1880s and the rise of modern forms of antisemitism, shown in a dramatic multimedia presentation, came as a shock. Many Jews emigrated, mostly for economic reasons. Others were caught up in new Jewish social and political movements, among them Zionism and the Bund, the Jewish labor movement. Modern Yiddish and Hebrew culture reached ever wider audiences through the mass press.
With the collapse of the Russian and Austrian empires during the First World War and the creation of the Second Polish Republic in its aftermath, there began what some historians consider a second "golden age," despite economic hardship and rising antisemitism. Visitors will enter a multimedia interwar years street. Behind the street façades at street level, visitors can explore political and cultural life. On the upper level of this gallery, visitors can embark on a journey around Poland, from Gdynia to Drohobycz, as if with map and guidebook in hand, to explore daily life in 13 localities, large and small. The second part of the upper level is dedicated to the experience of growing up and the creation of a new generation unique to the Second Polish Republic. Returning to the street level, visitors learn of events during the late 1930s outside of Poland, as well as about rising antisemitism in Poland, especially after the death of Jósef Piłsudski in 1935.
Turning the corner at the end of the street, visitors see how civilians experienced the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and the Soviet invasion 17 days later. The story of the Holocaust unfolds within the borders of occupied Poland and from the perspective of those living in Poland. Diaries and documents preserved in the secret archive created by Emanuel Ringelblum and his team provide a unique perspective on the Warsaw ghetto, a story told in the voices of those who recorded their experiences in real time on the spot. A space outside the ghetto, the so-called Aryan street, presents the harsh reality of German terror against Poles, how the Polish Underground State resisted the occupation, and how ordinary Poles responded to the Jewish fate, on a spectrum from help to indifference and even betrayal. The German invasion of Soviet-occupied Poland marks the onset of mass murder, first by death squads and then in death camps, all of which were built by the Germans on Polish soil.
By the war's end, 90 percent of Poland's Jews had perished. Of the almost 3.3 million Jews living in Poland in 1939, about 300,000 survived, most of them in the Soviet Union. But this is not the end of the story. The main question for those who survived and were in Poland after the war was whether to stay or to leave. The two options confront each other on opposing walls that line the "Postwar Years" gallery. Most Jews in Poland eventually left. Visitors will follow the various waves of emigration, legal and illegal but tolerated, from the very beginning of the postwar period. However, the biggest surprise for many visitors may well be the story of those who stayed, not only those who identified themselves as Jews, but also those who did not, during the 70 years of Poland's tumultuous postwar history. As visitors enter the last moment in the narration, which is not the end of the story, they find themselves in the breathtaking space of the building itself. It is filled with natural light and soars from the gallery floor to the building's roof. They will hear Jews living in Poland today respond to key questions. Did you always know you were Jewish? Is there a future for Jews in Poland today? What does Israel mean to you? Is there antisemitism in Poland today? Who can make Jewish culture? The story is still not over, neither in Poland, nor in all the places in the world where Polish Jews live today. There is a renewal of Jewish life in Poland, though small in scale, and there is enormous Jewish presence in Polish consciousness, as seen in festivals of Jewish culture, Christian-Jewish dialogue, films and books on Jewish subjects, Jewish studies, and artistic projects - and not least POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is itself part of the post-1989 story.
There are millions of Jews across the globe whose families once lived in the historical territory of Poland. Where did they go and what did they take with them? The geography of the history of Polish Jews expands and reconnects those who left with those living in Poland today. While the exhibition must come to an end, the story continues, a message that all visitors will take with them.
Telling the Story
How did the exhibition as realized today evolve from the master plan? From the outset, the Core Exhibition was to be a multimedia narrative exhibition that would start from the story, rather than from a collection of objects. Though objects play an important role, the exhibition was not to be limited to what could be shown through objects alone. Rather, the exhibition would be a theater of history. It would draw visitors into the world of Polish Jews. Event Communications had delivered a blueprint for the exhibition that proved both workable and inspiring. That said, the academic team introduced fundamental changes, consistent with a set of principles that would define the historical narrative and way to tell the story.
The original master plan organized the exhibition along four lines. First, a Polish and European historical timeline would run throughout the exhibition as "context." Second, "schisms," or "turning points," would break the continuity of history into periods, a gallery for each. Third, chronothematic displays would feature selected aspects of the story in a given period. Fourth, "Jewish culture galleries" would offer transhistorical presentations on such topics as antisemitism, Judaism, the Jewish life cycle and religious holidays, Hasidism, and Yiddish language and culture. When beginning work in April 2006, the academic team looked long and hard at this concept and modified it according to a set of "metahistorical principles," in Moshe Rosman's words, that is, concepts that would underpin the story and the way we would tell it.
The first principle in our historical approach is that the most important period in the history of Polish Jews is one thousand years - a millennium of continuous Jewish presence on Polish soil. This is not the story of Jews in Spain, England, France, Germany, or Austria, among other countries in Europe. The message of a thousand years without interruption is especially important not only because this long history has been so overshadowed by the Holocaust, but also because of the place of this cataclysmic event in the exhibition's historical narrative. The story neither begins nor ends with the Holocaust, nor does it drive inexorably to that end. We are often asked, "Which is the most important period?" This is a rhetorical question because the person who asks usually has an answer in mind. For some it is the Holocaust. For others it is the postwar years, the period in most recent memory through which they themselves lived, or the interwar years. Some insist that the entire exhibition, or most of it, should focus only on the modern period. No one cites the almost six hundred years of the medieval period, which will surely surprise and intrigue visitors. Our answer is always the same: the most important period is the one thousand years.
General Diagram, drawn by Steve Lumby for the Exhibition Masterplan Document for the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, prepared by Event Communications, circa 2003
The division into periods and galleries differs from the master plan in several ways. We reduced the number of periods from nine to eight by treating the long nineteenth century, from 1772 to the First World War, as one gallery, rather than dividing the period into two galleries. We also decided against schisms and turning points as an organizing principle. While useful in establishing clear breaks in a long story, schisms and turning points are artificial when considering historical processes that extend over long periods of time. We also wanted to move the story of Polish Jews who emigrated from the "Postwar Years" gallery into a space of its own, a circulation area that leads into and out of the various galleries.
The second principle follows from the idea that the history of Polish Jews is an integral part of the history of Poland, and that the history of Poland is not complete without a history of Polish Jews. We therefore decided not to treat the Polish and European historical timeline as a "context" for a separate Jewish story and chose instead to construct an integral rather than contextual history of Polish Jews. Jews would not be a footnote to Polish history.
A third principle is to treat the history of Polish Jews as a relational history. This is not the same as a history of Polish-Jewish relations, which is generally treated as a history of antisemitism. A relational history starts from a different premise, namely, that Polish Jews were not only in Poland, but also of Poland. They were subjects and agents of history, and not only objects onto which others projected their fantasies and fears. The result is a history "in common," a story of coexistence, competition, conflict, and cooperation, which is not the same as a "common history." Indeed, multiple perspectives on "events" (are they the same events if experienced so differently?) become central to the historical narration. In sum, the exhibition presents a broad spectrum of relations, from the best to the worst.
A fourth principle arises from the interplay of separation and integration that made possible the creation of a civilization that was "categorically Jewish, distinctly Polish," in the words of Moshe Rosman. It is here, in the sixteenth century, that Rabbi Moses Isserles, known by his Hebrew acronym as the Remu, wrote notes to Yosef Karo's concise code of Jewish law, the Shulhan Arukh. Karo's code was based on Sephardi custom. The Remu's notes reflected Ashkenazi custom as followed by Polish Jews. This book, with the Remu's notes, continues to guide Jewish religious life to this day for many Jews, and not only Ashkenazim. Similarly, the beautiful painted wooden synagogue that once stood in Gwoździec, today in Ukraine, and that is the basis for the painted ceiling and timber-framed roof that stands today in the exhibition, is itself an expression of the symbiosis of regional forms and building techniques and uniquely Jewish meaning.
A fifth principle is to tell the story from the perspectives of those whose story is being told and to do so in the historical present - without foreshadowing. We ask visitors to bracket what they know about what happened later. The horizon in front of them should remain short, just as it was for those in the period, while the past behind them extends ever longer. While we follow this principle throughout the exhibition, it is especially important for the place of the Holocaust in the thousand-year story. The narrative of most if not all Holocaust exhibitions starts with hate; the logical endpoint - the telos of hate - is genocide. The history of Polish Jews as presented in the Core Exhibition does not start with hate and does not end with genocide. The story does not drive to the Holocaust as the inevitable endpoint of a thousand-year history. From this perspective, Jews in the Second Polish Republic were not "on the brink of destruction." Whatever the "lessons" of the Holocaust, the thousand-year history of Polish Jews offers more than a case study in (in)tolerance. It would be a disservice to previous generations to reduce their lives to a prefiguration of genocide.
We are therefore careful to be historically precise in presenting conflict, right down to the words that we use and even how we spell them. For the medieval and early modern periods, we speak of anti-Jewish violence, attack, riot, tumult, or massacre, but not antisemitism and not pogrom. Anti-Jewish, anti-Judaism, and antisemitic are not the same thing. We reserve the term antisemitism for the modern period and modern forms of xenophobia, in particular racial hatred. This is also the reason we are particular about how we spell antisemitism, a term coined by the German polemicist Wilhelm Marr in the 1870s to distinguish a modern conceptual foundation for hatred of Jews, namely race, from older ones, based largely on religion, but also on antipathy to difference more generally. We reject the hyphen in "anti-Semitism" because it lends credibility to the word "Semites" as a racial category and to the false idea that Jews are a race. Similarly, pogrom is a term that arises in connection with antisemitic violence during the second half of the nineteenth century, and that is where visitors will first encounter it. We are equally precise in our use of the term "żydokomuna", which refers to "Commie Jews," or "Bolshevik Jews," or "Judeo-Bolshevism," unfortunate shorthand for the complex historical relationship of Jews and communism. We reserve these terms for the stereotype - the view that communism was a specifically Jewish phenomenon - a topic worthy of study in its own right, and we clearly distinguish the stereotype from the broader topics of why some Jews were attracted to communism and why many more were not, and the nature of Jewish life under communism.
A sixth principle is to avoid taking as our starting point misperceptions - whether antisemitic and philosemitic stereotypes or the stereotype of "Polish antisemitism" - and on that basis creating a narrative that will defend the history of Polish Jews and the history of Poland against such mistaken ideas. A proper historical account should correct the record, but not defensively - in other words, misconceptions should not set the agenda for what would become a defensive historical narration. Rather, our approach might be termed "constructive engagement," our intention is to create a "trusted zone" or zone of trust for engaging difficult subjects. The goal of the exhibition is not to create consensus, which is not possible in any case. Our goal is to create an exhibition worthy of debates worth having.
A seventh principle is to treat the history of Polish Jews as the history of all Polish Jews, not just its heroes and elites. The exhibition does not take as its starting point or leading idea the demonstration of Jewish worthiness, whether in collective or individual terms. An apologetic history would organize the exhibition around important people because they are important and showcase Jewish achievement - the contribution of Jews to the fields of politics, medicine, the arts, science, mathematics, and philosophy. That said, the leading role of key individuals finds its proper place in the exhibition's historical narrative, but that history should not be reduced to the stories of great individuals as such and their contributions to the world per se. Apologetic histories, which were popular in the nineteenth century, have their roots in debates dating from the seventeenth century on the prospect of Jewish integration and emancipation and in the fight against anti-Jewish attitudes.
An eighth principle is to keep open questions that seem to beg for definition. Some colleagues said the exhibition should begin with two text panels answering two questions - Who are the Jews? What is Judaism? - even before visitors enter the poetic "Forest" at the beginning of their journey. There are many ways to be Jewish, and Polish Jews continue to be a work in progress. Answers, provisional at best, are to be found in historically specific moments of the story, in actual situations. There is no normative presentation of Jews or Judaism, the Jewish life cycle or Jewish calendar year. There are no trans-historical thematic galleries, as proposed in the master plan.
Rather, visitors are on a "need-to-know basis" and build knowledge incrementally as they move through the story. It is early in the medieval gallery that they will encounter the prohibition of work on the Sabbath through a story of Jews on the road whose wheel broke on Friday just before sundown - we know this story from a rabbinical responsum, a letter responding to the question of what they should have done. Should they have repaired the wheel and continued along their way even though that meant arriving at the town after sundown and violating the prohibition of riding on the Sabbath? Or, should they have stayed on the road and waited until Saturday sundown, when the Sabbath was over, and only then repaired the wheel and traveled on? Staying on the road overnight was a dangerous proposition. Visitors will first encounter the Hebrew alphabet, also in the medieval gallery, when exploring bracteates, one-sided coins, with Hebrew letters. They will learn about the laws of ritual purity from a presentation of the Sha'arei Dura, a handbook on the laws of kashrut, printed in 1534 in Kraków - it was the first Hebrew book to be printed for Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. An interactive presentation of this book appears in the "Paradisus Iudaeorum" gallery.
Similarly, there is the expectation that the exhibition will provide "explanations" in answer to the question why? Our approach is, rather, to look for explanation in how. We encourage visitors to explore primary sources - documents, objects, recordings, films, photographs - whether in their original form or copies, precisely as historians do, and to piece together an understanding of what happened - with curatorial help to connect the dots. There are no easy explanations, but there is the historical record - sometimes thin, sometimes rich - for showing how something happened. If how is presented well, possible answers to the question of why will emerge. Exhibitions are uniquely positioned to build a historical narration from the historical record, whether objects or texts or images, film, or sound. The effect is somewhat like a documentary without a voice-over.
A ninth principle is pars pro toto, telling the larger story through smaller stories, in specific places and moments - Poznań, Łódź, Kraków, Vilna, Płock, Warsaw, Zamość, Gwoździec, and many more - rather than amalgamating sources from different places and times. The smaller stories are told, whenever possible, by those who actually lived in that place and time. We lead the narration with quotations from original sources. Featured are the words of such individuals as Jan Zamoyski, who contracted his Jewish leaseholder Jakub Nossałowicz in 1595; Natan Hannover, who recorded the massacres during the Khmelnytsky uprising in 1648-1649; Pauline Wengeroff, who recalled the transformation of Jewish life in the nineteenth century; young Jews who responded to autobiography contests organized by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in the 1930s; and Sara Hurwic, who surveyed Jews in Poland right after the Second World War. This is history in the first person, history with a face. In this way, visitors come into direct contact with voices from the period - not one voice, the voice of the historian, but many voices, a chorus that is sometimes in harmony, sometimes dissonant. The quotations are in the original language - Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Czech, Polish, and in later periods also Yiddish, German, French, Russian, and other languages. For each gallery there is a font specific to the period, for Latin letters and for Hebrew letters.
This approach is especially powerful in the Holocaust gallery, where the narration is based on the wealth of personal documents preserved in the clandestine Oyneg shabes archive organized by Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw ghetto. Through documents of many kinds created in real time on the spot, it is possible to bring visitors as close as possible to those who were there. In essence, this is narration in the historical present. It requires an active effort on the part of the viewer to bracket what they already know about what happened next and to enter into the very moment of event. The story unfolds a step at a time, without foreshadowing what will happen and without back shadowing from what we know today that those in the period did not. The "veil" is only gradually lifted until, by the end of the visitor's path, genocide is fully revealed, an approach pioneered by Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, the lead scholars for this gallery.
A tenth principle is the materializing of history in the absence of original objects. Had we the objects, we would surely have used them, but for the medieval period we can point to only two types of objects that Jews in Poland made and have survived to this day: tombstones and coins. Tombstones, the oldest of which dates from 1203, are immovable, and coins, no matter how informative they are with their beautiful Hebrew inscriptions, are tiny, and the story we must tell is deep and wide. What we do have are texts, the most important of which come from rabbis in the Rhineland who responded to questions from Jews passing through or living in Poland. These questions often take the form of a story that describes the problem. Necessity is the mother of invention. Illustrating those stories has resulted in a medieval gallery that is like a three-dimensional illuminated manuscript, the walls almost entirely hand-painted and gilded.
Similarly, for the modern yeshiva in the nineteenth century, there is virtually no visual material, but there are vivid memoirs and autobiographies. Based on those texts, we created a painted animation - twenty-four hours, from dawn to dusk to dawn, in the great Volozhin yeshiva. Finally, the wooden synagogues, architectural masterpieces created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, none of which exist today. While we can never recover the original synagogue, in the sense of its original material, we can do something else, something of great value - we can recover the knowledge of how to build it. Using traditional materials, tools, and techniques, by building it, and that is precisely what we did in Poland in collaboration with Handshouse Studio, an educational nonprofit organization based in Massachusetts. The result is a new kind of object, one whose value is exponentially greater because of how it was created and the knowledge we recovered and discovered.
Lastly, there is the principle of narrative space. While POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews does have a collection and continues to build it, the institution is defined first and foremost by the story it tells. It is no less a museum for telling that story in a multimedia narrative exhibition than primarily through objects. In contrast with museums that typically trace their history back to cabinets of curiosity, an early form of collecting and display, the historical origins of the multimedia narrative exhibition are to be found in world fairs, or Great Exhibitions, as they are known in the United Kingdom. From their inception in the mid-nineteenth century, Expos were laboratories of innovation. They not only showcased new ideas, but also experimented with display - and that is precisely what the exhibition at the heart of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews does.
The result is a theater of history, a story told in four dimensions - time is the fourth dimension. Only as the visitor moves does the story unfold. Perhaps the clearest example of "story space" expressed architecturally is the Warsaw ghetto section of the Holocaust gallery. "Life in the shadow of death" is set in claustrophobic spaces - the walls are slanted, the atmosphere disorienting and anxious. Visitors climb stairs and stand on a bridge like the one that joined two parts of the Warsaw ghetto. Like those in the ghetto, they look down on the "Aryan street" and see what seems like normal life. Visitors will encounter the reality of that world - occupied Poland under German terror - only when they exit the second part of the ghetto exhibit, "life in the face of death," and enter the "Aryan street" from below. They then see what they saw from the bridge, but from a new perspective. What seemed normal from afar is revealed as a terrifying reality up close.
First and foremost, visitors should experience the story through exploration rather than guiding, learning rather than teaching, soft mastery (trial and error) rather than hard mastery (information and instruction). They will encounter an open narrative in multiple voices. Commentary written by scholars appears in its own font and panel - and is kept to a minimum. These are among the ways of empowering the visitor to add his or her voice to the chorus of voices in the exhibition. Visiting museums and exhibitions is generally a social experience. The conversations that arise during and after the visit, whether between visitors or with museum staff whose role is to engage visitors, are a critical part of the experience. Younger visitors, whose natural inclination is to learn by trial and error (rather than to read the manual), will intuitively find their way through the story. Experienced museumgoers may expect a more explicit road map as they make their way through a continuous narrative that is organized in acts and scenes, much like a play, but one in which visitors find themselves on the stage and in the scenography, not on the other side of the proscenium.
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is part of the very history that it presents. It is an agent in that history and not simply a mirrored reflection of it. Our goal is to create an exhibition that is memorable. To be memorable, it must be emotional, but to be worthy of being memorable, it must be thought provoking. There is no end to the debates provoked by any history of Polish Jews, not least the one presented in the Core Exhibition. Our challenge is to create an exhibition worthy of debates worth having, including those that will surely arise from the exhibition itself.
Postscript
In 2024, POLIN Museum celebrates its 10th anniversary. Not long after the Grand Opening on October 28, 2014, POLIN Museum won the two most prestigious awards in Europe, the 2016 European Museum of the Year Award and the European Museum Academy Award. In 2017, POLIN Museum won the Europa Nostra Best in Heritage Award. These are among more than 60 national and international recognitions. POLIN Museum continues to rank in the top three attractions in Warsaw, and more than 4 million visitors have already passed through its doors, many of them international visitors. How have they responded to the Core Exhibition over the last ten years?
We have learned much from our visitors and have made adjustments to enhance their experience, whether to help them organize their time and find their way, improving the technology, or revamping entire sections. The message of the new post-89 gallery remains the same - "small numbers, big presence" - but the approach is different. We juxtapose the voices of Jews living in Poland today, beautifully filmed by Mikołaj Grynberg, with a large painting by Wilhelm Sasnal, who explores Jewish presence, hidden in plain sight, in the Polish landscape. In the coming year, 2025, we will be expanding the history of Polish Jews beyond the borders of Poland to the many places in the world where Polish Jews settled.
As was to be expected, colleagues, critics, and visitors have taken issue with some aspects of the Core Exhibition.
Artifacts
Visitors had hoped to see many more original artifacts, and critics questioned whether a multimedia narrative exhibition with relatively few original artifacts even qualified as a museum exhibition. At the time the Core Exhibition was being developed, POLIN Museum was only starting to form a collection. Since then, we have made it a priority to replace loans and copies in the exhibition with original objects in our collection and to add original objects in support of the historical narrative. Today visitors will see not only the original Sasnal painting, but also a remarkable self-portrait of the artist as a Polish nobleman, painted in 1874 by Maurycy Gottlieb, in the nineteenth-century gallery. Today an exquisite eighteenth-century Torah crown and Torah shield appear in the "Torah ark" beneath the painted ceiling of the Gwoździec wooden synagogue. An original painting by Jonasz Stern has been added to the space devoted to the period after March 1968, during which the last mass emigration of Jews from Poland took place. As of this writing, "The Bride," a massive painting by Maurycy Minkowski, circa 1912, is about to arrive and will be the centerpiece of the Jewish wedding presented in the "Encounters with Modernity" gallery.
Voice
Some fault the exhibition for telling the story through the voices of the period, rather than in the voice of the historian. The decision to drive the narration through carefully curated quotations from primary sources, in essence a play script in our theater of history, is strategic. The scholars responsible for each gallery selected, sequenced, juxtaposed, and set the quotations in relation to other exhibition elements to form a narrative ensemble. Moreover, voices from the period speak in ways that we, as scholars and curators, never could. Their style, tone, sensibility, and emotion are not only personal but also historical. The result is a greater sense of immediacy as visitors come into direct contact with those whose story we tell. This is our way of creating an open and multi-voiced narrative. Then, following the Jewish tradition of text and commentary, we bring our voices into the conversation, but only in a secondary text. As discussed above, this approach not only keeps our visitors in the historical present of the story, but also avoids the foreshadowing or back shadowing that would make the Holocaust the telos of the thousand-year history of Polish Jews.
This strategy is not what many visitors (and critics) expected. Indeed, they expected the opposite, namely, to lead the historical narrative through texts written by scholars. In addition, critics have taken us to task for "hiding behind the quotations," rather than "taking a stand" and clearly stating our position to the visitor. More specifically, they wanted us to devote much greater attention to antisemitism and to implicate the visitor, the Polish visitor in particular, lest they leave the Core Exhibition with the comfortable feeling that everything in this complicated history had been resolved. In contrast, our goal has been to engage the visitor, not take them to task, and to offer a historical narrative that is authoritative without being authoritarian. As Eli Wiesel states in the founding charter of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "A museum is a question; it is not an answer." Hopefully, our visitors will leave curious, open, and better prepared for informed debate about difficult questions. For these and other reasons already discussed, we continue to believe that providing a more open narrative in multiple voices, including those of the visitor and our own, is the right one.
Judaism
Polish visitors in this deeply Catholic country are particularly interested in "Judaism," and many of our critics and Polish colleagues think the museum has an obligation to explain what Judaism is to its Polish visitors. They feel that "Judaism" is missing from the exhibition or not given full enough treatment, a view not generally shared by our international Jewish visitors. After visiting the Core Exhibition, the directors of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow - Rabbi Alexander Moiseyevich Boroda, President of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, and Rabbi Borukh Gorin - declared that POLIN Museum was "more Jewish" than their museum. This came as a complete surprise to me, because their museum, which I have visited many times, is a project of Chabad-Lubavitch and devotes much attention to Jewish religious observance past and present.
Considering how extensively the Core Exhibition does treat Jewish religious life - to be distinguished from Judaism - why do critics find this aspect lacking? First, because they do not distinguish "Judaism" and "Jewish religious life," and second, because they expect a separate section devoted to "Judaism," as they understand it. One prominent critic proposed that we replace the entrance experience, the "Forest," with "Judaism in ten minutes." This "pill," as he called it, would not feature the ceremonial objects (kiddush cups, spice boxes, and seder plates) displayed in almost every Jewish museum, but it would explain the basic principles of Jewish civilization that he and others identify with Judaism.
There are many reasons why we did not adopt such an approach. In 2006, when we began to develop the Core Exhibition from the master plan, some colleagues said that the exhibition should answer two questions even before visitors enter the exhibition proper, even before the poetic "Forest" gallery that begins their thousand-year journey: Who are the Jews? What is Judaism? This is indeed common practice in other Jewish museums. Having visited the Jewish Museum London many times, I always read these two panels before entering the gallery dedicated to the Jewish calendar year and life cycle - it is a vault of exquisite ceremonial objects. To this day, I cannot recall what those introductory texts say. Rather than providing a priori definitions of Jews and Judaism, we ask our visitors to look for answers to these two questions in the history of Polish Jews.
This is why there is no normative presentation of Judaism, no Judaism "pill," and no transhistorical displays of related to the Jewish life cycle events and calendar year. Instead, we treat religious life and thought as a pervasive and integral part of Jewish lived experience and invite visitors to explore their transformation and variety across the millennium. As for providing basic knowledge about Judaism, our visitors are on a "need-to know basis," building knowledge of Jewish religious life in relation to a specific time and place, based on sources from the period, and in ways that are surprising and memorable - much more so than a Judaism "pill" to be swallowed before entering the thousand-year history of Polish Jews.
Legacy
The Legacy gallery, an epilogue to the Core Exhibition, opened in January 2021. It is the outcome of years of advocacy and resistance: advocacy to celebrate Jewish achievement and resistance to doing so within POLIN Museum's Core Exhibition. Instead, the Core Exhibition would present a social and cultural history of Polish Jews in which all Polish Jews and not only the most famous ones are agents of history. The heroes are also present, of course, but not by virtue of their prominence. Rather they appear where they play a role within the historical narrative. This approach did not sit well with those expecting much greater emphasis on the luminaries of Polish Jewish history and their contributions to Polish and world civilization. Many of them also wanted to see a greater emphasis on assimilated Polish Jews, especially those whose Jewish origins are generally unknown and would come as the greatest surprise.
Having managed to protect the historical narrative of the Core Exhibition from this demand, we faced intensified pressure to create a "Hall of Fame" and had to find a way to meet this sincere, deeply felt, and well-intentioned desire. We thought long and hard about what to do: where to locate a "Hall of Fame," how to create it in an intellectually responsible way and avoid an apologetic and defensive effort to prove Jewish worthiness and fight antisemitism. Such efforts do not stop antisemites - they continue to find in Jewish achievement handy "evidence" of ostensible Jewish world domination.
We chose a beautiful space on the main floor of POLIN Museum, overlooking the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. This is a ceremonial space, not a gallery in the conventional sense of the word - it is neither a white cube, nor a black box. It is rather an architectural space whose unique character needed to be respected. Those who most wanted the "Hall of Fame" were most concerned with the list. Who would be included, how many, and according to which criteria? Tamara Sztyma, who curated the Legacy gallery, and I gradually whittled the list down to twenty-six. Above all, it was not the list as such that concerned us, but rather how the lives and careers of the individuals we selected would illuminate the history of Polish Jews and be illuminated by that history. We thought of the selection as a group portrait, rather than as a list. Our goal was to engage visitors in the wider history of Polish Jews, with these individuals as inspiring points of entry.
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Visitors come to POLIN Museum not only for the Core Exhibition, but also for temporary exhibitions, which explore topics in greater depth and from different perspectives - and for much else. In contrast with the Core Exhibition, where we keep the visitor in the moment of the story, without looking forward, our temporary exhibitions explicitly relate the past to the present. The painted ceiling and timber frame of the Gwoździec wooden synagogue, a centerpiece of the Core Exhibition, was the inspiration for an exhibition of Frank Stella's Polish Village series together with the original documentation of the Polish wooden synagogues that inspired him. "Estranged: March '68 and Its Aftermath" ended with examples of how the hateful language of the March 1968 antisemitic campaign persists today. "Post-Jewish: Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt," on view during our 10th anniversary year, stages a dialogue between the shtetl, specifically the artist's hometown as represented in 70 of his paintings, and today's Opatów as a "post-Jewish" town, based on documents, maps, photographs, recent archeological evidence, and interviews.
Much has transpired during the last ten years since the Grand Opening - changes in Poland's government, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Israel-Hamas war. Antisemitism worldwide is on the rise. POLIN Museum has continued to rise to the challenges of our times by welcoming Ukrainian refugees with programming in their language, fighting antisemitism, creating a safe space for difficult discussions and strengthening the resilience of civil society.
Where will we be ten years from now? Museums will change and so will what visitors expect. New research will challenge and enrich our understanding of the history of Polish Jews. The story does not end. It is also a story about you, your ancestors, your neighbors, and the world in which we live.
First Encounters, 960-1500
Hanna Zaremska
Curatorial notes: Hanna Zaremska, Magdalena Dopieralska, and Kalina GawlasLead scholar for the gallery: Hanna Zaremska
The Historian in the Museum
Historians work with language. They use various methods to arrive at the truth about the past. When they write a history, they indicate how they have drawn conclusions from their sources. As a general rule, images and objects - whatever can be viewed or touched, and above all works of art, coins, and archaeological artifacts - are secondary.
Museum displays, by contrast, are made up of images and objects. Their aim is to visualize history. But displays in historical museums must be more than pictures with captions. They must also use new approaches to show the results of research in order to present not only facts about the past, but also historical processes. This is the task of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews - to communicate what is known about the history of Polish Jews and to show how Poland has shaped their history.
Traveling merchants, entrance to the medieval gallery
View of the royal relations and town walls, a story of the expansion of the Jewish community
Historians have a responsibility to those about whom they write as well as to their readers. Creating an exhibition may seem no different from writing a book, but the difference is actually enormous - both for the historian-turned-curator and for the reader-turned-viewer. In the case of the medieval gallery, both parties face a daunting task. The historian-curator must fit almost six hundred years of complicated history into three hundred square meters, while the reader-visitor must absorb what is before him or her.
Involvement in the creation of a museum is a new experience for the historian. There is no place in the gallery for any of the qualifications found in a historical text - words like perhaps, most likely, and supposedly are generally avoided. One can sometimes squeeze in a question mark, but who will see it on a map? There is no room in a museum display for footnotes, so how can one acknowledge one's debt to earlier scholars? The painstaking labor of generations of scholars must give way to images. Nor are images so easy to decipher without commentary. They may even be misunderstood if there is no explanation of the artist's intentions - and visitors will remember them.
Over five hundred years of the history of Polish Jews is presented in the medieval gallery. For this period, only two types of objects made by Jews in Polish lands have survived: coins and tombstones. How, then, can we tell a story that begins with a few Jewish travelers in the mid-tenth century and ends around the year 1500, with Jews living in about one hundred places and Jewish communities in about half of them? Among the sources for this period are texts, including the answers that rabbinical authorities, especially in German lands, gave to questions regarding religious law that were posed to them by Polish Jews. We invited Tomasz Leśniak, one of Poland's popular comic book artists, to illustrate those texts in the style of medieval illuminations. We then commissioned specialists in the conservation of the painted interiors of historic Polish churches to paint those illustrations on the walls of the gallery. The result is an entirely hand-painted and gilded medieval gallery - an illuminated manuscript in three dimensions.
Iconographic materials - chiefly works of Christian art, but also examples of Jewish manuscript illuminations from outside Poland - have their natural place in this museum. Visitors are encouraged to consider the situations in which medieval artists used Jewish motifs - and to reflect on how and why they employed such motifs. Images that Christians saw in churches reveal the role of such art in communicating the Church's teaching regarding Jews and their beliefs.
Jews Speak of Themselves
The timeframe for the medieval gallery reflects the dynamics of Jewish settlement in relation to the history of Poland. Poland became a significant - albeit not the only - locus of Jewish history at this time, and Jews formed an essential element in Poland's past. It is precisely because of the nexus of these two histories that this museum, devoted to the history of Jews, has been established in Poland.
Crucifixion, 1420-1430, from the Cistercian Church of the Assumption of the Virgin in PelplinPelplin Diocese Museum
The Jew piercing Christ's side is wearing a pointed "Jewish hat" and tapping his forehead in a mocking way. Such paintings appeared in medieval churches, where they popularized the attitude of medieval Catholicism toward Judaism. In images of the Passion of Christ, Jews are blamed for his death. The grotesque physiognomy of Christ's torturers was intended to strike fear and evoke contempt. To the medieval mind, the world of evil was at once the world of ugliness. Open mouths, protruding tongues, and unnatural grimaces produced a "diabolical image" of Jews. They were to be treated with suspicion and hostility, just like marketplace jesters or executioners, and were often shown with the attributes of those despised professions.
Jewish figures are immediately recognizable by their pointed hat. According to the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, Jews were to distinguish themselves from Christians: "Jews and Saracens . . . in all Christian countries for all time to come are to differ in the manner of their dress from the rest of the populace." The Jewish hat, pileus cornutus, was one way. No one knows if Jews in Poland had to wear such hats, but in medieval art the pointed hat was a universally recognizable sign that the person wearing it was a Jew. The hat's point could be stiff or slightly drooping, more or less rounded, or shaped like a funnel with or without a ball on top.
The gallery spans the period from the tenth century, when Jewish merchants first appeared in western Slavic lands, to around 1500, when the center of gravity of the Ashkenazi diaspora began to shift eastward to Polish lands. This timeframe also arises from Polish history. The tenth century witnessed the emergence of state structures here, while the beginning of the sixteenth century saw Poland's transformation from an estate monarchy into a multiethnic commonwealth dominated by the nobility.
Despite the lack of Jewish documents for creating this gallery, we have aimed to bring the Jewish experience forward and to emphasize the specific nature of Jewish culture, as shaped by religion, the Jewish calendar, Jewish languages and modes of dress, as well as by the distinctive civilization that Jews brought to Polish lands. To this end, we have adopted a twofold approach. First, we have attempted to allow Jews to speak for themselves wherever possible. Many of the quotations on the walls come from Hebrew sources. In this way, those we quote become, in a sense, guides to this gallery. Second, we have highlighted individuals of major importance in different historical periods, among them Ibrahim ibn Yakub, the banker Lewko, and Rachel, matriarch of the Fiszel family of financiers.
At the very start of the gallery, we present the beginnings of the Diaspora, Jewish settlement outside of the Land of Israel. Rather than write the history of ancient Israel in our own words, we present what medieval Jews knew of their history based on the Hebrew Bible, together with illuminations from medieval Hebrew manuscripts.
The history of the Fiszel family forms an entire chapter in the history of the Kraków Jewish community. Efraim Fiszel and his three sons first appeared in Kraków in the 1470s. They came either from Germany or Bohemia. Fearing competition, the local Jewish community, one of the largest in the country at the time, did not welcome them with open arms, but the Fiszels ultimately emerged victorious in this conflict. The family had many male descendants, and they were capable of taking over the family business. Its position was also strengthened by a fortunate marriage, of one of the daughters to a rabbi.
The Fiszel Family
The Fiszels' growing authority in the Kraków community is evidenced by their participation in its government - in 1485, two of Efraim's sons were already members of the council of elders. From then to the mid-sixteenth century, and so also after the Jews had moved from Kraków to Kazimierz, they continued to play a part in governing the community.
The Fiszels used their financial resources judiciously. As a widow, Rachel, Efraim's daughter-in-law and a native of Prague, was the banker of kings: she lent money to Kazimierz Jagiellończyk, Jan Olbracht, and Aleksander Jagiellończyk. In 1483, Rachel bought a tenement house on Szpiglarska Street. Enraged that the transaction was judged illegal, she "damaged three poles, one door, a bench and a board from the chamber . . . and broke the door and wall of the outhouse." In 1504, after Jews had moved to Kazimierz, King Aleksander allowed Rachel to buy a house in Kraków.
Rachel's sons and brother-in-law were also royal creditors, leaseholders of customs houses, and tax collectors. Her son Moshe was the creditor of King Jan Olbracht. Around 1502, he was baptized and took the name Stefan. His godmother was Elżbieta, widow of King Kazimierz Jagiellończyk. Jan Łaski, the King's Chancellor, became his protector. Stefan was ennobled in 1507. After divorcing his Jewish wife - their sons stayed with him, their daughters with her - Stefan married three times, each time to a Christian woman.
The beginnings of the renown of Kraków's yeshivas are also linked to the daughters of Rachel and Moses Fiszel. Hendel married the rabbi and kabbalist Asher Lemel, while Esterke became the wife of Jacob Polak from Prague. He had studied in Nuremberg at the yeshiva of Jacob Margolis and had served as a rabbi in Prague, where he became embroiled in a controversial divorce case. He then settled in Kraków. In 1503, King Aleksander appointed him chief rabbi of Poland, or possibly only of Lesser Poland. Polak is considered the founder of the yeshiva in Poland and introduced a new approach to the study of Talmud.
Six Centuries of Jewish Presence in Poland
The gallery is divided into three chronological sections that reflect the interaction of Polish history and the history of Polish Jews. The first section extends from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, the second is devoted to the thirteenth century (a turning point in the history of European and Polish Jewry), and the third deals with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This tripartite chronological division, with a distinct center assigned to each part, is clearly visible in the gallery floor plan.
These three periods differ in terms of local conditions (including state models and economic systems), the causes underlying the presence and movement of Jews into Polish lands (including participation in international trade, the influx of Jews as part of colonization under German town law, the expansion of Jewish settlement to the east following changes in the borders of Poland), and legal status (showing Jews as "guests," with their status then regulated under the Statute of Bolesław the Pious, also known as the Statute of Kalisz). The fields of Jewish economic activity also expanded in this period to minting and credit activity.
This is how the gallery organizes the narrative in space. It has its centers, the loci of Jewish presence and activity (the market, the suburbs of major strongholds, the city); these too changed and differed from one period to another. Similarly, we present topics especially relevant to a particular period. Some constitute key problems in the history of Poland (for example, the Christianization of the country in the tenth century), while others are important for the history of Jews (for example, the evolution of Ashkenazi diaspora culture), and all lie at the area of overlap between these two histories. Problems of a more general nature, in particular those that concern relations between Jews and the ruler or the Church, appear at temporal junctures and at other moments.
It was not possible during the medieval period to manage without a protector. Jews were particularly in need of protection and depended above all on the will of the ruler. Rulers knew how to turn this situation to their advantage, particularly as a way to increase their income. In medieval Poland, an exception in Europe at the time, the monarch monopolized authority over Jews. He confirmed the privilege for Jews that defined the conditions of their presence in the country, guaranteeing their safety. He allowed them to settle almost exclusively in royal towns, and they paid their taxes only to him until the end of the medieval period. In contrast to the Church, which constantly changed policy, medieval states like Poland were consistent in supporting their Jewish inhabitants and reaped economic benefit from them.
"We hereby make it known to all, present and future, whom this news shall reach, that our Jews, having presented themselves before our Majesty . . . have indicated as laws those which they have had since the time of our predecessor, Kazimierz the Great, of holy memory, to which they have been subject under other kings, our predecessors, until our times . . . they humbly asked and begged of us to recognize, confirm, and renew those rights, according to a copy they brought forward." - Privilege of King Kazimierz Jagiellończyk for the Jews, 1453.
Upon the unification of Poland shortly after 1300, King Kazimierz the Great confirmed the Statute of Bolesław the Pious and issued privileges to the Jews of Greater and Lesser Poland. Included were Jews living in Lwów and the Ruthenian lands, which had just been joined to Poland.
Pages from a fifteenth-century siddur (Jewish prayer book), as reproduced in M. Bałaban, Historja Żydów w Krakowiei na Kazimierzu 1303-1868, Kraków, 1931
The original siddur, a prayer book containing daily and Sabbath prayers, is from Western Europe and dates from the fifteenth century. It was stored in the Kupa Synagogue in Kraków before the Second World War, but did not survive. All that remains is a reproduction in a prewar book by the historian Majer Bałaban. On one of the pages, a fifteenth-century gloss with a prayer for King Kazimierz Jagiellończyk and his sons has been added.
Relations between the Church and Jews, a recurrent theme throughout the gallery, are treated in detail at two points. First, in the section devoted to the thirteenth century, we present the rabbis' attitude toward Christianity and its followers, as well as Polish and universal Church law regarding Jews. Second, for the late medieval period, we present the "Jewish problem" from the perspective of professors at the Kraków Academy, where the basis for Polish Church policy regarding Judaism and its adherents was set out. The chief narrator here is the chronicler Jan Długosz, who was associated with the Kraków Academy.
View of the Church and Synagogue installation
The Kraków Academy and Jews
The status of Jews living in medieval Europe was defined by the Church doctrine of servitus Iudaeorum (servitude of Jews), the idea that Jews were dependent on state authorities and the Church. The Church consistently sought authority over the Jews. Papal efforts to assert this authority encountered resistance from the rulers, who, in keeping with Roman imperial tradition, claimed the right to exercise control over their Jewish population and to hold a monopoly over the taxes that Jews paid. For its part, the Papacy justified its claim on religious and doctrinal grounds. According to the "doctrine of Jewish witness," Jews should be tolerated because their presence bears witness to the truth of Christ's fate, while their abject status testifies to the triumph of Christianity. Moreover, because Jews are the guardians of the Old Testament, one should patiently await their conversion and the fulfillment of the prophecy of the salvation of a remaining handful of Jews. However, among the flood of condemnations to be found in Church records, one can hardly find genuine attempts to protect them. Calls to keep the Jews separate outnumber those to defend them.
The theological and legal doctrine of Jewish servitude and the principle that Jews belonged to the ruler's treasury were also reflected in the pattern of Jewish settlement in medieval Poland. Seventy-seven of the one hundred Jewish settlements in the Kingdom of Poland and Masovia at the end of the fifteenth century were in royal towns, while there were only twenty on noble estates and only three on church estates.
Christ in the Temple, carved relief by Wit Stwosz, 1477-1489St. Mary's Church in Kraków
Christ in the Temple depicts the debate between Jesus and the rabbis in the Jerusalem Temple. Though the story is set in antiquity, the painting reflects the way Jews and others dressed at the end of the fifteenth century, when Wit Stwosz created the work as part of the altar in St. Mary's Church in Kraków. Both Judaism and Christianity consider the Hebrew Bible a holy book, but they interpret it differently. Jews do not recognize Christ as the Messiah and do not accept the New Testament, while Christians read the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New Testament.
Jan Dąbrówka, a theologian and rector of the Kraków Academy, commissioned copies of anti-Jewish treatises and even copied one of the texts himself. This page includes his marginal glosses. During the fifteenth century, at least twenty-six anti-Jewish manuscript treatises, most of them from outside Poland, made their way into the university's libraries or into the private collections of its professors. Codices produced in Poland arrived in Kraków with their owners or as bequests. Attitudes of intellectuals to the "Jewish problem" were shaped inside the walls of the Kraków Academy, not least by such books.
