The Jews of Pinsk, 1506 to 1880 [Hardcover]

The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1880is the first part of a major scholarly project about a small city in Eastern Europe where Jews were a majority of the population from the end of the eighteenth century. Pinsk boasted both traditional rabbinic scholars and famous Hasidic figures, and over time became an international trade emporium, a center of the Jewish Enlightenment, a cradle of Zionism and the Jewish Labor movement, and a place where Orthodoxy struggled vigorously with modernity.

The two volumes of Pinsk history were originally part of a literature created by Jews who survived the Holocaust and were determined to keep in memory a vital world that flourished for half a millennium. In this case, the results are extraordinary: no town of Eastern Europe has been described in such fascinating detail, invaluable to Jewish and non-Jewish historians alike.

For the second volume of this two-volume collection, seeThe Jews of Pinsk, 1881-1941.

...The author, editors, and publishers of this research are to be commended for having brought the living history of one of Eastern Europe's most important centers of Jewish settlement to the English-speaking world. The book's all-embracing historical, sociological and demographical scope allows us to learn how Jews lived, prayed, fought, built and preserved among strangers, often under difficult and dangerous conditions. This massive volume, the record of a complex and living (before its murder) civilization But because history was intterrupted, and cut off and cut out and entirely severed, The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1880 becomes a sort of museum, and its editors, curators. But what loving, scholarly, feeling curators! The Jews of Pinsk is a treasury of the four-hundred year history and culture of one of Eastern Europe's most important Jewish communities. Here is everything: communal organization, economics, legal status, religion and education, geography andl£¥