ABSTRACT
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth created in the Union of Lublin of 1569 was a multinational and multireligious state. One of the largest states in Europe at the time, it bordered the Baltic Sea in the north and the Black Sea in the south, stretching from Pomerania in the northwest to Ukraine in the southeast. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Poles represented only about 40 percent of the
country’s population, with ethnic minorities including Ukrainians, Russians, and Lithuanians but also immigrant populations such as Germans, Italians, Scots, andof course-the Jews. Poland-Lithuania was no less diverse religiously, with Catholics representing less than half the population and harboring Orthodox, Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish minorities. Thus, at least a degree of religious toleration was no less imperative here than it was in the contemporary Ottoman Empire, and though the Jews hardly enjoyed “equal rights” (a foreign concept in those days), they did enjoy far-reaching religious freedom and autonomy.
