ABSTRACT
For many centuries, Poland was an important center of Jewish life and culture and many Jews today trace their roots to the historical Polish territories. Many of them are well aware of the history of antisemitism in Poland which often affected their ancestors. The Shoah, one of the most extreme cases of mass murder in human history, was conducted by the German Nazis and their collaborators largely on Polish soil. The process of Jewish settlement intensified because of migration after crusades, persecutions, and expulsions from other (especially Western) European countries. For example, in the late eleventh century there was a wave of Jewish settlers who had been expelled from Bohemia. During the period of the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century, as elsewhere in Europe, various steps toward the emancipation of the Jews took place, but some leading intellectuals of the Polish Enlightenment expressed virulently anti-Jewish views, pioneering a “modern” form of antisemitism in Poland.
