ABSTRACT
Jews made up a substantial percentage of the overall population in many Polish towns and cities until the Holocaust; for example, on the eve of World War II Jews made up roughly a third of the population of Warsaw, Poland’s capital, and around a quarter of the population of Krakow, its second-largest city. Jews living in Poland generally spoke Yiddish. They did not adopt Polish on a large scale until the 20th century, so a distinctive Jewish variety of Polish never really developed. The Judeo-Polish charter was entered into the Wilkowyszki pinkas in around 1792. It granted the Jews the right to settle in Wilkowyszki and included a number of specific details of what they were allowed to do there. A number of Jewish newspapers in Polish (in the standard Latin-script Polish alphabet) were published in this period, and novels, poetry, and works of nonfiction on Jewish themes were written in Polish as well.
