We may begin the final commentary in this volume by returning to elementary levels. This happens to suit my own particular role and qualifications here, which is to know the least, among all the contributors, about the subject matter at hand. I have participated in order to learn, as a starting postulate, about the circumstances of a dispersed people - Diaspora - who nevertheless preserved a degree of identity and cultural integrity, despite their dispersion among a different, commonly hostile, politically dominant population or populations.

This beginning formulation has led me, as an everyday historian of central Europe in early modern times, to two further or subsidiary questions. One has to do with the external walls and internal webs of social entities - an issue broached at the very start of the discussion - and the relation between them; and the second, more particularly and contextually, has to do with the special sensibilities governing a society of estates and corporations, of legally and traditionally differentiated groups, which central European society surely was in early modern times, if ever there was one; and that is an issue that has come up especially in the later chapters of this volume.

Elaborating these two, briefly: the first question, having regard to the perennial social issues of group inclusion and exclusion, asks: What are the specific roles and connections between Christian exclusion of Jews as alien and Jewish internal coherence or inclusion over against a hostile environment? This is the question reified by the discussion of actual stone-andmortar walls, and how they came to be built.