A collection of scholarly papers encompassing the entire territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth over a period spanning more than four centuries, Religion in the Mirror of Law nevertheless achieves an admirable focus on the “interconnections of religion and law” (ix). Considering the various and changing political, social, and cultural conditions over space and time, this collection of fifteen articles still works as a whole to assess “the legal tools that formed the basis for cooperation, negotiation, mediation, and compromise between different religious communities and between individuals of different confessions” (ix), a welcome shift from the usual approach of assessing interreligious conflict or dissonance.
The anthology derives from papers presented at the 2010 international and interdisciplinary conference “Religion in the Mirror of Law: Research on Early Modern Poland-Lithuania and its Successor States in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries” held in L΄viv at the Center for Urban History of East-Central Europe, spearheaded by the research group on law in ethno-religiously mixed societies of Poland-Lithuania at the Institute for Slavic Studies at Leipzig University (vii). The scholars involved followed the anthropological perspective of Lawrence Rosen that law cannot be separated from culture and that it should be seen as “a framework for ordering relationships,” as well as the approach used in Law and Society Studies that stresses “the links between law, institutions, and the public sphere” (xii).
That eleven of fifteen articles discuss legal aspects and ramifications of Jewish communities in this geographic region reveals the extent to which their coexistence with the dominant Christian societies comprised perhaps the most intriguing aspect of legal life in the former Commonwealth—and certainly one rich in sources and circumstances ripe for study. Additionally, three articles discuss issues pertaining to Uniates, or Greek Catholics, and one addresses the role of the Polish Institute for Nationality Research in the 1920s and 1930s. Orthodox, Protestant, and Muslim experiences are not represented in this collection. The editors have distributed the articles into four conceptual parts: “Imagining Law—Imagining Society,” providing interdisciplinary approaches to a more flexible view of law; “Shifts in Political Rule and the Reorganization of Law,” addressing ways religious communities mediated between the state and national groups; “Competing Laws—Competing Loyalties,” exploring “legal pluralism” in situations of changed political context; and “Ethno-Religious Coexistence in Legal Norm and Practice,” with a focus on Jewish-Christian coexistence. The publisher is to be commended for allowing lengthy and informative footnotes throughout.
Dominating the volume, the articles regarding the Jewish experience offer fresh perspectives on their legal place within different Christian societies and political regimes. In the early modern period, Jürgen Heyde finds that the Polish king strategically allowed discriminatory language against the Jews to enter the constitution of 1538 to appease the nobility, only to drop the language once a “political consensus” was reached in 1539 (18–20). Anat Vaturi analyzes how voivodes in early modern Kraków worked to protect Jews, effectively reconciling both interreligious and internal Jewish cases of conflict. Focusing on the town of Rzeszów in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Yvonne Kleinman highlights a remarkably high level of accepted integration of Jewish communities and craftsmen into the legal order of the town. Maria Cieśła studies the third Lithuanian Statute (1588) to demonstrate a relatively high “social position of the Jews” (316) that offered them legal treatment in many cases similar to (and in some cases higher than) that of Christian burghers. For the modern period, authors turn also to Galicia and Russia. Anna Juraschek finds that Shakespeare's character of Shylock appeared in literature and legal theory in Galicia in the mid-19th century to help argue Jewish equality before the law under Habsburg rule. Jana Osterkamp looks at ideas of federalism for post-1848 Galicia, finding that the Jews advocated the complicated method of “personal autonomy,” giving dispersed individual members of a federal group their own rights (53). Tracie Wilson explores Jewish participation in women's charities and anti-trafficking associations in L΄viv, noting the role of social movements in “reshaping legal landscapes” (85). In post-1846 Kraków, Hanna Konżinska-Witt finds that Jews participated significantly in the municipal government and assesses the dynamics between Orthodox and Progressive Jewish representation. Turning to late imperial Russia, Dror Segev traces the Jewish movement away from religious legal views and toward a more scientific perspective in the late nineteenth century by studying the public debate in Hebrew newspapers for and against the Jewish tradition of immediate burial of the dead, in light of Russian (and European) norms prescribing a mandatory three-day wait before burial. Vladimir Levin reviews memoranda of rabbis from all regions of the former Pale and the Polish Kingdom, written in preparation for the 1910 Rabbinic Commission, defining areas of conflict between Jewish and Russian civil law. While in the end, governors did not advocate changing civil law, the memoranda demonstrate the extent to which Russia was “a relatively hospitable place for Jews observing religious laws and traditions” (213). Finally, Eugene Avrutin studies court cases in Lithuania and Belarus from the mid-nineteenth century to show how members of the Jewish community used Russian civil courts from the district level to the highest court of appeals of the Senate to settle disputes with their Christian and Jewish neighbors. His conclusion summarizes the content of all the articles described here: given the “vibrant horizontal interactions” in these multiethnic societies, “we can be certain that both Jews and their neighbors did not live in two distinct worlds” (344).
The remaining four articles also raise new perspectives. Addressing the first-partition lands of Belarus, Angela Rustemeyer proposes a link between Catherine's anti-Uniate policies and her provincial government reforms. Turning to Galicia, where the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church joined forces with Ukrainian nationalism, Oksana Leskiv studies the hostility between the well-educated Greek Catholic priests and their peasant parishioners, who brought one priest to trial in the mid-nineteenth century. Liliana Hentosh looks at Metropolitan Sheptytskyi's diplomatic work to push for an independent Galicia after the First World War through the prism of his pastoral duties. Additionally, Stephan Stach discusses the function of the interwar Polish Institute for Nationality Research, which represented minority religions, as a kind of “think tank” (149) for Piłsudski's government in its policies with the minority nationalities.
Despite its balance toward issues concerning Jewish communities, this anthology as a whole provides much food for thought for anyone interested in the multiconfessional and multiethnic experience of east central Europe. Throughout, the editors succeeded in ensuring that the diverse topics addressed in the volume were united in their intellectual focus on law as a realm of negotiated interactions between different religious, political, or cultural groups, underscoring their interconnectedness from the early modern into the modern era.
