Although it functioned for a matter of several years, the brick wall put up in 1940 by the Nazis efficiently enclosed the quintessential Jewish Warsaw. In this way, the ‘undefined’ Jewish town within the city's metropolitan area for the first and last time in its history was given clear physical boundaries, and in spite of the obvious differences in circumstance it could be said that Warsaw was physically divided some two decades before Berlin. Referring to Warsaw's pre-war Jewish community as a ghetto is likely further to strengthen popular misconceptions of the real state of affairs; misconceptions fuelled by the extreme situation created during the brief but cataclysmic Nazi occupation.

The existence of one particular district where more than 90 per cent of the population was Jewish in faith and culture cannot be denied; it was also this district which the Nazis all but erased from the face of the earth during and after the tragic Jewish Uprising of April-May 1943. But Muranów represented just one, if a major, aspect of Jewish Warsaw. The Ghetto Wall until July 1942 also embraced a very significant part of the neighbouring Western (Zachodnia) district, where Grzybowski Square and Krochmalna Street, as familiar to I.B. Singer readers as Muranów's Nalewki Street, were situated. The Main Synagogue stood not in Muranów or the Zachodnia, but in the commercial centre, its location as much as its architecture emphasising its importance to the Europeanised Haskala community ratherthan the unacculturated majority.Jews lived to a larger or smaller degree in every part of Warsaw; an especially numerous and long-established community could be found in the Right Bank district of Praga.

The aim of this article is to offer some insight into the origins and nature of Jewish settlement in pre-war Warsaw. The years 1862-1900 have been taken as a period when both Warsaw as a modern metropolis and its exceptionally large Jewish community of varying social make-up took shape. After considering the progression and restrictions of Warsaw's urban development within the Russian Empire we have traced the history of Warsaw's Jewry from its medieval origins, to establish a general background to the rapid and intense changes during the second half of the 19th century.