The idea was simple enough: proceeding from the assumption that to some degree literature reflects popular values and attitudes, Magdalena Opalski would sift Polish writing for portrayals of Jews, while Israel Bartal would do the same for Polish personages in Yiddish and Hebrew literature. The special impetus for the comparison was the short-lived interval of Polish–Jewish ‘brotherhood’ that preceded the 1863 Polish insurrection against tsarist Russia. In an effort to secure Jewish support, the Poles had promised the Jews full equality. Many Jews, for their part, took active part in the Polish military effort. The uprising failed, and in the decades that followed Polish–Jewish relations deteriorated. The two com - munities grew further and further apart, not least during the twenty years of Polish independence between the two world wars.

Professors Opalski and Bartal, both experienced scholars in their fields (she, the author of a study of the Jewish tavern-keeper in nineteenth-century Polish writing, he, of a forthcoming monograph on the portrayal of gentile society in Hebrew and Yiddish fiction) were quite aware of the strikingly asymmetrical nature of the materials they probed. Secular Jewish writing, both Hebrew and Yiddish, is largely a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back only to the latter part of the nineteenth century, at which time it was also supplemented by Russian Jewish prose, drama, and verse. Moreover, all of it reflected one particular ideological stance, that of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), a movement born in Germany that strove to reconcile religious tradition with secular modernity. Opponents of that tendency, the steadfast Orthodox—whether hasidim or mitnagedim—produced no secular writing at all. In contrast, Polish literature was already flourishing during the Renaissance and the Reformation, and was inspired by a variety of religious values and political creeds. Fortunately, these methodological difficulties failed to dissuade the two scholars from undertaking their exceptionally challenging project, which required a huge amount of research. Their persistence was rewarded. The slim volume Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal have produced is a most valuable contribution to Polish, as well as Jewish, history and literary scholarship, and also to general literary sociology.