Jewish life in early modern Poland was characterized by an adherence to
Jewish law (halakhah) that Polish Jewry had inherited from medieval
Franco-German Jewry, and almost all aspects of Jewish activity, even the
most personal of matters, fell within its purview. Jewish law remained
constant throughout the ages in some areas, but in others rabbis were
forced to reinterpret it in light of the complexities of contemporary
life. Edward Fram draws upon the ordinances of Polish Jewry's political
leadership, Polish legal records, and the responsa of some of the
outstanding poseqim of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to show
how Polish jurists responded to those complexities. His case studies,
gleaned from a period of exceptional creativity in the annals of Polish
Jewry, deal with weddings on the Sabbath, the rights of daughters to
familial wealth, women in the marketplace, the personal reliability of
those who dealt in the sale of kosher wine, competition among Jews for
sources of livelihood obtained through leases (arendy), the transfer and
payment of personal debts via bills payable to bearers (membrany), and
personal insolvency. Concerned with the needs of the underprivileged as
well as those of the marketplace, these rabbis struggled to maintain the
integrity of Jewish communal life and to preserve the tradition they
perceived to represent divine law. Particularly in commerce, failure to
observe Jewish law or at least the independent direction taken by the
lay leadership often became the basis for communal legislation and
practice. Fram shows how the Polish community, at times consciously and
at times unconsciously, transformed some of its traditional values until
they may have been unrecognizable to Jews from an earlier age..
