Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era

by Magda Teter

Contrary to the common contention that the Catholic Church triumphed in Counter-Reformation Poland, this study reveals that from the rise of the Reformation and the rapid dissemination of its new ideas, the Catholic Church was overcome with a strong sense of insecurity. The beleaguered Church sought to separate Catholics from non-Catholics: Jews and heretics. This process helped form a Polish identity that led to racial anti-Semitism and to the exclusion of even most assimilated Jews from the category of Poles. The book portrays Jews not only as victims of Church persecution but as active influential participants in Polish society.

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Jackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book on the history of Catholicism in Poland and its response to Judaism and Eastern Orthodoxy in the era of Reformation is an excellent and well-researched book. Teter argues that the emergence of an increasingly intolerant Catholicism in Counter-Reformation Poland came as a result of the magnates’ inability to soften the power of the multitude forms of heretics within the Commonwealth. Jews in early modern Poland were not only craftsmen and merchants but also lessees of the estates of the nobility and in some places it was they who enserfed the peasants. They had a privileged position within society and this was threatening to Polish Catholic authority. Because of the close bonds that could sometimes form within Jewish/Catholic society (within business deals, domestic labor, small villages, etc.), Catholics began to rail against the rising numbers of converts to Judaism and children born to illicit unions between the two faiths.