The Beginnings of Jewish Self-Government in Poland A Tangled History JÜRGEN HEYDE T his chapter examines the contribution of the Jewish economic elite to the development of Jewish self-government in the Kingdom of Poland up to the sixteenth century. Beginning with the earliest cases of Jewish community and court organization, it discusses self-government as a tangled process of communication between Jewish and non-Jewish actors and analyses the role of the Jewish economic elite as an element of the community leadership, through the lens of non-Jewish documents, the largest part of the available source material for this period. Jewish self-government in medieval Poland has been for the most part discussed in the context of the legal and institutional ramifcations of the ‘general privileges’ granted to Jews from the thirteenth to the ffeenth centuries. To illustrate the institutional history of Jewish communities, Majer Bałaban and, more recently, Hanna Zaremska have drawn on the well-documented and researched examples of the high-medieval Rhineland takanot, comparing them to the oldest statutes of the Kraków community dating from the end of the sixteenth century. 1 Te impact of the Jewish economic elite on Jewish self-government in Poland– Lithuania has been extensively studied in works on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his classic monograph Tradition and Crisis, Jacob Katz underlined the ambiguity of the situation of the elite: on the one hand, their close contacts with the non-Jewish elite (nobles and royal officials) helped safeguard the economic liveli- hood of the Jewish population in general, but, on the other, their economic power could also be used to assert their own interests against those of the community. 2 Gershon Hundert, 3 Moshe Rosman, 4 Adam Teller, 5 and Maria Cieśla 6 all discussed examples of this ambiguity. At the same time they emphasized that the role of the Jewish economic elite within the system of Jewish self-government cannot be analysed as a dichotomous, inner-Jewish relationship but needs to be understood as part of (at least) a triangle, in which the representatives of the Jewish communities interacted just as actively with the non-Jewish authorities as with the members of the Jewish economic elite. On the non-Jewish side there is also no clear-cut political agenda. In his study of the Jews on the estates of the Sieniawski and Czartoryski families, Moshe Rosman pointed out that the nobles, in contrast to the royal administration, had no interest in strengthening Jewish self-government, as they strove for a maximum of control over their latifundia. Against this, Adam Teller has shown that on the Radziwiłł estates the landlords did support the autonomy of the 02Polin34Heyde-054-069_Layout 1 05/04/2021 22:23 Page 54