T HE J EWISH Q UARTERLY R EVIEW, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Fall 2007) 647–659 REVIEW ESSAYS (What Was Once) The World’s Largest Jewish Community NANCY SINKOFF Israel Bartal. The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772–1881. Translated by Chaya Naor. Jewish Cultures and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Pp. vi  203. Gershon David Hundert. Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity. S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Pp. xix  286, maps. Magda Teter. Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xxxiii  272. ChaeRan Freeze, Paula Hyman, and Antony Polonsky, eds. Jewish Women in Eastern Europe. Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 18. Oxford and Port- land Ore.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2005. Pp. xiv  470. TAKEN TOGETHER, these four books suffice for a crash course in the history of Polish Jewry from the early modern period until shortly after World War I. They offer specialists and nonspecialists alike an under- standing of the newest trends in the historiography of ‘‘the Jews of East- ern Europe,’’ who are still often relegated to a sidebar in the master narrative of modern Jewish history and too frequently only appear within it in relation to their destruction. In fact, these four books demonstrate conclusively that this narrative must be rewritten. The seminal impact of the partitions of Poland (1772, 1792, and 1795) as the dividing line be- tween early modern and modernizing Polish Jewry is asserted directly by Israel Bartal and assumed implicitly by Hundert’s and Teter’s work and by the numerous essays in the Polin anthology. We do well therefore to address the issues of the two books that are squarely in the early mod- ern period and then continue with a discussion of the two books whose focus is the nineteenth century. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2007) Copyright  2007 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved.