Jewish Quarterly Review

The paper examines political activities of R. Isaac of Warka, the best known Hasidic intercessor in Poland, against the background of both Jewish tradition of shtadlanut and the political environment of the nineteenth-century Congress Poland. It focuses on the strategies, tactics and tools of this activity, which, I clam, differed from those employed by the shtadlanim in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The thesis of the paper is that these new forms of political activism were made possible only by the changed political system of nineteenth-century Poland. I claim that this political system and the policy of the Polish government both contributed to the unique form of the Polish Hasidism resulting from Hasidic responses elicited in part by Polish social policy. The sources for the paper are mainly archival documents of the governmental origin, including a series of Isaac of Warka's petitions to the government, government's responses, internal ministerial correspondence etc. These sources has never been utilised before. They shed a new light on the social and political history of the Hasidic movement in Poland.