The Role and significance of the Jews in the economy of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth: the state of research and research directions

Research conducted in the nineteenth and early twentieth century on the participation of the Jewish population in the economy of the Polish–Lithuanian state in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries was summa-rized in the 1930s in two studies by Ignacy Schiper. The first was a chapter in a collection, dealing with the economic history of the Jews of the Polish Crown and Lithuania in the pre-partition era. The second was a monograph on the history of Jewish trade in the Polish lands. Research on Jewish history in Poland was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, in the course of which many sources were destroyed, including records of Jews’ economic activities. Among them were mass sources preserved at the Archive of the Crown Treasury in Warsaw, particularly customs records for the years 1509–1794. Fire also consumed 2,198 quarterly registers of various customs posts for the years 1718–90 at the Krasiński Library in Warsaw.3 The loss to scholarship was irreparable since without that source material we will never be able to establish the scale of commerce in the early modern commonwealth. For that reason, some prewar studies, based on sources that no longer exist, still have evidentiary value; for example, Roman Rybarski’s study of trade and trade policy in sixteenth-century Poland, based on customs books from that time