The Gahal in Tykocin and Jewish Settlement in Villages in the 17th and 18th Centuries

500 lat osadnictwa żydowskiego na Podlasiu. Materiały z konferencji międzynarodowej, Białystok, 14 - 17 września 1987 r.500 Years of the Jewish Settlement in Podlasie. Popers From the International Conference, Białystok, September 14 - 17, 1987.The author of this paper prepares the pinkas of the Tykocin Kahal for publication. The pinkas, covering the period from the 1760s to the 1830s concerns some issues of Jewish settlement in the villages of Podlasie and Mazowsze. The material obtained from this source enables to verify some theses functioning till now in historiography. For example, it is questioned whether the decline of economic activity and the impoverishment of the Jewish population took place during the wars of the mid-17th century and so called Great Northern War at the beginning of the 18th century. On the basis of inscriptions to the pinkas it can be concluded that the Tykocin community functioned well in this period and - despite unavoidable losses brought by the war - relatively small number of complaints was brought. Also the procedure of lease-holding on the basis of „chazakot" law is introduced, as well as the interpretation of this law. The role of Tykocin in the Jewish rural settlement in Mazowsze in the 1780s is presented in the new light. The pinkas provides information specitiving and moving backwards in time the dates of coming into existence of some kahals, e.g. in Goniądz and Mielnik (compared to the results of Anatol Leszczyński's research in his work), The pink as of the Kahal in Tykocin has been preserved in the copy made by an oustanding scholar, lsrael Halperin, in the 1920s.39-4