As a result of a series of Jewish expulsions and of Poland's increasing economic attractiveness, in the sixteenth-century Ashkenazic world Poland was widely recognized as the most promising of the European communities.

Poland and Lithuania

The expulsion of Jews from numerous German cities and secular principalities and from much of Bohemia and Moravia, coupled with the final division of Hungary (previously relatively hospitable to Jews) into Habsburg, Ottoman, and Transylvanian sections, encouraged Jews to look eastward. Poland's rapid commercial expansion, the relative weakness until the late sixteenth century of its craft and trade guilds, and the religious toleration that characterized crown policy reinforced these migratory trends. Jewish adjustment to the new surroundings was eased because of German influences in the cities, which (despite the rapid polonization of the German immigrants) may have encouraged the retention by...