Cracovie

At the heart of medieval Poland and later of Austrian Galicia, Kraków was for six centuries one of the greatest centers of Ashkenazi Judaism. Royal capital of the Piast and Jagiellonian dynasties, a university town and a commercial crossroads between the Baltic and the East, it welcomed from the Middle Ages a Jewish community which, relocated to the suburb of Kazimierz at the end of the fifteenth century, was to experience there a rabbinic golden age without equal. Homeland of Moses Isserles — the Rema, whose gloss gave the Shulchan Aruch its Ashkenazi dimension —, seat of the Council of Four Lands, Kraków embodied the autonomy and erudition of the "Poland of the three communities." Its history, from splendor to Nazi annihilation and then to reclaimed memory, condenses the entire destiny of Polish Judaism.

Jewish presence in Kraków is attested as early as the thirteenth century, doubtless linked to the city's rise as a way station on the great continental trade routes. Since the Statute of Kalisz, granted in 1264 by Bolesław the Pious, the Jews of Poland had enjoyed a protective legal framework placing them under the direct authority of the sovereign and guaranteeing freedom of trade, worship, and internal jurisdiction. It was Casimir III, known as the Great (reigned 1333–1370), the last king of the Piast dynasty, who gave this protection its lasting scope. On 9 October 1334, he confirmed Bolesław's privileges, then extended them in 1364 and 1367. Eager to populate and develop his kingdom, Casimir saw in the Jewish population a factor of prosperity: it was active in commerce, crafts, finance, and credit. The king went so far as to forbid, under penalty of death, the abduction of Jewish children for the purpose of forced baptism. This policy of welcome, which contrasted with the expulsions then striking Western Europe, made Poland a land of refuge. Later tradition crowned Casimir with a reputation for benevolence, sometimes embellished by the legend of Esther, his supposed Jewish companion. Beyond the myth, the legal foundation laid under his reign remains the true bedrock of Jewish settlement in Poland.

In the 14th century, Casimir the Great had founded, on an island in the Vistula south of the city, a new town bearing his name, Kazimierz, endowed with its own municipal charter and long independent of Kraków. It was there that Jewish life gradually concentrated. At the end of the 15th century, tensions sharpened in the old town: commercial rivalries with the Christian bourgeoisie, hostile preaching, and the fire of 1494 fueled animosity. In 1495, King John I Albert ordered the transfer of the Jews from Kraków intra muros to Kazimierz, where a quarter of their own was assigned to them, the oppidum Judaeorum, delimited by a wall. Far from marking a decline, this relegation laid the foundation for the rise of one of the most remarkable urban ensembles of European Jewry. Kazimierz became an autonomous center, endowed with strong communal institutions, the kahal, and a dense fabric of synagogues, houses of study, and charitable works. The arrival of refugees expelled from Bohemia, Germany, and soon from other provinces increased the population and its diversity. In the 16th century, thanks to the "golden age" of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the quarter experienced a brilliant prosperity. The Old Synagogue, the Stara Bóżnica, built at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries in a Gothic style and later remodeled in the Italian manner, remains its foundational monument: the oldest surviving synagogue in Poland.

In the sixteenth century, Kraków became one of the great capitals of Talmudic study. Its dominant figure was Moses ben Israel Isserles (c. 1520–1572), known by the acronym Rema. Born in the city where his father was among the notables, trained at the yeshiva of Shalom Shakhna in Lublin, he was appointed rabbi of Kraków at a very young age and there directed a renowned academy that drew students from across Central Europe. His major work, the Mappah — the "tablecloth" spread over Joseph Caro's "set table" — is a series of glosses on the Shulchan Aruch. Through them, the Rema adapted Caro's Sephardic code to Ashkenazi customs (minhagim): it is this synthesis that made the Shulchan Aruch the universal reference code of halacha. The Rema had a synagogue built at the edge of the cemetery that bears his name, the Rema (Remuh) Synagogue, consecrated around 1557. His grave, in the adjoining cemetery, remains a place of pilgrimage. Alongside the Rema shone his contemporary and brother-in-law Solomon Luria (the Maharshal), and then, in the following century, Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (1579–1654). Of Bohemian origin, a disciple of the Maharal of Prague and author of the commentary on the Mishna Tosafot Yom Tov, Heller was elected in 1643 as head of the rabbinical court of Kraków and directed the yeshiva there until his death. This continuity of scholarship secured the city's enduring prestige.

The power of Kraków could also be measured by its role in Polish Jewish autonomy. The Vaad Arba Aratzot, the Council of the Four Lands, established in the second half of the sixteenth century, brought together the delegates of the great communities — including Lesser Poland, whose metropolis was Kraków — to apportion taxes, legislate, and arbitrate disputes. Its sessions were held during the fairs of Lublin and Jarosław. This institution, unique in Europe, granted Polish Judaism a remarkable political cohesion until its abolition by the Sejm in 1764. The seventeenth century brought trials: wars, the Swedish invasion known as the "Deluge," and the violence that accompanied it weakened the community. The decline deepened with the general weakening of the Commonwealth. The partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) finally upended the political framework: Kraków came under Austrian rule in the province of Galicia, before a brief interlude as a free city, then the lasting annexation of 1846. Under Habsburg administration, the Jews of Galicia experienced ambivalent reforms, combining heavy taxation, attempts at Germanization, and, gradually, an opening toward emancipation. In 1799, for sanitary reasons, the authorities closed the old cemetery of the Rema Synagogue, a witness to the end of an era.

The nineteenth century saw the community transform profoundly. The Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, reached Kraków and fostered there the emergence of an acculturated bourgeoisie, divided between fidelity to tradition, hassidic currents, and aspirations toward integration. Emancipation, achieved within the Austrian constitutional framework after 1867, opened the professions and municipal life to Jews. The Tempel synagogue, of progressive rite, symbolized this modern Judaism. On the eve of the Second World War, Kraków numbered about sixty-eight thousand Jews. The German occupation, beginning in September 1939, annihilated this world. In March 1941, the Nazis established a ghetto in the Podgórze suburb, where fifteen to twenty thousand Jews were crowded together. Nearby, the Płaszów camp was erected, under the command of Amon Göth. Deportations to the Bełżec extermination center struck as early as 1942. On 13 and 14 March 1943, the ghetto was liquidated. It was in this context that Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist, saved nearly one thousand two hundred Jews by employing them in his factory. Almost all of Kraków's Jews perished. After the war, Kazimierz long remained a dilapidated quarter. The turning point came in the 1980s and 1990s: the fall of communism, the Festival of Jewish Culture held each summer since 1988, and the impact of the film Schindler's List in 1993 revived interest in this heritage, making Kazimierz one of the best-preserved Jewish quarters in Europe.

The history of the Jews of Kraków alone mirrors the trajectory of Ashkenazi Judaism: medieval welcome under Casimir the Great, the flourishing of Kazimierz, a pinnacle of scholarship embodied by the Rema and the Council of Four Lands, slow decline under Austrian rule, modern renaissance, then the abyss of the Shoah. That the gloss of a Krakovian rabbi still governs today the practice of millions of Jews, and that the lanes of Kazimierz resound once more with music and study, attests to the persistence of a memory that extermination could not erase. Kraków thus remains at once a cemetery and an open book, where one continues to read the destiny of a great hearth of the Jewish world.