Reconstructing Politics in the Diaspora: Discourses on the Council of Four Lands at the end of the Nineteenth Century

The minute book of the Council of Four Lands, a Jewish autonomous institution in early modern Poland, was lost until today except for a few leaves. In 1871, Heinrich Graetz wrote ironically, the Jews in the time ‘had not considered it worth for effort, to preserve its documents.’ After two decades, however, the very existence of the Jewish national self-government had attracted many intellectuals in Eastern Europe, who aspired after Jewish national autonomy in Russian Empire and Poland. On response to a call for ‘Search and Research’ by Simon Dubnow, scholars, political writers and even rabbis sought for excerpts from the lost minute, and accumulated new findings in the course of time. Their efforts culminated in the monumental compilation by Israel Halperin, which offered an important corpus for the study of Jewish Politics in Diaspora.

My paper will discuss the initial phase in the history of study on the Council. When pioneers started to describe Council’s activities, they had few materials and thus introduced many presumptions in order to characterize its autonomous framework. While some of these were validated afterwards, others proved unfounded, but betraying images of Jewish self-government à la fin de siècle. Alongside major figures in the research history of the Council, I would like topay attention to the correspondence between Graetz, one of the champions of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in Germany, Nathan Dembitzer, a rabbi and modern Posek in Cracow, and Nahum Sokolow, a journalist and one of the leading figures in Zionist movements in Russia.