Warszawska Szkoła Rabinów w świetle źródeł misyjnych
Rabbinical School in Warsaw in Light of Missionaries’ Texts

Summary/Abstract: The article offers a look at the Rabbinical School in Warsaw from an angle from which it has not been viewed so far: through critically examined texts by missionaries from the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, dealing with their missions in the Kingdom of Poland. The main source materials for the research summed up in the article were archived materials and missionary press. The London Society was set up in England in 1809 but rapidly expanded its operations not only within the British Empire but also beyond its frontiers. Due to the large number of Jews living there, Polish lands were one of the most strategic areas of its activities. The Society sources and especially mission reports from the period corresponding to the times when the Rabbinical School was in operation, constitute a valuable addition to our knowledge of that institution, its teachers and disciples and also, more broadly, about the pro-modernity oriented part of the Jewish community, especially from Warsaw. The article shows how the missionaries interacted with Orthodox Jews Committee, the authorities of the Rabbinical School and its teachers and students, and also what we can learn from these contacts. An analysis of the reasons for meetings between the Jews from the School milieu with the missionaries proves that, contrary to appearances, a willingness to convert was not the only or even the most important incentive, and that interest in Christianity was often of a polemical nature. For the Jews these meetings were first of all an additional space in which they expected to find an opportunity to hold discussions about the shape of contemporary Judaic faith. The accounts of missionaries concerning the operation of the Rabbinical School make it imperative to take a fresh look at the accusations and charges against this institution, known from literature and coming chiefly from traditionalist Jews. One good example of such new perspective was the juxtaposition of missionary and Jewish sources concerning events that occurred in the School milieu in 1837, notably the conversion by two students, which took place under the influence of the “English missionaries.”

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