Jewish Publishing Houses and the Censorship of Jewish Publications in the Kingdom of Poland before 1862
Jewish Publishing Houses and the Censorship of Jewish Publications in the Kingdom of Poland before 1862

Summary/Abstract: The introduction of state preventive censorship of Jewish publications in the Kingdom of Poland was by no means something obvious. The Constitution of the Kingdom guaranteed the freedom of establishing publishing and printing houses. Neither did the state have any direct interest in interfering with the Jews’ religious publications or any disputes among them. In fact, in Russia itself and in the so-called seized lands, there was no censorship of Jewish books all the way until the 1820s. Therefore the call for censorship did not come from Petersburg but precisely from Warsaw. It can even be suspected that in Russia itself, preventive censorship was largely introduced in response to suggestions if not demands coming from the Kingdom because massive imports of Jewish books from Russia frustrated the effects of the actions of the local censors. The censorship in the Congress Kingdom can be regarded a sequel to internal Jewish censorship exercised by Waad Arba Aratsot, except that now it as implemented by another camp inside the Jewry and with the help of state authorities. In the Congress Kingdom the censor’s authority was taken over by the maskil faction, which supported a program of reforms of the Jewry, popular with political elites, by branding as an enemy whatever it deemed to be vestiges of Jewish obscurantism: first of all the recently formed and dynamically growing Hassidism and he Jewish vernacular, a tool of Jewish separatism and backwardness. Preventive censorship did not prove to be terribly successful. The ambitious plans to reform the Jews in a small patch of the vast lands inhabited by the Jews of the old Republic of Poland had to misfire, given that the borders were not sealed tight and the individual neighbors who partitioned Poland were each pursuing a different policy toward the Jews.

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