Border Jews: Jewish life on the medieval frontier of Europe. Jews of Red Ruthenia until 1506

This dissertation focuses on exploring Jewish history in Red Ruthenia (today’s eastern provinces of Poland and western Ukraine) until 1506, where important centers of Jewish life such as Lviv (Lemberg), Drohobycz, Luck, Chelm and Przemysl were located.;Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe expanded most rapidly in the Ukraine and southern Lithuania, where Jewish-Christian relations (with various Christian denominations) were highly complicated. The dissertation re-examines the sources and historiography that dealt with the problem of Jewish settlement in Poland-Lithuania and the Ukraine. It attempts to provide a comprehensive picture of the Jewish migrations to and within east central Europe in the early and late medieval periods.;Significant part of this work is devoted to determining the legal status of the Jews in Red Ruthenia and Poland with its peculiarities and specifics. Since the Jews of Red Ruthenia, and generally speaking Poland and Lithuania, lived in the society composed of various religious, linguistic and ethnic groups, this dissertation also describes how Red Ruthenian Jews interacted with these groups, both with the Catholic minority and Orthodox majority. The Jews in Red Ruthenia, as elsewhere, lived mostly in the urban centers. The current study also tries to describe the process of building the Jewish communal structure in Red Ruthenian lands and its relations with municipal authorities and burghers.;Polish-Lithuanian Jews, in contrast to their situation in Western Europe, enjoyed an unprecedented freedom of economic activity. Much less severe restrictions were placed on Jews which resulted in a significantly broader range of the Jewish occupations in comparison to any other European state. This dissertation attempts to show the importance of Jews in the economic life of Poland-Lithuania.;In conclusion the present work provides a new perspective on the late medieval Jewish life in one of the most diverse borderlands of Europe. It argues that the Jewish settlement and economic activity lead created strong and active Jewish communities in Red Ruthenia. The importance of Jews in this region as well as the development of their communal life was proved to be much more extensive than previously thought in the scholarship.