This chapter provides an overview of the Polish–Lithuanian Jews' flight westward after 1648. Three major issues underlie the discussion as a whole. First is the nature of Jewish solidarity in those years and the fate of the Jewish refugees outside Poland–Lithuania when the religious imperative to ransom captives was not a relevant issue. Second is the policies adopted by the states of the Holy Roman Empire toward the refugees and their impact on the refugees themselves as they tried to rebuild their lives on German lands. Third is the new social and cultural formations created by the encounter of “eastern” and “western” Ashkenazim in the wake of the refugee crisis and their consequences for the development of German Jewry in both the short and long term.
Rabbi S. R. Hirsch and his Perception of Germany and German Jewry