Notes: The 1765 confirmation kept by the Krakow Jewish Community, published by M. Schorr in Yevreiskaya Starina 1 (1909), 2 (1910).

This privilege of August 1453 – only a small part of whose 46 paragraphs is presented here - was one of the most short-lived ever granted to the Jews of Poland. The King, Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (1447-1492), seems to have wanted to extend his power over his country’s Jews (note the usage, “Our Jews”), a significant urban population who played an important role in developing regional and national markets. The privilege - by which is meant not only its legal content but its physical form - was an expanded version of privileges previously granted to the Jews of Poland by Jagiellończyk’s ancestor, Kazimierz the Great in the mid-14th century, which were themselves a slightly expanded version of the first charter of rights granted to Polish Jews by Bolesław the Pious in Kalisz, 1264. However, Jagiellończyk’s version gives the Jews a number of new economic concessions. (Notice, however, that these new concessions are granted under the guise of simply renewing a previous privilege burnt in the Poznań fire). It is also the first privilege explicitly to give state backing to the organs of Jewish autonomy in Poland (paragraph 7). It was this state backing which was to allow the highly complex and sophisticated development of Jewish communities and regional councils in future centuries. However, if in this important aspect, the privilege of 1453 looks forward to future developments, in other stipulations it is clearly medieval in nature. These are the references in clauses 6 and 7, as well as in one version of the conclusion (here brought in square brackets), which demarcate the Jews as belonging to the Royal Treasury. This status of “servi camerae” was one of the characteristics of Jewish legal status in Europe during the high Middle Ages, which disappeared as a result of constitutional changes in the early modern period. In Poland, these changes stemmed from the strengthening of the nobility at the expense of monarchy. The first sign of this development was seen in 1454, where the Polish nobility, gathered at Nieszawa, forced the King to grant them a number of concessions, including the weakening of his control over Poland’s Jews and the consequent cancellation of this privilege.

↑ Back to top