The Vilnius magistracy and the Jewish community in the 18th century

ENA somewhat forgotten historiographic fact is that 1998 is the 75th anniversary of the publishing of a book written by A. Janulaitis, entitled "The Jews in Lithuania." Questions raised in it were not researched either during the period between the wars in Lithuania, which, having lost Vilnius, in fact severed ties with its GDL multi-nation tradition, and had little interest in its fate, nor during the Soviet period, when such research was unwelcome. Even academic works, and the two volume "History of the City of Vilnius" limit themselves to noting that the Jewish community (the kahal) lived in isolation from other townspeople, that it had its own laws, and that if it came into contact with other levels of the population, it probably did so only in court. It was different in Poland: there was an Institute of Jewish History, which regularly printed its works in an ongoing publication. However, it allocated most of its research to the history of the Jewish community itself, and did not delve deeply into its relations with other levels of the town's population, and secondly, it limited itself to the Polish Kingdom, with reference to episodes from the history of the GDL only for the sake of comparison.Therefore, in discussing the relationship between the communities of the two faiths, which existed during the Gaon Eliyahu's time, we will have to rely on the historiographic tradition of the end of the 19th century, and the surviving documents of only one institution - the Vilnius magistracy. It would seem appropriate to briefly describe the developments within these communities, from the time of their founding up to the 18th century, to review the legal acts which regulated their inter-relations, and to illuminate the condition of these relations during the changeable 18th century. What the Christian townspeople and Jewish communities had in common was the fact that they were made up of foreigners who had brought with them from other European lands, formulated modes of living, and legal norms which were later confirmed by privileges granted by the kings of the Republic of Two Nations [p. 305-306].