Bidspirit auction | (POLAND). Royal Universal (Proclamation) Liquidating

(POLAND). Royal Universal (Proclamation) Liquidating the Debt of Jewish Kahals. Manuscript in Polish. Official copy. Three pages. Foxed, central folds with hole and some loss. Folio. Warsaw,   29th February, 1792.     Since the 17th century, Jewish communal authorities (Kahals) in Poland had accumulated millions of zlotys in debt, leveraging not only communal property, but even the personal property of community members.     This precarious situation became a full-blown crisis with the 1764 disbandment of the Council of the Four Lands (Va’ad Arba Aratzot) and many local Kahals, which left creditors unsure from whom to claim their money and unwilling to lend further sums. The sudden lack of available credit, and increasing pressure from lenders had severe effects on the financial health of many Jewish communities in Poland.     Thus, in 1792, along with numerous other reforms intended to save the stagnant Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, King Stanisław II August Poniatowski sought to settle the issue of Jewish debt once and for all. The present document details how in the course of the next few months, all Kahals’ debts would be systematically liquidated by regional courts.     See Gershon David Hundert, The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatów in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1992) and Moshe J. Rosman, “The Indebtedness of the Lublin Kahal in the 18th Century, ” in Studies in the History of the Jews in Old Poland: In Honor of Jacob Goldberg, Scripta Hierosolymitana 38, ed. Adam Teller, pp. 166–183.