Conclusion

This concluding chapter assesses whether the fate of the Polish Jewish refugees in each of the three major arenas in which they found themselves was really a single, interconnected refugee crisis or whether there were, in fact, three different crises sparked by a common cause: the mid-seventeenth-century wars of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Underlying all of the differences in the conditions in each of the three regions were numerous commonalities. Perhaps most important was the sense of solidarity that induced Jews to come to the aid of other Jews in distress. The term most commonly used at the time to describe this connection was “brotherhood.” The phenomena examined in this book are indeed, therefore, aspects of a single refugee crisis. The chapter then considers how large the problem was and how well Jewish society dealt with its challenges. It also highlights the effects of the refugee crisis on Jewish society, both while it was happening and in the longer term, and the importance of the crisis for the course of early modern and modern Jewish history in general.