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Located in the Poznań province west of Łódź, Kalisz was for centuries a border town between Poland and Germany. One of the oldest cities in Poland, Kalisz also played a pivotal role in Polish Jewish history: in 1264, Prince Bolesław V the Chaste, ruler of the western part of Poland (Wielkopolska), was the first to grant a charter to the local Jewish community, giving them settlement rights, legal protection, and certain religious and financial freedoms. This "Statute of Kalisz" (largely copied from a similar statute in neighbouring Bohemia) was extended to the whole country by King Casimir the Great and expanded by later Polish rulers. It provided the legal foundation for Jewish rights in Poland. ==History from the 12th century to World War II== There had probably been Jews in Kalisz since the 12th century, when refugees from the Crusader massacres fled to Poland from the Rhineland. Coins from the area stamped with names in Hebrew letters reveal that Jewish minters were active in the town during the 12th century. As Polish Jewry developed rapidly in the early modern period, so did the Kalisz Jewish community. In the mid-14th century, Kalisz Jews received permission to build a synagogue, which stood for over four centuries until destroyed by fire. The Kalisz Jewish community played an important role in the Council of the Four Lands, the supracommunal body that represented Polish Jewry to the king. Jews made their living as moneylenders, craftsmen, and import-export merchants dealing in livestock, horses, agricultural produce and textiles. The Jewish merchants of Kalisz played an important role at the international fairs in the German cities of Leipzig and Breslau. The Jewish population declined somewhat in the 17th and 18th centuries, due to the disruption of the Polish-Swedish War (1655–1659), as well as fires and plague in the 18th century. Even so, by 1793—when the region was annexed by Prussia—Jews owned about a quarter of the buildings in the town. At that time Jews constituted 40 percent of the population of Kalisz; they dominated the textile trade and made up half the craftsmen in the town. From 1815 until 1914 Kalisz was under Russian rule. Russian authorities expelled Jewish residents who lacked Russian citizenship from Kalisz in 1881. A few years later, by 1897, the Jewish population of the town numbered 7,580 or about one-third of the total population. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of the Jews in Kalisz」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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