Description: Jewish life in early modern Poland was characterized by an adherence to the halakhah that Polish Jewry had inherited from medieval Franco-German Jewry, and almost all aspects of Jewish activity, even the most personal of matters, fell within its purview. Ideals Face Reality shows how the Polish community unconsciously and consciously transformed some of its traditional values from an earlier age.

Edward Fram draws upon rabbinic legal decisions (responsa), talmudic and legal exegesis, the ordinances of Polish Jewry's political leadership, Polish legal records, and the responsa of some of the outstanding posequin of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to show how Polish jurists responded to unfamiliar circumstance. Fram examines cases in which the halakhah confronted unfamiliar circumstances or the special needs of individuals or groups within the community. Faced with questions of ambiguity, rabbis had to reconcile contemporary realities with the demands of a tradition perceived to represent divine law.

Ideals Face Reality shows how rabbis struggled to maintain Jewish communal law and preserve divine law. Students and scholars of East European Jewry and rabbinical law will find this study invaluable.

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