Paradisus Judaeorum

"Jewish Paradise" and related terms redirect here; it is not to be confused with Heaven in Judaism.
1605 Latin text that has been described as a pasquinade "planted" at celebration of the 11 December 1605 wedding of Poland's King Sigismund III Vasa to Constance of Austria.[1]

"Paradisus Judaeorum" (Latin: Jewish paradise) is a Latin phrase which became one of four components of a 19th-century Polish-language proverb[2] that described the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795) as "heaven for the nobility, purgatory for townspeople, hell for peasants, paradise for Jews."[3][a]

The proverb's earliest attestation is an anonymous 1606 Latin pasquinade that begins, "Regnum Polonorum est" ("The Kingdom of Poland is"). Stanisław Kot surmised that its author may have been a Catholic townsman, perhaps a cleric, who criticized what he regarded as defects of the realm;[5] the pasquinade excoriates virtually every group and class of society.[6][7][8]

The phrase "Paradisus Iudaeorum" appears as the epigram to a gallery at Warsaw's POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews that ends in a "Corridor of Fire symbolis[ing] the Khmelnytsky Uprising" (1648-1657). Mikołaj Gliński writes that Jews consider the latter event "the biggest national catastrophe since the destruction of Solomon's Temple."[9]

Some authors have read the phrase "Paradisus Iudaeorum" as a comment on the favorable situation of Jews in the Kingdom of Poland (and subsequently in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth), a polity that was notable for granting Jews special privileges in the 1264 Statute of Kalisz while Jews faced persecution and murder in western Europe.[10][11] Others have read the phrase as antisemitic – as suggesting that the Jews of the Polish Kingdom and Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth were overprivileged.[b] Most present-day usage relates to the first interpretation.[2]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference kot1937withquote2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ a b Konieczny, Piotr (2021-06-23). "From Xenophobia to Golden Age: "Jewish Paradise" Proverb as a Linguistic Reclamation". Contemporary Jewry. 41 (2): 517–537. doi:10.1007/s12397-021-09380-4. ISSN 1876-5165. S2CID 236146777.
  3. ^ Gromelski, Tomasz (2013). "Liberty and liberties in early modern Poland–Lithuania". In Skinner, Quentin; Gelderen, Martin van (eds.). Freedom and the Construction of Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 233 (215–234). ISBN 978-1-107-03307-8.
  4. ^ Krzyżanowski, Julian (1958). Mądrej głowie dość dwie słowie: Trzy wieki przysłów polskich [Word to the Wise: Three centuries of Polish proverbs]. Warsawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. p. 435.
  5. ^ Kot, Stanisław (1937). Polska rajem dla Żydów, piekłem dla chłopów, niebem dla szlachty [Poland: paradise for Jews, hell for peasants, heaven for the nobility]. Warszawa: Kultura i Nauka. p. 6. OCLC 459874686.
  6. ^ "Regnum Polonorum est: Paradisus Judaeorum, infernus rusticorum". Wielkopolska Digital Library.
  7. ^ Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna (28 December 2016). "Polin: 'Ultimate Lost Object'". Studia Litteraria et Historica. 5 (5): 7 (1–8). doi:10.11649/slh.2016.002.
  8. ^ Krzyżanowski 1958, p. 436.
  9. ^ Mikołaj Gliński (27 October 2014). "A Virtual Visit to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews". Culture.pl. Retrieved 2018-09-25.
  10. ^ Covington, Coline (2017). Everyday Evils: A Psychoanalytic View of Evil and Morality. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. p. 122, note 1. ISBN 978-1-317-59304-1.
  11. ^ Engel, David (2012). "Salo Baron's View of the Middle Ages in Jewish History: Early Sources". In Engel, David; Schiffman, Lawrence H.; Wolfson, Elliot R. (eds.). Studies in Medieval Jewish Intellectual and Social History: Festschrift in Honor of Robert Chazan. Leiden: BRILL. p. 313 (299–316). ISBN 978-90-04-22233-5.
  12. ^ a b Matyjaszek, Konrad (2017). "'You need to speak Polish': Antony Polonsky in an interview with Konrad Matyjaszek". Studia Litteraria et Historica (6): 10. doi:10.11649/slh.1706.
  13. ^ Matyjaszek 2017, p. 10, note 21.


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