Summary
The best known of the super-Kehilla organizations that tied the Jewish communities of Poland, Lithuania, Moravia and western Hungary together in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, as Dowty presents it (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 480-500).
Details
- Such organizations (known sometimes as a medina, the term used in modern Hebrew for “state”) were composed of representatives sent by the various local communities and sometimes elected their own executive officials; they carried out fewer direct governmental functions than the kehilla itself but dealt with matters of common interest to all the Jewish communities, such as relations with governments and other external authorities (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 480-495).
- The Council of the Four Lands was dissolved in 1765, a symptom, in Dowty’s account, of the decline of Jewish self-governing institutions as Poland disintegrated politically and economically and external authorities increasingly interfered in internal Jewish matters (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 495-510).