"Theodore Weeks examines how the ideal of assimilation was gradually replaced by more exclusionary and aggressive ideologies, culminating in the early twentieth century in widespread Polish antisemitism. He argues that several long-term factors - economic change, political and cultural repression, the general intensification of national consciousness at the time, and the revolution of 1905 - played a part in the deterioration of Polish-jewish relations. As the hope for Polish cultural and political autonomy dwindled, Jews became an easy target for Poles."--BOOK JACKET.