In beginning of the twentieth century, Kazimierz was discovered by Jewish artists. A Jewish community had existed in Kazimierz since the Middle Ages, and this Jewish population grew with every century. At the turn of the nineteenth century, there were 3,000 inhabitants in the town, most of them Jews. In that respect, Kazimierz was similar to hundreds of Polish towns, especially those to the east of the Vistula. Nevertheless, Kazimierz managed to stand out, although at first glance it is quite difficult to say what made it so different. Still, both Poles and Jews observed Kazimierz’s singularity. Of greatest interest is that the common denominator for Poles and Jews was King Kazimierz the Great. The well-known legend about the King and his beloved Esterka, a Jewish girl, was a manifestation of the Kazimierz Jews’ veneration for the great King. The author and poet Konrad Bielski wrote about this phenomenon: “We are royal Jews, they used to say, and I think they believed that Kazimierz the Great himself had chosen them to settle in the town and had given them special secrets to guard. And they were so separate, so different from others.” Another witness to the times, Zygmunt Kamiński, who participated in a painting workshop in 1901, also noticed the very specific nature of the Jews of Kazimierz. He wrote, “Generally, the Jews of Kazimierz were so different, so ancient, old and almost monumental—marked with signs of the past, tradition, and time that had been stopped.” For Jewish culture, Kazimierz had gradually become an archetypical model of the shtetl—a typical small Jewish town. If for Polish culture Kazimierz was a synonym of the state of being Polish, for Jews, Kazimierz became a symbol of Jewishness. Such a perception of Kazimierz by Jews was shaped by Jewish painters and writers. Most of them were those artists who at the beginning of the twentieth century, after the failure of assimilationism, decided to go back to tradition and folklore associated with the shtetl.

The first Jewish artist whose presence in Kazimierz is well documented was Józef Mojżesz Gabowicz (1861– 1939). A great sculptor who was widely known in Europe, Gabowicz created busts of many famous people (among whom was Sara Bernhardt) and was awarded the Legion of Honor order in 1910. In 1901, he settled in Warsaw, and it was probably at that time that he visited Kazimierz. One result of that visit was a small pastel drawing depicting Kazimierz as seen from the Three Crosses Hill. Soon many other artists, some of them relatively obscure today, started coming to the town. After 1910, Stanisława Centnerszwerowa often painted Kazimierz.

Jewish writers started coming to the town at the same time as Jewish painters, and it was not by pure chance that most of them chose to write their works in Yiddish. Sholem Asch’s visit was most significant. He described Kazimierz in his poetic novel A Shtetl (The Village), which was published in 1905. Although the name “Kazimierz” did not appear in this work, it was Asch’s goal in this novel to depict a full year’s cycle in a typical shtetl. Thus he created the literary foundations for the movement in Jewish literature and culture that drew upon the shtetl’s traditions and habits. Acknowledged as the father of Yiddish literature, Isaac Leib Peretz incorporated those traditions into his Folktales (the title itself suggests the theme—Jewish folklore), but this work also had no mention of Kazimierz. However, the town meant much to Peretz, as in 1909, when he commissioned the Jewish artist Ber Kratka to illustrate the book, Peretz specifically requested that the illustrations should depict Kazimierz. Zusman Segałowicz, who was also called “the bard from Kazimierz,” wrote directly about the town in his verse and prose.

From Waldemar Odorowski, Artistic Colony in Kazimierz Dolny. Centuries 19^th–21^st, trans. Joanna Roszak, revised by Halina Goldberg and Virginia Whealton (Kazimierz Dolny: Nadwiślańskie Museum in Kazimierz Dolny, 2005), 37–38.