The Jewish intelligentsia as a social group appeared on the Polish lands in the second half of the nineteenth century and, until the turn of the century, it was most often associated with assimilationists. However, it was gradually expanding and, with the development of Jewish national movements and ideology evoking class identity, this group increasingly often included Zionists, Folkists, socialists of various options, communists, and finally people associated with the Orthodox Jewish party commonly known as the Aguda. While ethnic and religious issues were theoretically inconsequential for the communists, the basis of Jewish identity for the Zionists was ethnicity and religion for the Orthodox. Regardless, the Jewish and non-Jewish intelligentsia had a sense of a social mission, and a need to act for the benefit of the public, and to be involved in public, political, and cultural life. What set the Jewish intelligentsia apart (not only the formal one, consisting of intellectual workers with higher or secondary education) was its multilingualism, the inevitability of struggling with anti-Semitism, and perhaps certain internal brokenness that was more frequent than in the case of other nations. Research into the Jewish intelligentsia encounters many methodological problems concerning both its very definition and its “Jewish” specification. It is possible to extend the formal requirements of “an intellectual” (profession, education) and discuss the intelligentsia without any formal education or the intellectual elites (or: secular intellectual elites). However, it is harder to determine whether an atheist and a Communist working among the Jewish workers or a baptised founder of a Jewish orphanage are leaders and representatives of Jewish, Polish or perhaps Polish-Jewish elites. In the article, the author wants to indicate some problems related to the research into the intelligentsia and the intellectual elites of the Jewish population in Poland in the second half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century