August 2017 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

Breaking out of the traditional constraints of Jewish society was particularly difficult in small shtetls. Jewish communal life was closely controlled by the local umbrella community organization which hired rabbis, cantors and ritual killers of animals. Since ritual slaughter (Shechita) was a major source of income, generating around one half of the Jewish community’s income, funds and incentives were allocated in the budget to combat the unauthorized slaughter of animals.³⁹² Pressure to conform to social norms was all-pervasive. Shtetl life was far more regimented that Polish communal life in the countryside.
Every shtetl had to have its own Sabbath klapper, a sort of “town crier,” for want of a better term. The klapper’s duty was to hurry from door to door in the Jewish neighbourhood on Friday before sunset and klap, or tap, several times with a wooden mallet on the doors and shutters of Jewish shops to remind the shopkeepers of the imminent start of the Sabbath and summon them for evening prayers. The klapper would rap harder on the shutters of shops whose keepers were prone to be lax with their time-keeping, urging them to conclude their business. The latter were tempted to take advantage of the last-minute trade prior to the onset of the Sabbath at sundown, when all manual work must cease, when trading and the handling of money is not permitted.³⁹³
Those in the community who did not conform to its decrees could not count on understanding, as there was no tradition of tolerance in the ghetto. This often gave rise to conflict, retaliation, and even altercations for non-observant Jews. The following examples are illustrative:
There was some religiously based excitement, but it happened among the Jews themselves. Once a group of young Jews from the city of Zamość arrived unexpectedly in Izbica on the Sabbath—without caps and on bicycles. This was too much for Izbica; they were chased out under a hail of stones by their Orthodox brethren.³⁹⁴
Rabbi Feiwel Singer, of Ostrow-Mazowiecki [Ostrów Mazowiecki] … was arrested on the evening of Yom Kippur, with five leading members of his congregation, for inciting his congregation against a Jewish hairdresser in the town, who keeps his shop open on Saturdays. As a result of his agitation, a group of Jews proceeded to the shop on Saturday after the reading of the Law in the synagogue and smashed the windows and mirrors. On the intervention of the Union of Rabbis in Poland, the Chief State Attorney has ordered the rabbi’s release.³⁹⁵
I was born in 1930 in a small town called Narol, a typical Galician town in eastern Poland. The nearest large city was Tomaszow-Lubelski [Tomaszów Lubelski]. The majority of the population was Jewish, and the few Poles who lived there spoke Yiddish. …

My father was different from the other Jews in town in that he was not religious, only traditional. He agreed that I stop attending heder, and because of that decision, he had a lot of quarrels with the local Jews. The quarrels became worse as time went by. I remember that once, they even denounced us to the Polish authorities, who came to search our home.³⁹⁶

When youths from the Jewish soccer team in Szczebrzeszyn secretly went by wagon to a neighbouring town to play a match with a Christian team on the afternoon of the Sabbath, an incensed crowd gathered when they returned. The fathers took their sons home and gave them a severe thrashing for violating the Sabbath.³⁹⁷

As we have seen, Poles could also find themselves on the receiving end of Jewish violence. Jews were often far more at risk from fellow Jews than from the Christian population. Incidents of communal violence, which were all too frequent, were, however, seldom reported to the local authorities.³⁹⁸ Nor were many other crimes recorded in the criminal registers.³⁹⁹ It would be wrong, therefore, to attribute to Poles a particular propensity for violence. The generation born after the First World War was highly politicized and Jewish political life became particularly volatile. Various Jewish political organizations, as well as the heavily Jewish communist movement, had their own paramilitary structures, or militias, consisting of hundreds of shturmers (“storm troopers”).⁴⁰⁰ If the need arose, they could mobilize several thousand armed supporters, including members of trade unions and the criminal underworld which, according to Israeli historian Mordechai Zalkin, who has researched this topic extensively, was dominated by Jews.⁴⁰¹ (It is not surprising, therefore, that words of Jewish origin describing various types of criminal activities are rather frequent in the Polish language, thus attesting to the prominent role played by Jews in the criminal underworld.⁴⁰²)

The Bund had an impressive militia, as did its youth organization, whose uniformed Tsukunft-shturem was modeled after the Austrian Schutzbund. Its largest and most violent clashes were with the Communists, not Polish nationalists. Bernard Goldstein, who organized and headed the Bundist militia in Warsaw, escaped an attempt on his life in 1929 after the Communists passed a death sentence on him. Goldstein recalled:
the militia often found it necessary to resist Communist terror. In their campaign to split the labor movement and to destroy the Socialists, the Communists stopped at nothing. They used intimidation freely. They would often send groups armed with revolvers to break up workers’ meetings. Once they even attempted to disperse a national convention of the Jewish Transport Workers’ Union with gunfire. They did not shrink from a shooting attack of the famous Medem Sanatorium for Children in Myedzeshyn [Miedzeszyn], near Warsaw. The attacks were carried out by toughs who received from the Communists an ideological justification for their own predilection for violence.

The Bundist militia was angry and strong enough to give the Communist attackers a lesson which would have driven from their minds any desire to continue their disruptive activity.⁴⁰³

Retaliations against radical Polish movements are also noted. After some explosives damaged the Bund headquarters in Warsaw,
Bernard [Goldstein] organized a group of Bundists and Polish Socialists who went to the Falanga headquarters on Bratska [Bracka] Street in the heart of the Polish district and smashed it to bits. Everyone found there was soundly beaten.⁴⁰⁴
In a penetrating Amazon review of Bernard Goldstein’s memoir Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund,⁴⁰⁵ Jan Peczkis described a number of little-known aspects of the Bund’s policies and activities.
Goldstein features much interesting information. For instance, the Bund demanded equal rights for Jews as well as special national rights (including Yiddish language and Yiddish culture) for Jews. (pp. 76, 273-274). Obviously, these anti-assimilationists wanted to have their cake and eat it too: To be part of Poland and not part of Poland at the same time. …

The anti-Semitic violence, conducted by some militant Polish nationalists (e. g, the ONR: Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny), has been greatly hyped in Jewish publications (the best-known of which is probably Celia S. Heller: On the Edge of Destruction. See my review). In contrast, the much-greater largely-Jewish Communist violence against Jews has largely disappeared down an Orwellian memory hole. [It does not fit the standard left-wing-academic narrative of the Communists as noble, reformist-driven idealists, and it does not fit the standard Judeocentric narrative of the Jews as solely victims and—what’s more—victims of the big, bad Polish Catholics.]

Archival evidence proves that by far the greatest amount of violence, in pre-WWII Poland, came from the Communists (of whom Jews were a large fraction), and not from the ONR (oenerowcy).

…

This work is a startling exception to the tendency of Jewish authors to ignore Jew-on-Jew violence. Author Goldstein details the Communist violence, against Jews, in too many pages to mention. However, it is particularly worth noting the many times that Communist violence became lethal, especially with the use of firearms. (e. g, pp. 171–173, 189–191, 197–199, 202, 227, 283, 313, 319–321, 343, 346).

During WWII, the Soviets murdered the main Bundist leaders, Henryk Ehrlich and Viktor [Wiktor] Alter. [Ironically, we commonly hear the exculpation, by neo-Stalinist authors such as Jan T. Gross, for Jewish support of Communism in 1939–1941 and 1944–on, as caused by “murderous Polish anti-Semitism”. Lo and behold, many Jews had no problems supporting Communism in spite of the much-greater-murderousness of the Communists against Jews.]

The Bund could dish out violence as well as receive it. In fact, by the late 1930’s, in Warsaw alone, the Bund had a 2,000-man militia. (p. 278). During times of violence, when Bundist members were arrested, other Bundists tried to bribe the freedom of their arrested comrades from the Polish police. (p. 385).

From the beginning, there were differences between leftists on the future of the Jews. For instance, the SDKPil (and part of its Communist successor) and PPS-Lewica (PPS-left) favored Jewish assimilation (p. 343), while the Bund was always anti-assimilationist and separatist. Many otherwise-Comsymp Jews felt that the Soviet Communist movement (especially the Bolsheviks) were insufficiently deferential to Jewish-specific demands. …

The remainder of the Bund--the vast majority--continued an at-worst distant admiration of the Communists. They spoke of the Bolshevik revolution as an “example of the politics the Socialist parties should adapt in all countries” and as something “immensely significant … (and moreover) it was possible to have a revolutionary-Socialist oriented International, without its splitting politics, with Socialists and Communists working together.” (pp. 41–42).

In 1920, the “21 Conditions”, most of them stipulated by Lenin, specified the means by which Socialist parties could join the Comintern (Communist Third International). (p. 61). By then, Medem’s “rightist” group, evidently never significant to begin with, was essentially gone. The centrist faction of the Bund accepted 16 of the 21 points, and the larger leftist majority of the Bund was ready to accept 19.5 of the 21 points. The mere 1.5-point difference was all that prevented the Bund from joining the Comintern (p. 57): That is how close mainstream Bundism was to Communism! Even then, part of the Bund, the Kombund, split-off from the Bund and joined the Communists, contributing to the rancorous ongoing Communist attempt to bring the Bund into total submission to Communism. (pp. 57–58).

By way of introduction, the student of Polish-Jewish relations is probably familiar with Polish Cardinal August Hlond’s much-quoted and much-maligned 1936 statement on “Jews as freethinkers”. While Goldstein does not talk about religion, he does shed some indirect light on the Bund as a factor in the growing atheization of Poland’s Jews.

Let us consider Bundist provocations against religion. Although Goldstein describes the Bund merely as “secular”, it soon becomes obvious that it shared much of the militant atheism of the Communists. In what can be nothing less than a calculated insult to religious Jews, the BUND started to print its daily newspaper, the Folkstsaytung, on the Sabbath (Saturday). Moreover, young Bundists, the Tsukunfistn, deliberately went out into religious Jewish neighborhoods, and loudly awoke the sleeping religious Jews on the Sabbath morning, while hawking the newspaper. When some of the understandably-offended Sabbath practitioners reacted with violence against the young Bundists, the Bund whined about “Hasidic terror” and (what else?) the “right of free speech”, and sent its militia to defend the young Bundist provocateurs. (pp. 149-151). Goldstein makes heroes out of them.

Whatever the professed differences between Communists and Bundists, actions speak louder than words. They show the Bund’s true colors.

The Bund joined with the Communists in defaming the Polish nation. It repeated the stock Communist propaganda about Poland the aggressor in the 1920 Polish-Bolshevik War, and Poland as a (what else?) imperialistic nation. (pp. 47-54). It also mouthed the canard that equated Bereza Kartuska with the Nazi concentration camps. (p. 299).

In Poland, Bundists had no problem marching in May Day parades, right alongside openly-Communist units. (p. 31). Moreover, this was no temporary fad: It persisted into the 1930’s. (p. 255). Bundist organizations, such as the Kultur-Lige (Culture League), welcomed Communist members. (p. 209). In addition, the Bundist and Communist labor movements continued to overlap: The Bund did not require its members to leave Communist-controlled labor unions. (p. 202).

Perhaps most galling of all, Bundist and other Jewish lawyers sided with the Communists. Bernard Goldstein comments, “It was a principle among the Socialist lawyers that, despite the anti-Socialist assaults, invective, and murderousness on the part of the Communists, they should nevertheless be defended in court. The Socialist lawyers, and even some liberal ones, used to do this pro bono or for a minimal honorarium.” (p. 228). Clearly, then, by this very act alone, the Bundists were allied with the Communists in the attempted subversion of the Polish state.
The Zionist Revisionist student movement, by far the largest Jewish student movement in interwar Poland, and especially its militant wing Betar, a Fascist-leaning paramilitary organization that counted more than 40,000 members in 1934, carried out verbal and physical attacks on the fairly small Jewish assimilationist student movement because of its promotion of Polishness, contacts with Christian Poles and loyalty to the Polish State.⁴⁰⁶ Zionist student “corporations,” like others, were also quite adept at organizing “counterattacks” against Polish students:
Armed with heavy canes, the Betaria members under the command of the burly manager of the Student House would make forays into the vicinity of the University [of Warsaw] and partake in defense brawls. One of the counterattacks remained in my memory for a long time. … Someone in the fraternity thought of a strategy that would teach a lesson to the more aggressive hooligans. Members of the Betaria armed with heavy canes waited at the gate of the University and soon engaged a group of students from the anti-Semitic Endek organization. At a certain moment the Betaria fighters seemed to lose their nerve and started retreating, but at the same time jeering the hooligans who pursued them with a renewed vigor. The retreating forces managed to lure their pursuers toward a Jewish neighborhood where there was a concentration of tough Jewish teamsters who were used to handling heavy loads. The teamsters who had been alerted to the stratagem waited in the gates of houses and suddenly the situation took a different turn. The retreating Betaria boys turned around and with the added force of teamsters faced the pursuers, who only now perceived the trap. The beating the Endeks received made them more cautious, and from then on they confined their actions nearer to their own territory.⁴⁰⁷
The level of mutual hatred among these various factions ran high. As one Jew from Warsaw recalled,
You should have been here, in the Jewish district, before the war on May 1: on Gęsia Street, on Franciszkańska Street … Hashomer Hatzair walked separately, the left and right wings of Poalei Zion walked separately, Hehalutz walked separately. Hashomer carried their slogan: “Down with the Revisionists and Fascists.” Bund walked with their banner: “Down with Hashomer Hatzair—Fascists,” “Down with Beitar—Fascists,” “Down with Hehalutz—Fascists.” That’s the way it was.⁴⁰⁸
Even Jewish high schools were not immune from poltically motivated strife, as a student of Tuszia Gymansium in Wilno recalled: “Within the gymnasium there were intensive social, political and cultural activity and most of the students were members of youth movements. The discussions were very vociferous, and sometimes developed into open fights.” The annual elections for the student council was accompanied by virulent and “sometimes violent” debates.⁴⁰⁹

It is not surprising therefore to learn that Jewish community leaders, despite pressures by the community to keep such matters out of the hands of the state, often sought the intervention of the Polish authorities when they sensed a serious internal threat to their communal life. The rabbi of Szydłów wrote to the starosta (county supervisor or district administrative officer):

On behalf of the complaining parents of the entire Jewish community, I would be greatly obliged if you would kindly put an end to the impudence of the young, and not allow them to enter the Hehaluts [Pioneer] organization, which is undesirable for the Szydłów settlement, as it leads to the corruption of the youth, which is prohibited by our religion.⁴¹⁰
Orthodox Jews complained to the authorities in Chmielnik about the fact that Communists had infiltrated a slate of Jewish candidates for the municipal elections.⁴¹¹ However, secular influences, including Communust ones, had made deep inroads within the Jewish community in the interwar period. These new ideas did not necessarily represent a repudiation of Judaism, rather they were regarded by many as a secularized mutation of conventional Jewish thinking.
While studying the teachings of Marx and Engels, Lassale and Medem, the Jewish poor in the shtetl saw how smoothly the new teachings fitted into the words of the ancient prophets. … Many of the young Bundists from the crowded, poor streets of the shtetl, educated on the Talmud, didn’t actually have such a long way to go. Later, when the Bund became a powerful party with its own candidates for the Polish parliament and municipal bodies, thousands of religious Jews gave their votes to those “godless socialists.” They were not frightened of the sharp slogans, for they sounded familiar. They had heard them from the prophets.⁴¹²
In business dealings too Jews favoured their own and discriminated against Poles by promoting preferential hiring for Jews (rabbis were known to exhort Jewish employers to dismiss Poles and hire Jews in their place), by boycotting Polish businesses, and by resorting to various unfair practices such as undercutting prices below cost, intimidation, coercion, refusing to lease commercial premises to Poles, cutting off supplies, and other “sharp” business practices.⁴¹³ In a study on Jewish tavern keeping in the late 1700s through the mis- and late-1800s, historian Glenn Dynner writes:
Contrary to Werner Sombart’s claim that Jews were the first to be committed to the “spirit of capitalism" and the principles of free trade, monopolistic practices and ethnic protectionism were as yet unquestioned in Polish Jewish society. Age-old communal ordinances forbade Jews to compete with and outbid fellow Jews (with limited success, as we shall see), while other ordinances attempted to protect the Jewish community from external competition “lest money fall into non-Jewish hands.” …

The same ethnic protectionism increasingly prevailed in the liquor trade. … While resorting to a curse [against would-be Polish competitors] may seem extreme, the increase in non-Jewish competitiveness was perceived as an act of aggression against the Jewish community, suggesting an economic aspect to the emerging traditionalism.⁴¹⁴

Thus the slogan pushed by Polish nationalists, “Buy from Poles,”⁴¹⁵ had an ingrained and longstanding counterpart in the way Jews had managed their business affairs for centuries,⁴¹⁶ as well as in ongoing communal propaganda. According to a non-Polish author, “About 1907 they [Jews] began a boycotting policy against Poles, forbidding their countrymen, for instance, to consult Polish doctors, and in 1909 when the Poles proclaimed a boycott of German products in Poland, the boycott failed because the Jews lent their support to German commerce.”⁴¹⁷ In June 1912, the populist Yiddish-language newspaper in Łódź, Lodzher togblat, renewed calls of previous years for exclusively “Jewish factories.”⁴¹⁸ An appeal issued by a Jewish Farmers’ Cooperative (probably in the early 1920s) reads: “It is also necessary to point out that by buying our dairy products marketed under the name of khema [‘butter’ in Hebrew] you are supporting the productive Jewish farmers and are performing a national duty by helping the Jewish farmers to keep their land.”⁴¹⁹ Other minorities, such as the Ukrainians, also set up ethnic-based cooperatives and conducted economic boycotts that entailed setting up checkpoints at Jewish shops, smashing Jewish stores and plundering of property.⁴²⁰ It is not surprising, therefore, that Poles did likewise, given their weak position in commerce, trade and industry. As Vladimir Jabotinsky points out, the cooperative phenomenon “has little to do with any conscious will to harm the Jews qua Jews, but is rather inherent in the very nature of the development. It would oust the rural shopkeeper as surely as if he were an American or a China-man; but he happens to be Jew, who has nowhere to go.”⁴²¹ Jabotinsky does not view the economic rivalry of the interwar period solely in racist terms either: “there was no other way out: ‘it’s either my son or the Jew’s son, for there is only one loaf.’” Jabotinsky adds, “Apart from the hooligan element, there was little actual hatred of Jews in Polish society.”⁴²²

Needless to add, there was no pervasive boycott of Jewish businesses by Poles as otherwise most Jewish businesses would have folded. Conditions on the ground cast matters in a rather different light than that pushed in Jewish nationalist literature. Most Poles shopped at Jewish stores and most farmers traded with Jews, and in many localities the boycott had no impact on Jewish businesses.⁴²³ As survivors from Wierzbnik noted, “since virtually all the stores were owned by Jews, Poles had nowhere else to shop and the economic impact was thus mitigated.”⁴²⁴ The boycott promoted by the National Democrats was even boycotted by those who organized rallies in support of it. The following example is not atypical:

To generate support for the peasant leaders’ policies huge rallies were organized in the marketplace of Kolbuszowa … What provided at least some small comfort to us was the fact that the leaders used my father’s store as their headquarters on days when rallies were scheduled. Also they continued to purchase boycotted goods from my father for distribution to the peasants, making certain that these transactions were kept secret.⁴²⁵
One should not be surprised by the failure of Poles to gain significant ground. As Jan Peczkis put it,
The economic playing field, between Poles and Jews, was very, very far from level. Jewish economic privilege, having lasted so many centuries, had become so entrenched, so variegated, so versatile, and so sophisticated, that it was almost impossible for Poles to even put a dent into it. Poles could hardly ever compete successfully with Jews, and to start businesses.
Historian Rosa Lehmann traces the Poles’ economic efforts, with their very modest successes, in Jaśliska near Krosno, Galicia, beginning with some business initiatives, and half-hearted boycotts of Jews, in the 1890s, and then proceeding through the 1930s. She writes,