August 2017 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

; translation of E. Leoni, ed., Rokitno (Volin) ve-ha-sevivah: Sefer edut ve-zikaron (Tel Aviv: Former Residents of Rokitno in Israel, 1967) 45, 65–66, 87–112, 167. Joseph Schupack describes similar conditions in Radzyń Podlaski, where Jewish religious-based nationalism thrived:
My small existence, like that of my friends, centered around my parents’ home, the Hebrew school and the Zionist youth organization, Hashomer-Hazair. There, on the fertile ground of the Diaspora, we were nourished with love for Eretz-Israel. It was unnecessary to teach Zionism; we were born in Zionism and grew up with it. The Polish national holidays of May 3 and November 11 were only pro forma holidays for us; our holidays were Purim and Hanukah. The biblical prophets and Bilaik were our poets. Negev, Judea and Galilee were our provinces. The pictures we drew as children always depicted the sun, palm trees and the Star of David. Our coins went into the Keren-Kayemeth piggy banks. We were always concerned about recent developments in Eretz-Israel. When we weren’t speaking Yiddish with each other, Hebrew became our common language. Thus we lived our own lives. I was supposed to go to Palestine and attend the agricultural school of Ben-Shemen, but things turned out differently. There were only a few Jews who were willing to do without the cultural or religious ties to Judaism in order to assimilate into Polish society.

See Joseph Schupack, The Dead Years ([New York]: Holocaust Library, 1986), 6. This self-imposed isolation with its negative preconceptions of the “hostile” environment surrounding it appears to have a direct correlation to the holding and disseminating of primitive prejudices against Poles harboured by Jewish society. This memoir is littered with such examples: “Polish children had ingested anti-Semitism along with their mothers’ milk” (p. 3); “The Polish anti-Semites, a group largely identical with the ruling class, thought they should equal or even surpass the Nazis’ intense hatred of Jews” (p. 5); “We children had our first amusing moment when [Polish] officers carrying maps … asked us the way to Rumania” (p. 8); “the power of the Nazis was based partly on the considerable support which anti-Jewish laws received among the Polish population. It was not by chance that Poland was chosen as the place for the extermination of the Jews” (p. 59); “I also think about the Poles who helped my friends and me when we were in grave danger. Although their number is less than in other countries …” (p. 185); “Without their collaboration, quite possibly every third or fourth Jew in Poland might have remained alive” (p. 186).

61 Norman Salsitz describes how, in the interwar years, when buildings were obligated to display the flag on national holidays, he made the rounds in his small town of Kolbuszowa to bring to the attention of Jews that they had sewed together the flags incorrectly: “Many people sewed the red segment on top of the white; but that unfortunately was the Czech flag … In the Polish flag the white area was above the red.” See Norman Salsitz, as told to Richard Skolnik, A Jewish Boyhood in Poland: Remembering Kolbuszowa (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 64–65, 70–71, 126.

62 Candid Jewish authors do not hide this fact. For example, Isaac Deutscher acknowledges that “From the outset Zionism worked towards the creation of a purely Jewish state and was glad to rid the country of its Arab inhabitants.” See Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, 137. Even today there is a strong movement, as evidenced in the proposal for a Basic Law on Israel—the Nation State of the Jewish people, to turn Israel into a purely Jewish state in which minorities are at best tolerated on the sidelines.

63 Janusz Korczak, The Ghetto Years, 1939–1940 (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters’ House and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1983), 128.

64 Arthur L. Goodhart, Poland and the Minority Races (New York: Brentano’s, 1920), 170–72.

65 Salsitz, A Jewish Boyhood in Poland, 201–202.

66 Ibid., 25. Goodhart also saw an anti-Polish play in a Jewish theatre in Warsaw, to which the “audience was most enthusiastic. … The audience consisted chiefly of young people, all of whom were dressed in the modern European style. ” According to Goodhart, “In this play a young Jewish widow marries a Pole, who is anxious to get her money. She changes her religion, but in spite of this her drunken husband abuses and ridicules her. Finally, she leaves her home in despair, while her cousin, who has remained true to her faith, marries a young Jew and lives happily ever after.” Ibid., 134.

67 Hania and Gaither Warfield, Call Us to Witness: A Polish Chronicle (New York and Chicago: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1945), 49–50.

68 Raymond Leslie Buell, Poland: Key to Europe, Second revised edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), 308–9.

69 Authors sympathetic to Poles have underscored the fact that economics has long divided Polish Jews and gentiles. C.M.A.Phillips wrote in 1923: “The first trade of the Jew in Poland was the slave trade. Money lending and the ubleasing of State revenues next developed …. then tavern-keeping and the liquor traffic, which became in time almost exclusively a Jewish business; finally, a general trading and brokerage in all commodities … Money-lending, in the days when such business knew no regulations and the profits were unlimited, naturally led to extortion and usury; and out of it all grew inevitably that bitter feeling which such trade always engenders between lender and borrower—in this case between Jew and Pole.” See C.M.A. Phillips, The New Poland (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923), 288.

70 W. D. Rubinstein, “Jews in the Economic Elites of Western Nations and Antisemitism,” The Jewish Journal of Sociology, vol. 42, nos. 1 and 2 (2000): 5–35, especially at pp. 8–9, 18–19.

71 Real output in Poland fell by more than 20%, thus exceeding Austria and Germany’s drop. The rate of decrease in most other countries was substantially smaller. See Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 234. According to another source, between 1928 and 1932 the wage index fell by 61 percent and industrial output declined by 40 percent. See Alexander V. Prusin, The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 114.

72 Joseph Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919–1939 (New York: Mouton, 1983), 42 (Table 6), 231, 253–56. The argument that Jews generally avoided land ownership, and agriculture, because they were forbidden to do so is baseless. They did so by choice. In medieval Poland, there had been no restrictions on Jews owning land, and the prohibitions against land ownership, in other nations, were no more decisive than those, for example, directed against Jewish involvement in coin minting, in which the Jews nevertheless engaged. See Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 41, 273.

The image of Jews as poverty-stricken and persecuted was reinforced by publications such as Roman Vishniac’s photographic A Vanished World. It turns out, however, that Vishniac had been sent by the Joint Distrubution Committee “on a very specific assignment: to document not the fullness of Eastern European life buts its most needy, vulnerable corners for a fund-raising project. … The most extensive falsification … is in the captions, the bulk of which Vishniac wrote after the war. Many include incredibly vivid captions—too vivid—as well as dramatic narratives that either could not have happened or could not have happened the way Vishniac presented them.” See Alana Newhouse, “A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac,” New York Times Magazine, April 4, 2010.

73 Ludwik Ręgorowicz, “Obraz Dąbrowy Tarnowskiej i powiatu dąbrowskiego od końca XIX w. do wybuchu II wojny światowej,” in Rocznik Tarnowski 1999/2000 (Tarnów, 2000), 130. 

74 Beatrice C. Baskerville, The Polish Jew, His Social and Economic Value (New York: MacMillan, 1906), 36–37. The British author’s understanding of Jews is quite different from that of Westerners, and she points out, in the Preface, that her conclusions are supported by eight years’ residence in Russian-ruled central Poland, at the turn of the century. She asks, “Can he [the Westerner] imagine the capital of Poland, the most civilized city in Russia, the link between Europe and Asia, where every third man is a Jew, where the trade and commerce are in the hands of the Jews and where Jewish organizations have openly declared their intention of converting the Imperial army to the tenets of Socialism and of gaining the greatest amount of political influence...?” Baskerville also points out that for the most part Poles and Jews lived in amity, notwithstanding the anti-Semitic undercurrent, which was normally dormant and otherwise lacking in aim and energy—completely unlike Russian anti-Semitism. (Pp. 57, 127, 144, 150.) The Catholic clergy opposed pogroms and the blood libel (pp. 141, 146).

As for blame, Baskerville faults with both sides: “But to the mere observer it appears that there has been a good deal to forgive on both sides; and today, at any rate, the Jews are as anti-Polish as the Poles are anti-Semitic. They do not want to assimilate, they do not want to blend their interests with the interests of the rest of the community. They are striving to assert their national individuality, to live their own lives and attain their own ends, all three of which are as far removed from the Sclavonic [Slavonic] ideals as the twilight from dawn, as night from day.” (Pp. 150–1.) She adds, “Thanks to political and social conditions, and partly also to Talmudism, the Jews in Poland have preserved their exclusiveness.” (P. 107.) Jewish self-imposed separateness was also re-affirmed by modern Jewish thinking. Baskerville comments: “Amongst the Poles themselves, Sionism [Zionism] with its separatism, with its anti-communal and anti-cultural tenets, has only served to increase anti-Semitism. To the Polish nature, easy-going though it be, there is something particularly obnoxious in the contemplation of the better part of a million Jews, whose forefathers found a refuge in the country at a period when the Semite was chivied and chased from all parts of Europe, who have lived upon that country for centuries, some of which have even amassed fortunes, assuming an attitude of hostile exclusiveness towards the very people of whom they owe so much, flaunting the cult of the jargon [Yiddish], the halat and the Talmud before their eyes, and eagerly looking forward to the time when they will have amassed a sufficient quantity of Polish gold to bear them over the seas and establish them in Palestine.” Jews also had active prejudices against Poles. Baskerville notes: “(the) learned Jew holds a high place in the ghetto. Nobody hates the goya [goy] like he, and he would rather suffer hunger than learn to speak Polish.” (P. 26.) As for Jewish children in the cheder (school), taught by a melamed (teacher): “All they are taught of the Gentile and his culture is to hate both.” (P. 87.) Ironic to the later much-maligned Polish boycotts of Jews, Baskerville faulted the Poles for not forming guilds, or taking other measures, to protect their economic interests from the Jews (p. 138). Although the Dmowski-led retaliatory boycotts of Jews after the 1912 Duma election were still years in the future, Baskerville alludes to one of the reasons for the newly-politicized Judaism constituting an affront to Polish national aspirations: “…the Jew, who has been economically dangerous to Polish interests for centuries, has now become a political peril, because, having nothing to gain by keeping quiet and a possible gain in revolt, he has prompted and is guiding the present revolutionary movement. This conviction prompted the Poles to act with unexpected energy during the election for the Duma.” The Bund, though anti-Zionist, promoted Jewish particularism (p. 158) and grew increasingly anti-Polish (p. 186). The Jewish Bund and SD (Social Democrats) often turned against even Polish socialists (p. 164). Bund-led strikes ended up hurting Poles more than the Russian authorities: They closed factories, drove commerce overseas, and lowered the standard of Polish produce (p. 165). Armed Bund gangs killed policemen in broad daylight (p. 21). Bund-led violence, both of a revolutionary as well as bandit nature, was supported by numerous firearms, and was well organized (pp. 173–201). Poles were often the victims.

Roman Dmowski’s 1912 anti-Jewish boycott is nowadays presented without proper context. C.M.A. Phillips, author of the The New Poland, by contrast, understands the crucial nature of Polish representation in the Duma [Russian parliament]: “But then had come the Russo-Japanese war and the establishment of the Duma, with Poles sharing in the newly-won constitutional privileges of the Empire. These privileges, extremely limited though they were, had revived the political impulse of the Pole.” (p. 52) “But Russia still feared the subject State. Within two years, practically all the blood-bought concessions of 1905 had been repudiated. Poland’s Duma delegation of thirty-four was reduced to twelve…” (p. 101). Continuing this theme, Phillips elaborates on the overt Jewish separatism as follows: “The newcomers, especially those from Lithuania and Russia, the ‘Litwaki’ [Litvaks], brought with them as counteractants against assimilation not only a rigorist Talmudism … but they added the embittering factor of political Judaism, which they immediately backed up with the foundation of the Jewish Press… It was at this period that the Poles, now literally inundated with the Jewish flood, heard perhaps for the first time the cry of ‘Polish Judea’ raised in their midst. ‘Judeo-Polonia!’—Poland was henceforth to be Zion… The Rabbinical extremists welcomed this new political strength… The Jewish masses, wholly ignorant except for their Talmudic training, fell completely under the spell of the new ‘Judeo-Polonia’ power, which spoke so efficaciously to them in terms of political ambition that by 1912, in the election for the Russian Duma, the Jews of Warsaw—40 percent of the city’s population—were able to secure majority enough to send their own representative to the Assembly at Petrograd as the spokesman for the Polish capital. If he had been simply a Jew—that is, if he had been merely a Polish citizen of the Mosaic religion—it would have been one thing. [In fact, the Jewish-supported winner was Eugeniusz Jagiełło, a Pole and a Socialist, who did not sit as a part of the Polish Circle.] But he was a radical internationalist socialist, pledged to every policy and ideal abhorrent to Poland and to democracy. The complete cleavage of Pole and Jew dates from this time.” It was then that Dmowski launched his much-condemned boycotts of Jews. Phillips sees the 1912 decision as not so much a boycott as “a protest of the Poles against political Zionism” (p. 305), and continuation of the positive goal whose end had been the economic emancipation of Poles: “The co-operative movement in Poland did not owe its origin to anti-Jewish politics, but was a natural outgrowth of the country’s agricultural and economic progress. The realization among Poles that Jewish trade was becoming a dangerous monopoly did, however, give enormous impetus to the idea.” (p. 305) Although Joshua Karlip does not put it in these terms, he realizes the inordinate political power that Jews had acquired, owing to tsarist Russian policies, before 1912. He remarks, “When the tsarist authorities promised municipal self-government to the cities of Congress Poland, the Kola [Koło, the Polish Club] joined forces with the tsarist regime in seeking to restrict Jewish representation in cities where Jews constituted a majority. Tension reached fever pitch when Poles and Jews fought over whom to send to the fourth Duma as a representative from Warsaw. Because Stolypin’s limited franchise favored property owners, the majority of Warsaw voters for the fourth Duma were Jewish.” Karlip, The Tragedy of a Generation, 74. This greatly, of course, hindered Polish national aspirations, which hinged upon representation in the Duma. Furthermore, it functionally and artificially made the Poles a minority in their own (Russian-occupied) capital city. Both the Poles’ disenfranchisement and the inordinate political power of the Jews became even more objectionable to Poles because of the refusal of these Jews to even nominally support Poland’s liberation as a free nation after more than a century of post-Partition foreign rule. Karlip states, “Complicating matters further was the fact that Diaspora nationalists, as opponents of territorial nationalism, envisioned the future of Poland as part of a reformed Russian state, not as an independent country of its own. This issue deeply divided Jewish socialist and liberal nationalists from their Polish counterparts.” Ibid., 75. Karlip realizes that support for the Dmowski-led boycott of the Jews went far beyond Endek and Endek-sympathetic circles. It included many Polish liberals and progressives. Ibid., 74, 75. In any event, outside Warsaw the boycott, which was short-lived (it was initiated in November 1912 and was over by the beginning of 1914), had little or no success. It was virtually ignored in the countryside. It had no impact on large Jewish enterprises. Most of the violence involved Poles attempting to stop other Poles from entering Jewish shops. Jewish factory owners began to retaliate by firing Christian workers and Jewish shops proclaimed a counter-boycott in the fall of 1913. See Robert Blobaum, “The Politics of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Warsaw,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 73, no. 2 (2001): 275–306;Yedida Kanfer, “‘Each for His Own’: Economic Nationalism in Łódź, 1864–1914,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, 1815–1918, vol. 27: Jews in the Kingdom of Poland, 1815–1918 (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2015), 176–77. Moreover, at that time (1914), even the National Democrats (Endeks) warned against violence directed at Jews in their popular newspaper: “All manifestations of physical violence toward Jews we regard as harmful, above all for Polish society, and beneath our national dignity.” See Robert Blobaum, “A Warsaw Story: Polish-Jewish Relations during the First World War,” in Glenn Dynner and François Guesnet, eds., Warsaw: The Jewish Metropolis (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 274.

75 For a discussion of this topic which draws on studies by Edna Bonacich—“Theory of the Middleman Minorities,” American Sociological Review, vol. 38 (1973): 583–94—and Amy Chua—World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2003), see Danusha V. Goska, Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), 178–92. Yuri Slezkine also noted that the difficulties experienced by Jews, as traders and middlemen, were or are paralleled by those of other nationalities that fill the same niche all over the world. For instance, the pre-World War II European-Jewish conflicts revolving around Jewish economic dominance were similar to those between Chinese and native Malayans. See Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University, 2004), 37.

76 Emanuel Melzer, “Anti-Semitism in the Last Years of the Second Polish Republic,” in Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk, The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars (Hanover, New Hampshire and London: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1989), 129. See the discussion of this topic later on.

77 It has been reported that more than 130 people were killed in racist violence in Germany between 1990 and 2010. There have been numerous firebomb attacks in Germany on “foreigners” in recent years. Attacks on residences for asylum seekers and foreign workers occurred in Hoyerswerda and Rostock in 1991 and 1992 respectively. Two homes of Turkish families were set on fire with Molotov cocktails in Mölln in November 1992, with a woman and two young girls dying in the flames and nine other people injured. Two women and three young girls died in an arson attack on a home occupied by two Turkish families in Solingen in May 1993, and another 14 people were injured. (Four German men, one as young as 16, were convicted and sentenced to prison terms of 10 to 15 years.) Ten people died and another 38 were injured in an arson attack on a residence for asylum seekers in Lübeck in January 1996 (no Germans were charged for this crime). A homemade cluster-bomb detonated on the platform of a railway station in Düsseldorf in July 2000, injuring ten immigrants from the Soviet Union, most of them Jewish (no charges were ever brought). A nail bomb detonated in a Turkish area of Cologne known as “Little Istanbul” in June 2004, injuring 22 people, four seriously—all but one of the injured were of Turkish descent (no charges were ever brought). In 2006, a black German citizen of Ethiopian descent was beaten into a coma by two unknown assailants who called him “nigger” in an unprovoked attack. In August 2007, a mob consisting of about 50 German youth attacked eight Indian street vendors, chasing them through the town of Mügeln. The Indians were beaten and all of them sustained injuries. The German youths were encouraged by spectators to continue their assault and the attack was accompanied by police brutality on the victims. It took 70 police to quell the violence. In February 2008, neo-Nazi graffiti was found scrawled on the entrance to a Turkish cultural centre at a building in Ludwigshafen, Germany, where nine Turks, including five children, were killed in a fire believed to be set by arsonists. See “Investigators Visit German Fire Site,” The New York Times, February 7, 2008. Between 2000 and 2006 nine immigrant shop and snack stand owners, eight Turks and one Greek, were murdered by Germans described as right-wing extremists. Most of the victims were shot in the head. See John Rosenthal, “An East German Problem? Racist Violence in Germany,” World Politics Review, August 30, 2007; Melissa Eddy, “German Murders by Neo-Nazis ‘a disgrace’,” Toronto Star, November 15, 2011. This disturbing trend appears to be on the rise. In 2014 there were about 150 attacks on refugee shelters, with three residences in Vorra set on fire in December of that year. There is no sign of abatement. There were 150 arson or other attacks that damaged or destroyed refugee shelters in the first six month of 2015. The German media reported, in October 2015, that several refugees have been injured in dozens of arson attacks on German asylum shelter in the preceding few months. By December 2015, there had been 68 recorded arson attacks on refugee shelters and over 800 racist incidents. A scathing 2016 Amnesty International Report, Living in Insecurity: How Germany is Failing Victims of Racist Violence, detailed how 16 times as many crimes were reported against asylum shelters in 2015 (1,031) as in 2013 (63). More generally, racist violent crimes against racial, ethnic and religious minorities increased by 87% from 693 crimes in 2013 to 1,295 crimes in 2015. The also report lambasted Germany’s law enforcement agencies for their “long-standing and well-documented shortcomings” in responding to racist violence, and in particular noted the failure of the authorities to investigate, prosecute and sentence racist crimes effectively. See Amnesty International,