August 2017 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

Among more traditional Jews, however, interaction was carefully guarded and openness to non-Jews was rare to the “Other,” as was the case in Kolbuszowa, except for those few Jewish professionals who broke out of the confines of the accepted social norms.
In this small town of ours we lived together while we remained separate and apart. Practical necessities brought us into daily contact, but these encounters were specific and brief and rarely produced mutual understanding or respect. We needed each other, often complemented each other, and so there was reason for tolerance; but there was not much incentive for eliminating the barriers that separated us.

Poles dominated the government and administration of Kulbuszowa; Jews operated nearly all of the businesses. The Jews lived largely in and around the marketplace, the Poles in an area known as New Town. Most Poles were devout Catholics, and we Jews followed in the path of orthodox Judaism. … In look, in dress, in behavior, there was usually no mistaking the Pole and the Jew. Then, too, Poles all spoke Polish, Jews mostly Yiddish. …

Acquaintances among Poles and Jews were common, indeed nearly inevitable in a town the size of Kolbuszowa; but close friendships were practically nonexistent. Poles married Poles, and Jewish boys sought out Jewish girls. The one or two exceptions proved the point. Though my father had many Polish acquaintances from business, never were any invited to my sisters’ weddings. Practically every Jew in town came, but not any Poles, nor was he ever invited to their celebrations. Organizations like the Scouts, the fire department, and the Kolbuszowa soccer team were exclusively Polish. [Later, as we shall see, the author contradicts himself on this point.—M.P.]. No Jew in town had ever set foot in the Catholic church of Kolbuszowa; Catholic priests would not look at Jews, much less talk to them. [Later the author contradicts himself on this point—M.P.: “It was my father, for example, who supplied Catholic churches in our area with candles and other items used in various church ceremonies.” In another book the same author writes: “Most Jews had absolutely no contact with the Catholic Church. Whenever they saw a priest coming down the street, they would cross over to the other side to avoid him. The Church was deeply mistrusted and was looked upon as the spawning ground of anti-Semitism. How many plots against Jews, we wondered, were hatched in the dark halls of the old stone church buildings on the edge of town?”¹⁵⁶] … Only on the rarest occasions had a Pole been to the Jewish synagogue. Catholics celebrated their holidays throughout the year and Jews theirs, neither group much concerned with what the other was about.

On each side the separateness was seen as desirable. A coming together, a mixing—no one saw any need for it, any point to it. Best to let things stay the way they were. “We could be spoiled”—that’s what Jews said would happen if we mixed with Poles. It could be threatening, could challenge the way it had always been. … Some Jews, not many, did attempt to move in the other direction. These were the modern men, professionals mostly, who wore their Judaism casually, if at all, and sought out friendships among the Poles. Dr. Leon Anderman was a notable exception …

Anderman and a few other men mingled almost exclusively with Poles, were invited to their social gatherings, seemed to move among them with ease. …

There were certain times when Poles and Jews came together in Kolbuszowa. When disaster hit, whether fire or flood, the relief committees were organized, both Poles and Jews did what they could to aid in the recovery. Jews … participated in the celebration of Polish national holidays; a portion of the festivities took place in the synagogue, where the rabbi offered remarks on the occasion before an audience that included local Polish dignitaries. Always in the municipal government a Pole served as mayor and a Jew as deputy mayor. The municipal council was equally divided between the two. On the Kolbuszowa all-star soccer team were two Jews (from the town Gymnasium) …¹⁵⁷

In September 1939, the Germans ordered that the Polish troops who fell in the battle for Kolbuszowa be buried together in a mass common grave in the Catholic cemetery. This incensed the Jewish community:
The fact that Jewish soldiers had been so interred was deeply offensive to many of us. When Berish Bilfeld and Leib Lampel told the Germans of our distress, the authorities agreed that we could, if we wished, remove the Jewish dead to our cemetery. For two weeks that is precisely what we did, checking every body for identification (ID cards often indicated which soldiers were Jewish, as did circumcision). Altogether we reburied about fifty Jewish soldiers in the Jewish cemetery outside of town.¹⁵⁸
A Jewish woman from Radom recalled the superstitious attitude Jews harboured toward Catholic priests:
Growing up, I knew to stay away from the Poles … If we saw Polish people walking down the street, we always crossed to the other side. If we ever saw a priest—I don’t know why we did this—we would always hold on to a shirt or button coat. There was somehow supposed to be protection in that small gesture. No priest ever accosted me or anyone I knew, but I knew I was supposed to be wary of priests, to stay away, to clutch a button.¹⁵⁹
Rabbi Byron L. Sherwin of Spertus College of Judaica in Chicago expressed the following thoughts on the complex topic of Polish-Jewish relations:
Similarly, it does not seem to occur to some Jews that manifestations of Polish anti-Semitism might be reactions to Jewish clanishness and parochialism. As a character in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel The Manor puts it: ‘How can anyone move into someone else’s home, live there in total isolation, and expect not to suffer by it? When you despise your host’s god as a tin image, shun his wine as forbidden, condemn his daughter as unclean, aren’t you asking to be treated as an unwelcome outsider? It’s as simple as that.’¹⁶⁰
On a recent trip to Poland, Rabbi Sherwin describes the reception he received in a Warsaw synagogue where he was accompanied by his host, a Polish Catholic priest:
A young Orthodox Jew from New York interrupts my prayers, points to the priest, and admonishes me for bringing an ‘idol worshipper’ into the synagogue. The service ends abruptly. I introduce myself to the rabbi. A Gerer Hasid from Israel, he was born in Poland. His tenure had begun only the year before. … The rabbi says to me in Hebrew, ‘After everything that has happened to us here, you see how they still hate us. They are afraid that we might return.’¹⁶¹
The historical complexities of Polish-Jewish relations, however, escape many Western observers and scholars, who claim that all the Jews ever wanted was to be accepted into Polish Christian society, but were cruelly rejected by them. Therefore, the argument goes, the Jews felt rebuffed and only responded in kind. (Such statements abound even though no inclusive society existed even for the majority of Christian Poles, i.e., the peasants, until well into the twentieth century.) Sociologist Naomi Rosh White is an exponent of this facile but patently false school of thought:
The absence of Polish-Jewish contact was principally the result of a refusal by Poles to accept Jews into their circles. … Despite the desire of Jews to become integrated into Polish society, Jews were excluded from non-Jewish friendship groups and from participation in Polish political and bureaucratic life.¹⁶²
However, the testimonies recorded in White’s study contradict this simplistic portrayal, as most of the Jews she interviewed expressed strongly defined tendencies of separateness.¹⁶³ Among some German Jews, Polish Jews were known for their intensely nationalistic disposition. Walter Tausk, for example, deplored the “super Zionists” among them who he believed gave Jews a bad name.¹⁶⁴

Robert Michael, a professor of European history at the University of Massachusetts, who fancies himself as being on the cutting edge of exposing Catholic anti-Semitism, claims that Jews developed anti-Christian attitudes only out of desperation. “Some powerless Jews,” he writes, “responded to anti-Semitism by stereotyping Gentile Poles as ‘dangerous, demonic, and devlish’; most Jews felt ambivalent toward Poles.” On the other hand, Michael states that Poles are responsible for all the failings in Polish-Jewish relations and goes so far as assuring us, without citing any proof, that: “Many Poles, including those well-educated, continue to insist that Jews caused World War II.”¹⁶⁵ Can such “scholarship” be taken seriously? Seemingly, and incredibly, yes.

Influenced by such views such as those expressed by Naomi Rosh White, Robert Michael and many others of that ilk, non-Jewish historians have also endorsed this skewed picture of Jewish-Christian relations. For example, Eugene Davidson writes: “the Christian populations … were likely to avoid contact with Jews except for practical purposes like trade.”¹⁶⁶ There is no inkling on his part that there may have been a bit more to the story, and that Jews may have displayed similar attitudes toward Christian Poles. Many commentators adamantly deny the possibility that there ever was any independent animus on the Jewish side. For example, Mark Raphael Baker, a lecturer in modern Jewish history at the University of Melbourne, writes:
Goyim was the generic term for Gentile used by my father and others of his generation. It was not used with hatred, but in a matter of fact way to describe the world out there, beyond his Polish shtetl, outside the confines of his closely-knit network of survivor-friendship. His Jewish world was a shell which protected him.¹⁶⁷
After laying all of the blame for the mutual antagonism on Christians, Jewish-American author Anne Roiphe concedes grudgingly, albeit for a rather specious reason: “It is true that Jews in the privacy of their houses have for centuries taken revenge on the anti-Semitism of their neighbors by portraying them as dumb. Jews have long thought of Poles as less intelligent.”¹⁶⁸ That reality is reflected in the realistic fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who “in story after story … makes it clear that Jews historically regarded themselves as superior to their Slavic neighbors.”¹⁶⁹ Unfortunately, that legacy was transposed to North America where it also poisoned Polish-Jewish relations.¹⁷⁰

Other historians, who had had first-hand experience, are more cautious in their assessment. Zvi Gitelman, for example, writes:

Perhaps there was antecedent Jewish distrust of Poles or contempt for them, but Polish hostility bred a Jewish reaction of distrust and reciprocated hostility … But there may have been other sources of Jewish negative attitudes toward Poles. Jews may have regarded Poles (and most other east European peoples) as culturally inferior. … Religious Jews held that Poles believed in a false and pernicious doctrine.¹⁷¹
Paradoxically, anti-assimilationist attitudes were promoted in Poland by Jews who had settled in the United States and Western Europe, even though they would never have advocated the same stance there. Lucy Dawidowicz, who paid an extended visit to Wilno before the war, where most Jews spoke Yiddish and knew little, if any, Polish, wrote: “Not knowing Polish, I didn’t get to meet many of those Polish-speaking university-educated Jews. That didn’t bother me, for I had somehow come to believe that they weren’t my kind of people and didn’t live in my kind of world. … The other Polish speakers whom I met, yet barely knew, I labeled as ‘assimilated,’ even ‘assimilationist,’ that is, advocates of assimilation. Those were a Yiddishist’s pejorative words, darkly intimating that to speak Polish instead of Yiddish was a public act of betrayal, an abandonment of one’s people.”¹⁷² In was enough not to look Jewish or to be dressed in non-traditional garb to be labelled a shaygets (or sheygets) or a shikse, a pejorative Yiddish term for a Christian male or female, even if one was Jewish.¹⁷³ Christians were commonly referred to in derogatory terms as shkotsim (or shkotzim), and this term was also applied to assismilated Jews.¹⁷⁴

How all this impacted on the day-to-day life of many Jews in Poland, right up to the Second World War, is illustrated by the following candid testimonies. Nechah Hoffman-Shein recalls her childhood formation in the village of Serafińce near Horodenka, in Eastern Galicia:

At home they tried to implant within us elevated feelings. They emphasized morning and evening that we were different—better, more elevated than the goyim. What was theirs was non-kosher, disgusting, and despised. … And in the house meanwhile they would tell me, “Don’t play with the shiksas, the non-Jewish girls, with their colored eggs, and don’t taste their giant Easter bread, and don’t go into their homes which are absolutely non-kosher.” … However, [my mother] added, “When we go by the statue of Jesus, we need to spit three times and say, ‘It is an abhorrence,’ but make sure that the goyim don’t see you…”¹⁷⁵
A Jew from Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski recalled:
Another place I dreaded was the forbidding Catholic Church of Archangel Michael, which occupied the highest point in town, with its tall spire dominating the skyline. It was a large church, the only one in Ostrowiec, and when the bells pealed, they could be heard all over town. As there was no way of avoiding the church to get to the other side of town without taking a long detour, I would race past it as quickly as I could, as did all the Jewish boys.¹⁷⁶
Some went even further and fantasized about the destruction of churches:
There was a widespread legend in town that the church and the fence were sinking at the rate of the size of one pea every day. Of course, we did not doubt, heaven forbid, the truth of this legend. But we, the children, still wanted visible proof of this wonder and miracle. We also wanted to see the downfall of the Gentiles, and the sinking of their “contamination.” But we couldn’t prove the sinking of the church, because we weren’t allowed to enter the grounds and, because of its height, it was impossible to discern a change in height of one pea a day. But the sinking of the fence could be determined: we measured it with respect to our own heights, and made various marks. But to our disappointment, we could not prove the point, and we were not satisfied that we had actually seen with our own eyes and felt with our own hands this great miracle, and extracted pleasure from the sinking of the “contamination.”¹⁷⁷ [emphasis added]
The custom of spitting when a crucifix or church came into view was transported by Jews to North America, as recalled by Moshe Rozdzial:
my clearest memory of anything that relates to churches was the way my grandmother would spit three times, you know, tu! tu! tu!, like in Fiddler on the Roof, to ward off evil spirits, every time she would walk past a church steeple. … I remember walking down the street with my hand in hers, feeling that tug and knowing, almost instinctively that if I look up I’d see a cross atop a roof, as she reflexively crossed the street to avoid walking directly in front of the church. Muttering, Nevelah! Nevelah!

Do you know what that means? The impurity of the dead. Any dead thing. Any dead thing, that by Jewish law, could not be touched in any way, so as not to be defiled by spiritual purity. That’s what Bubbe thought of the crucifix and ultimately, the church ... She’d spit three times, more if she was in a dark mood, and walk out of her way to avoid the site. The dead Jew on the cross was a Nevelah to her, a presence that has always defiled her life, Jewish life. A symbol of death and human corruptness, to my people. I know it’s not politically correct to say these things to you. We Jews are always watching our tongues, when it comes to Christianity.¹⁷⁸

As we shall see, the Jewish tradition of spitting at Christian symbols, and even at Christians, is alive and well in contemporary Israel.

Leon Weliczker Wells, adviser to the Holocaust Library in New York, who hails from Eastern Galicia, recorded:

Our small town, Stojanow [Stojanów], had about a thousand Jews and an equal number of Poles and Ukrainians. … We looked down on the small farmer, whom we called Cham, which was an old traditional way of saying Am Haaretz (people of the earth), which to us meant simpletons. …

We lived in a self-imposed ghetto without walls. The Jewish religion fostered our living together in groups which separated us from non-Jews. … All of these [religious] restrictions caused the Jews to live in ghetto-like societies so that they could maintain their Jewish way of life. … We had virtually no contact with the outside world, surely not social contact, as our interests and responsibilities were completely different from the goish’s. … We young Jewish boys did not take part in any sports as this was considered goish. … We Jews even tried to avoid passing a church, and if that was impossible, we muttered an appropriate curse as we hurried by. …

We Jews felt superior to all others, as we were the “chosen people,” chosen by God Himself. We even repeated it in our prayers at least three times a day, morning, afternoon, and evening … The farmers, who, even considering their low living standards, couldn’t support an entire family, sent their daughters to town to become servants in the Jewish households. I never knew a Jewish girl to be a servant in a Polish household, but the reverse was the norm. The gentile maid was referred to in negative terms as the “shiksa” (Hebrew for “a vermin like a cockroach”). [In Polish, the term had the added etymological connotation of “urine-dripping” girl.—M.P.] There was a repertoire of jokes about these girls. For example, there was the joke about how Jewish mothers made sure that the servants were “clean,” because their sons’ first sexual experience was usually with this girl.¹⁷⁹ …

We were strangers to the neighboring gentiles because of our religion, language, behavior, dress, and daily values. Poland was the only country where a nation lived within a nation. … In Poland the Jew dressed completely different from others, had beards and peyes (side curls), spoke a different language (Yiddish), went to separate religious schools, and sometimes even to different public schools … Since every meal on Sabbath and holidays started with the blessing of the wine, there was no possibility of a pious Jew sharing a festive meal with a gentile because the wine, once opened, became nonkosher if a gentile merely looked at it. The laws of kashruth prevented a Jew from eating at a gentile’s nonkosher table. Thus, there was very little social intercourse between Jews and non-Jews. We never spoke Polish at home, only Yiddish. Polish was negatively called goish. When we spoke Polish we had a Yiddish accent. The newspapers and books in our homes were in Yiddish. … We lived in a strictly self-imposed ghetto, and it suited our requirements and wishes. … Our parents not only praised that time [i.e., Austrian rule] as being better for the Jews, but spoke with pride about the superiority of German culture and its people compared to the Polish culture. This attitude was very badly received by the Polish people. … The belief that German culture was superior continued even to the time when Germany occupied Poland in 1939, and in its eastern part in 1941. I remember when the Jews spoke among themselves about the future under the Nazi regime: “Under the Germans it couldn’t be so bad as the press wants us to believe because they are the leading civilized nation.”¹⁸⁰

Farming was an occupation that Jews in Poland generally eschewed and held in low esteem. Some Jewish historians maintain that this was because of restrictions imposed on this occupation. However, Jews were offered a farming colony in Bolechów near Stanisławów in the late 1700’s, which they refused owing to their lack of interest in farming. (Instead, the colony was given to German colonists.)¹⁸¹ The pro-German sentiments mentioned by Weliczker Wells should not be underestimated.¹⁸² Nor should the bonds of religious and ethnic loyalty and solidarity among Jews. Wolf Mendelsohn (Willy Melson), the son of an industrialist from Stanisławów, shares Weliczker Wells’s views:
But I wouldn’t say the Jews were completely innocent. They didn’t behave like guests, they behaved like a separate nation, with another language, another dress, another culture—completely different. And, really, they looked down on the Poles. If they admired anybody, it was the Germans. And the Poles understood this.¹⁸³
Professor Yacov Talmon, who hails from the Russian partition of Poland, acknowledged:
… many important factors infused in the Jews a spirit of contempt and hatred towards the Poles. In contrast to the organizational activity and capacity of the Germans, the Jews saw the Poles as failures. The rivals most difficult to Jews, in the economic and professional fields were the Poles, and we must not underrate the closeness of Yiddish to the German language as well. I still remember that during my childhood the name “goy” sounded to me as referring to Catholic Poles and not to Germans; though I did realize that the latter were obviously not Jews, I felt that the Germans in the vicinity were not simply Gentiles.

It would be shocking to think of it to-day, but the pre-Hitlerite relations between Jews and Germans in our vicinity were friendly. … In the twenties, Jews and Germans stood together on election lists. Out of those Germans rose such who, during the German invasion, helped in the acts of repression and extermination as experts, who had the experience and knew the secrets.

It is not surprising, then, that in the mixed loyalties of the time Jewish unity grew stronger and deeper, and consciousness in this direction burned like a flame. … the actual motherland was not a temporal one, but a heavenly one, a vision and a dream—to the religious it was the coming of the Messiah, to the Zionists it was a Jewish country, to the Communists and their friends it was a world revolution. And the real constitution according to which they lived was the Shulhan Aruch, code of laws, and the established set of virtues, or the theories of Marx, and the rules of Zionism and the building up of a Jewish country.¹⁸⁴
Awe for German culture persisted among many Jews, and not just the older generations, in the early period of the German occupation. Adam Adams, who was a schoolboy in Lublin in 1939, recalled:
A German officer was allocated to our house. He was dressed like a god in a beautiful uniform; he was a highly educated man from Vienna. I remember him playing our piano, always beautifully dressed in a fantastic uniform, and I would look at him and admire him.¹⁸⁵
Ironically, German Jews generally felt contempt for Ostjuden.¹⁸⁶

Most of the so-called Russian Jews were really Jews that had been inherited by the tsarist Russian Empire after the partitions of Poland in the late 18^th century. Under Russian rule, the Jews were increasingly alienated from the Polish population. Many Jews in the 1840s and 1850s saw an opportunity for social advancement in the Russian education and little room for social mobility within Polish culture.¹⁸⁷ Nonetheless, many non-Polish speaking Jews moved westward for economic reasons, flooding the so-called Congress Kingdom. Between 1816 and 1913, the number of Jews grew by 822 percent, while the number of inhabitants increased by only 381 percent. Thus, the proportion of Jews almost doubled, from 7.8 to 14.9 percent. Denunciation of fellow Jews to the tsarist authorities has a long and unsavoury history. Historian Allan Nadler portrays the conflict between the Hasidim and the Mitnagdim as one that sometimes turned bitter. The Gaon of Wilno led the struggle of the Mitnagdim against the Hasidim.