May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles
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Another key source that reflected the changing society of the shtetl was the weekly newspaper. Such publications contain valuable contemporary accounts that serve as a counterpoint to the nostalgic accounts that were published in many of the post-war memorial books (yizker bikher). For example, the memorial book of Glebokie [Głębokie] made no mention of grinding poverty. Indeed, it said that most Jews lived well … But the weekly shtetl newspaper painted a far bleaker picture and ran detailed accounts of riots by desperately poor Jews who demanded more help from the Jewish community. The memorial book depicted an image of a Jewish community that lived in peace and harmony. But in an editorial from October of 1931, the shtetl newspaper bemoaned the fact that on Shabes Shuva (the Sabbath between Rosh Hashona and Yom Kippur) fights had broken out in three different synagogues. “Gentiles like to fight in taverns,” the newspaper complained. “We prefer to fight in the synagogue.” On Yom Kippur of 1932 a fight broke out over who would lead a service in the synagogue [and] resulted in a mass brawl that spilled into the street. On this, too, the memorial book was completely silent. … Elections [to the kehilles, the local Jewish community councils] were often intense and hard fought and exposed political rifts in the community. Political parties, coalitions of Hasidim and prayer houses, and personal cliques all contested these elections, which were sometimes marked by violence, especially when the Orthodox Agudat Yisroel used Polish law to overturn Bundist and Zionist victories. In the shtetl of Sokolow [Sokołów], after the Aguda used Article 20 to cancel a Poalei Tsiyon (Labor Zionist victory), the Poalei Tsiyon invaded the kehila building and smashed the furniture.355 In a number of cases, violence was directed also against Poles.356 The following examples are from Radom: Majloch Zynenberg and some other young Jewish communists shot the police detective Zygmunt Blachner, one of several policeman on whom they had passed death sentences. The investigation was stonewalled because of a lack of cooperation on the part of Jewish eyewitnesses. A riot broke out on June 6, 1931, after a Jewish team lost a soccer match with a Polish team. Two Jewish fans attacked a Polish student, Marian Mantorski, in the street, and seriously injured him. The Pole succumbed to his injuries a few days later. In October 1935, a group of Jews beat up Wincenty Sienkiewicz, a nationalist activist. Polish nationalists retaliated and attacked some Jews.357 In Brześć Kujawski, in the summer of 1932, three Jews beat up two Polish boys who came to buy bread on a Jewish holiday, and one of the boys lost an eye. A similar occurrence took place in the fall of 1932, when two Jews attacked two Polish brothers, breaking the leg of one of them. Jews were also known to hurl slurs like “Polish pigs” at Poles.358 (One often comes across Poles being referred to as “pigs” in Jewish writings, even in memorial books.359) In Marcinkańce, a small town north of Grodno, three local Jews lynched a Pole who flicked his whip to chase some Jewish youth off the back of his carriage.360 In Włocławek, a young Jew shot two Poles on August 24, 1939, allegedly in defence of two rabbis.361 According to historian Jolanta Żyndul, between 14 and 17 Jews out of a population of more than three million, lost their lives in disturbances in the years 1935–1937. Polish losses were greater, often occasioned by the police who intervened to quell the riots.362 As Israeli historian Emanuel Melzer has noted, the anti-Jewish excesses “[u]sually … resulted from the killing of a Pole by a Jew.”363 It is also worth noting that the infamous pre-World War I pogroms in Russian Poland—Białystok and Siedlce in 1906, which took the lives of some 130 Jews—were not the work of the local population, who did not participate in them, but of the Russian authorities who employed the military and goons to strike at the violent Jewish revolutionary movement in those cities. As historian Artur Markowski points out, in the 100-year period between 1815 and 1914, in the lands known as the Kingdom of Poland, no more than a handful of Jews perished as a result of the rare occasions of anti-Jewish rioting.364 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.365 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.366 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.367 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.368 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.369 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.370 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.371 Nor were many other crimes recorded in the criminal registers.372 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”).373 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.374 (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.375) 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. Bernard Goldstein, who headed the Bundist militia in Warsaw and escaped an attempt on his life in 1929 after the Communists passed a death sentence on him, 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.376 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.377 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.378 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.379 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.380 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.381 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.382 Orthodox Jews complained to the authorities in Chmielnik about the fact that Communists had infiltrated a slate of Jewish candidates for the municipal elections.383 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.384 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 (undercutting prices below cost, intimidation, coercion, refusing to lease commercial premises to Poles, cutting off supplies, and other “sharp” business practices).385 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.386 Thus the slogan pushed by Polish nationalists, “Buy from Poles,” had an ingrained and longstanding counterpart in the way Jews instinctively managed their business affairs for centuries,387 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.”388 In June 1912, the populist Yiddish-language newspaper in Łódź, Lodzher togblat, renewed calls of previous years for exclusively “Jewish factories.”389 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.”390 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.391 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.”392 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.’”393 Jabotinsky adds, “Apart from the hooligan element, there was little actual hatred of Jews in Polish society.”394 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.395 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.”396 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.397
It should be noted that during the inter-war years Poles also entered the sector of moneylending. Mortgage deeds in the real-estate registers show that debtors and creditors were Poles as well as Jews. However, in contrast to Poles, who often were indebted to Jews (with debts sometimes exceeding 200 złotys), the Jews themselves were rarely indebted to Poles as richer relatives or co-religionists were quick to help them out.398 One often encounters bald claims like the following in Jewish memorial books as well as many Jewish memoirs: “The [Polish] Government levied heavy taxes upon the Jews and decreed harsh laws against them.”399 “I later discovered that podatki were in fact punitive tax demands, levied arbitrarily by the tax authorities against Jewish concerns.”400 There is no truth to the claim that the Polish authorities enacted anti-Jewish laws, imposed harsh, arbitrary or punitive taxes on Jewish businesses, or waged an economic war on the Jews.401 (The latter is something that the British have historically excelled at in relation to “colonials” and Americans in relation to their Native and Black populations.402) Indeed, many Jewish firms received lucrative government contracts,403 contrary to the claim of Western historians who allege “a government-backed boycott of all Jewish business establishments.”404 A resident of the border town of Łunin, in Polesia, where there was a large military base, recalled: “Jewish craftspeople, tradespeople and storekeepers made their income catering to the Polish officers and their families.”405 A Jew whose parents owned a grocery near a military base in Chełm states that “the entire clientele was mostly military families.” He added, “All of my friends … were Poles. There were few Jews where we lived.”406 In Bolesławiec, a small town near the German border: “My father’s business was cap making. … A lot of the caps were made to order as part of uniforms for fraternal organizations, the military, police and firemen.”407 On the other hand, Jewish businessmen would band together to thwart new Polish businesses from springing up. Jewish glaziers in Łódź and suburban Dobra banned together to drive the newcomer Polish glaziers out of business.408 Pressure was exerted by the Jewish community in Dubno, Volhynia, on a Jewish proprietor to renege on the lease of his business premises to a Polish milk co-operative which wanted to operate their own store. It was explained to him that business was the exclusive domain of the Jews, and that the community did not welcome Christian intruders in this near monopoly on local trade.409 A Christian shopkeeper recalled asking a Jewish wholesaler from whom she acquired merchandise for a rebate on the goods he supplied to her: the Jewish merchant replied categorically that he gave rebates only to Jews.410 It must be noted, however, that even among Jewish businessmen, cutthroat practices were used frequently. Thugs were hired to block the entrance to competitors’ shops and shops of competitors’ were demolished. Fishmongers got together to form a cartel to illegally raise the price of herring, and paid “damages” to producers who closed down their smokehouses.411 Yüklə 2,16 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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