May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles
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4 Israeli historian Ariel Toaff has noted this same tendency in other areas of relations between Jews and non-Jews: Any additional example of the two-dimensional “flattening” of Jewish history, viewed exclusively as the history of religious or political “anti-Semitism” at all times, must necessarily be regretted. When “one-way” questions presuppose “one-way” answers; when the stereotype of “anti-Semitism” hovers menacingly over any objective approach to the difficult problem of historical research in relation to Jews, any research ends up by losing a large part of its value. See Ariel Toaff, Blood Passover: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murder (lulu.com, 2014), 10. (Internet: For Jews engaged in dialogue, it has been much easier to identify the problems within Christianity than to turn that scrutiny back on our own heritage. Jews, after all, were very much the victims, not just of the Holocaust, but also of centuries of Christian anti-Jewish venom and oppression. Consequently, traditions developed among those studying in the Wissenschaftlich mode to obscure embarrassing elements of the tradition rather than to confront them. True dialogue, though, requires partnership, mutuality, and adjustment of attitudes on both sides. … Thus, full Jewish participation in reconciliation with Christians requires that Jews similarly examine and take responsibility for their own traditions, especially where, as in the case of liturgy, these traditions affect daily life and are not simply dusty books on the shelf. In her book, Ruth Langer offers an in-depth study of the birkat haminim, a Jewish prayer that, in its earliest form, cursed Christians, apostates to Christianity, sectarians, and enemies of Israel. 5 Account of Beniamin Horowitz (Władysław Pawlak), Przesiedleńcy w zaświaty, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), Record group 302, number 121. 6 Some of the bases for those stereotypes—religious, social, cultural, and Polish hostility, both real and alleged—are canvassed in Marcin Urynowicz’s study “Wokół stacji gdzie przejeżdża pociąg mieszkają dzicy ludzie – Pamięć o Polsce i Polakach w żydowskojęzycznych reportażach pierwszych lat powojennych: Przyczynek do badań,” in Adam Sitarek, Michał Trębacz, and Ewa Wiatr, eds., Zagłada Żydów na polskiej prowincji (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego; Instytut Pamięci Narodowej–Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, Oddział w Łodzi, 2012), 441–52, here at 445, 448–50. 7 Rabbi Mordechai Menahem Kaplan, the Founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, rejected the usual exculpatory reasoning behind Jewish Chosenness, that is, it simply implies that Jews have more obligations to God. (The following commentary is based on an Amazon review by Jan Peczkis.) Rabbi Kaplan comments, “No one can question the fact that the belief of being divinely elect has long been associated in the Jewish mind with consecration and responsibility. However, we cannot ignore the other implications of this belief, especially those which are often sharply stressed, such as in the Alenu and the Havdalah prayers. In the latter, the invidiousness of the distinction between Israel and the nations is emphasized by being compared with the distinction between light and darkness. It is that invidiousness which is highly objectionable, and should be eliminated from our religion.” See Mordechai M. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 218. The author elaborates that, “Is it not more in keeping with spiritual religion, when we recite the ‘Alenu’ to thank God for having given us ‘the Torah of truth and planted eternal life in us’, than for not having made us ‘like the nations of other lands?’” Ibid., 227–28. Jews commonly frame Jewish Chosenness as the Jewish duty, or privilege, of transmitting ethical insights (or ethical monotheism) to the gentiles. Kaplan dismisses this as a form of what nowadays is called benevolent prejudice. It is reminiscent of the 19th century concept of imperialism as something good, in that white people were the “bearers of civilization” to nonwhites (the white man’s burden). Ibid., 221. Unfortunately, Kaplan skirts around the most controversial aspects of Jewish Chosenness. These include Jewish messianism (how Jews are fated to rule over the goyim), and the Talmud (notably its dual morality of Jews and non-Jews), about which there is more later. Kaplan points out that the centuries-old concept of Jewish Chosenness, based on the Torah (and Talmud), had increasingly been replaced, in 19th-century Germany, by a new-fangled racial concept of Jewish Chosenness. He writes, “Unable to accept literally the traditional version of the doctrine of the chosen people, the religious wing of the early Maskilim, the first Reformers and the middle group who designated themselves as the Historical School reinterpreted that doctrine to mean one or all of the following propositions, which are set forth in Kaufmann Kohler’s Jewish Theology, as justifying the claim of the Jews to being a chosen people: 1. Jews possess hereditary traits which qualify them to be superior to the rest of the world in the realm of the religious and the ethical. 2. Their ancestors were the first to achieve those religious and ethical conceptions and ideals which will, in the end, become the common possession of mankind and help them to achieve salvation. 3. Jews possess the truest form of the religious and ethical ideals of mankind. 4. Jews are entrusted with the task of communicating those ideals to the rest of the world.” Ibid., 215. Kaplan condemns biologically-based Jewish elitism, which may be considered a form of Jewish racism, with the following scathing words directed against the four propositions quoted above, “What is wrong with the reinterpretations? First, the proposition that Jews possess unusual hereditary traits which entitle them to be God's elect is based on a series of unproved generalizations concerning certain qualities as being characteristic only of Jews, and on biological assumptions concerning heredity, which are entirely unwarranted. It is one thing for the ancient sage to express his love for his people by describing them as unique in the possession of the traits of chastity, benevolence, and compassion. But it is quite another for a modern person seriously to assert that, because Jewish life has manifested these traits, Jews alone are inherently qualified to grasp and promulgate the truth of religion. We expect a greater regard for objective fact than is evidenced by such sweeping statements about hereditary Jewish traits. If Jews were to adopt the foregoing reinterpretation of the doctrine of election, they would, by implication, assent to the most pernicious theory of racial heredity yet advanced to justify racial inequality and the right of a master race to dominate the rest of mankind.” Ibid., 215–16. In the 19th and 20th century, local Jews decided whether they thought that the surrounding gentile culture was “good enough” for their emulation and assimilation. Although Kaplan does not put it in those terms, he makes it obvious that such was indeed the case, “Emerging into the broad stream of European culture, the Jews sought to adapt their own culture to that of the world around them. In Germany, this led to complete assimilation and to the modernization of the Jewish religious traditions. In Eastern Europe, where the surrounding culture was on a low plane, the Haskalah developed a strong nationalist trend [Yiddishism, or Diaspora nationalism: p. 25], with the renaissance of Hebrew literature as the distinguishing feature. There, too, the process of emancipation, expected or partly achieved, together with enlightenment led, in many instances, to complete assimilation.” Ibid., 553–54. However, Kaplan does not tell the reader that, unlike in Germany, only a single-digit percentage of Poland’s Jews ever became assimilated prior to the Second World War. On the anti-Christian character of the Aleinu (Alenu) see Ruth Langer’s article in Debra Reed Blank, ed., The Experience of Jewish Liturgy: Studies Dedicated to Menahem Schmelzer (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011). Rabbi Mordechai M. Kaplan also tackled the issue of Jewish Chosenness in his seminal study Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of Jewish-American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1934). (The following observations based on an Amazon review by Jan Peczkis.)
In Deuteronomy 7:6-8 and 9:6, God plainly tells the Jews that He is not choosing them according to any merits of their own. However, this did not prevent Jewish interpretations from developing that explicitly taught that Jews are better than the goyim, and that God chose Jews precisely because of their pre-existing superiority. Moreover, these beliefs became a mainstay in the Jewish religion, and persisted to fairly modern times. What today is called Orthodox Judaism is really neo-Orthodox Judaism. Kaplan explains this whole process. He writes, “The Neo-Orthodox conception of Israel, though presumably a reiteration of the traditional view of Israel, turns out, upon examination, to be a decided recasting of that view in a number of ways. The traditional belief as formulated by Judah Ha-Levi is that Israel was privileged to come into the possession of the Torah on account of the inherent superiority which it had inherited from Adam, Noah, and the Patriarchs, and which marked them off as a higher human species. According to Neo-Orthodoxy, it is for the sake of the Torah, for the sake of preserving and propagating the teachings of that Torah, and not because of any hereditary superiority, that God chose Israel. Tradition declares that the Torah is principally a means of maintaining Israel’s inborn superiority so that at no time shall Israel descend to the level of the nations. … It is evident that Neo-Orthodoxy is not prepared to retain the traditional belief in the inherent superiority of Israel.” (Pp. 145–46.) Furthermore, the traditional Jewish belief had unmistakable Jewish supremacist connotations. Kaplan remarks, “According to Judah Ha-Levi, Kitab Al Khazari I, par. 47, the Jews alone inherited from Adam a capacity for spiritual life.” (P. 526.) Jews as Chosen: Talmusic Perspective Rabbi Kaplan implicitly supports the premise that the Talmud teaches a much stronger form of Jewish elitism than does the Old Testament. He thus describes the reason, according to the Talmud and in contradistinction to the Bible (Old Testament), for God creating the world, “The creation of the world is no longer taken for granted, as in the Bible, as an ultimate act of God which needs no further accounting. It is now interpreted as having been intended mainly for Israel. Rabbinic Judaism represents largely a reversal of centrality in the spiritual realm analogous to the reversal of centrality effected by the change from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system of astronomy. Instead of Israel existing for the world, it is the world that exists for Israel.” (P. 380.) It gets even better. The Talmud teaches that, not only was the world created specifically for the Jews, but the entire universe was created specifically for the Jews, and, what’s more, only for the Jews. Quoting Berakot 32b (Reference 54, p. 547), Kaplan writes, “It is in no hyperbolic sense that Resh Lakish represents God as saying to Israel, when the latter complains that God seems to have forgotten her, ‘I have created twelve constellations in heaven, each constellation consists of thirty hosts, etc., and each camp consists of 365 times ten million stars, … and all of them I have created only for thy sake.’” (P. 381.)
Mordecai M. Kaplan comments, “The Jews, however, have found it necessary to retreat from the stand taken by them in the past with regard to their being God’s chosen people. They realize intuitively that, if they were to persist in the literal acceptance of that doctrine, they would have to exclude themselves from complete self-identification with the state. For, according to the literal interpretation of that doctrine, it is the destiny of the entire Jewish people to be restored to Palestine.” (emphasis his) (P. 23.) Jewish Chosenness, Zionism, and Messianism The author quotes Claude Montefiore, who wrote a 1912 book, Outlines of Liberal Judaism. Montefiore considers Jewish Chosenness as having less to do with universalism and more to do with what may be called Jewish nationalism. He writes, “He [Montefiore] recognizes that even the few passages in the Bible which dwell upon the election of Israel were always understood in the national sense. Messianism meant less the universal adoption of the truth concerning God than the prosperity of Israel and its spiritual preeminence. The glory of God was identified with the glory of Israel.” (P. 531.) In an essay published in 1903, Claude Montefiore, a leading British Jew, sees the original Jewish conception of a Chosen People in terms of a tribal deity: “Jehovah or Yahweh was originally a national God, whose pleasure and profit was to protect and aggrandize his own. This was the popular conception. The wars of Israel were the wars of Yahweh, and Israel’s victories were Yahweh’s victories as well.” Montefiore continues, “But why did Yahweh “choose” Israel? In old days nobody asked the question. The race had its god, as the child had his father. The one relation was as natural as the other.” See Claude Goldsmid Montefiore, Liberal Judaism: An Essay (Ulan Press, 2012), 184, 185. This book was originally published in 1903 by Macmillan (London and New York). 8 A striking example of this was the successful campaign mounted by Jewish organizations in the United States after the Second World War to have President Truman recognize Jewish DPs as a distinct national group entited to separate Jewish camps; Truman’s designation of Palestine as the main destination of the Jewish DPs; and his appeal to the British to allow entry of 100,000 Jewish DPs into Palestine. “All helped the Zionist claim that Jewish DPs were part of a single and distinct people, the Jewish nation, for whom Zionism sought a state in Palestine.” See Arieh J. Kochavi, “Pressure Groups versus the American and British Administrations during and after World War II,” in Norman J.W. Goda, ed., Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014), 260–61. While presenting a united front vis-à-sis non-Jews, this is not to say that Jews, among themselves, are a cohesive entity. On the contrary, even in Poland, there was considerable rivalry and bad faith among various factions, especially the so-called Litvaks caused concern for native Jews. (There is more on this later.) See Edward Gigilewicz, “Litwacy,” in Encyklopedia “Białych plam” (Radom: Polskie Wydawnictwo Encyklopedyczne, 2005), vol. 19, 262–64. 9 Jakob Weiss, The Lemberg Mosaic: The Memoirs of Two Who Survived the Destruction of Jewish Galicia (New York: Alderbrook Press, 2010), 373. 10 This phenomenon still persists. On June 25, 2005 “, the Toronto Star reported the Jewish enclave around Bathurst Street and Steeles Avenue ran as high as 70 percent, making it the most “segregated” neighbourhood in Toronto, even though Jews—unlike many other groups—are not recent immigrants to the city. See Prithi Yelaja and Nicholas Keung “A Little Piece of the Punjab: Immigrants recreate home in suburbs,” Toronto Star, June 25, 2005. One can imagine how much more intense the desire for separation was in a traditional Jewish environment like Poland’s. 11 Avigdor Miller, Rejoice o Youth! An Integrated Jewish Ideology (New York: n.p., 1962), 276–77. Historian John Doyle Klier broaches the topic of assimilation in his study, John Doyle Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1885–1881 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The resistance of many Jews to acculturation and assimilation is usually framed in terms of the consideration that doing so would cause an unacceptable loss of essential Judaic elements (e.g, p. 103), or that a strongly Christian majoritarian atmosphere made it difficult for Jews to “fit” into gentile society. In addition, Jews must maintain their particularism as an antidote to anti-Semitism and the lack of Jewish legal equality with gentiles (e.g, p. 106). However, Jewish attitudes have also been animated by the notion that the goyim are unworthy of Jewish assimilation—that is, unless the local Jews decide that their self-interest indicates otherwise, or that the nation in which they live is, or becomes, “good enough”—in Jewish opinion—to merit the Jews’ assimilation. Jewish Germanophilia also became a factor. The foregoing lines of thinking are exemplified by an article in the Jewish newspaper Sion, which rejected linguistic acculturation (let alone assimilation). Klier comments, “Sion offered its own list of reasons why the Empire’s Jews were slow to speak Russian, none of them very flattering to Russians. On a daily basis, Yiddish served the Jews as the language of a separate caste of tradesmen within the wider society. Where economic necessity required the Jews to acquire another language, such as Ukrainian, they easily did so. Russian culture offered nothing that Jews saw as worthy of imitation, in contrast to German culture. There was even a ‘German Party’ of Jews in Russia, seeking to introduce their fellows to the cultural riches of Germany.” Ibid., 106. In what is perhaps an ironic reversal of the minority conforming to the majority, the article in Sion specified the economic and cultural terms that could make Russia worthy of Jewish acculturation and assimilation. Klier writes, “Russian participation in the commercial life of the Empire must grow sufficiently to force knowledge of Russian out of economic necessity. The institutional network of Russian culture must expand sufficiently to justify and expedite its adoption by Jews.” Ibid., 107. Interestingly, the same attitudes later surfaced during the resurrection of the Polish state in 1918. Some of Poland’s Jews openly stated that Poles were not morally or culturally worthy of the Jews’ assimilation. 12 Harry M. Rabinowicz, The Legacy of Polish Jewry: A History of Polish Jews in the Inter-War Years 1919–1939 (London: Yoseloff, 1965), 148. Rabinowicz goes on to state: “Not only were there invisible walls between Jew and Pole, but there were even barriers between Jew and Jew. On the one side were the ultra-Orthodox Chassidim; on the other side were the Bundists who substituted Das Kapital of Karl Marx for the Torah of Moses.” 13 The rise of Jewish nationalism and Zionism in the 19th century was a phenomenon that was parallel to and inspired by European models, especially the German one, and thus borrowed some of its racist teachings. Zionism and diaspora Jewish nationalism incorporated a high level of political self-awareness and thus resembled other nationalist movements in East Central Europe. See Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (New York: Verso, 2009). As Joshua Shanes’s study of the Austrian-ruled province of Galicia—Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012)—shows, although lacking in territorial ambitions because the Jewish population was dispersed, modern Jewish nationalism shared features in common with other nationalisms. It manifested itself primarily in the nascent but growing Zionist movement, which promoted exclusivist Jewish ethno-nationalism (Jewishness was seen as an innate and immutable characteristic, and religious symbolism and the “glorious” past of ancient Israel were appropriated for its nationalist propaganda—pp. 13, 63, 89–90, 92, 128–29, 138–41, 229, 233, 286); bitterly opposed assimilationist politicians and Orthodox Jews who sought cooperation with the dominant Poles (even though the former merely intended the modernization of Jews and their integration into non-Jewish societies as Jews, and the latter eschewed both modernization and integration—pp. 10, 65, 109, 150, 251, 260–61); was permeated with a high degree of chauvinism and even displayed open hatred towards its opponents and other national groups (its inflammatory nationalist rhetoric unfairly denigrated Jewish assimilationists and Orthodox Jews and led to their increasing marginalization and “illegitimacy” in the political spectrum and society, looked down on other national groups as “inferior,” and railed against Poles and Polonization, because of its perception of an irreconcilable conflict between Polish and Jewish interests—pp. 51, 60–61, 64, 80, 81, 128, 137, 144–45, 150, 216–17, 223, 227, 243–45, 250–53, 257, 264); and did not shy away from political violence to combat its opponents (pp. 236–37, 271–72, 279). Shanes makes it abundantly clear that Jewish nationalism was not simply “constructed,” but rather derived from Jewish ethnicity embedded in Jewish religious tradition. Jewish nationalism was an integral development among Galician Jews, and not so much of a defence against alleged anti-Semitism (pp. 49, 50). Its ultimate goal was “to organize Jews politically as Jews” (p. 11). Cooperation was shunned in favour of confrontation. Jewish nationalists tended to be self-declared enemies of the Polish cause. They had no loyalty to Poland, and even those Galician Jews considering themselves Polish did not usually identify with Polish national aspirations. (On the other hand, Galician Zionists, as almost all Habsburg Jews, openly declared their loyalty to Austria, even though Austria did not recognize Jews as a national or ethnic group and denied them linguistic rights. In January 1914, Galician Zionists even issued a resolution calling Jews to arms against Czarist Russia—p. 282.) By 1914, most Jews in Galicia had come to accept an ethno-nationalist definition of their community and demanded political rights. As Shanes notes, Galician Jews constituted a distinct ethnic group in the region: linguistically, religiously, economically and socially. Moreover, Judaism itself provided the linguistic and cultural building blocks with which Jewish nationalists could construct a modern nationalist consciousness: a collective understanding of Jewish peoplehood, reinforced by liturgy and ritual, a shared historical connection to a specific territory, and a unique common language. (P. 286). Similar developments had occurred in Russian-occupied Poland. Even the socialist Bund (General Jewish Workers’ Party), at its 1901 congress, adopted a full-fledged national programme, declaring that Jews should be recognized as a nation and receive “national-cultural autonomy.” When nationalisms share a common territory and have disparate political agendas, conflict is inevitable. The situation was, therefore, diametrically opposed to Western European countries, where integration and assimilation were the norm and Jews did not think of asserting their own political agenda. Notwithstanding these glaring differences, Western historians do not address Jewish ethno-religious nationalism as a factor in Polish-Jewish relations, and focus exclusively on Polish nationalism as the sole cause of Polish-Jewish antagonism. Although hostile to competing nationalisms, as were all nationalisms at the time, Polish nationalism lacked the sophistication and racist edge of the German model or the perseverance of Jewish nationalism, as evidenced in the State of Israel and the Jewish diaspora. 14 David E. Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 69. 15 Joshua D. Zimmerman, “Feliks Perl on the Jewish Question,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, 1815–1918, vol. 27: Jews in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2015), 328. 16 As Poland was in the process of being resurrected, a majority of local Jews supported the total dis-affiliation with Poland. In Prussian Poland, where pro-German sentiments were nearly universal, many Jews opted for German citizenship and those Jews that remained in Poland often sent their children to German schools and considered themselves to be German patriots. See, for example, Jerzy Topolski and Krzysztof Modelski, eds., Żydzi w Wielkopolsce na przestrzeni dziejów, 2nd edition (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1999), 191; Roman Wapiński, ed., U progu niepodległości 1918–1989 (Ostaszewo Gdańskie: Stepan design, 1999), 174; Czesław Łuczak, “Żydowska Rada Ludowa w Poznaniu (1918–1921),” in Marian Mroczka, ed., Polska i Polacy: Studia z dziejów polskiej myśli i kultury politycznej XIX i XX wieku (Gdańsk: Uniwersytet Gdański, 2001), 191–99. See also Zvi Helmut Steinitz’s memoir As a Boy Through the Hell of the Holocaust: From Poznań, through Warsaw, the Kraków ghetto, Płaszów, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Berlin-Haselhorst, Sachsenhausen, to Schwerin and over Lübeck, Neustadt, Bergen-Belsen, and Antwerp to Eretz Israel, 1927–1946 (Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre, 2009), 15, 17, 58. Although born in Polish Poznań in 1927, Steinitz considered Germany to be his fatherland. (His contempt for Poland continued even after the horrors of the Second World War: “It is probably no coincidence that the Holocaust took place in Poland. ... Within a matter of days, Poland was occupied almost without a fight ... It was no great surprise to me that the Nazis had built their extermination machine in Poland, as they knew that many Polish people had a negative attitude towards Jews.” Ibid., 67, 77, 264.) Moreover, the pro-German sentiments of Jews in Upper Silesia were not dampened by German demonstrations in 1920 and 1923 that “escalated into pogrom-like attacks on Jewish property.” See Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New Yok: The Penguin Press, 2006), 197. Oscar Janowsky comments, “The Jews of Posen [Poznań] had become thoroughly German in sentiment, but the defeat of Germany, the uncertainty as to the ultimate disposition of that Polish region, and fear that the Jews might suffer in the struggle between Germans and Poles led to a demand that the Jews be recognized as a third nationality in the region. … with the support of a majority of Jews of the contested territory, it appealed to the Peace Conference to assure the Jews of Posen the rights of a national minority.” See Oscar I. Janowsky, The Jews and Minority Rights (1898–1919) (New York: Columbia Uinversity Press, 1933), 279. Jews in Galicia overwhelmingly supported the Austrians throughout the First World War, even as Polish attitudes towards Austria became more hostile, thus leading to worsening of Polish-Jewish relations. The Russian Jewish writer S.Y. Ansky noted: “The Galician Jews, however, stuck to their pro-Austrian orientation, flaunting it in the most delicate circumstances, with no concern for horrible consequences.” Jewish merchants were widely blamed for hoarding goods and profiteering which, in increasingly impoverished conditions, led to riots in a number of cities. See Michał Galas and Antony Polonsky, “Introduction,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 23: Jews in Kraków (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011): 18–21. Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. envoy sent to monitor conditions in Poland in 1919, reported on conditions in Eastern Poland as follows: “Now, of course, the Jews in that part of the country were a little to blame, and the reason is this: We found that … they do not want to remain with Poland, and they make no secret of it. They are pro-Russian. They believe that Lithuania should be returned to Russia or what they want is … to have a separate Canton arranged where Jewish and Hebrew would be spoken; where they would elect their man to Parliament, who could speak in their own language and have entirely self government.” See Przemysław Różański, “Wilno, 19–31 kwietnia 1919 roku,” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów, no. 1 (2006): 13–34. The opposition to Polish rule in Białystok was quite vociferous, whereas in Lwów, Drohobycz and Borysław it was more muted. See Katarzyna Sztop-Rutkowska, “Konflikty polsko-żydowskie jako element kształtowania się ładu polityczno-społecznego w Białymstoku w latach 1919–1920 w świetle lokalnej prasy,” Studia Judaica, vol. 5, no. 2(10) (2002) and vol. 6, no. 1(11) (2003): 131–50, especially 136–37 (virtually all Jewish organizations in Białystok were opposed to Polish rule); Vladimir Melamed, Evrei vo Lvove (XIII–pervaia polovina XX veka): Sobytiia, obshchestvo, liudi (Lviv: Sovmestnoe Ukrainsko-Amerikanskoe Predpriiatie TE, 1994), 134 (documents support for the Ukrainian cause by Zionists in Lwów); Iakov Honigsman, 600 let i dva goda: Istoriia evreev Drogobycha i Borislava (Lviv: Bnei-Brit “Leopolis” and Lvovskoe ob-vo evreiskoi kultury im. Sholom-Aleikhema, 1997), 27–28 (documents support for the Ukrainian cause by Zionists, Poalei Zion and the Bund in Drohobycz and Borysław). Arthur L. Goodhart, who came to Poland in the summer of 1920 as counsel to a fact-finding mission sent by the president of the United States, was told by leading Jewish citizens of Białystok that the Jews hoped that a plebiscite would be held, in which case the majority would vote in favour of belonging to Lithuania (even though there were no Lithuanians in this predominantly Polish region). See Arthur L. Goodhart, Poland and the Minority Races (New York: Brentano’s, 1920), 45, 60. (When the Red Army conquered Białystok in 1920, only Russian and Yiddish were recognized as official languages and those who spoke only Polish could not occupy any official positions.) In Wilno, a city where ethnic Poles formed the largest group and Lithuanians represented no more than two percent of the population, the Jews were also opposed to Polish rule. An article in the June 1918 Yiddish daily Letzte Naies expressed surprise that Poles would even ask Jews for support, since they would not grant Jews rights as a full-fledged separate nationality. The article argued that Jewish culture is older and more advanced than Polish culture, and the moral development of Poles is on the same level as that of the Hottentots. For more on conditions in the Eastern Borderlands, where Jewish opposition to Polish statehood sometimes took on violent forms, see the studies by Janusz Szczepański, Wojna 1920 roku na Mazowszu i Podlasiu (Warsaw and Pułtusk: Instytut Historyczny Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 1995); Janusz Szczepański, Wojna 1920 roku w Ostrołęckiem (Warsaw, Ostrołęka, and Pułtusk: Urząd do Spraw Kombatantów i Osób Represjonowanych, Wyższa Szkoła Humanistyczna w Pułtusku, Ostrołęckie Towarzystwo Naukowe, and Stacja Naukowa MOBN w Pułtusku, 1997); Janusz Szczepański, Społeczeństwo Polski w walce z najazdem bolszewickim 1920 roku (Warsaw and Pułtusk: Naczelna Dyrekcja Archiwów Państwowych, and Wyższa Szkoła Humanistyczna; Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza Towarzystwa Opieki nad Zabytkami, 2000). Even in central Poland, Jews dispalyed open hostility toward Polish statehood. According to Jewish accounts, the Jewish working class awaited the arrival of the Red Army with anticipation and wanted to see it victorious over Poland. See Pierre Goldman, Souvenirs obscurs d’un Juif polonais né en France (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 28. On November 10, 1918, large demonstrations of Jews in Warsaw chanted slogans like “Down with Poland, long live Bolshevism,” “Down with the Polish army,” “Down with Piłsudski.” See Piotr Wróbel, Listopadowe dni—1918: Kalendarium narodzin II Rzeczypospolitej (Warsaw: Pax, 1998), 89. A large demonstration against the Polish army and government in Kalisz was attended mostly by Jews, and understandably provoked a reaction which escalated into a small riot after a Pole was stabbed by a Jew. See Katarzyna Sztop-Rutkowska, Próba dialogu: Polacy i Żydzi w międzywojennym Białymstoku (Kraków: Nomos 2008), 143–44. There was also considerable agitation on the international scene by influential Jewish circles directed against Poland, and even its restoration as an independent state. The foremost Jewish delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, which was dominated by Zionists and enjoyed the support of the American Jewish Congress, demanded that Poland recognize its Jewish residents as members of a distinct nation, with the right to collective representation at both state and international levels. This sweeping form of autonomy would have entailed the creation of a separate Jewish parliament, alongside a state parliament representing all the country’s inhabitants, as well as a Jewish seat at the League of Nations. The demands for formal, corporate, political/diplomatic status for a territorially dispersed nation, in effect creating a state within a state, were strongly opposed by Poland, as well as the Czechoslovak contingent who faced similar demands. Ultimately, these demands were rejected as unworkable, as they would seriously undermine the authority of the Polish Government. Grossly exaggerated claims about the hardships faced by Jews, accompanied by a vicious public relations campaign directed against the Polish state, did much damage to the Polish cause, while diverting attention from the incomparably worse treatment being meted out to Jews by the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians. The negative publicity generated by this concerted campaign, as well as other displays of hostility toward Polish Americans, likely also played a significant role in the antagonism toward Jews felt by some Polish-American volunteers in General Haller’s army. What particulary irked many Poles, as well as some assimilationalist Polish Jews, was the demand that Poland be monitored by an international body on the treatment of its minorities, something which no Western European countries (or any non-European countries) had to endure. A rhetorical question: Would Israel or the Jewish diaspora ever tolerate such a condition being imposed on Israel? See, for example, Peter D. Stachura, “National Identity and the Ethnic Minorities in Early Inter-War Poland,” in Peter D. Stachura, ed., Poland Between the Wars, 1918–1939 (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press, 1998), 67–70, 74–77; Tadeusz Radzik, Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w Stanach Zjednoczonych Ameryki w latach 1918-1921 (Lublin: Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, and Polonia, 1988); David Kaufman, “Unwelcome Influence? The Jews and Poland, 1918–1921,” in Stachura, Perspectives on Polish History, 64–79; Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 165; Neal Pease, “‘This Troublesome Question’: The United States and the ‘Polish Pogroms’ of 1918–1919,” in M.B.B. Biskupski, ed., Ideology, Politics and Diplomacy in East Central Europe (Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 58–79; Andrzej Kapiszewski, “Contoversial Reports on the Situation of Jews in Poland in the Aftermath of World War I,” Studia Judaica, vol. 7, no. 2 (14) (2004): 257–304. For a comparison of the situation of Jews under Polish rule with the incomparably worse conditions that prevailed under Russian and Ukrainian rule, see Benjamin Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 140–46; Lidia B. Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov: Pogromy na Ukraine, v Belorussii i evropeiskoi chasti Rossii v period Grazhdanskoi voiny 1918–1922 gg. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: ROSSP-EN, 2007). The symbol of well-placed Jews working against the interests of Poland was Lewis Namier (formerly Niemirowski Bernstein), who worked in the British Foreign Office. Namier is believed to have tampered with the drawing of the so-called Curzon line (first suggested by Lord Curzon at the Spa Conference in 1920), which was surreptitiously altered in favour of Soviet Russia; the altered frontier line was resurrected in 1943 and provided ammunition for Molotov’s rapacious claims to Poland’s Eastern Borderlands. See Norman Davies, Rising ’44: ‘The Battle for Warsaw’ (London: Macmillan, 2003), 55, 144. That intransigent Jewish nationalism was also a destabilizing factor is attested to by the Jewish leader Lucien Wolf who commented on the Minorities’ Treaty on September 16, 1919: “We cannot pretend to have solved the Jewish Question in eastern Europe, but at any rate we have on paper the best solution that has ever been dreamt of. We have still before us the task of working out this solution in practice. It will be difficult and delicate because we shall be confronted by two kinds of mischief-makers—on the one hand the violent anti-Semites, and on the other the extreme Jewish nationalists.” See Peter D. Stachura, Poland, 1918–1945: An Interpretive and Documentary History of the Second Republic (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 91. Anti-Polish fanaticism personified in Jewish political leader Yitzhak Grünbaum plagued the Jewish political agenda during the interwar period, just as anti-Semitism was part of the agenda of some Polish political movements. 17 The Rightist Zionists went even further: the Jews would tolerate the presence of Arabs, but they would never be equals. In the view of Vladimir Jabotinsky and many others similarly minded (then and now), “they [Arabs] could never be part of the Israeli nation.They could not become one with the dominant force that would determine the nature of the country. ... to maintain the distinction between members of the Hebrew nation, who ruled the country (and determined its character), and the Arabs, whom the Hebrews denied any access to real centers of power.” This followed from Jabotinsky’s tacit definition of nationalism: “‘Every distinctive race aspires to become a nation, to create a separate society, in which everything must be in this race’s image—everything must accommodate the tastes, habits, and unique attributes of this specific race. … A national culture cannot be limited to music or books as many argue.’” See Eran Kaplan, The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2005), 49–50. 18 Joshua M. Karlip, The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013). 19 Janowsky, The Jews and Minority Rights (1898–1919), 300. 20 Karlip, The Tragedy of a Generation, 146. 21 See, for example, Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, vol. 2: 1881 to 1914 (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010), who, while acknowledging Jewish demands for autonomy and the existence of Jewish nationalism (e.g., pp. 111, 138–39), does not attribute any particular significance to these phenomena, and attributes the deterioration of Polish-Jewish relations exclusively on Polish nationalism. In earlier years, however, some Jewish historians were more even-handed in assigning blame for the state of affairs: “Having just concluded a bloody struggle for national independence, the Poles could not have been expected to be pleased with the presence on their soil of three million mostly unacculturated Jews, many of whom had been sympathetic to Poland’s enemies. … Objective reasons for disliking the Jews, who were so numerous, so influential, and so clearly non-Polish, were not lacking, and the chauvinistic atmosphere that pervaded the country made things worse.” See Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 12. 22 H.H. Fisher, America and the New Poland (New York: MacMillan, 1928), 159, 331. 23 For example, the municipality of Zamość allocated substantial funding for Jewish schools, an old age home, social organizations, and summer colonies for Jewish children. See Mordechai V. Bernstein, ed., The Zamosc Memorial Book: A Memorial Book of a Center of Jewish Life Destroyed by the Nazis (Mahwah, New Jersey: Jacob Solomon Berger, 2004), 283. Jewish schools and socio-cultural organizations received subsidies from the municipality of Mińsk Mazowiecki. See Janusz Kuligowski, “Zarządy miejskie Mińska Mazowieckiego i Siedlec w pierwszych miesiącach okupacji niemieckiej, Rocznik Mińsko-Mazowiecki, vol. 5 (1999): 56–64, here at 57. The same was true in many other localities, such as Wilno (and nearby towns) and Białystok. See Jarosław Wołkonowski, Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w Wilnie i na Wileńszczyźnie 1919–1939 (Białystok: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku, 2004), 133–43, 186–97, 209–12, 216–17, 219, 222–23, 227, 263, 275–76, 280, 285, 288; Katarzyna Sztop-Rutkowska, Próba dialogu: Polacy i Żydzi w międzywojennym Białymstoku (Kraków: Nosmos, 2008), 182–83, 233, 244. Subsidies to Jewish schools and organization were also provided in Warsaw and Łódź, and doubtless many more places. 24 Writing in 1894, a French Jewish author describes this phenomenon in the following terms: While Talmudism (“the nationalist ethics of the Talmud”) and Jews-as-nationality reigns among the Jews of such places as Russia and Poland, “This intolerant aversion toward the stranger has disappeared among the Western Jews,” who opted for assimilation. See Bernard Lazare, Antisemitism: Its History and Causes (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 136. 25 Sean Martin, Jewish Life in Cracow, 1918–1939 (London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 14, 50, 84; Wierzbieniec, Żydzi w województwie lwowskim w okresie międzywojennym, 41–42. 26 Joanna Januszewska-Jurkiewicz, Stosunki narodowościowe na Wileńszczyźnie w latach 1920–1939, 2nd edition (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2011), 550. Another organization started up in interwar Wilno which promoted biculturalism was also denounced by Jewish community leaders, especially Zionists. Ibid., 550–51. The actions of Berek Joselowicz, who participated in the 1794 Kościuszko Uprising, are usually celebrated in terms of Polish patriotism. Derek J. Penslar throws some cold water on this narrative. First of all, he considers the regiment of Jewish volunteer cavalry a legend, and suggests that it may have been a part of the urban militia defending Warsaw from the Russians, and not an independent regiment. More important, Penslar raises sensitive issues that include opportunism and ephemeral loyalties: Berek was not so much a Polish patriot as an adventurer and activist who sought to enhance his own personal honor as well as that of the Jews under his command. Although Berek is most famous for his service for Poland, in 1796 he proposed to the Habsburg emperor the raising of a corps of six thousand to eight thousand Jews who would be divided into cavalry and infantry units to fight against the French. See Derek J. Penslar, Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013), 56–57. On a related Jewish personage, Penslar examines the motives of Dov Ber Meisels, the chief rabbi of Kraków, a prosperous banker and supporter of the Poles’ January 1863 insurrection. The author notes that Meisels was, in his words, a “reactionary antinationalist,” and proposes that Meisels’ support for the Polish cause owed to his long-standing close associations with the Polish nobility. Ibid., 58. However, was the fact that Meisels was a banker imply that he had a financial stake in a Polish victory in the 1863 Uprising? While rejecting the premise of international bankers working in collusion, Penslar is candid about the fact that, “Revulsion against hateful stereotypes should not blind us to the sizable presence of Jews in finance and business who made money from war. … It is a fact, not an antisemitic fantasy, that Jews played vital roles in coordinating the allocation of raw materials during the First World War, not only in Germany but also in the United States.” Ibid., 145, 150. Even in Warsaw, Jewish support for the Polish patriotic manifestations that culminated in the January 1863 uprising was atypical, and the Jewish population as a whole “displayed no great enthusiasm for rapprochement or merger with the Poles.” See Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1885–1881, 147. The disloyalty of most erstwhile Polish Jews was not just an opinion held by Poles. M. Morgulis, a Russian Jewish intellectual, reckoned the Jews to have been loyal to Russia during the insurrection. Ibid., 191. Russian “hangman” Muraviev, while wreaking ghastly reprisals against Poles, considered Jewish conduct to have been ambiguous enough, during the insurrection, for the Jews to escape massive repression. Ibid., 160. In Den, an Odessa-based Jewish newspaper, “In article after article Den asserted that the Jews had steadfastly resisted Polonization. Jews recognized the ultimate futility of Polish aspirations and also displayed a basic loyalty to the Russian state. If the Jews acted in this way when they received no tangible reward, what would be their response if the government adopted a positive program of emancipation to win over the Jews?” Ibid., 354. For a time, Jews were allowed by the tsarist authorities to acquire Polish land, Klier comments: “Thus, the decree of 26 April 1862, which gave the Jews in the Southwestern and Western Regions the right to purchase gentry land, assumed that the Jews were allies of the Russian cause in the Ukraine.” Ibid., 185. 27 Ralph Slovenko, “On Polish-Jewish Relations,” The Journal of Psychiatry & Law, vol. 15 (Winter 1987): 597–687, as quoted in Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, Jews in Poland: A Documentary History: The Rise of Jews as a Nation from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel (New York: Hippocrene, 1993; Revised edition–1998), 157. Slovenko goes on to state some rather self-evident truths that are often overlooked by those who tend to view Polish-Jewish relations as some exceptional form of ethnic or religious interaction: “The phenomenon is surely not unique. Birds of a feather flock together. That people group with those similar to themselves is one of the most well-established replicable findings in the psychology and biology of human behavior. People of whatever race or religion have always tried to insulate and remove themselves from what is perceived as different behavior, whatever its origins.” George Orwell in his famous “Notes on Nationalism,” writes that characteristic for the nationalism of the victim is a reluctance to acknowledge in just measure the sufferings of other peoples, and an inability to admit that the victim can also victimize. 28 In fact, there was nothing unusual in such co-existence either at that time or today. In Canada, there was an enormous divide between French Canadians and the dominant English-speaking society until the 1960s. A similar situation prevailed in Northern Ireland, between the dominant Protestants and the Catholics, throughout the 20th century, and many Protestants and Catholics continue to live in segregated communities to this day, afraid of attacks from the other side. In many Western countries, where racist policies were part of their very fabric, there was state-enforced segregation and, in some cases, genocidal policies were implemented. In the United States, Blacks and native Indians were segregated from Whites, as were native Indians in Canada and the aboriginal peoples in Australia and New Zealand. New Zealand, like the United States, has a shameful, but little known, history of bloodily forcing its Maori population off their lands. Edward Cornwallis, the governor of Nova Scotia, ordered all Mi’kmaq people to be scalped and killed in 1752 amid the natives’ raids on the British settlement in Halifax. Historians have recently argued that Canada pursued a deliberate policy of starving the Plains people in the latter half of the 19th century. See James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Poltics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina, Saskatchewan: University of Regina Press, 2013). The Canadian government either abandoned or attempted to assimilate its aboriginal population through coercive measures such as residential schools. The monumental 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which gave rise to entirely credible charges of cultural genocide, highlighted the practice of seizing aboriginal children permanently and usually unwillingly from their parents, placing them in state custody, and subjecting them to the forced labour and isolation of “residential schools.” The practice reached its peak at the very end of the 1950s and continued in significant numbers through the 1970s (the last residential school didn’t close until 1996). Almost a third of aboriginal Canadians—150,000 people—were raised, without access to their families, in these institutions. The system of institutionalized cultural control and domination arose in the 1870s when the new bureaucratic order of post-colonial Canada began to apply structure and order to newly added territories—many of which it wished to parcel up and hand to newcomers, cleansed of pre-existing people—and also applying discipline and institutional homogeneity to what it saw as lost and unhygienic populations. The result was the simultaneous emergence of the reserve system and the residential-school archipelago. The residential school archipelago, when it was created in the 1870s and 1880s, was modelled not after European boarding schools but after the British reformatories and industrial schools designed in the early 19th century to support a child-labour regime, and which were gradually abolished in Britain after 1848. This Canadian system was meant to receive no government or private financing whatsoever: It was to be funded entirely (and in practice was funded “on a nearly cost-free basis,” according to the report) from the products of the unpaid labour of its “students.” The resulting revenues proved grossly inadequate to the nutritional, physical and health needs of the children, and as a result, more than 4,000 of them died. Between 2006 and 2011, there were 29,000 documented claims of physical and sexual abuse in native residential schools. The following is a rather typical profile of one of the thousands of victims of abuse who was forced into a residential schools in the late 1940s, as reported by Tom Hawthorn, “Residential School Survivor Spoke for Truth,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), August 9, 2014: At the age of 10, Alvin Dixon was removed from his home and family and sent more than 500 kilometres south to the Alberni Residential Indian School on Vancouver Island. Two hours after arriving, he was beaten with a strap. His crime: speaking the only language he knew, which was not English. Many more beatings were to be endured in the following years. The boarding school operated by the United Church would be revealed later to have been a stalking ground for sadists and at least one predatory pedophile, their quarry the helpless children snatched away in the name of civilization. What young Alvin and the other children suffered is shocking for its callousness and cruelty. Even the mundane seemed puzzling; he was expected to fill out a form detailing what he had eaten after every meal, an odd bureaucratic task considering the boys all ate from the same shared pot. Only last year it was revealed the children had been the unwitting subjects of experiments conducted by the federal government and the Canadian Red Cross to determine how little nutrition they needed to survive. Alvin Dixon, a malnourished boy, had been a human guinea pig. During the 1930s, Canadian government officials tested tuberculosis vaccines on impoverished aboriginal people instead of fixing poor living conditions that spread the disease. See Bob Weber, “TB Vaccine Tested on Reserves in 1930s: Historian Says Medicine Given Meant Officials Could Ignore Poverty,” Toronto Star, July 28, 2013. In the 1940s and 1950s, Canadian government bureaucrats subjected 1,300 hungry aboriginals, mostly children, to nutritional experiments by cutting milk rations in half at residential schools and depriving them of essential vitamins and dental services. See “Hungry Aboriginal People Subject of Experiments, Paper Finds,” The Canadian Press, July 16, 2013, Internet: Yüklə 2,16 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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