May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

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103 Miller, Rejoice o Youth!, 136.

104 Mordechai Nadav, The Jews of Pinsk, 1506 to 1880 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2008), 76–79, 85.

105 Ibid., 142–43.

106 Ewa Morawska, “Polish-Jewish Relations in America, 1880–1940: Old Elements, New Configurations,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 19 (2007): 75. Morawska goes on to argue that the negative attitude towards peasants was “accompanied by pity for their wretched conditions.” This is an unwarranted generalization for which she presents no persuasive evidence. While this sentiment is sometimes mentioned in Jewish memoirs, it was that of some individuals and could not be said to be widely held or representative of Jewish attitudes.

107 Abraham Shulman, The Old Country (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 15.

108 John D. Klier, “Christians and Jews and the ‘Dialogue of Violence’ in Late Imperial Russia,” in Anna Sapir Abulafia, ed., Religious Violence Between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Publishers, 2002), 163.

109 Jabob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (London: Oxford University Press; New York: Behrman House, 1961). In recent centuries, according to Katz, some Jewish thinkers did genuinely reject the Christians-are-idolaters premise—in part because Christians believed in creatio ex nihilo (pp. 163–66, 191). Put in broader context, Jewish goodwill towards Gentiles, according to Katz (pp. 58, 101–2), was motivated in part by expediency (e.g., avoid giving all Jews a bad name), and in part by genuine adherence to moral principles. Commensurate with both tendencies, the Talmud teaches loving-kindness to all human beings, helping the poor and sick, etc. (pp. 59–60). But what of the Talmudic verses that allow Jews to cheat gentiles, etc.? (p. 107). Katz replies: “The disputants claimed that all disparaging references to Gentiles in Talmudic sources applied only to those ‘seven nations’ which are mentioned in the Bible as the aboriginal inhabitants of the Land of Israel, and remnants of which survived as late as Talmudic times. But this statement is no more than an ad hoc device used in the course of controversy. There is no indication in the Talmud or in the later halakhic sources that such a view was ever held, or even proposed, by any individual halakhist. In fact, evidence to the contrary exists.” (p. 110.) Another important, path-breaking study is Israel Jacob’s Yuval’s Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). In his review of that book, Jan Peczkis writes:
Yuval does not see Christianity as a daughter religion of Judaism. Instead, he sees both Christianity and Talmudic Judaism as daughter religions of Biblical Judaism—the latter of which ended with the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. Thus, Christianity and Mishnaic Judaism were sister religions that formed against a common backdrop of subjugation and destruction. …

Nowadays, we commonly hear that Judaism had no inherent hostility to Christianity, and reacted belatedly against it only in response to persecution by Christians. The truth is rather different. We learn from Yuval that, notwithstanding the rarity of obvious Jewish polemical literature against Christianity in the first eight centuries of their coexistence, the Jewish polemics was more subtle. In addition, the hostility between the two religions began long before Christians had acquired the political power to be in a position to persecute Jews. In fact, in pagan Rome, Christians were persecuted while Jews had the legal status of religio licita.

Yuval summarizes the situation as follows, “The basic premise of this book is that the polemics between Judaism and Christianity during the first centuries of the Common Era, in all their varieties and nuances, played a substantial role in the mutual formation of the two religions. Here I am referring not only to an explicit and declared polemic, but to a broad panorama of expressions that include, particularly from the Jewish side, allusions, ambiguities, denials, refutations, and at times also internalization and quiet agreement.” (p. xvii). For example, the Midrashic literature opposes Christian teachings not by direct rebuttal, but by presenting alternative stories that negate the Christian versions. … Christians understood the Roman destruction of the Temple as an act of divine vengeance for the Crucifixion of Christ. Jews saw the guilt of pagan Rome in the destruction of the Temple, which they juxtaposed Rome with Edom. (p. 32). Later, Christian Rome became Edom—the continuation of pagan Rome. (p. 274).

Yuval confirms the sometimes-denied fact that the Talmud refers derisively to Jesus Christ. He comments, “Indeed, in several places the identification of Balaam with Jesus is clearly called for (e. g, in B. Sanhedrin 106b), while other sources clearly speak of two distinct figures (as in B. Gittin 57a—in the uncensored version the reading there is “Jesus” rather than “the sinners of Israel”, as in the Vilna edition). (p. 293). The author also confirms that the sentence of boiling in feces (B. Gittin 57a) applies to Jesus Christ, and that Jews interpreted it as such, going far back into history. (pp. 196–197).
Some commentators have gone as far as suggesting that Christianity is inherently intolerant of Jews and Judaism (perhaps even in a proto-Nazi exterminatory sense), because the very existence of Judaism is a negation of the raison d'etre of Christianity. However, Yuval notes that this goes both ways, “To be a ‘Jew’ meant, in the most profound sense, to adopt a religious identity that competed with Christianity, and vice versa. Or, to adopt the formulation of the late Jacob Katz, the veracity of one religion depended on the negation of the other.” (p. 25).

The author describes in considerable detail the imprecations against gentiles, directed to God and spoken by Jews, in the face of persecution by Christians, notably during and after the First Crusade. They called upon God to kill indiscriminately and ruthlessly. (p. 120). Yuval points out that these Jewish attitudes went far beyond the pain and anger of persecution, and became more or less a mainstay of Jewish thinking. He comments, “Two arguments may be adduced to refute the explanation of Goldschmidt and Freimann, who tended to see these curses as a direct response to the distress and suffering of Ashkenazic Jewry. The first is that this is a standard ritual transplanted into the landscape of Ashkenazic prayer. Even if the texts were created against the backdrop of great disaster, there is a far-reaching significance to their repetition year after year, even in times of calm and tranquility. … We are dealing here with a comprehensive religious ideology that sees vengeance as a central component of its messianic doctrine.” (pp. 122–123).

In addition, the hostility of Jews against Christianity was not limited to matters surrounding Christian conduct against Jews. It was directed against the Christian religion in toto. For instance, Rabbi Yitzhak of Corbeil denounced Christians as idolaters. (p. 204). Of the many anti-Christian stories told by Jews, there was one in which the account of King Solomon and the two whores (I Kings 3:16) was changed so that Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of Jesus, were the two whores. (p. 194).

Yuval points out that, whereas Christianity never sought the systematic extermination of Jews as collective punishment for the Crucifixion of Christ, European Judaism did seek the systematic extermination of Christians (by the hand of God) as collective punishment for the pogroms during the Crusades. Yuval, having just finished an extensive discussion of such things as the accusations of ritual murder, and the blood libels, assesses all this as follows, “Jewish messianism plays an important role in understanding the mechanisms that triggered Christian fantasies about the Jews. There is a tragic asymmetry between the messianic expectations of Christians and of Jews. The Christians awaited the conversion to Christianity of the Jews, while the Jews anticipated the destruction of Christianity. … Thus, the Jewish messianic fantasy played a major role in shaping Christian anti-Semitic fantasies.” (p. 289).

110 Antony Polonsky, “Introduction,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 15 (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 52. In his study Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2004), Gershon David Hundert argues that the Jewish community held a basic and unassailable feeling of superiority over the non-Jewish world, 234–35. Hundert also dispells the notion that 18^th century Poland was a period of social and economic deterioration for the Jews, as well as of serious decline in Polish-Jewish relations. Historian David Frick argues that separation for the good of the community “was the goal of authorities on both sides, and structural parity in the two societies helped both to maintain that separation and to police necessary breaches of it.” See David Frick, “Jews in Public Places: Further Chapters in the Jewish-Christian Encounter in Seventeenth Century Vilna,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 22 (2010): 215–48, here at 242. See also Edward Fram, Ideals Face Reality: Jewish Law and Life in Poland, 1550–1655 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1997), 28.

111 Magda Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reform Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 118.

112 Ibid., 71–73.

113 Ibid., 75.

114 Salo Baron, History and Jewish Historians (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1964), 142.

115 Moshe Rosman, “Poland before 1795,” in Gershon David Hundert, ed., The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), vol. 2, 1388.

116 M. J. Rosman, “A Minority Views the Majority: Jewish Attitudes Towards the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and Interaction with Poles,” in Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies, vol. 4 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies, 1989), 37. An example of a double standard of morality is found in the writings of David ben Samuel Halevi, a 17^th century rabbi, who pondered the question of whether one should rescue non-Jews or apostates from danger to prevent their death. The rabbi concluded that active killing was not permissible, even if walking away without helping was. Faced with that same question, an anonymous Polish Catholic priest’s answer was: “Without any exception whether he is a good man or a bad man, a Jew or a pagan, faithful or an infidel, Catholic or heretic, servant, lord, or a serf, relative or kinsman, rich or poor, he is our neighbour and therefore must be loved, albeit not equally.” See Magda Teter, “‘There should be no love between us and them’: Social Life and the Bounds of Jewish and Canon Law in Early Modern Poland,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 22: Social and Cultural Boundaries in Pre-Modern Poland (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010), 250.

117 Raphael Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment: Their Confrontation in Galicia and Poland in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985), 16–17.

118 Ibid., 307.

119 Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (New York: YIVO Institute, 2001), 17.

120 According to the Boston College Center for Christian-Jewish Learning (Internet: