May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles



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He generally manages to succeed, for the Polish peasant is easy prey. Having very little ready money … readily pays interest in kind without reflecting how much dearer it really costs him. And borrow he must from time to time. … When a misfortune comes, and the cow dies or falls sick, the Jew is at hand, and so it goes on till the peasant is perpetually in his debt and power. He and his wife have no idea of the market value of their dairy and farm produce, for the Jews rule the market and keep their secrets to themselves.61
Middlemen—whether Chinese in Southeast Asia, Tamils in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Indians in Uganda, or Jews in Eastern Europe—exhibit a distinctive cultural profile which includes strong group ties, resistance to forming bonds with those who are not members of the group, and dress, language and religion that differs from the majority’s population. Middleman minorities are often regarded as economic exploiters who do not commit to solidarity with the peoples they exploit. From time to time these sentiments explode in violent outbursts, often in response to an incident that provokes outrage among the host society.62 (As Israeli historian Emanuel Melzer has noted, the anti-Jewish excesses and pogroms that occurred in Poland in the years 1935–37, “Usually … resulted from the killing of a Pole by a Jew.”63 This is to be contrasted with the situation in present-day Germany, for example, where “foreigners” are being killed for purely racial reasons.64) As Edna Bonacich has also noted, in relation to other countries that faced this problem, “The efficient organization of the middleman economy makes it virtually impossible for the native population to compete in the open market; hence, discriminatory government measures … have been widely introduced.”65 Arguing, in the case of Poland, that religious prejudice (Christian anti-Semitism) or (Polish) nationalism per se is the driving force behind these reactions simply misses the mark.66

Comparisons are sometimes made, especially in the writings of American Jews, between the position of Jews in Poland and that of Blacks in the United States. This analogy is simply devoid of legitimacy and misleading. Blacks came to the Americas by force, were slaves with no rights, could not emancipate themselves, performed menial labour, were mostly poor, and were at the very bottom of society. Jews came to Poland voluntarily and could leave at any time, served as traders, were largely exempt from the menial labour of the Polish masses, and—as middlemen situated between the tiny nobility and the peasant majority, enjoyed more rights and privileges than most Poles. The Jews’ long-term advantaged position no doubt facilitated their becoming a literate class, and of many Jews becoming wealthy. Finally, discriminatory laws and policies against Blacks served primarily to keep them inferior, whereas those directed against Jews were primarily to reduce their advantages.



Rather, it was the Polish peasantry that occupied the position of Blacks, at least up to the end of the 19th century. In pre-partition Poland, the Jews occupied a position between the landowners and the peasants that perpetuated inquities against the latter class. The primary exploitative device was the so-called propinacja, a liquor production and sale monopoly enjoyed by landowners on their estates and private towns, which was usually operated by Jewish leaseholders. As Jan Peczkis points out in his review of Hillel Levin’s book Economic Origins of Anti-Semitism: Poland and Jews in the Early Modern Period,67
Poland’s Jews did not simply transmit the policies of the Polish landowners to the peasants. These Jews had considerable autonomy, and assumed considerable powers of their own. To begin with, the Polish owners were often absent (p. 10) or only remotely involved with their estates (p. 62). Jews became leaseholders, or arendars. They often managed the estates. In fact, they sometimes managed entire villages, and oversaw the economic development of forests, mines, mints, breweries, etc., using serf labor (p. 62). Clearly, the Jews were less middlemen, and more an economic class.

Author Levine leaves many questions unanswered. How was the exploitation of Polish peasants apportioned by Polish landlord and “middleman” Jew? To what extent were the landlords actively driving the liquor enterprises, and to what extent were they taking their “cut” of the already-functioning Jewish-run alcohol trade?

One quoted Russian official, Kachovsky, who visited an area after the First Partition, contended that the Jews were the ones primarily responsible for the exploitation of the peasants (pp. 172–173). A quoted visitor, Stephens, reported observing a Jewish innkeeper wrangling with, and extorting money from, intoxicated peasants (p. 143).

The scale of the Jewish liquor enterprise was staggering. Around 1750, about 85% of Polish Jews were in some way associated with the liquor trade (p. 9). Moreover, the very sustenance of many Polish Jews was dependent upon the propinacja (taproom) (p. 12). It is obvious that the Jews, most of all, had a vested interest in its perpetuation.

Levine suggests that the Jewish role in the dysfunctional late feudal Polish society only postponed its end (pp. 237–238). However, the “cultural inertia” actually worked in several ways. Consider the “laziness” of the landowners. To what extent was it an outcome of the fact that the Jews had assumed such dominance in estate affairs? In Poland, unlike many western European nations, the Jews did not identify with Polish society (p. 236). Why should they, in view of their huge size and economic power in Poland? Now consider the complaints, repeatedly stated by Levine, that Polish society suffered from decentralization and backwardness, and that the landowners were, for a long time, disinterested in modernization. Why should they, in view of the fact that most of the benefits would accrue to the Jewish economic class?

Author Levine suggests that anti-Semitism developed as Poles, more and more, unfairly blamed the Jews for the propinacja. However, Levine acknowledges that Jewish prejudices also existed against Poles, and that the Jewish tavern-owner or liquor-dealer could use them to rationalize his role in the degradation of the Polish peasant. He comments, “The drink was both the effect and the cause of that broken resistance and degradation. The Jew, as the primary representative of this system, as the monetizer of unmarketable grain, could avert facing his contribution to the plight of the serf—a ‘Goy’, he might mutter in self-righteousness, ‘drunken sloth is the essence of the Gentile.’” (P. 10.)
Despite oft-repeated claims (and supposed exculpation) that Jews became tavern keepers under compulsion, without regard to the deleterious impact that this system had on the welfare of the peasants, the evidence is not that persuasive. Some of that comes from the research of Jewish-American historian Glenn Dynner, who concludes that Jews stuck with tavern keeping largely because of economic self-interest: “But many Jews could not evidently see why they should renounce a lucrative industry like liquor and enter less lucrative ones like agriculture and army service …”68 Dynner realizes that Jewish profiteering sometimes occurred69 but provides no indications as to how widespread it was. He portrays Jewish tavernkeepers as self-policed, while tacitly admitting that they could take considerable liberties with peasants:
Most Jewish tavernkeepers were also probably careful not to push things too far. Perhaps few felt bound by their lease contracts’ pro forma moral stipulations, according to which they promised never to cheat customers. And perhaps few were deterred by the risk of fines and prison sentences for serving liquor that was less than the regulation 45 percent alcohol. But each was constrained by the knowledge that there was a limit to what the peasant was willing to endure in terms of watered-down vodka, usurious loans, cooked books, and so on.70
Unfortunately, Dynner does not develop the latter theme. If there is to be any apportionment of blame for the propinacja, Dynner, in spite of his qualifications, apportions it evenly, “Jewish tavernkeepers may not have been the architects of this ghastly enterprise nor even its main beneficiaries, but they were fully complicit.”71 As for the charge that Polish peasants physically abused Jewish tavern operators, Glenn Dynner is dismissive of this claim:
The memoirists who report on the local situation in everyday Poland-Lithuania will talk about how the Jewish tavern keeper was willing to be insulted and abused and even beaten, because in the end he would get revenge by extracting maximum profit from the peasant by encouraging him to drink beyond what he can afford. This is a very hostile observation. If that happened all the time, I think the situation would have been too unstable.

One thing I discovered about all the abuse and insults was that it might have originated in halacha, in Jewish law. In order to keep a tavern profitable, you had to keep it open on the Sabbath and festivals. The rabbis developed elaborate legal fictions to say if a Christian comes and demands a drink, using the threat of violence, even if it’s the Sabbath, you have to serve him. And what ends up happening is a bit of a farce. On Saturday, the peasant had to come in and threaten violence to the Jewish tavern keeper in order to receive his drink. So what you have are Christians helping Jews circumvent their own laws.72


Booker Washington, a prominent Black American leader and a representative of the last generation of Blacks born in slavery, made a tour of Europe in 1910 during which he had an opportunity to observe the condition of European labourers and peasants. He used those observations to illuminate the situation of African Americans, especially in the South. This was a witness who, more than Whites or Jews, had first hand experience and knew of what he wrote. While in Poland Washington saw peasants living in “weather-worn and decrepit” huts shared with cows, pigs, geese, and chickens. Every exchange of cash seemed to be in the hands of Jews:
wherever in Poland money changes hands a Jew is always there to take charge of it. In fact, it seemed to me that the Jew in Poland was almost like the money he handled, a sort of medium of exchange.
He noted that his Jewish guide “looked down upon and despised” the Polish peasants among whom he traded. He referred to them as “ignorant and dirty creatures.” He observed that, unlike Jewish immigrants who came to America,
Instead of seeking to make themselves look like the rest of the people among whom they live, they seem to be making every effort to preserve and emphasize the characters in which they are different from the people about them.
Washington concluded that
there was much the same life that I had known and lived among the Negro farmers in Alabama. … I am convinced that any one who studies the movements and progress of the Negroes in America will find much that is interesting by way of comparison in the present situation of the Polish people and that of the American Negroes.73
The reality of shtetl life was far removed from the picture perpetuated in popular literature. In a study based on historical records from the first half of the 19th century, historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern writes:
Jews and Christians routinely exchanged insulting remarks about each other’s religions. Verbal and other forms of violence were endemic among ordinary shtetl Jews as among gentiles. The shtetl was profoundly politically incorrect. More important, this kind of behavior was a positive affirmation of one’s identity—through deprecating the identity of the other. …

The shtetl in its splendor did not have a monopoly on violence. Slavs and Jews alike conceived of violence as an acceptable means of communication. Abuse—physical, rhetorical, and verbal—was a daily occurrence. Violence was one of the indispensable languages of the shtetl, an environment in which outbursts of brutality were as normal as Sunday bazaars.74


Adam Teller shares this view and expands on its implications:
Thus it was that in the shtetls, as elsewhere in Poland-Lithuania, the Jews were the victims of violence, both verbal and physical, on the part of their neighbors. However, a close examination of the sources reveals that the Jews were able to give as good as they got, and often did so. Violence in the shtetls and towns of Poland was by no means one-sided. The court records indicate many cases of Jews attacking townspeople, peasants on their way to market, and even nobles and priests who tried to interfere in their daily lives. This violence, which was endemic to Polish society in this period, should therefore be understood not so much as signifying the Jews’ weakness in the face of non-Jewish society, or their excessive self-confidence in light of noble protection, but rather as a sign that the Jews were well integrated into urban society and acted, mutatis mutandis, just like their neighbors.75
Relying on quoted newspaper extracts, sociologists William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki Znaniecki summarize what essentially is the co-dependency of Polish peasants and Jews at the local level.
The Jewish shopkeeper in a peasant village is usually also a liquor-dealer without license, a banker lending money at usury, often also a receiver of stolen goods and (near the border) a contrabandist. The peasant needs and fears him, but at the same time despises him always and hates him often. The activity of these country shopkeepers is the source of whatever anti-Semitism there is in the peasant masses. We have seen in the documents the methods by which the shopkeeper teaches the peasant boy smoking, drinking, and finally stealing; the connection established in youth lasts sometimes into maturity, and almost every gang of peasant thieves or robbers centers around some Jewish receiver’s place, where the spoils are brought and new campaigns planned. Gangs composed exclusively of Jews are frequent in towns, rare in the countryside; usually Jews manage only the commercial side of the questions, leaving robbing or transporting of contraband to peasants.76
Any attempt by Poles to move out of their economic rung and venture into endeavours that were regarded as traditional Jewish economic “turf,” and thus considered off-limits for Gentiles,77 was met with hostility, communal resistance and even violence. Historian Keely Stauter-Halstead, who traces these developments, points out that after peasant emancipation in the mid-19th century, the traditional Jewish middleman position, between landlord and peasant, began to decline, and Polish-Jewish relations began to sour, culminating in the notion, nowadays, that Poles are born anti-Semites. The emancipated peasantry increasingly needed credit. In the then-absence of credit institutions, this made him dependent upon the Jewish tavern owner, who also doubled as a usurer. Although Austrian law forbade usurious interest rates, they sometimes were as high as 250%, computed weekly. Furthermore, as Polish peasants themselves became entrepreneurs, they, for the first time, came into direct competition with the Jews. In time, peasants organized a network of Polish-owned shops to break the Jewish monopoly on rural trade.78 In addition, Stauter-Halstead points out that, “Beginning in the 1870’s, Christian peasants sought to organize their own credit institutions and village stores in order to undercut the interest rates and prices Jewish merchants demanded.”79 Polish-Jewish rivalry not only continued, but expanded into new venues,
Village innkeepers were also almost always without exception Jewish, since gentry landowners had sold their concessions for alcohol trade only to nonserfs before emancipation. In the absence of formal credit facilities, peasanrs were frequently forced to turn to village Jews for emergency loans, especially to meet their new tax burdens. Because of their position within the money economy, Galician villagers viewed rural Jews, whether in the capacity as bartenders, moneylenders, or managers of general stores, as responsible for much of their economic misery. To complete the picture of economic control, Jewish families in the 1870’s began competing with small farmers to buy up estate land from impoverished gentry. By 1889, some 10 percent of agricultural land was owned by Jews.80
Pointedly, Polish-Jewish antagonism was not as one-sided as nowadays portrayed. Stauter-Halstead comments,
Peasant resentment of rural Jews heightened still further after the latter began to retaliate against the loss of business. Jewish merchants attacked parish priests for their role in founding Christian stores. The Jewish shop owner in the town of Kalwarya reportedly offered to donate 60 zlotys [złoty] year to a cloister of the priest’s choosing if the clergyman would convince circle members to close their store, and offered the circle itself 100 zlotys to cease its operations. In most cases, peasant entrepreneurs persevered. Occasionally, however, as in the parish of Dąbrowa in 1884, the Jews triumphed and circle activities ceased altogether in response to the “great agitation” Jewish businessmen organized.81
Many additional examples can be cited. Stanisław Thugutt, a minister in the interwar Polish government, was threatened by Jewish merchants after he opened a food cooperative in Ćmielów near Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski in 1903. After the threats proved futile, he was falsely charged with assaulting a Jew, a charge that was thrown out by the court. Nonetheless, the constant harassment exerted by the Jewish community resulted in Thugutt’s departure from the town.82 When a cooperative produce store was opened in Brańsk in 1913 on the initiative of the local Christian intelligentsia, local Jews physically attacked one of its founders. In addition, the Jewish merchants who wanted to force the store to close, so as to maintain their monopoly on local commerce, jointly lowered their prices.83 When a Polish company attempted to open a provision shop in Tarnobrzeg, they ran into a formidable obstacle. All the buildings in the centre of the town were owned by Jews who were adamantly opposed to the idea and would not rent or sell to Poles. When one Jew finally sold to the Poles, the Jews
made things very bad for the Jew who sold it, and offered to double the amount paid down in order to recover the place. It all came to naught. That evening the deed was signed after the seller left town. His family was the object of persecution, their windows were broken and for weeks they were not admitted to the synagogue.84
The opening of a Polish business in Tarnobrzeg in 1899, resented by Jewish merchants, turned out to be a very positive development for consumers:
The ‘Bazaar’ was a godsend to the county, for it set all prices. Up to that time traders asked what they would, and since they had everything in their hands there was nothing for it but to pay. From now on they had to keep in line with ‘Bazaar’ prices. So, too, up till then the Jews made fun of Christians, as I have often heard with my own ears. … For a time the others waged a price war with the new firm, trying to ruin it; but they soon gave that up, and things became quiet.85
An extract from a 1903 issue of the newspaper, Gazeta Świąteczna, is also instructive. It describes the efforts of a priest to get the Polish peasantry, at Skomlin in Prussian-ruled Poland, to alleviate their misery by uniting their scattered landholdings:
Persuaded by the priest, the majority of the farmers had signed their names; but after leaving the office some stirred up the others against it. The local shopkeepers, Jews, contributed to this a great deal because they were afraid that in a unified village they would be unable to get a dwelling and that their trade would be ruined.86
At that time economic solidarity was completely foreign to Polish peasants, as it was to townspeople. It was something that had to be learned from others, including the Jews. Meanwhile Jews were eager to expand into areas traditionally occupied by Poles, like farming, and started to buy up large agricultural holdings in Galicia.87

Unlike Polish attitudes toward Jews, about which there is an extensive and growing literature, the issue of Jewish attitudes toward Poles is a much neglected topic.88 In fact, the issue is largely shunned as if it provides no clues for understanding the long history of interaction between Poles and Jews. Historically, Polish-Jewish relations were multifaceted and developed in an entirely different setting than those which prevailed in the rest of Europe. Jews had been expelled from most of Europe over the centuries, starting in England (where the traditional blood libel charges originated) and followed by Spain, or butchered in large-scale massacres like those in Norwich, Strasbourg, Prague and Lisbon. When they started to trickle back to Western Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, unlike in Poland, Jews sought cultural, linguistic and political assimilation. In Poland, Jews wanted autonomy and as little interaction with the Christian population as possible. By and large, Jews went out of their way not to assimilate and, with the growth of Jewish nationalism in the late 19th century, they shunned political solidarity with the Poles in favour of their own national agenda which was often expressed in neutrality, at best, or by siding with Poland’s political foes. Jewish historiography tries to explain this conflict away by “Polish anti-Semitism.” If exclusionary attitudes can be the source of friction between Hasidic and non-Hasidic Jews in Israel, then there were all the more objective reasons for tensions to exist between Christians and Jews in Poland. However, in the case of Poland, it is commonplace to shist all the blame for this state of affair exclusively, or primarily at best, onto the Poles and any attempt to examine Jewish conduct is summarily dismissed as a display of anti-Semitism.

As Eva Hoffman points out, there were mutual parallels in how the two groups—Jews and Poles—traditionally viewed each other and interacted:
throughout much of Poland’s history, Jews were a highly visible and socially significant presence—a constituency that had to be reckoned with and one that could even pose challenges to the Poles themselves. In this respect, the nature of the Polish-Jewish relationship is exceptional. In contrast with Western European countries, where Jews were usually a tiny minority (below 2 percent of the population in modern Germany) and where, therefore, they were a mostly imaginary Other, in Poland, the Jewish community comprised a genuine ethnic minority, with its own rights, problems, and powers. We have become skilled nowadays in analyzing the imagery of Otherness, that unconscious stratum of preconceptions, fantasies, and projections we bring to our perceptions of strangers. Such subliminal assumptions and archetypes can and do have a very real impact on how we see and treat each other. But in the intergroup relations that were as extended in time and as complex as those between Poles and Jews, the material realities of economic competition and practical loyalties, of policy and political alignments, also played a vital role.89


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