May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles



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What of Jewish attitudes toward the Poles? We tend to forget that minority groups are not powerless in the perceptions; that they, too, exercise judgment and gauge the character of others; and that, much as they may be the targets of prejudice, they are not themselves immune to it. That the Jews had their views of the people among whom they lived we cannot doubt, but their ordinary opinions, ideas, and preconceptions are largely inaccessible to us, since almost no secular Jewish literature is extant from the early period. We do know, however, that Jews had their exclusionary and monopolistic prescriptions, prohibiting rights of residence to outsiders in their quarters, and strictly guarding certain business practices and “secrets” from non-Jews. … We can take it for granted, moreover, that fierce religious disapproval traveled both ways. Just as Jews were infidel in Christian eyes, so Jews were convinced that Christians were wrong, deluded, and blasphemous. And from both sides of the divide, the conviction of the other’s wrongness created essential, and increasingly rigid, spiritual barriers. As the Jewish communities in Poland became more settled and began to establish stronger religious institutions, Polish Jews became more rigorously observant. They began to shun intimate contact with Christians, if only on account of the dietary laws.

The Poles, then, were the Jews’ radical Other, just as much as the other way round.90


Jewish separatism was also an active choice, and it also had its consequences. It meant that Jewish individuals and communities cultivated their own alienness, and that although they were willing to engage in contractual relations with the Poles, they did not wish to enter into a shared world with them.91
Although much has been written about “Polish anti-Semitism,” there is very little about the other side of this two-way relationship. Most commentators simply deny its existence or downplay it to the point of insignificance. For some scholars, like Joanna Michlic, “anti-Polish stereotyping” by Jews is essentially a reactive and insignificant postwar phenomenon that has little or nothing to do with actual Jewish attributes. In her estimation, it is hardly worthy of mention:
this stereotyping basically constitutes a reaction to the negative experience of Jews in modern Poland. This reaction takes on the form of biased and unjustified expressions and overgeneralizations. However, such stereotyping does not constitute an important and irreducible element of Jewish national identity and nationalism …92
Recently, historian Theodore Weeks made short shrift of such arguments:
Indeed, one cannot understand the development of relations between Poles and Jews in this period (i.e., turn of the 19th century and into the 20th century) without some consideration of the popular religious prejudices that both Jews and Poles harboured vis-à-vis their neighbours. On a popular level, Jews tended to see their Christian neighbours as crude, unpredictable, violent, and following a religion that was fundamentally pagan, worshipping idols (images of saints). Poles, on the other hand, despised Jews as moneylenders and Christ-killers, while also fearing Jews as crafty, sly, and possibly even demonic … While the Catholic clergy did not advocate violence against Jews, the Church generally urged believers to have nothing to do with Jews. [One might add that the Jewish religion and rabbis instilled a similar attiude with regard to Christians. M.P.] In short, religious beliefs emphasized and strengthened the maintenance of a large distance between Jews and Christian Poles.93
Moreover, Michlic’s approach is ahistorical because it overlooks the historical context in which Polish-Jewish relations developed. Furthermore, it is hypocritical because it subjects Poles and Jews to two different moral standards. She takes Poles to rask for holding views similar (regarding Jews) to those held by Jews (regarding Poles), and offers not one word of criticism regarding Jews. The situation is further compounded when Poland is compared to European countries which had no significant Jewish population or separatist minorities, but not to those (numerous) countries which experienced (and experience) serious ethnic strife between rival ethnic or religious groups who happen not to be Jewish.

There is little, if anything, that is novel about anti-Semitic views voiced by some Poles about Jews. (It is a separate question to what extent these views were shared by Polish society as a whole. The notion that anti-Semitism was a universal phenomenon among Poles is symptomatic of Jewish projection rather than reflection of reality.) Poles inherited traditional Christian beliefs and prejudices regarding Jews from the Catholic Church, and some of the modern doctrines were brought from Western Europe (primarily France and Germany), where they developed. There is no evidence Poles invented anything original in this regard. As Theodore Weeks notes:


The Poles certainly had no monopoly on antisemitism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In fact, both “scholarly” and popular expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment were much more pronounced in Germany and France in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. … It is also clear that much of the rhetoric of Polish antisemites … was appropriated from German and French sources.
… no prominent Polish writer or scholar of the prewar [i.e. pre-World War One] period chose to publicly denounce the Jews as a threat to the Polish nation. Indeed before 1905 it was a rare Polish intellectual who made a carrer of denouncing the Jews. Instead, in that period prominent writers sucg as Bolesław Prus and Aleksander Świętochowski mercilessly mocked and reviled antisemites as hacks, careerists, and benighted fools.94
But the Poles were also saddled with a formidable problem—unknown in most of Europe—of having to cope, on a practical level and a day-to-day basis, with large numbers of Jews living in their midst as a separate community. Most of these Jews came to Poland because they were expelled from or fled persecution in other parts of Europe. Continually during Polish history, relations between Poles and Jews were exacerbated by the interference of outsiders: German settlers in the Middle Ages, the Cossack uprisings,95 the Swedish invasion in the 17th century, the dogmatic pressures of the Vatican, the autocratic rule of Czarist Russia, the Nazi Germany invasion, and the Stalinist occupation, to name the most significant examples.

Few people, even among Poles, are aware of the nature of the earliest contacts between Jews and Poles: Jews first came to Poland in the 10th century as traders in—among other commodities, but primartily—Christian slaves, which certainly did not augur well for mutual relations.96 In the early medieval ages, the international slave trade was monopolized by Iberian Jews known as Radanites, who transferred slaves (Slavs) from Central Europe through Western Europe centres such as Mainz, Verdun and Lyons, where they were often castrated, to Islamic buyers in Muslim Spain and North Africa.97 According to a Polish historian:


In the early Middle Ages the Jews kept a high profile in various branches of long-distance and overseas trade, in which slaves were, for at least three hundred years, the chief commodity. … The accounts of travellers (Ibn Kordabheh, Ibrahim ibn Yacub), passages in the works of other Arab and Jewish authors (Ibn Haukal, Ibrahim al Quarawi, Yehuda ben Meir ha-Kohen), documents issued by ecclesiastical and secular authorities, charters of municipal privileges and customs tariffs build up a massive body of evidence corroborating the involvement of the Jews in the slave trade. Their “goods” came mostly from the Slav nations; their trade routes led to and crossed in Eastern and Central Europe. Slaves of Slav origin would be taken westwards across the Frankish lands to Arab Spain and from there to other countries in the Mediterranean. The main centres of the slave trade were Prague (from the 10th century onwards); Magdeburg, Merseburg, Mainz and Koblenz in Germany; Verdun in northern France and a number of towns in southern France. In spite of the vociferous debates that the slave trade provoked in both secular and church circles, the Jews were undismayed and went on with their business.98
The slave trade was strongly opposed by the Catholic Church, which prohibited the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands. So many Slavs were enslaved for so many centuries that the very name “slave” derived from their name, not only in English and other European languages.

Unlike other countries in which they settled and unlike the waves of German migrants who came to Poland, Jews who migrated to Poland from the 13th century onward clung tenaciously to a German dialect rather than learning the language of their country of refuge. According to Jewish-American historian Robert Chazan,


In this regard, we must note the fascinating phenomenon of the emergence of Yiddish as the Jewish language of Polish Jewry. We have noted throughout this study Jewish adoption of the local vernaculars as the language of everyday communication. … What is clear, however, is that the importation of German into Poland by immigrating Jews represents a new development. In Poland, the migrating Jews did not adopt the language of their new environment. Rather, they held fast to the language and culture with which they had arrived. This linguistic tenaciousness seems to have been rooted in two factors. The first was the overall Germanic migration into Poland, which made the urban areas—within which the Jewish migrants first settled—heavily German in language and culture. Secondly, the Jewish migrants into Poland—unlike their predecessors in eleventh- and twelfth-century northern France and Germany—seem to have viewed their new environment as distinctly backward and to have clung to their prior language as a sign of cultural superiority.99
The chasm separating Jews from Polish peasantry, or the common people, was acutely felt well into the 20th century. The situation of Jews in Poland bore no resemblance to the harsh and inhumane conditions that Black slaves and their descendants, who were brought from Africa by the tens of thousands by the Dutch, British, Portuguese, Spanish, and French, endured on the way to and in the European colonies in the Americas. Rather the Jews in Poland occupied a place between the nobility and the peasant serfs. They collected taxes for the nobility and managed their estates. They were known as pachciarz, or “commercial agent.” The Jew, on behalf of the nobleman, controlled the life of the village. Having lost legal protection in 1518, when the king ceased to consider their complaints against the nobles, the peasants remained virtually at the mercy of the nobles, who decided on the levies to be imposed upon them in the form of services and the use of monopolies and held jurisdiction over them. The nobles, with the Jews as their agents, often misused their privileges to exploit the peasants subject to their whims. Poland in the 16th and 17th centuries has often been described as “heaven for the Jews, paradise for the nobles, hell for the serfs.”100 The result was inevitable: strong resentment.

The reaction of the Jews caught up in this vicious cycle was to “dehumanize” the Christian peasants, and to view themselves as superior. As Jonathan Krasner points out,


The dehumanization of the peasants was also ‘an instrument for sustaining a social and political order in which the Other is a victim’. In central and eastern Europe, particularly in Poland and Ukraine, the Jews were frequently cast in an exploitative role in relation to the peasants. Although they were often acting as agents of the aristocracy, whether as estate managers, tax-collectors, or merchant capitalists, the face of the victimizer was Jewish. Peasant outbursts directed at Jews [and also magnates—M.P.] in the form of pogroms were more often than not fomented by perceived Jewish exploitation. The Jew could not escape awareness of his position, but rather than question the social and political order, he unconsciously justified that position by labelling the lower classes as subhuman, as animals. The occasional violence on the part of the peasants only served to reinforce this image.101
This attitude was also evident in the Jewish literature of the period, in which peasants were depocted with stereotypical disdain. According to Israel Bartal,
At the bottom of the ladder were the peasants, who constituted an absolute majority in the surroundings where Jews lived. Peasants dwelled in villages, at the edges of towns, and in rural suburbs of cities. A considerable number of the non-Jews who provided domestic services to the Jews were peasants. (Especially important was the shabes goy, who did things for Jews that they were forbidden to do on the Sabbath). From Jews, peasants bought supplies in the city and purchased products that they did not make themselves, and they sold agricultural produce to Jews. Peasants also drank vodka that Jewish innkeepers sold them in taverns owned by Polish noblemen. The tavern (Yid., shenk; Pol., szenk), which was the ordinary place of encounter between the Jew and the peasant, occupied a central place in the folklore of the peoples of Eastern Europe. …

The peasants in the Russian Empire were serfs on the estates of the nobility until 1861; they were regarded as property that could be bought and sold. Their collective name in the languages of the Jews was goyim, a word that could have extremely negative connotations of stupidity and ignorance, coarseness, sexual promiscuity, drunkenness, and violence. Their languages were called goyish, and in Jewish literature—which is full of passages, transliterated into Hebrew, in the vernaculars of the peasants—there is no distinction between one language and another. Moreover, until the beginning of the twentieth century, there is no clear differentiation in the literature between one ethnic group and another. …

The figure of the peasant did not serve the authors of the Haskalah as a positive model (although some Haskalah writers speak of the need to improve the difficult conditions of peasants’ lives, which were attributed to political and social injustices). For this reason, it is difficult to find depictions of individual peasants in the literature. Rather, they are depicted stereotypically, as part of a mass, with common identifying features: similar facial features, identical items of dress, and the personality characteristics (violence, coarseness, ignorance, drunkenness) alluded to above.102
This phenomenon is not simply a historical relic. Orthodox Rabbi Avigdor Miller, writing in 1962, unambiguously believes that, notwithstanding the gentile righteousness that comes from obeying the Noahide Laws, the goyim are inferior ethically to Jews. This owes not only to God’s special blessings to the Jews, and the sanctification that comes from having and obeying the Torah, but also as something that is innate to Jews. He comments,
Y [Youth]. So you say that, both by heredity and by the Torah influence, Jews are far superior to the nations of the world in qualities of character. S [Sage]. There is no doubt about that, as one can plainly see even by superficial observation. But you do not realize how vast is the difference between Israel and the nations.103
Compared to the lot of the peasant, Jews enjoyed prerogatives which were by and large respected, and had recourse to higher authorities when faced with occasional attempts to violate their rights. For example,
the Jews of Pinsk [Pińsk] enjoyed freedom to trade, lend money, lease customs rights and estates, and maintain the [Christian] serfs attached to them. They also seem to have been permitted to engage freely in crafts. Their privilege rights assured them of a significant degree of security for their lives and property. In a case of murder or injury, Jews insisted on compensation and punishment of the perpetrator. Usually, with the help of the administrative authorities and the courts, they prevailed. …

Pinsk Jews sued for large amounts of money in cases of bodily injury where the defendant was a nobleman. When a Jew was the attacker such cases were fairly frequent), he would also be summoned to court in the same manner as a nobleman, and on the basis of the same law. … Lawlessness and violence were prevalent generally, in the Christian community too; the primary victims were peasants subject to the nobility. The fact is that sometimes Pinsk Jews were accused of attacking Christians. …

The sources also show that sometimes Jews who were sued by Christians were given preferential treatment by the judicial authorities. … It can be assumed that bribery played a crucial role in such instances. …

In 1646, David Jakubowicz, one of the most important of the Pinsk arrendators, appealed a verdict reached by a nobility court in Pinsk. David, together with his nobleman lord, Lukasz [Łukasz] Olkowski, had been accused of killing a peasant who worked in Olkowski’s distilleries. The nobleman was fined sixty-four kopy for damages, but the Jew claimed that according to the Jews’ privilege the nobility court was not competent to judge him. The judges (who included the podstarosta) accepted this argument, and his case was referred to the podstarosta’s court sitting in its capacity as the sad [sąd] zamkowy, which was empowered to judge Jews. …

As arrendators, they dealt with the nobility and clergy who gladly leased their latifundia to Jews. They also, in line with the economic realities of the period, profited by the feudal labor and tax obligations of peasant serfs bound to leased properties. …

In this period, the peasant serf of the Pinsk region did not display any particular hostility toward the Jews. … They were indifferent as to the question of who would exploit them. … The only recorded cases of serfs acting against Jewish arrendators in particular involve incitement by their nobleman master who fell out with the arrendator, or instances where the Jew committed some egregious injustice that clearly went against custom or law.104


However, when a Jew was attacked or robbed by a serf, the situation was radically different and the serf could expect no mere fine or mercy.
On the night of September 6 and 7, [1648], while they were camped in a field near the village of Osowiec, they were attacked by a gang of local [Orthodox] men posing as Cossacks, who broke open four of the trunks in the wagons and stole cash, silver utensils, and valuables. …

The kopa investigation, done with summary severity, succeeded in identifying the guilty parties. They turned out to be four serfs of the nobleman Buchowiecki, the owner of Osowiec, who were interrogated by the kopa. … the case was brought for judgment before the nobleman Buchowiecki, the lord of the accused serfs.



Buchowiecki gave up his claims to the escaped serfs, thereby giving the aggrieved Jews the right to catch them and bring them to trial. Buchowiecki sentenced to death the two serfs who had been captured and imprisoned. Since the Jew did not have an executioner on hand, the prisoners remained in jail in the Jews’ custody and were later brought to Pinsk.105
Social interaction between Christians and Jews was, until the modern period, minimal and superficial. For most Poles and Jews it simply did not exist. Almost all dealings were on the economic level, and mostly in the marketplace. The non-Jews
were seen by the Jews primarily instrumentally, as the source of parnose (livelihood) through everyday economic exchange. However, as with the peasants, their everyday interaction, purely functional as it was, together with their differences in appearance, language, and customs, reinforced rather than diminished the sense of ‘otherness’ felt by the Jews towards their economic partners. Underlying this sense among the Jews of the otherness of the peasants were feelings of scorn and suspicion. But if similar feelings among the peasants towards the Jews were prompted by their perception of the latter as endowed with characteristics beyond their grasp, the Jewish perceptions of peasants were the reverse: they represented the uncivilized and uncultured. The term goy, referring generally to non-Jews, was actually used to denote ‘peasant’ in the everyday Yiddish idiom across the Polish territories. It denoted people and things that were backward, ignorant, driven by unrestrained animal instincts and physical aggression—everything that a Jew did not want to and should not be. This value-laden distinction was inculcated in Jewish children from infancy, and their sense of superiority emerged even more forcefully from Jewish religious convictions. Because of their cult of icons, statues, and other ‘graven images’, the Jews held Christians to be idolatrous, especially the rituals observed by the peasantry.106
Here [i.e., in the town’s marketplace] the peasants of the neighboring villages came to sell their products, buy urban products from the Jews, and use the services of the Jewish artisans. In the course of centuries this contact was seldom of lasting duration or of profound value. The relationship usually remained on the level of mutual distrust. To the Jew, the non-Jew was the symbol of raw instinct, of physical power and primitive reflexes. To the peasant, the Jew represented slyness, brains, and, most of all, religious heresy.107
Other descriptions of the marketplace highlight the potential for antagonism—one that extended in both directions:
The marketplace was the quintessential meeting place for Jews and non-Jews, and it was an environment where the Jews felt confident and at home. Like markets around the world, it was also a centre for disagreements, insults and fights. Jewish stall-holders felt no compunction against trading insults with Christian competitors, importuning potential buyers, manhandling troublesome customers or boxing the ears of the street urchins who filled the marketplace. Tavern-keepers, whose livelihood depended on catering to human weakness, had even less respect for many of their customers, especially those who asked for credit or became drunk and disorderly. Such patrons were unceremoniously shown the door. In short, the meek and mild Jew, cringing before the Gentiles, is very much a fictional creation.108
In fact, although many Jews do not admit it, religion also had an enormous impact on how Jews perceived non-Jews. In his study Exclusiveness and Tolerance,109 Jacob Katz acknowledges that both Jews and Christians had stereotypical views of each other (p. xiv), and Jewish views of Christianity were just as unflattering as the reverse. Katz comments: “The biblical name of Edom was, in Talmudic times, applied to Rome. In medieval poetry, however, it is synonymous with Christianity.” (P. 16.) Throughout history, Jews had tended to see Christians as idolaters (e.g., pp. 27, 53, 100). Following Talmudic law, this would have forbidden Jews from having business dealings with Christians. Consequently, “Practical considerations required the dissociation of Christianity from idolatry, and this was rationalized by means of halakhic casuistry. But this rationalization cannot be assumed to imply that, from a theological point of view, Christianity was no longer regarded as a ‘pagan’ religion.” (P. 162; see also p. 108.). The 16th-century seminal Jewish thinker Maharal (Rabbi Judah Loeb of Prague) thought that: “However, his criticism [of Jews] did not affect his basic conception that Jews were, essentially, of a superior religious and moral caliber to others. Their inadequacies were incidental only, and attributable to the trials of the Exile; at a different level, Jewish deficiencies had a direct relationship to the Jews’ superior spiritual nature.” (P. 141.) Until the 11th century, and sometimes later, Jews could own slaves (p. 41). As for usury, both Christians and Jews employed a double standard. Christianity forbade usury among Christians, but regarded Jewish conduct as outside its jurisdiction. For its part, Judaism forbade Jew-on-Jew usury, but allowed Jew-on-gentile usury (p. 57). Since time immemorial, Jews had preferred to live among their own kind. Compulsory ghettoization came much later. Katz comments: “But contrary to what might be expected, the institution of the closed Jewish quarter was not in itself resented by Jews. It was accepted as a provision appropriate to a group of their status, and as corresponding to their social and religious needs; moreover, it provided a measure of security. Jews were content to be recognized as a socio-religious unit, distinct from the general population.” (Pp. 132–33.)

According to other Jewish scholars,


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