May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

As Gershon Hundert has put it, ‘the norms of both the Church and the Synagogue were strongly segregationist in intent, and … each faith taught that the other was spiritually and morally inferior’. The preacher and moralist Tsevi Hirsh Koidonover (d. 1712), in his Kav hayashar, argued strongly against any contact with the society of non-Jews, which he saw as ‘full of idolatry, violence, and drunkenness’. Christians, lacking divinely taught ethics, were in the process of sliding steadily into chaos. A Jew could best save his soul by avoiding all contact with them. Historically, Ashkenazi Jewry’s categorization of Christians as idol worshippers had indeed created numerous legal barriers to Christian-Jewish interaction, at least from the Jewish perspective.¹¹⁰
Jews did express in prayers strong negative views of Christianity, and of Jesus and Mary, sometimes even calls for vengeance. Although passages offensive to Christianity were later removed [by censors] from Jewish prayers, an early sixteenth-century collection of penitential prayers published in Cracow still contained a few references to Christianity as a religion of the “hung-one,” an expression to denote the crucified Jesus, and references to “menstruating women.” According to medieval Jewish counternarrative of the Gospels, Jesus was born of a menstruating woman, in Jewish tradition a powerful and insulting denotation of impurity. Such prayers played on the contrast between Christian impurity and defilement and the ritual purity of the Jews. Christians were portrayed as the impure uncircumcised.¹¹¹
Laws separating Jews from non-Jews (or “Israelites” from “non-Israelites”) appear in the Torah, or the Pentateuch. In the early postbiblical Jewish literature, the Mishnah—and especially the section ‛Avodah Zarah—delineated the boundaries and served as a foundation for subsequent rabbinic laws on contacts between Jews and non-Jews. … in the rabbinic law or halakhah, prohibitions appear against Jews celebrating non-Jewish holidays and attending non-Jewish weddings. There are laws attempting to limit friendly interaction between these two groups and to restrict the use of each other’s bathhouses and doctors. …

Jewish dietary laws of kashrut also would have limited contacts, at least to Jewish homes … But Jewish law was often about restricting actual socializing rather than simply about the observance of kashrut. …

… the Mishanic prohibitions that forbid Jews to leave their animals with gentiles, because of the gentiles’ alleged inclinations to bestiality, and that disallow Jews from being alone with gentiles because they are suspected of easy bloodshed. These prohibitions present non-Jews as dangerous, as licentious sexual predators or as killers. …

Indeed, the Jewish leaders desired that Jews dress distinctly in order to prevent any possibility of intimacy …

… the Shulḥan ‛Aruk, in Yoreh De‛ah 154.2, prohibited a Jewish woman from helping a gentile woman in childbirth unless she was known to the birthing woman and the help was performed for payment. … it was also prohibited to teach gentiles crafts. This prohibition comes from the Mishnah, and as the text states it was intended to prevent a Jewish woman from helping to bring an idolater into the world … The Shulḥan ‛Aruk, on the other hand, established professional boundaries between Jewish and Christian women, discouraging contacts based on friendship. To avoid such intimacy and friendship, rabbinic authorities made a payment part of the relationship.¹¹²
The mutual anxieties and mutually promoted attitudes of animosity added a level of distrust and suspicion of the Other and, therefore, a sense of vulnerability that such intimate contacts might bring. …

Because socializing and eating together could lead to simple friendships, then to emotional closeness, and eventually also to sexual relations, neither Jewish nor Church authorities wanted to encourage the crossing of boundaries. Both clearly saw contacts between Jews and Christians more as opportunities for corruption within their communities and as threats to religious loyalty among their co-religionists than as opportunities to gain converts.¹¹³

Much has been said about how Christians viewed Jews as the “wrong” religion, whose members might contaminate the faithful, and whose only merit was their potential for conversion. Salo Baron points out that Jews thought exactly the same of Christians, as exemplified by the teachings of the famed rabbi Moses Maimonides.
On account of their Trinitarian doctrine the Christians are legally in the category of heathens with whom one must not have any dealings on Sunday or, in Palestine, even during the preceding three days. Evidently, living in a Muslim environment, Maimuni could only indulge in the luxury of prohibiting commercial intercourse with the Christian minority during one to four days a week. On the other hand, in view of their qualified approval of the Jewish Scripture, they may be given instruction in its Jewish interpretation, in the hope that they may realize their error and join the ranks for full-fledged Jews.¹¹⁴
Based on a study of Hasidic sources, Jewish scholar Moshe Rosman provides the following historical perspective on this topic:
Based on their respective theologies, Jews and Christians shared an assessment of Jews’ fundamental otherness within dominant Christian society. … Rabbinic laws and communal ordinances attempted to restrict contact with non-Jews, and Jewish folklore often assigned a demonic role to its gentile characters.

But in their otherness, Jews maintained a positive evaluation of themselves and their way of life, entertaining feelings of Jewish solidarity and rejection of, and even superiority to, the hegemonic culture.¹¹⁵

Alongside the belief in the non-Jews’ demonic nature and the fear and mistrust of Gentile society, some of these tales hint at a very different evaluation of the theological-moral standing of the non-Jews. According to Jacob Katz, given the religious rivalry between Judaism and Christianity, the members of each group adopted a double standard of morality towards each other. There was no religious rationale for treating outsiders according to ethical norms. Jews frowned on mistreating or cheating non-Jews not on moral grounds but from enlightened self-interest: such behaviour would bring Jews into disrepute and result in sanctions or even violence being brought to bear against them.¹¹⁶
Raphael Mahler writes in a similar candid vein about the theological prejudices the Jewish people inherently held against Christians (non-Jews).
The views of the Hasidim … were a direct outgrowth and development of the Weltanschauung of the Kabbalah. The Jewish people were not simply the chosen, but were the only people of God; “Israel and the Torah and the Holy One, blessed be He, are one.” According to the Midrash, the whole world was created only for the sake of the Jews … Consequently, their feelings of social involvement did not reach beyond their own people.

The positive expression of this attitude was the principle of the unconditional solidarity of the Jews and the idea of ahavat yisrael (love of the Jewish people), [which became a main theme] in the stories and legends of the prominent Hasidic rebbes in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, a negative attitude toward Gentiles, which took the form of contempt, was also an unavoidable consequence of this position. As Mendel of Rymanów put it, “A Gentile does not have a heart, although he has an organ that resembles the heart.” Simon of Jarosław asserted that the Gentiles will be held responsible not for their evil decrees—these were actually divinely inspired and had been prophesied in order to “cleanse [the Jews] of their sins”—but for their “vengefulness and revelry in the distress of the Jews.” The symbol for the Gentile in the Hasid’s consciousness was the brutal landowner or the enslaved and boorish peasant.¹¹⁷

Mahler also mentions that the Rabbi of Izbica taught that Jews are innately good, even when they do evil deeds, simply because they are Jews. Gentiles are innately bad, even if they do good deeds.
These principles also apply to the Rabbi of Izbica’s teaching with regard to the Jews and the gentile nations … Just as God chose individuals from among the Jews in accordance with His will, bestowing the light of His Torah upon them in greater abundance than upon others, … so did He select the Jews to be His chosen people. … But all these differences among the gentile nations with regard to each other are as nothing when compared with the abyss which exists between them and the Jews. Even “the good qualities and the beneficent knowledge” of gentile nations, which are reflected in their wealth and possessions, are there in exile, since idol worshippers do “the reverse of God’s will”; but when the Jews have one of these qualities, then God’s will is fulfilled through it, for the Jews are the “instrument by which God’s will is implemented.” … So beloved are the Jews in the eyes of God that even if they do deeds like those done by the Gentiles, they are good precisely because they are the deeds of Jews. Even the wicked among the Jews have goodnesss at the root of their lives, for it is only their acts which are not good, and those can be amended through penitence. However, the root of the gentiles is bad and their acts are evil, even though they seem good “in their outer guise,” as in the outer shell of Amalek, who “stretches forth his cloven hoof, as if to say, I am a clean animal.” The quality of the Jewish people is that of Aaron, kind and peaceful, whereas the quality of Edom is one of murder, as it is written (Gen. 27:40): “And by the sword shalt thou live.” It is true that it is stated (in Mal. 1:12): “Was not Esau Jacob’s brother?—but this resemblance is merely external, for “God is aware that they are not equal.” Also, ‘it seems that Esau and Jacob hated each other in the same way; but Esau’s hatred of Jacob is a deep-rooted hostility, since he hates him in his very essence,” whereas Jacob dislikes Esau for “the evil of his nature, because he is irate and cruel.”¹¹⁸
Thus Christians were inherently evil and, what is more, beyond salvation. At least in Christian theology Jews (and infidels) could redeem themselves by accepting Christ. Apparently this was not so in Judaism. Encumbered with such baggage, how could good relations with Christians possibly flourish? In a social order that mandated or encouraged separation (unlike those that mandated assimilation), how could Poles be seen—and judged—other than through the prism of their alleged innate anti-Semitism? Zvi Gitelman believes that tradition-minded Jews were more inured to anti-Semitism because they reckoned goys as Esau—always an enemy of Jacob.¹¹⁹ This distinction between Jews and non-Jews was reinforced on a daily basis. Religious Jews would say in their morning prayer, “Blessed are You, Eternal our God, who has not made me a gentile.”¹²⁰ (Christians prayed the Our Father without any such differentiation: “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”)

An important sociological study of the shtetl by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl,¹²¹ takes note of various themes that can be confirmed, and developed, when looking at conditions in various localities: reciprocity of de-legitimization, Jewish elitism, and the impact of Jewish religion.

Each group will use animal terms in speaking of the other, implying that it is subhuman. If a Jew dies, a peasant will use the word for animal death in reporting the event, and a Jew will do the same for a peasant. The peasant will say that a Pole umiera and a Jew zdechl [zdechł]. The Jew will say that a Jew shtarbt and a peasant peygert. A peasant “eats” and a Jew “gobbles” when a peasant is talking, and when a Jew speaks the usage is reversed. The peasant will say, “That’s not a man, it’s a Jew.” And the Jew will say, “That’s not a man, it’s a goy.” (P. 157.)

The amorets, the ignorant man, is less adequate a Jew than the woman, for he has been commanded to have much learning and in fact has little or none. The non-Jew, by his original rejection of the Covenant, placed himself outside the hierarchy, like a star that exists beyond the solar system, and therefore he has no status with regard to learning. (P. 80.)

Among Jews he [the Jewish child] he expects to find an emphasis on intellect, a sense of moderation, cherishing of spiritual values, cultivation of rational, goal-directed activities, a “beautiful” family life. Among Gentiles he looks for the opposite of each item: emphasis on the body, excess, blind instinct, sexual license, and ruthless force. The first list is ticketed in his mind as Jewish, the second as goyish. (P. 152.)

For the shtetl, the opposition is not so much between secular and nonsecular, as between Jewish and non-Jewish. (P. 116.)

The majority group [non-Jews] is as much part of the design as the minority. They live without benefit of divine Truth and Law which, according to the legend, they themselves rejected. They remain, therefore, the victims of their own blind impulses and their own excesses. No more can be expected of them for they live in the dark. This is why a “good” Gentile deserves more credit than a good Jew, and a bad Jew is infinitely more reprehensible than a bad Gentile. (P. 154.)

Ordinarily, any member of the shtetl would try to avoid even passing a church, and if it is unavoidable he will mutter a protective formula as he hurries by. Yet for all this, many Jews have been saved during pogroms by humane priests who gathered them into the churchyard for safety. (P. 158.)

Such a squewed belief-system made some Jews, including rabbis, uncomfortable, but these qualms had no real impact on the dissemination of traditional teachings. Rabbi Menahem Nahum Friedman (1879-1933), who was born in Moldava (Romania), wrote Perush Man, which featured a heated discussion between Friedman and a modern Jew. The setting of this discussion was a train that was travelling from Ancona to Rome. In the opinion of historian David Assaf, the discussion between Rabbi Friedman and the modern Jew was a projection of the Rabbi’s own troubling questions.

In response, his interlocutor posed a further question: how is it possible to explain the unethical attitude toward non-Jews evidenced in Talmudic sources and Halakha? In reply, Friedman quoted a plethora of citations indicating the low moral level and barbarism of non-Jews during the Talmudic period, also noting that the sages treated decent non-Jews and non-Jewish scholars with respect, and moreover demanded fair treatment for them.

The conversation between the two unfolds over several pages, with the traveler posing thorny questions and the young rabbi providing apologetic answers. Friedman’s companion complained of the sages’ and the halakhists’ overt racism toward non-Jews, which contradicted his interlocutor’s claim regarding their intense humanity and morality. Behold, he noted, an animal can be saved from drowning, as the prevention of cruelty to animals is a pentateuchal command, but Maimonides rules that a non-Jew drowning in a river is not to be rescued: “Is that love for humanity? Can such laws be considered ethical?” Menahem Nahum replied that this ruling was directed at ancient idolaters, who were baser than, and inferior to, animals. Because these bestial humans not only treated Jews with extreme cruelty but also saw their lives as forfeit, any ethical being would therefore agree with the principle of “if a man comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first” (BT [Babylonian Talmud] Berakhot 58a) applies to them. But regarding non-Jews who are not suspected of spilling blood, the rabbis displayed a high moral attitude and required that they be treated equitably, like all Jews.¹²²

In terms of day-to-day interaction between Jews and Poles, Rosa Lehmann notes in a regional study:

We have seen that the Jews strongly marked themselves off from the Poles. The distinction between Jews (yidn) and non-Jews (goyim) reflected the Jewish fear of Gentile intrusion, as well as the Jewish disdain for the Gentile world. In communal and personal matters Jews kept strictly to Jews. Any involvement with Poles beyond what was strictly necessary (like work or commerce) was regarded as improper, since this would blur the community boundary and endanger the traditional Jewish way of life.¹²³
Thus negative stereotypes coexisted with positive ones, and were not the exclusive provenance of either group. For instance, Poles had their folk tales about Jews using the blood of kidnapped Christian children, and Jews had their Hasidic teachings about such things as the Jews being God’s only people, and Gentiles having no hearts. Polish peasants at times thought of the exploitive usurious Jew, and at other times the benevolent usurious Jew.¹²⁴ However, even when Jewish usury was benign, the lot of the poverty-stricken Polish peasant could only breed resentment: “This (like any other) form of involuntary dependence typically gave rise to feelings of hostility and frustration.”¹²⁵ Jewish literature in the late 1800s and early 1900s were full of stereotypical portrayals of Polish society: Polish nobles became the symbols of the corruption and licentiousness of the non-Jewish worls and Polish peasants were shown as primitive and prone to violence, and the treatment of Christianity was the for the most part negative.¹²⁶ Talmud-inspired perceptions of Christians could take on extreme forms. As historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern writes,
[Jews] mistrusted the gentiles, goyim, and would spit on the ground when passing by a church. They also spat on the floor of synagogue while reciting the line in the everyday concluding prayer Aleynu about those “who pray to the emptiness and void and bow down to the god that does not save.” Although censors had long crossed this line out and had forbidden Jews to reprint it in prayer books, it nonetheless remained in the oral culture …

Rik, Hebrew for “void,” also was associated with Hebrew for “spit” (rok), while “god who does not save” could also mean “God is not Jesus.” Jews spat on the floor when they mentioned those who bow down to the void and emphasized that Jesus was not God. Jewish enlightened thinkers complained that Jews spat in the synagogue during prayers and that it was deplorable—but they cautiously avoided a detailed description.
[Jews] sometimes challeng[ed] their Christian neighbors with outright mockery of Christianity. … Thus, for example, in Lithuania, several Jews spent Hanukah putting on an amateur performance with a Jew performing as Jesus on stage. … in Belorussia, several Jews got exuberantly drunk on Purim, dug out a wooden effigy of Jesus from a road chapel, and carried it on their shoulders around the shtetl, singing and mocking a church procession. Elsewhere Jews went out on Christian holidays, particularly to the church processions, and engaged in clashes with Christians.

In the early nineteenth century, we hardly find victimized Jews hiding themselves in their attics from the chastising sword and missionary word of the Christian Church. The contrary was closer to the truth: the shtetl at its height was afraid of nothing.

Jews stole from the churches, although those involved in sacrilegious offenses were ordinary Jews, not Jewish clergy. … The Makhnovka Jews …, accused of stealing church property, also demonstrate that some Jews engaged in Christian sacrosanct activities: if offenses against the religious “other” was the norm, so were offenses against religious property.

The adventures of several Jews in Polonnoe top many other examples of Jewish defiance. All involved agreed that sometime around the late 1840s, eight Polonnoe Jewish merchants celebrated Sukkot (Tabernacle). This group included some wealthy people … These Jews, who grew up seeing Catholic and Christian Orthodox churches dominating the shtetl skyline, manifested what a Jewish scholar called “the transgressive craving for the cross.”

They also found an interesting way to rejoice in their Judaism by making fun of Christain symbolism. They gathered in the tavern of Pinhas Gurvits and indulged themselves in abundant and festive libations. … The guests and the host moved from wine to vodka, and then began what the witnesses considered blatantly sacrilegeous behavior, “making fun of the Holy Miracles of the Christian church.”

First they undressed Beirish Stoliar to his underpants, put him in the corner of the room, and made him stretch both hands to his sides, as if he were being crucified. Then they slapped his cheeks, as a Jewish teacher would do to a bad student in the heder. They accompanied this ritual with some crude statements, although the participating Jews later failed to reproduce what they had said. The Gurvits donned a gown as if he were a priest, brought in a Jewish boy, and started pretending to baptize the boy—all in front of Beirish Stoliar as Christ. Once the “conversion” was over, the show continued with a mock Christian wedding, the same boy now playing the groom. … when the mock Jesus stretched out his hands, one of the Jews said in Russian, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”—and spat on the floor.¹²⁷

Jewish anthropologist Samuel Heilman notes that the Hasidic literalist movement, founded in the 18^th century, became the dominant Jewish world-view in Eastern Europe. “In several generations,” he observes, the Hasidic movement “absorbed huge numbers—perhaps a majority—of the region’s Jews.”¹²⁸ However, the longevity of Hasidic teachings can be seen in contemporary Israel. Heilman’s book about the Hasids in Israel shows that the Hasidic movement’s profoundly separatist and ethnocentric world-view is still reflected by 11- and 12-year olds in the Hasidic school system. Showing a school class a map of Israel, Heilman recounts,
I asked each boy if he could tell me what lay to the east, the south, the north, and the west [of Israel], each time pointing my pencil to the area in case they did not know the bearings of the compass. Again, no one knew … Next I asked each boy to tell me the names of the surrounding countries, without necessarily specifying where they were in relation to Israel. In response, one boy began to list cities in Israel … Perhaps the most revealing answer came from one youngster who, in reply to the question of what bordered on Israel, confidently answered that Israel was surrounded by chutz la’aretz. Chutz la’aretz is the Hebrew expression that most Israelis use to refer to the rest of the world. Literally, it means “outside of the Land (of Israel),” abroad. In this boy’s mind the world was neatly divided. Just as there were goyim and Jews, so similarly there was Israel and chutz la’aretz … It struck me that in the world they inhabited, the information I had asked them was simply not important. They had a different map of the world … The large territories were not Russia, Germany, or Poland. They were named after cities of importance to the hasidim of Zvil: Apta [Opsatów], Lublin, Mezerich, Berdichev, Chernobyl. Cities had become countries.¹²⁹
Historian Bernard Weinryb makes the point that the negative images Jews held of Christians were based on ideas “about the superiority of [their own] community, the chosenness of the Jews in comparison with the idolatry (paganism) of the others.” In ancient times, Jews were required to keep their distance from idol-worshippers. During the Middle Ages, rabbis insisted that those laws be applied to Christian practices even though they recognized differences between the idol-worshippers of ancient Greece and Rome and the Christians of medieval Europe.¹³⁰ Judaism created a series of anti-Christian rites and narratives. According to Ivan Marcus, Jews “often did this through rituals or narratives that denied and even mocked the competing stronger ideology of Christianity in medieval Europe.”