The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars (Tauber Institute Series, No 10)
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Book Summary Information
Editor: Yisrael GutmanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1989-10-15
ISBN: 0874515556
Number of pages: 544
Publisher: Brandeis
Book Reviews of The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars (Tauber Institute Series, No 10)
Book Review: Limited Polish Anti-Semitism; 1930's Pogroms, Jewish Violence, etc.
Summary: 4 Stars
Of the numerous authors in this anthology, this review focuses on only a few.
In spite of the great deal of attention given to prewar Polish anti-Semitism, its effect on Jews was rather limited. As Yisrael Gutman, an eminent Holocaust scholar, writes: "It should be made clear that political antisemitism and anti-Jewish economic policies did not impinge on the considerable freedoms the Jews enjoyed in their organizational life and social and cultural activities. The Jews were free to set up their own political organizations, to bring up their children as they saw fit, to publish a whole range of newspapers and literary works relatively free of outside interference, and to present their cause to the Sejm and before the court of public opinion. Furthermore, Jews--mostly assimilated ones--occupied important positions in Polish literature, art, and the theater."(pp. 103-104).
Most Polish Jews were not only unassimilated, but did not even speak Polish. Gutman says: "Boguslaw Miedzinski, ...a leader in the camp of Pilsudski's heirs, quipped in the Sejm (House of Deputies) in 1937 that he personally like Danes very much but if there had been three million Danes in Poland he would want to get rid of them as soon as possible."(p. 101).
A long-term source of Polish-Jewish antagonisms has always been Jewish economic dominance. Jerzy Tomaszewski (p. 147) found that Jews (at 10% of the population) accounted for 73.7% of those active in agricultural-related commerce in all of prewar Poland. He concludes: "No matter how good the relations between the shopkeepers and their customers seemed, there was always some level of distrust. In the traditional values of the villagers, manual work in the fields was the main--or even the sole--worthy occupation; all other professions and occupations were considered to exploit the hard labor of the peasants. This distrust grew during economic disturbances, when peasants received less for the goods they produced."(p. 147).
Taking this further, the reader may be intrigued by Edward D. Wynot. He cites a 1933 study, by political liberals, of peasant attitudes towards Jews. Contrary to the stereotype of peasants being virtually all bigoted, challenged by the blood libel, etc., their attitudes are described as follows: "The first volume of selected responses revealed overt antisemitism in nearly ONE-FOURTH [Emphasis added by reviewer] of those surveyed. Although actual wording varied according to the individual authors, the general viewpoint expressed was consistent on certain points: The Jew was a parasitic middleman who exploited the naïve, ignorant peasants by paying submarket prices for farm products and then charging exorbitant ones for manufactured goods or essentially raw materials, often dealing dishonestly with them in the process; the Jew was an archetypical "loan shark" who deceived the peasants into overextending their credit at usurous [usurious] rates, then foreclosing on their land; the Jew was responsible for using his influence abroad to knock the bottom out of the international market for Polish agricultural products. The second volume contained fewer peasant contributions, but more than one-half of those expressed anti-Jewish feelings to some extent."(p. 48).
Even assuming that the foregoing attitudes are entirely unjustified, the 25-50% level of anti-Semitic attitudes in prewar Poland contrast sharply with the stereotype of nearly all Poles (save that of political leftists, plus a tiny number of other enlightened individuals) being rabid anti-Semites. Not mentioned in all of this is the fact that the seller-buyer relationship is, to a degree, an inherently adversarial one. When the sellers tend to be of one nationality and the buyers a different nationality, and moreover this pattern persists for generations, how can there NOT be resentment and conflict?
To show the irrationality of anti-Semitism, a number of Jewish authors have pointed out that Poles often remained anti-Semitic despite having friendships with Jews. Such Jews were considered exceptions. It turns out that exactly the same attitude existed on the Jewish side. Ben-Zion Gold comments: "The teachers of secular subjects were either nonreligious Jews or Christians. They usually treated us well, and the stories and poems we read with them were interesting. Strangely enough, these teachers did not effect our general prejudice against Gentiles or secular Jews except perhaps subliminally. We thought that each teacher was an exception."(p. 274).
Relative to the 1930's pogroms, and bearing in mind that, whether justified or not, violence tends to escalate, it is interesting to note that the line of murderous violence had often been first crossed by Jews. Emanuel Melzer comments: "The anti-Jewish excesses and pogroms in the years 1935-37 had their specific characteristics and dynamics. Usually they resulted from the killing of a Pole by a Jews, either as an act of self-defense or as a criminal act of an individual committed out of personal revenge. For this killing the entire local Jewish community was held collectively responsible. The pogroms of Grodno (1935), Przytyk (1936), Brzesc nad Bugiem (1937), and Czestochowa (1937) all followed this pattern. In other cases the Endeks used anti-Jewish violence as a means for undermining the authority of the government."(p. 129). Not mentioned is the fact that, although collective responsibility is part and parcel of interethnic violence, the small number of Jewish victims overall (a few hundred) does not support a high degree of collective blame directed against Jews in general.
Violence also existed within the Jewish community. Samuel D. Kassow writes: "Contrary to popular perceptions, the shtetl saw its share of violence and chicanery...Grudges and grievances often interrupted Sabbath prayers and even led to fights in the synagogue. Incidents such as that which occurred in Minsk Mazowiecki in the 1930's, when the local butchers assaulted a respected Zionist delegate to the kehillah after he raised the meat tax to pay for the local Tarbut school, were not uncommon. Bribery to fix elections of new rabbis was rampant, and the disgruntled party often brought in its own candidate, thus leading to serious conflicts that split families and friends"(pp. 204-205).
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