Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland

360 Pages·2005·9.525 MB·English

by  Robert E. Blobaum

ANTISEMITISM AND ITS OPPONENTS
IN MODERN POLAND

ANTISEMITISM
AND ITS
OPPONENTS IN
MODERN POLAND
EDITED BY
ROBERT BLOBAUM
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
ITHACA AND LONDON
Copyright © 2005 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must
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First published 2005 by Cornell University Press
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2005
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Antisemitism and its opponents in modern Poland / edited by Robert Blobaum.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8014-4347-4 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8014-8969-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
i. Jews—Persecutions—Poland—Congresses. 2. Antisemitism—Poland—History—
Congresses. 3. Poland—History—20th century—Congresses. 4. Poland—History—19th
century—Congresses. 5. Poland—Politics and government—Congresses. 6. Poland—Ethnic
relations—Congresses. I. Blobaum, Robert.
DS135.P6A72 2005
305.892*4043 8*09—dc22
2005002688
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Contents
Preface vii
Introduction i
ROBERT BLOBAUM
1. Assimilation, Nationalism, Modernization, Antisemitism: 20
Notes on Polish-Jewish Relations, 1855-1905
THEODORE R. WEEKS
2. Jews as Middleman Minorities in Rural Poland: 39
Understanding the Galician Pogroms of 1898
KEELY STAUTER-HALSTED
3. Resisting the Wave: Intellectuals against Antisemitism in the 60
Last Years of the “Polish Kingdom”
JERZY JEDLICKI
4. Criminalizing the “Other”: Crime, Ethnicity, and 81
Antisemitism in Early Twentieth-Century Poland
ROBERT BLOBAUM
5. Antisemitism and the Search for a Catholic Identity 103
BRIAN PORTER
6. The Moral Economy of Popular Violence: The Pogrom in 124
Lwow, November 1918
WILLIAM W. HAGEN
7. Anti-Jewish Legislation in Interwar Poland 148
SZYMON RUDNICKI
8. Clerical Nationalism and Antisemitism: Catholic Priests, Jews, 171
and Orthodox Christians in the Lublin Region, 1918-1939
KONRAD SADKOWSKI
M
H CONTENTS
“Why Did They Hate Tuwim and Boy So Much?” Jews and 189
9-
“Artificial Jews” in the Literary Polemics of the Second
Polish Republic
ANTONY POLONSKY
10. Gender and Antisemitism in Wartime Soviet Exile 210
KATHERINE R. JOLLUCK
11. Antisemitism, Anti-Judaism, and the Polish Catholic Clergy 233
during the Second World War, 1939-1945
DARIUSZ LIBIONKA
12. The Role of Antisemitism in Postwar Polish-Jewish Relations 265
BOÉENA SZAYNOK
13. Fighting against the Shadows: The Anti-Zionist Campaign 284
of 1968
DARIUSZ STOLA
14. Memory Contested: Jewish and Catholic Views of Auschwitz 301
in Present-Day Poland
JANINE P. HOLC
15. Works on Polish-Jewish Relations Published since 1990: A 326
Selective Bibliography
STEPHEN D. CORRSIN
A Note on the Contributors
342
Index
344
Preface
Antisemitism in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland was part
of a larger and especially European hostility toward Jews and their
place in the modern world. Practically all the attitudes and behaviors
associated with antisemitism in Poland could be found elsewhere in modern
Europe to varying degrees, and indeed its ideological expressions were often
imported and adapted to a changing Polish environment. Thus, there is
nothing peculiarly “Polish” about antisemitism, and claims to the contrary
have served only to encourage present-day antisémites. It is accurate, how­
ever, to speak of antisemitism “in modern Poland”: that is, its multiple and
shifting contexts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Since these
Polish contexts have not remained static, antisemitism in modern Poland has
taken on different meanings, content, forms of expression, and social range.
A chief purpose of the chapters in this volume is to examine this constantly
moving target at different moments in time, in various contexts, and in
relation to other factors. At the same time, the fact that the relative strengths
and weaknesses of resistance and opposition to antisemitism in Poland
during the modern era have been similarly situational has in turn affected
their capacity to be heard and acted upon. The goal of this collaborative
effort, therefore, is not to provide a definitive history either of antisemitism in
modern Poland or of opposition to it but to bring the larger picture into better
focus.
[viii] PREFACE
This collection of original essays and articles is the final product of a col­
laborative research project that has involved fifteen scholars from the United
States and Poland since the autumn of 2001. Its origins, however, date to the
summer of 2000 and a roundtable—“The Politics.of Antisemitism in Early
Twentieth-Century Poland”—involving Jerzy Jedlicki, Theodore R. Weeks,
and Brian Porter at the World Congress of Central and East European Studies
in Tampere, Finland. As the organizer of the roundtable, I sought to put my
own conclusions about the emergence of a modern, politicized antisemitism
in Warsaw on the eve of the First World War to the test of a larger scholarly
debate before they appeared in print.1 At the same time, the Tampere round­
table provided an opportunity to discuss topics and areas in the rapidly
expanding scholarship of Polish-Jewish relations in the twentieth century
which nonetheless demanded new exploration or further consideration.
Subsequently, and in consultation with several U.S. and Polish colleagues,
I began to organize a team of scholars whose past research had helped define
or whose current work had the potential to redefine the contours of study of
Polish-Jewish relations in the modern era. After several mutations, the research
team whose work appears in this volume comprised a group of individ­
uals fairly diverse in academic rank, professional training, methodological
approach, and specific period of historical interest. Such diversity was neces­
sary in light of the project’s goal of bringing chronological breadth, thematic
depth, and a balanced treatment of actors to this complex and controversial
subject. On the one hand, the work presented here synthesizes an enormous
amount of recent research since 1989, in Poland and the United States as well
as in Israel and Western Europe—work reflected in the selective bibliography
compiled for this project by Stephen D. Corrsin. On the other hand, contri­
butors have sought to break entirely new ground in their discussion of spe­
cific issues and topics not previously or prominently featured in the scholarship
of Polish-Jewish relations.2
Most members of the research team presented, shared, and discussed pre­
liminary versions of their contributions at a conference held in Morgantown,
West Virginia, June 16-18, 2002. This conference, free and open to the public,
drew in interested parties from the Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., areas
(including a representative from the Polish Embassy) as well as from the West
1. Robert Blobaum, “The Politics of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Warsaw,” Journal of
Modern History 73, no. 2 (2001): 275-306.
2. For example, the roles of gender, sexuality, and notions of social deviance in shaping per­
ceptions of the ethnic and religious “other” in modern Poland are discussed here for the first time.
In contrast, the more general study of antisemitism in modern Europe has long included such
approaches; see George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal
Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985), and Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body (New
York, 1991). In Polish, Boiena Uminska’s recent discussion of the images of Jewish women in
Polish literature begins to address the role of gender and sexuality in Polish stereotypes, but only
in respect to women; see her Postac z cieniem: Portrety Zydowek w polskiej literaturze od konca
XIX wieku do 1939 roku (Warsaw, 2001).
PREFACE [ix]
Virginia University and local communities. Those team members who were
unable to attend the conference made separate trips to Morgantown to present
their research to and take questions from a mixed academic and public audi­
ence. These individual contributions were then extensively critiqued by fellow
collaborators on the research team, which in turn led to some lively electronic
exchanges. The most contentious issues revolved around the definition of anti­
semitism itself and the relationship between traditional Judeophobia and more
modern hatreds; the role of Jewish assimilation (or lack thereof) in the dete­
rioration of Polish-Jewish relations; reasons for the relative ineffectiveness of
Polish opposition to antisemitism over most of the modern era; the social range
of antisemitic ideology and of specific images and stereotypes (positive and
negative) of Jews; interpretations of the causes and meanings of pogroms and
other forms of anti-Jewish violence; and the role of the Roman Catholic
Church and its clergy in the spread of antisemitism in Poland as well as the
prospects for success of recent Catholic efforts to deal with that legacy.
The space constraints of a single volume have left some obvious chrono­
logical and thematic gaps, the coverage of which can be entrusted to future
research in the rapidly growing field of Polish-Jewish studies. A hypothetical
second volume could include, for example, separate contributions on the role
of Jewish issues in the “Polish October” of 1956 and Solidarity’s self-limiting
revolution of 1980-81. Moreover, nearly all the discussion in these pages is
about Poles, although modern Poland (especially before 1945) contained both
antisémites and opponents of antisemitism who were not Polish—especially
Ukrainians, who outnumbered Jews by two million in interwar Poland, but
also Germans, Belarusians, and Lithuanians. To do any justice to Ukrainian
and other Christian minority perspectives, however, would require additional
chapters and therefore must also be set aside for future study.
Finally, with the exception of the Zionists in the interwar Polish parliament,
Jewish opponents of antisemitism receive relatively little attention in this
volume. An additional chapter or two devoted to the various strategies
pursued by different Jewish groups, ranging from the Orthodox members of
the conservative Agudas Israel to the radical socialists in the Bund, in dealing
with and responding to antisemitism would certainly have been of value.3
Again, constraints tend to impose their own priorities. The opposition of
Jewish groups and parties to antisemitism, interesting though its variations
and dilemmas might be for scholarly analysis, can ultimately be assumed—
unfortunately, that opposition also came to little effect—whereas not only
3. This is not to suggest the existence of a historiographical vacuum in this area, although in
English most attention in this regard has been paid to early Jewish socialist and Zionist political
formations. See, for example, Joshua Zimmerman, Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality:
The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1891-1914 (Madison Wis., 2004);
Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1913-1926 (New Haven, Conn.,
1982) ; and Joseph Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919-1939 (Berlin,
1983) .
PREFACE
M
could opposition among the Christian Polish majority not be assumed, but its
relative absence or presence at critical moments counted a great deal. Even
then, it can be argued that not all Polish actors—for example, the socialist and
communist movements and the leftist political tradition that remained rela­
tively open to Jews (in any case, before 1950)—have received their appropri­
ate due in this volume.
At the same time, although some limited attention is paid to Jewish society
and institutions, this is not a book about Jewish communal life. On the one
hand, an extended discussion of the Jewish community and Jewish actors
would be more appropriate to a work on Polish-Jewish relations generally.4
On the other hand, in a book about antisemitism that treats only one aspect
of Polish-Jewish relations, Jews necessarily appear as objects rather than sub­
jects. That said, readers should not expect this book to be about the Holo­
caust in Poland, though it can hardly be ignored. Tempting though it might
be to view Polish-Jewish relations and even the history of antisemitism in
modern Poland from its low point during World War II, this is something that
serious scholarship should resist. Instead, this book looks at the Holocaust as
an episode, however important and tragic, in a much longer history of social
and cultural attitudes that have shaped and reshaped Polish-Jewish relations.
This project has been generously supported by major funding over a two-
year period from the National Council for Eurasian and East European
Research. Additional support at critical moments has come from various units
of West Virginia University, including the WVU Research Corporation, the
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, and the Office of International Programs.
I thank Feliks Tych and Alina Cala of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw
and Padraic Kenney of the University of Colorado for their advice during early
stages of the project; Wlodzimierz Rozenbaum, John Markoff, Malgorzata
Markoff, Maciej Pisarski, and William Brustein for their encouraging com­
ments and insights during the June 2002 conference in Morgantown; and Lisa
Di Bartolomeo of the University of Pittsburgh for her timely assistance with
the translations. My wife, Victoria Gruber, has for long been the most faith­
ful reader of my own manuscripts and has lent her discerning eye to the editing
and indexing of this work. And, finally, I thank all my collaborators whose
names and work appear in this volume and who helped transform a personal
vision into a collective one.
4. In fact, a relatively unknown but important two-volume work consisting of such contri­
butions already exists: The Jews in Poland, vol. 1, ed. Andrzej K. Paluch (Krakow, 1992), and
vol. 2, ed. Slawomir Kapralski (Krakow, 1999).