“ a Jew from Poland is not and never was simply Polish. … it was clear to Jews and Poles alike

Jews enjoyed an unhampered cultural, social and religious life that flourished in interwar period.³⁴ They also participated in the country’s political life through a host of political parties that won representation both locally and nationally. Nonetheless, separateness was fostered by Jewish community leaders and remained the preferred lifestyle for most Jews. Assimilation into Polish society automatically put one outside the mainstream of the Jewish community and even led to ostracism. Assimilation on the Western model was vigorously rejected by most Jews, who saw themselves as a distinct nation.³⁵ Tellingly, during the 1931 census, the Jewish community leaders urged Jews to identify their mother tongue as Hebrew or Yiddish, rather than Polish.³⁶ When a committee named after Berek Joselewicz promoting Polish-Jewish dialogue was started in Wilno in 1928, it was boycotted by the Jewish community leaders on the grounds that it could lead to assimilation.³⁷ Shedding traditional Jewish dress in a shtetl was enough to warrant condemnation in the synagogue.³⁸ This sense of Jewish separateness, coupled with the Poles’ objectively justifiable belief that the Jews—unlike others who had settled among the Poles (like the Armenians)—were by and large an inassimilable group, constituted the most serious impediment to Polish-Jewish co-existence.

The separateness of the Jews was clearly discernible at every turn. According to one Jewish researcher,

In Poland, … there was little question: Jews were Jews. With some exception, Jews neither considered themselves nor were they regarded by others as Polish or Polish Jews. As is well known, Jews in Poland were allowed to have their own laws and institutions. They were a nation unto themselves and they maintained their nationhood in Poland. From the time of their arrival and through the centuries, they sought to protect their way of life. They were not merely a separate religion but a tightly-knit community, leading life largely separate from Poles. They had their own customs, culture, dress, schools, courts, community government, and language (in the 1930 census almost 80 percent declared Yiddish as their mother tongue). Menachem Begin’s father refused to learn Polish. In a word, the vast majority of Jews were unintegrated socially and culturally in the fabric of the larger society. They shared little or no national sentiment or common allegiance with the Poles. They and the Poles were almost strangers. They avoided association with the vast majority of the population, the Polish peasantry, not wanting to live like, or with, them.³⁹
According to historian Regina Renz,
Many small country towns … could be described as shtetls—localities dominated by a Jewish community, organized according to their own rules in their own unique manner. The Jews constituted an integral part of the material and spiritual landscape of small towns.

Poles and Jews living in the same town formed two separate environments. Rose Price recollects: ‘I was born in a small Polish town. In our district, everyone knew everyone else: grandparents, aunts, friends, neighbours, merchants, and craftsmen. The strangers were the non-Jews—the Poles.’ That there was such fundamental closeness and such great psychological alienation is astounding.⁴⁰ Both the Polish and Jewish side harboured grievances and prejudices, although these had different sources and disparate natures. The model of bilateral contacts accepted by both sides was one of peaceful isolation, of a life devoid of conflict, but also of closer friendship. The Jews were an ethnic community with a marked consciousness of their cultural distinctiveness, which had been strengthened through the centuries by their common history, and which manifested itself in the cult of tradition and religious ties. Apart from tradition and religion, other important factors binding the Jewish community were the Yiddish language, clothing, customs, and communal institutions.⁴¹

Noah Prylucki (1882–1941), a leading Jewish cultural and political figure and proponent of Yiddishism, actively promoted complete and permanent national polarization: “We are not Russians, we are not Germans, we are also not Poles. We were, we are, and we will remain Jews…”⁴² The vast majority of Poland’s Jews agreed, and lived their lives accordingly. Israeli statesman Shimon Peres, born in Wiszniew (in what is now Belarus) in 1923 to a wealthy timber merchant, recalled that the town where he grew up, was “totally Jewish, and we were living neither in Poland nor in Russia. We were living in Israel from the day I was born, even before emigrating” to Palestine in 1932.⁴³ In an article entitled, “Jews and Poles Lived Together for 800 Years But Were Not Integrated,” published in the New York newspaper Forverts (September 17, 1944), Yiddish author and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote under the pen-name Icchok Warszawski:
Rarely did a Jew think it was necessary to learn Polish; rarely was a Jew interested in Polish history or Polish politics. … Even in the last few years it was still a rare occurrence that a Jew would speak Polish well. Out of three million Jews living in Poland, two-and-a-half million were not able to write a simple letter in Polish and they spoke [Polish] very poorly. There are hundreds of thousands of Jews in Poland to whom Polish was as unfamiliar as Turkish. The undersigned was connected with Poland for generations, but his father did not know more than two words in Polish. And it never even occurred to him that there was something amiss in that.
Bashevis Singer again returned to this theme in the March 20, 1964 issue of Forverts: “My mouth could not get accustomed to the soft consonants of that [Polish] language. My forefathers have lived for centuries in Poland but in reality I was a foreigner, with separate language, ideas and religion. I sensed the oddness of this situation and often considered moving to Palestine.”⁴⁴ Singer recalls wanting to learn Polish as a boy growing up in Warsaw, but his father scoffed at the notion. Tellingly, Jews also believed that even well-intentioned Gentiles cannot understand the Jewish spirit.⁴⁵

Compared to Singer, who espoused rather moderate views, many Jews advanced extremist views. They underscored their alienation by reacting strongly against the supposed spirit of submissiveness that Jews had shown while in the Diaspora. In his novel Mikan U-Mikan (“From Here and From Here”), published in 1911, Yosef Haim Brenner wrote:

For hundreds of years those foul creatures [the Poles] have been spitting in our faces and we wiped away their spittle and sat down to write books of Talmudic interpretation and dispute, nonsense, revolting things … we waited for the Messiah, gave money to our murderers and fled from one place to another …Wherever we went we were slaughtered and we fouled the air with our spilled blood.⁴⁶
Non-Jews also perceived this problem, though from a rather different perspective. Hendrik Willem van Loon, a Dutch-American correspondent for the Associated Press during the Russian Revolution of 1905, commented that most of the Jews “were never polonized: they hardly ever used the Polish language and did not feel to be a Pole.” Thus, the Poles “found themselves in company with 5,500,000 [an inflated figure—M.P.] strangers who live with them and on them and who have no intention to act in unison with them.” More than anything else, van Loon saw the Jewish attitude of “I belong to the chosen people and I am a different creature from you” as the source of feelings of animosity toward the Jews in Poland.⁴⁷ Alfred Döblin, a German novelist who visited Poland in 1924, was immediately struck by the essential difference between Poland’s Jews and the Jews of Weimar Germany. He writes,
Three hundred fifty thousand Jews live in Warsaw, half as many as in all Germany. A small number of them are strewn across the city, the bulk reside together in the northwestern sector. They are a nation. People who only know Western Europe fail to realize this. The Jews have their own costumes, their own language, religion, manners and mores, their ancient national feeling and national consciousness.⁴⁸
William John Rose, an authority on Poland who taught at several North American universities, observed on his visits to Poland before and after the First World War, that many Jews were hostile to even learning Polish—even after the rebirth of the Polish state itself. Rose describes his experiences with a Polish Jew who experienced enmity from fellow Jews for not sharing their veiled (and politicized) anti-Polish and anti-Christian sentiments:
Then my guide took me to see what everyone regarded as a model piece of work for abandoned children, the Jewish orphanage on Leszno Street [in Warsaw], managed by a Mr. Hosenpud. This remarkable man had been a teacher for years, and was president of the Jewish Teacher’s Association. A believer, he took the view that Jewry is a religion and not a nation, and had many enemies among his own people, who were opposed to having orphan lads taught Polish, or brought up to play games, or introduced to the school curriculum that is regarded the world over as the road to intelligent citizenship.⁴⁹
Having a firsthand knowledge of Poles and Jews, Rose, in contradistinction to most modern thinking, found Jews the ones primarily responsible for the negative aspects of Polish-Jewish relations. Citing several sources published by Rose, Daniel Stone comments:
[Rose] recognized that Jews were subject to discrimination but considered actual anti-Semitism uncommon and of recent date, deriving from economic competition. The real problem was not Polish attitudes but the refusal of Jews to assimilate. He strenuously opposed Zionism insofar as it led to a resurgence of Jewish nationalism in Eastern Europe. The best solution would be emigration, preferably to established countries where Jews would not be too ‘arrogant’ to assimilate. Rose applauded those Jews who considered themselves Polish nationals whether they maintained their Hebrew faith or converted … [such as] historian Szymon Aszkenazy, a practising Jew … Nonetheless, assimilation could not offer a solution to the mass of Jews.⁵⁰
As recognized by European Jews themselves, Zionism was not conducive, and indeed was at odds with, patriotism to their host country:
It made me think about who I was, though: was I a Dutchman first, or a Jew? The distinction between a Jewish Dutchman and a Dutch Jew is important: the first is totally assimilated, whereas the second puts the stress on his Jewishness, which is the internationally linking thing between us all. As a Zionist I beling to the second category, and I felt that the first line of defence for the Jewish race was the foundation of the State of Israel.⁵¹
Assimilationist tendencies caused one to step back from one’s community and look at it through from a different perspective. Apolinary Hartglas (1883–1953), who was born, and grew up, in Biała Podlaska, experienced difficulty in completely fitting into either the Jewish world or the Polish world.⁵² The language spoken at home was Polish, except when his parents wanted to hide something from the children. Then they spoke Yiddish. The family ate treyf food, and did not observe the Sabbath. They only attended synagogue on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. The young Apolinary disliked the traditional dress of non-assimilated Jews, and frowned on Jewish funerals, owing to the paid grievers and their loud wailing. He found Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic funerals much more dignified. As a young boy, Hartglas, owing to his dislike for Jews even though he was one, used to run the local Jewish children off the town square. He indicates that the Polish children neither encouraged him in this conduct, nor took part in it. Hartglas writes that he experienced countless acts of benevolence from Poles, and never personally suffered from Polish anti-Semitism. While in gymnasium (high school), he was once insulted by a Russian and once by a Pole. These incidents were resolved with fisticuffs, with Poles and Russians sometimes supporting him. After graduating from the University of Warsaw, he practiced law in Siedlce. Hartglas stated that he loved both the Polish and the Jewish nations. He also shared the Jews’ grief and anger at the wrongs that Jews faced from Poles, even though he himself did not experience them. At the same time, he felt many of the same grievances that many Poles—including even the “best” Poles—had against Jews. Interestingly, Hartglas’s worst experiences were from fellow Jews. For instance, while a lawyer, he was exploited by Jews. Large numbers of Jewish clients would come to him, saying that they were destitute and in need of his services for free, even though they later turned out to be well-off. Hartglas said that his Jewishness was not a religion but a nationality, in the same way that Poles are a nationality. What is more, Hartglas plainly stated that he did not consider himself a Pole. In addition, he considered himself a Zionist. Zionism, by definition, was a form of loyalty to another state, and not only, or not at all, to Poland. During some May 3 ceremonies in 1916, there was a speech given by a prominent Jewish speaker. The speech called for Jews to be granted full rights alongside Poles, while also fully retaining their rights to their own language and their own cultural separatism. Based on this, one might reasonably think that this Jewish speaker was part of the Yiddishist (folkist, or Bundist) variety. But no. It was Hartglas—the assimilated Polish Jew. (The foregoing confirms Endek accusations that Poland’s Jews wanted it both ways—to be Poles and not to be Poles. Is it any wonder that Endeks commonly doubted if assimilation would transform Jews into Poles?) Of course, there were also assimilated Polish Jews who considered themselves Polish by nationality. However, it is unclear how common they were, and how many of them were unambiguously Poles first and Jews second. Interestingly, Hartglas’s attitudes towards the Jewish national movement were not exactly flattering. Referring to the time around 1914, Hartlas stated that the idealistic assimilationist impulse was dead, that the Jewish national movement had by now grown immensely, and that—outside of Zionism—it had, in his words, “acquired distasteful, chauvinistic tones.” In the interwar period, Hartglas sat in the Polish Parliament (Seym), where he was co-creator of the Bloc of National Minorities, a coalition of parties representing ethnic minorities. Between 1938 and 1939, he was a member of the Warsaw city council. He was allowed to leave German-occupied Poland in December 1939, and thus escaped the eventual Holocaust. He went to Palestine, where he spent the last several years of his life.

Parallel to the orthodox stream of Judaism, there emerged in the 19^th century a strong secular movement that eschewed Jewish religious tradition. Chaim Zhitlovsky, an influential Yiddishist thinker who wrote from 1897 to 1914, followed the atheist line that dismissed religion as something discredited by modern science, philosophy, and morality. Isaac Leib Peretz stripped the Bible of divine revelation, and redefined it as a repository of Jewish literature. Still another leading Yiddishist thinker, Esther Frumkin, writing in 1910, scoffed at Jewish religious practices, and expressed a desire for holidays to celebrate what she called the proletarian struggle.⁵³ The following commentary about the views of Chaim Zhitlovsky, one of the leading ideologues of the secular Yiddishist movement, provides more insight on the pitfalls of integration:

Since Enlightenment universalism was the secular product of Western Christian culture. Jews must overcome their instinctive hatred of Christianity if they wish to join the modern world. The paradoxical path to Jewish secularization led through the Christian religion, not by conversion but by renouncing the Jewish religion’s teaching of contempt. Yet, by reclaiming Jesus as one of their own, the Jews might argue that their culture was a key source for Western civilization.⁵⁴
The degree of alienation of the Jewish community, which was largely self-imposed, cannot be overemphasized. For Orthodox Jews, their Jewishness constituted an absolute and insurmountable obstacle to meaningful relations with the outside world. As sociologist Alina Cała argues, Orthodox Jews manifested no emotional relationship to Polishness or Polish culture, and thus “were virtually precluded from experiencing a sense of Polish nationality or cultural identity.”⁵⁵ Marian Milsztajn, who was born in Lublin in 1919, wrote:
Where we lived … I didn’t hear one word of Polish. I didn’t know such a language existed. To the extent it existed, I knew it was the language of the goys. Poland? I had no idea. I first encountered the Polish language when I was seven, when I entered my first class on the second floor of Talmud-Tora. The language of instruction was Jewish (Yiddish). … We wrote in Jewish, learned some history in Jewish, mathematics, and the Polish language. During the first week of studies, when the teacher spoke in Polish we did not understand a word. And we began to shout: “speak our language, speak our language.” We made such a commotion that the shames arrived. And the shames turned to us: “Children, you must learn Polish because we are in Poland.” …

In the small towns the Jewish youth did not know Polish at all, but Jewish or Hebrew. … The youth did not know Polish, and if they did, they knew it like I did—poorly.⁵⁶

A “goy” (“goyim” in plural), it should be noted, is a term used to refer to a non-Jew, and is often used is a pejorative way. The situation was much the same in many large cities such as Białystok:
Only a small percentage of Jewish kids attended Polish schools, and therefore most had virtually no non-Jewish friends and didn’t speak the language of the state in which they resided. In the home of Yehiel Sedler, Yiddish was spoken, and Polish was a “foreign language” (OHD-110(15)). Chana Birk attended a Jewish school where Polish was taught only several hours a week, “like English in Israeli high schools” (OHD-110(8)). Zvi Yovin spoke only Yiddish and Hebrew at home, and his Polish was very weak (OHD-110(11)). In many educated families the situation was not different. Tuvia Cytron was a doctor, from one of the most prominent Jewish families in the city. He knew German much better than he knew Polish even though he lived most of his life in the Polish state (OHD-110(6)). In the family of Abraham P. Russian was prioritized over Polish (HVT-2942). Overall, very few Jews in the city, and mainly only those from middle and upper class families, spoke proper Polish.⁵⁷
Isaac Deutscher, a native of Chrzanów, offers the following observations:
In Poland Jews lived in virtual ghettos even before 1940. Polish nationalism, anti-Semitism, and Catholic clericalism on the one hand, and Jewish separatism, orthodoxy, and Zionism on the other, worked against a lasting and fruitful symbiosis.⁵⁸
Deutscher shared the “Endek” view that, owing largely to their large population and strong sense of separatism, Polish Jews would never assimilate:
It was in the Eastern European ghettoes that the ancient current of Jewish life ran strongest and that Jews dreamt the dreams of Zion most intensely. … The processes by which before the rise of Nazism French, British, Italian, and German Jews were being ‘assimilated’ never went far in Russia and Poland. The Jews there lived in large and compact masses; they had their own homogenous way of life; and the adsorptive powers of the Slavonic cultures were anyhow too weak to draw them in and assimilate them. Eastern Europe was therefore the land of Jewry par excellence (not for nothing was Vilna [Wilno] called ‘the Jerusalem of Lithuania’).⁵⁹
By the beginning of the twentieth century, most Jews regarded themselves as members of an ethnic or national group, and were so regarded by the surrounding population. This made much more difficult an accommodation between Jews and the reborn Polish state, since what they were now demanding were national rights. Many Jews were in fact opposed to Polish rule and some even the notion of Polish nationhood. The vast majority of Jews would only settle for living in Poland under one condition: full autonomy, which meant separation from the “Other”—their Polish neighbours, except in narrow areas where it was not in their economic interest to do so. As historians point out,
Zionists, who dominated the joint committee of East European Jewish delegations at the [Paris] Peace Conference and enjoyed the support of the American Jewish Congress, demanded that Poland … recognize their Jewish residents as members of a distinct nation, with the right to collective representation at both state and international levels. This would entail the creation of a separate Jewish parliament in Poland, alongside a state parliament representing all the country’s inhabitants, and it would mean the creation of a Jewish seat at the League of Nations.

In demanding formal, corporate, political/diplomatic status for a territorially dispersed nation, as distinct from a state, the Zionists were challenging traditional notions about the indivisibility of state sovereignty …⁶⁰

It is of profound significance that the memorial books of the Jewish communities destroyed by the Germans during the Second World War are written in Yiddish and (less often) in Hebrew, and although some of them contain English sections virtually none have any Polish-language content. According to French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the Jews of Poland could not properly be regarded as Poles of Jewish faith, as they represented a civilization and culture unto themselves.⁶¹ The ultimate goal for many, if not most Jews, in interwar Poland was to one day live in a national Jewish state in Palestine, governed by Jews, where Jews would live in conformity with their Jewish religious and cultural traditions.⁶² This dream was especially strong among residents of the hundreds of traditional shtetls (small towns) strewn throughout Poland, where many Jews did not even know what the Polish flag looked like.⁶³ For many, committed Zionists as well as others, the Jewish national state was to be a purely Jewish one.⁶⁴

The historic separateness of the Polish and Jewish communities, even on a day-to-day level, remained pronounced right up to the Second World War. As late as 1940, the famed doctor Janusz Korczak pointed out, “A certain nationalist told me: ‘A Jew, a sincere patriot, is at best a ‘Warszawer’ or ‘Cracower’, but not a Pole.’”⁶⁵ For many Jews, especially the younger ones, the atmosphere of the traditional shtetl was stifling, if not repressive. True, some inroads had been made in “assimilating” the Jewish population, but that was a rather recent trend and, for the most part, largely superficial. It was more akin to acculturation than to the concept of assimilation. (Assimilation was something that was taken for granted and expected of Jews who settled in the West.) To outside observers the reality of Jewish communal life in Poland was a rather rude awakening.

Arthur L. Goodhart, who came to Poland in the summer of 1920 as counsel to a mission sent by the president of the United States to investigate conditions in Poland, described typical Jewish schools in Warsaw connected with synagogues. These schools were steeped in Jewish history tradition and paid virtually no attention to the non-Jewish community around them: