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

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.¹⁴⁰
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.¹⁴¹
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.¹⁴² 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.”¹⁴³ 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 world and Polish peasants were shown as primitive and prone to violence, and the treatment of Christianity was the for the most part negative.¹⁴⁴ 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.¹⁴⁵

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.”¹⁴⁶ 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.¹⁴⁷
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.¹⁴⁸ 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.”
By weaving tougher elements from earlier Jewish traditions, Jews developed a ceremony in the late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century Germany and northern France that in many ways parodied and subverted aspects of Christian rituals and symbols. … Eating special cakes baked with foods that symbolize Torah (flour, honey, milk, and oil), and shelled hard-boiled effs on which words of Torah were written served as a Jewish antidote to the increasingly more prominent central Christian rite of the Eucharist [eucharist in original] that bound Christians to one another and to the living sacrificed Christ.¹⁴⁹
Significantly, 18^th century Polish scholarship was well aware of at least some of the offensive Jewish beliefs and practices, as well as the writings of the Talmud which were replete with disgusting and spiteful references to Jesus, Christians (non-Jews), and Christian beliefs.¹⁵⁰ German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz elaborates on the central, and destructive, role that the Talmud played in Jewish society in the Commonwealth of Poland:
The study of the Talmud was a greater necessity in Poland than in the rest of Europe. The rabbis, as has been already said, had jurisdiction of their own, and decided according to Talmudical and Rabbinical laws. The great number of Jews in Poland, and their fondness for litigation, gave occasion to intricate law cases.

A love of twisting, distorting, ingenious quibbling, and a foregone antipathy to what did not lie within their field of vision, constituted the character of the Polish Jews. Pride in their knowledge of the Talmud and a spirit of dogmatism attached even to the best rabbis, and undermined their moral sense. The Polish Jews of course were extraordinarily pious, but even their piety rested on sophistry and boastfulness. Each wished to surpass the other in knowledge of what the Code prescribed for one case or another. Thus religion sank, not merely, as among Jews of other countries, to a mechanical, unintelligent ceremonial, but to the subtle art of interpretation. To know better was everything to them; but to act according to acknowledged principles of religious purity, and to exemplify them in a moral life, occurred to but few. Integrity and right-mindedness they had lost as completely as simplicity and the sense of truth. The vulgar acquired the quibbling method of the schools, and employed it to outwit the less cunning. They found pleasure and a sort of triumphant delight in deception and cheating. Against members of their own race cunning could not well be employed, because they were sharp-witted; but the non-Jewish world in which they came into contact experienced to its disadvantage the superiority of the Talmudical spirit of the Polish Jews.¹⁵¹

For God’s “Chosen People” the “rival” Polish messianistic movement which developed in the 19^th century proved to be particularly unpalatable and met with scorn. Unlike the situation in countries where Jews formed a tiny presence, given their large numbers in Poland they felt little or no compunction to rein in their negative feelings toward the surrounding population.

Stephen Bloom’s book about an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave (the Chabad Lubavitchers, a prominent Hasidic movement founded in Lithuania) in Postville, Iowa, in the 1980s, sheds some light on what relations must have been like between many Jews and Poles in Eastern Europe before the rise of the Nazis. Hasidic Jews who moved to the Iowa town practiced self-imposed apartheid. They used only their own schools. They did such things as demanding exclusive use of the town swimming pool for part of the day. They refused to participate in an ecumenical service at a neutral locality. They ignored greetings from neighbours, they did not want to touch Gentiles, they resisted eye contact with them as they walked down the street. They had no knowledge or interest in Gentile life around them. They appeared “obnoxious and imperial” to local people, they cheated local merchants, and they used oil in their candelabras because oil, which doesn’t mix with other liquids, symbolizes Jewish separateness from all non-Jews. “Wherever we go,” one Chabad leader (Lazar) said, “we don’t adapt to the place or the people. It’s always been like that and always will be like that. It’s the place and the people who have to adapt to US.” Continuing his interview, Bloom remarked: “Lazar’s comment underscored the Hasidim’s contempt for non-Jews, which wasn’t limited to the Postville gentiles, but to all Christians … Lazar’s gentile-bashing reminded me of the Yiddish aphorism Er shmekt nit un er shtinkt nit (‘He doesn’t smell and he doesn’t stink’), used derisively to describe non-Jews, who are viewed as inconsequential and unimportant.” Such attitudes were not limited to the unassimilated. Bloom, a much-assimilated largely non-observant American Jew, recounts what his parents said: “A common expression used by Jews to describe a slow, dense person was—and still is—‘He’s got a goyischer kop’, which literally means ‘He’s got a gentile head’ but figuratively means ‘slow-witted’.” “Postville people, by and large, were tolerant,” says Bloom, “… [but the Hasidic Jews] were downright rude. They seemed to go out of their way to be obnoxious, especially when it came to business dealings … At first, the locals welcomed the Jews, but even the simplest offer—a handshake, an invitation to afternoon tea—was spurned. The locals quickly discovered that the Jews wouldn’t even look at them. They refused to acknowledge even the presence of anyone not Jewish.” The Postville residents, for their part, grew increasingly tired of being told to be tolerant. A Jewish boy was run off the road, causing injuries that required stitches. Derogatory remarks about the Jews grew more and more common. Bloom grew concerned that the Gentiles were hardening their attitudes: “The problem, as I saw it, was that although the locals might have been right about the atrocious behavior of some of the Postville Jews, not a few of the locals began using this behavior to generalize about all Jews … All Jews were greedy, all Jews bargained, all Jews reneged on their agreements.” In the end, the Postville locals voted to rezone the area in hopes that it would drive the Lubavitchers out. Bloom, who had visited the Postville area many times to be sure of his conclusions, sided with the locals.¹⁵²

One can find the same theme of mutual religious-based animosity in some memoirs from the interwar period. Leon Berkowicz, the son of a successful timber merchant from Baranowicze, writes:

The deep intolerance and hatred was caused by the poverty and ignorance which prevailed for centuries, and to no less a degree by the clergymen of all three denominations [i.e., Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Jewish] who spent more time emphasising the superiority of their own creed and the certainty of preferential treatment by the Almighty than they did in teaching the Ten Commandments or the love and compassion of Jesus Christ.
Many religious practices and traditions associated with Judaism seemed strange to Christians, just as Christian rituals did to Jews. Some Jewish customs became known to Christians, and vice versa.
The practices surrounding Tisha Ba’av were much more to my liking. … this holiday was a mournful one indeed. Commemorating as itdid the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem … Jews generally observed Tisha Ba’av by denying themselves anything that gave pleasure, by debasing themselves, sitting, for example, not on chairs but on special low boxes, placing ashes in their hair, and not eating or drinking for twenty-four hours. Throughout the entire day my father wore torn clothes specially set aside for this time. Understand this and try to explain why it was that children were allowed to do what they did.

At this time of year [summer] a certain kind of prickly thistle grew abundantly in our region, which we proceeded to collect. In short order these thistles were being used as missiles within the synagogue, children taking aim at the long beards of the congregants and then throwing them. When accurately thrown they became entangled in the beards and were very hard to remove. Here were men absorbed in mournful prayer forced to be on the alert for annoying thistles aimed at them! Women were considered to be off limits, but not young girls. It was also “permitted” to sneak up on a girl and rub a thistle into her hair. Once in, it was not easily removed; at times girls were forced to cut off parts of their hair. …

You would think such disruption would tax the limits of everyone’s patience, but there was more. On Tisha Ba’av in the synagogue, children threw bricks! In the midst of solemn prayers, bricks were sent skidding along the floor! Naturally when things got out of hand people complained bitterly, but never did anyone insist that such doings ought not to be tolerated. It was accepted; it was tradition.
The year-round pieces [of dishes and utensils] remained in our house, but they no longer belonged to us. As was the custom, they were temporarily “sold,” together with the chumetz food [i.e, food forbidden during Passover], to a non-Jew, a handshake usually confirming the transaction. With the chumetz dishes, utensils, and food no longer ours, the laws of Passover were thus upheld.
So much did matzohs symbolize Passover that we used them as gifts for Polish friends, who considered them treats—ironically enough, given the ancient Christian charge that Jews baked their matzohs with blood from Christian children. I was the one selected by my father to deliver these gift matzohs, usually two or three packed together. It was customary for Jewish children to bring matzohs for their favorite teachers in public school.
All this might have been all right if the town’s dentist had not been a woman. That in itself was sufficient to keep all the orthodox Jews away from her door.¹⁵³
We used to buy meat at the kosher butcher, of course, in the Jewish store—there was no doubt about that. But it happened sometimes that we’d buy something live, like for Rosh Hashanah. We had to have a sacrificial hen. We would say a prayer and spin the hen above the head. And then we'd take the hen to the butcher, and there was this shochet that would kill it. And I really hated it when they were spinning that hen over the head. Because it was flailing her wings and I was afraid it would do something to me.¹⁵⁴
Nonetheless, there as in most places, day-to-day relations between Christians and Jews remained proper and entirely civil.¹⁵⁵ Acts of kindness were also not uncommon. A famous incident occurred in Wilno in April 1931, when an 18-year-old Polish youth drowned after jumping into the Wilejka River in an unsuccessful attempt to save a four-year-old Jewish boy from drowning. The Polish authorities commemorated this heroic deed by erecting a monument to the Pole, who became a source of pride—not shame—for the Polish community. The Jewish representatives on the municipal council chose not to support the erection of the monument.¹⁵⁶

At the Polish state-run high school Leon Berkowicz attended in Baranowicze,

nobody was handicapped because of his origin or his religion. The Jewish boys excelled academically, but if they were usually first in maths and science they were nearly always last in sports. Physical education was a low priority in Jewish upbringing. Somehow, I was an exception and … the sports-master always gave me top marks. … I was very proud when the captain from the 78^th Polish infantry regiment asked me to join their soccer team and play for them in Wilno … I had two Christian friends at school … Our relationship was based on mutual respect and understanding. On a few occasions I went to their homes and they came to mine; I had the impression that the parents of both sides raised their eyebrows.¹⁵⁷