August 2017 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

Any attempt by Poles to move out of their economic rung and venture into endeavours that were regarded as traditional Jewish economic “turf,” and thus considered off-limits for Gentiles,⁹⁰ was met with hostility, communal resistance and even violence. Historian Keely Stauter-Halsted, who traces these developments, points out that after peasant emancipation in the mid-19^th century, the traditional Jewish middleman position, between landlord and peasant, began to decline, and Polish-Jewish relations began to sour, culminating in the notion, nowadays, that Poles are born anti-Semites. The emancipated peasantry increasingly needed credit. In the then-absence of credit institutions, this made him dependent upon the Jewish tavern owner, who also doubled as a usurer. Although Austrian law forbade usurious interest rates, they sometimes were as high as 250%, computed weekly. Furthermore, as Polish peasants themselves became entrepreneurs, they, for the first time, came into direct competition with the Jews. In time, peasants organized a network of Polish-owned shops to break the Jewish monopoly on rural trade.⁹¹ In addition, Stauter-Halsted points out that, “Beginning in the 1870’s, Christian peasants sought to organize their own credit institutions and village stores in order to undercut the interest rates and prices Jewish merchants demanded.”⁹² Polish-Jewish rivalry not only continued, but expanded into new venues,
Village innkeepers were also almost always without exception Jewish, since gentry landowners had sold their concessions for alcohol trade only to nonserfs before emancipation. In the absence of formal credit facilities, peasants were frequently forced to turn to village Jews for emergency loans, especially to meet their new tax burdens. Because of their position within the money economy, Galician villagers viewed rural Jews, whether in the capacity as bartenders, moneylenders, or managers of general stores, as responsible for much of their economic misery. To complete the picture of economic control, Jewish families in the 1870’s began competing with small farmers to buy up estate land from impoverished gentry. By 1889, some 10 percent of agricultural land was owned by Jews.⁹³
Pointedly, Polish-Jewish antagonism was not as one-sided as nowadays portrayed. Stauter-Halsted comments,
Peasant resentment of rural Jews heightened still further after the latter began to retaliate against the loss of business. Jewish merchants attacked parish priests for their role in founding Christian stores. The Jewish shop owner in the town of Kalwarya reportedly offered to donate 60 zlotys [złoty] year to a cloister of the priest’s choosing if the clergyman would convince circle members to close their store, and offered the circle itself 100 zlotys to cease its operations. In most cases, peasant entrepreneurs persevered. Occasionally, however, as in the parish of Dąbrowa in 1884, the Jews triumphed and circle activities ceased altogether in response to the “great agitation” Jewish businessmen organized.⁹⁴
Many additional examples can be cited. Stanisław Thugutt, a minister in the interwar Polish government, was threatened by Jewish merchants after he opened a food cooperative in Ćmielów near Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski in 1903. After the threats proved futile, he was falsely charged with assaulting a Jew, a charge that was thrown out by the court. Nonetheless, the constant harassment exerted by the Jewish community resulted in Thugutt’s departure from the town.⁹⁵ When a cooperative produce store was opened in Brańsk in 1913 on the initiative of the local Christian intelligentsia, local Jews physically attacked one of its founders. In addition, the Jewish merchants who wanted to force the store to close, so as to maintain their monopoly on local commerce, jointly lowered their prices.⁹⁶ When a Polish company attempted to open a provision shop in Tarnobrzeg, they ran into a formidable obstacle. All the buildings in the centre of the town were owned by Jews who were adamantly opposed to the idea and would not rent or sell to Poles. When one Jew finally sold to the Poles, the Jews
made things very bad for the Jew who sold it, and offered to double the amount paid down in order to recover the place. It all came to naught. That evening the deed was signed after the seller left town. His family was the object of persecution, their windows were broken and for weeks they were not admitted to the synagogue.⁹⁷
The opening of a Polish business in Tarnobrzeg in 1899, resented by Jewish merchants, turned out to be a very positive development for consumers:
The ‘Bazaar’ was a godsend to the county, for it set all prices. Up to that time traders asked what they would, and since they had everything in their hands there was nothing for it but to pay. From now on they had to keep in line with ‘Bazaar’ prices. So, too, up till then the Jews made fun of Christians, as I have often heard with my own ears. … For a time the others waged a price war with the new firm, trying to ruin it; but they soon gave that up, and things became quiet.⁹⁸
An extract from a 1903 issue of the newspaper, Gazeta Świąteczna, is also instructive. It describes the efforts of a priest to get the Polish peasantry, at Skomlin in Prussian-ruled Poland, to alleviate their misery by uniting their scattered landholdings:
Persuaded by the priest, the majority of the farmers had signed their names; but after leaving the office some stirred up the others against it. The local shopkeepers, Jews, contributed to this a great deal because they were afraid that in a unified village they would be unable to get a dwelling and that their trade would be ruined.⁹⁹
At that time economic solidarity was completely foreign to Polish peasants, as it was to townspeople. It was something that had to be learned from others, including the Jews. Meanwhile Jews were eager to expand into areas traditionally occupied by Poles, like farming, and started to buy up large agricultural holdings in Galicia.¹⁰⁰

Unlike Polish attitudes toward Jews, about which there is an extensive and growing literature, the issue of Jewish attitudes toward Poles is a much neglected topic.¹⁰¹ In fact, the issue is largely shunned as if it provides no clues for understanding the long history of interaction between Poles and Jews. Historically, Polish-Jewish relations were multifaceted and developed in an entirely different setting than those which prevailed in the rest of Europe. Jews had been expelled from most of Europe over the centuries, starting in England (where the traditional blood libel charges originated) and followed by Spain, or butchered in large-scale massacres like those in Norwich, Strasbourg, Prague and Lisbon. When they started to trickle back to Western Europe in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, unlike in Poland, Jews sought cultural, linguistic and political assimilation. In Poland, Jews wanted autonomy and as little interaction with the Christian population as possible. By and large, Jews went out of their way not to assimilate and, with the growth of Jewish nationalism in the late 19^th century, they shunned political solidarity with the Poles in favour of their own national agenda which was often expressed in neutrality, at best, or by siding with Poland’s political foes. Jewish historiography tries to explain this conflict away by “Polish anti-Semitism.” If exclusionary attitudes can be the source of friction between Hasidic and non-Hasidic Jews in Israel, then there were all the more objective reasons for tensions to exist between Christians and Jews in Poland. However, in the case of Poland, it is commonplace to shist all the blame for this state of affair exclusively, or primarily at best, onto the Poles and any attempt to examine Jewish conduct is summarily dismissed as a display of anti-Semitism.

As Eva Hoffman points out, there were mutual parallels in how the two groups—Jews and Poles—traditionally viewed each other and interacted:
throughout much of Poland’s history, Jews were a highly visible and socially significant presence—a constituency that had to be reckoned with and one that could even pose challenges to the Poles themselves. In this respect, the nature of the Polish-Jewish relationship is exceptional. In contrast with Western European countries, where Jews were usually a tiny minority (below 2 percent of the population in modern Germany) and where, therefore, they were a mostly imaginary Other, in Poland, the Jewish community comprised a genuine ethnic minority, with its own rights, problems, and powers. We have become skilled nowadays in analyzing the imagery of Otherness, that unconscious stratum of preconceptions, fantasies, and projections we bring to our perceptions of strangers. Such subliminal assumptions and archetypes can and do have a very real impact on how we see and treat each other. But in the intergroup relations that were as extended in time and as complex as those between Poles and Jews, the material realities of economic competition and practical loyalties, of policy and political alignments, also played a vital role.¹⁰²
What of Jewish attitudes toward the Poles? We tend to forget that minority groups are not powerless in the perceptions; that they, too, exercise judgment and gauge the character of others; and that, much as they may be the targets of prejudice, they are not themselves immune to it. That the Jews had their views of the people among whom they lived we cannot doubt, but their ordinary opinions, ideas, and preconceptions are largely inaccessible to us, since almost no secular Jewish literature is extant from the early period. We do know, however, that Jews had their exclusionary and monopolistic prescriptions, prohibiting rights of residence to outsiders in their quarters, and strictly guarding certain business practices and “secrets” from non-Jews. … We can take it for granted, moreover, that fierce religious disapproval traveled both ways. Just as Jews were infidel in Christian eyes, so Jews were convinced that Christians were wrong, deluded, and blasphemous. And from both sides of the divide, the conviction of the other’s wrongness created essential, and increasingly rigid, spiritual barriers. As the Jewish communities in Poland became more settled and began to establish stronger religious institutions, Polish Jews became more rigorously observant. They began to shun intimate contact with Christians, if only on account of the dietary laws.

The Poles, then, were the Jews’ radical Other, just as much as the other way round.¹⁰³

Jewish separatism was also an active choice, and it also had its consequences. It meant that Jewish individuals and communities cultivated their own alienness, and that although they were willing to engage in contractual relations with the Poles, they did not wish to enter into a shared world with them.¹⁰⁴
Although much has been written about “Polish anti-Semitism,” there is very little about the other side of this two-way relationship. Most commentators simply deny its existence or downplay it to the point of insignificance. For some scholars, like Joanna Michlic, who adhere to the Manichean view of the malevolent Pole and the perpetually-innocent Jew, “anti-Polish stereotyping” by Jews is essentially a reactive and insignificant postwar phenomenon that has little or nothing to do with actual Jewish attributes. In her estimation, it is hardly worthy of mention:
this stereotyping basically constitutes a reaction to the negative experience of Jews in modern Poland. This reaction takes on the form of biased and unjustified expressions and overgeneralizations. However, such stereotyping does not constitute an important and irreducible element of Jewish national identity and nationalism …¹⁰⁵
Recently, historian Theodore Weeks made short shrift of such arguments:
Indeed, one cannot understand the development of relations between Poles and Jews in this period (i.e., turn of the 19^th century and into the 20^th century) without some consideration of the popular religious prejudices that both Jews and Poles harboured vis-à-vis their neighbours. On a popular level, Jews tended to see their Christian neighbours as crude, unpredictable, violent, and following a religion that was fundamentally pagan, worshipping idols (images of saints). Poles, on the other hand, despised Jews as moneylenders and Christ-killers, while also fearing Jews as crafty, sly, and possibly even demonic … While the Catholic clergy did not advocate violence against Jews, the Church generally urged believers to have nothing to do with Jews. [One might add that the Jewish religion and rabbis instilled a similar attiude with regard to Christians. M.P.] In short, religious beliefs emphasized and strengthened the maintenance of a large distance between Jews and Christian Poles.¹⁰⁶
Moreover, Michlic’s approach is ahistorical because it overlooks the historical context in which Polish-Jewish relations developed. Furthermore, it is hypocritical because it subjects Poles and Jews to two different moral standards. Michlic takes Poles to rask for holding views similar (regarding Jews) to those held by Jews (regarding Poles), and offers not one word of criticism regarding Jews. The situation is further compounded when Poland is compared to European countries which had no significant Jewish population or separatist minorities, but not to those (numerous) countries which experienced (and experience) serious ethnic strife between rival ethnic or religious groups who happen not to be Jewish.

There is little, if anything, that is novel about anti-Semitic views voiced by some Poles about Jews. (It is a separate question to what extent these views were shared by Polish society as a whole. The notion that anti-Semitism was a universal phenomenon among Poles is symptomatic of Jewish projection rather than reflection of reality.) Poles inherited traditional Christian beliefs and prejudices regarding Jews from the Catholic Church, and some of the modern doctrines were brought from Western Europe (primarily France and Germany), where they developed. There is no evidence Poles invented anything original in this regard. As Theodore Weeks notes:

The Poles certainly had no monopoly on antisemitism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In fact, both “scholarly” and popular expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment were much more pronounced in Germany and France in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. … It is also clear that much of the rhetoric of Polish antisemites … was appropriated from German and French sources.
… no prominent Polish writer or scholar of the prewar [i.e. pre-World War One] period chose to publicly denounce the Jews as a threat to the Polish nation. Indeed before 1905 it was a rare Polish intellectual who made a carrer of denouncing the Jews. Instead, in that period prominent writers sucg as Bolesław Prus and Aleksander Świętochowski mercilessly mocked and reviled antisemites as hacks, careerists, and benighted fools.¹⁰⁷
But the Poles were also saddled with a formidable problem—unknown in most of Europe—of having to cope, on a practical level and a day-to-day basis, with large numbers of Jews living in their midst as a separate community. Most of these Jews came to Poland because they were expelled from or fled persecution in other parts of Europe. Continually during Polish history, relations between Poles and Jews were exacerbated by the interference of outsiders: German settlers in the Middle Ages, the Cossack uprisings,¹⁰⁸ the Swedish invasion in the 17^th century, the dogmatic pressures of the Vatican, the autocratic rule of Czarist Russia, the Nazi Germany invasion, and the Stalinist occupation, to name the most significant examples.

Few people, even among Poles, are aware of the nature of the earliest contacts between Jews and Poles: Jews first came to Poland in the 10^th century as traders in—among other commodities, but primartily—Christian slaves, which certainly did not augur well for mutual relations.¹⁰⁹ In the early medieval ages, the international slave trade was monopolized by Iberian Jews known as Radanites, who transferred slaves (Slavs) from Central Europe through Western Europe centres such as Mainz, Verdun and Lyons, where they were often castrated, to Islamic buyers in Muslim Spain and North Africa.¹¹⁰ According to a Polish historian:

In the early Middle Ages the Jews kept a high profile in various branches of long-distance and overseas trade, in which slaves were, for at least three hundred years, the chief commodity. … The accounts of travellers (Ibn Kordabheh, Ibrahim ibn Yacub), passages in the works of other Arab and Jewish authors (Ibn Haukal, Ibrahim al Quarawi, Yehuda ben Meir ha-Kohen), documents issued by ecclesiastical and secular authorities, charters of municipal privileges and customs tariffs build up a massive body of evidence corroborating the involvement of the Jews in the slave trade. Their “goods” came mostly from the Slav nations; their trade routes led to and crossed in Eastern and Central Europe. Slaves of Slav origin would be taken westwards across the Frankish lands to Arab Spain and from there to other countries in the Mediterranean. The main centres of the slave trade were Prague (from the 10th century onwards); Magdeburg, Merseburg, Mainz and Koblenz in Germany; Verdun in northern France and a number of towns in southern France. In spite of the vociferous debates that the slave trade provoked in both secular and church circles, the Jews were undismayed and went on with their business.¹¹¹
The slave trade was strongly opposed by the Catholic Church, which prohibited the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands. So many Slavs were enslaved for so many centuries that the very name “slave” derived from their name, not only in English and other European languages.

Unlike other countries in which they settled and unlike the waves of German migrants who came to Poland, Jews who migrated to Poland from the 13^th century onward clung tenaciously to a German dialect rather than learning the language of their country of refuge. According to Jewish-American historian Robert Chazan,

In this regard, we must note the fascinating phenomenon of the emergence of Yiddish as the Jewish language of Polish Jewry. We have noted throughout this study Jewish adoption of the local vernaculars as the language of everyday communication. … What is clear, however, is that the importation of German into Poland by immigrating Jews represents a new development. In Poland, the migrating Jews did not adopt the language of their new environment. Rather, they held fast to the language and culture with which they had arrived. This linguistic tenaciousness seems to have been rooted in two factors. The first was the overall Germanic migration into Poland, which made the urban areas—within which the Jewish migrants first settled—heavily German in language and culture. Secondly, the Jewish migrants into Poland—unlike their predecessors in eleventh- and twelfth-century northern France and Germany—seem to have viewed their new environment as distinctly backward and to have clung to their prior language as a sign of cultural superiority.¹¹²
The chasm separating Jews from Polish peasantry, or the common people, was acutely felt well into the 20^th century. The situation of Jews in Poland bore no resemblance to the harsh and inhumane conditions that Black slaves and their descendants, who were brought from Africa by the tens of thousands by the Dutch, British, Portuguese, Spanish, and French, endured on the way to and in the European colonies in the Americas. Rather, the Jews in Poland occupied a place between the nobility and the peasant serfs and exerted considerable power over the latter. They collected taxes for the nobility and managed their estates. They were known as pachciarz, or “commercial agent.” The Jew, on behalf of the nobleman, controlled the life of the village. Having lost legal protection in 1518, when the king ceased to consider their complaints against the nobles, the peasants remained virtually at the mercy of the nobles, who decided on the levies to be imposed upon them in the form of services and the use of monopolies and held jurisdiction over them. The nobles, with the Jews as their agents, often misused their privileges to exploit the peasants subject to their whims. As stewards of the estates belonging to the Polish magnates, Jews had the power of inflicting capital punishment on the Polish serfs. Poland in the 16^th and 17^th centuries has often been described as “heaven for the Jews, paradise for the nobles, hell for the serfs.”¹¹³ The result was inevitable: strong resentment.

The reaction of the Jews caught up in this vicious cycle was to “dehumanize” the Christian peasants, and to view themselves as superior. As Jonathan Krasner points out,

The dehumanization of the peasants was also ‘an instrument for sustaining a social and political order in which the Other is a victim’. In central and eastern Europe, particularly in Poland and Ukraine, the Jews were frequently cast in an exploitative role in relation to the peasants. Although they were often acting as agents of the aristocracy, whether as estate managers, tax-collectors, or merchant capitalists, the face of the victimizer was Jewish. Peasant outbursts directed at Jews [and also magnates—M.P.] in the form of pogroms were more often than not fomented by perceived Jewish exploitation. The Jew could not escape awareness of his position, but rather than question the social and political order, he unconsciously justified that position by labelling the lower classes as subhuman, as animals. The occasional violence on the part of the peasants only served to reinforce this image.¹¹⁴
This attitude was also evident in the Jewish literature of the period, in which peasants were depicted with stereotypical disdain. According to Israel Bartal,
At the bottom of the ladder were the peasants, who constituted an absolute majority in the surroundings where Jews lived. Peasants dwelled in villages, at the edges of towns, and in rural suburbs of cities. A considerable number of the non-Jews who provided domestic services to the Jews were peasants. (Especially important was the shabes goy, who did things for Jews that they were forbidden to do on the Sabbath). From Jews, peasants bought supplies in the city and purchased products that they did not make themselves, and they sold agricultural produce to Jews. Peasants also drank vodka that Jewish innkeepers sold them in taverns owned by Polish noblemen. The tavern (Yid., shenk; Pol., szenk), which was the ordinary place of encounter between the Jew and the peasant, occupied a central place in the folklore of the peoples of Eastern Europe. …

The peasants in the Russian Empire were serfs on the estates of the nobility until 1861; they were regarded as property that could be bought and sold. Their collective name in the languages of the Jews was goyim, a word that could have extremely negative connotations of stupidity and ignorance, coarseness, sexual promiscuity, drunkenness, and violence. Their languages were called goyish, and in Jewish literature—which is full of passages, transliterated into Hebrew, in the vernaculars of the peasants—there is no distinction between one language and another. Moreover, until the beginning of the twentieth century, there is no clear differentiation in the literature between one ethnic group and another. …