May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

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.³²
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.³³

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.³⁴
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.³⁵
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 assimiltated, 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.³⁶
Assimilatonist 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.³⁷ 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.³⁸ 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.³⁹
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.”⁴⁰ 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.⁴¹

A “goy” (“goyin” 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.⁴²
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.⁴³
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’).⁴⁴
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 …⁴⁵

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.⁴⁶ 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.⁴⁷ 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.⁴⁸ For many, committed Zionists as well as others, the Jewish national state was to be a purely Jewish one.⁴⁹

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.’”⁵⁰ 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:
We then went to the senior class, where the children were thirteen or fourteen years old. These children had just been studying Jewish history, and one of them enthusiastically repeated to me the names of the different kings of Judah. As this was the oldest class, I thought I would ask them some questions. Of the thirty-five children … Nearly all of them knew that New York was in America. None of them knew who Kosciuszko [Kościuszko] was, and one particularly bright boy was the only one in the class who had ever heard of [King John] Sobieski. He thought that Sobieski was a Polish nobleman who had fought against the Russians. I then asked them some questions about languages. Only one boy could talk Polish, although four or five could understand it. … All the classes in this school were conducted in Yiddish, although the main emphasis was put on teaching the children Hebrew. …

We visited three or four other Talmud schools during the day. One of the best had some maps on the wall. When I examined them I found that they were detailed charts of Palestine. The children in this class were able to draw excellent plans of the country on the blackboard, filling in the names of all the cities and most of the villages. I asked one of the boys whether he could draw a similar map of Poland, and he said “No.” …

After having visited these schools, we had an interview with the head of the Talmud Torahs. He was opposed to the idea that the Polish Government should inspect these schools and force them to teach [even some] Polish to the children. … The purpose of his schools was to give the pupils the traditional Jewish education.⁵¹
Many Jews had more affinity for distant, mythical America than for Poland, or even Palestine, despite overwhelming evidence that Jews who immigrated there soon shed everything that made their lives distinctive in Poland.
Citizens of Kolbuszowa, still we were in love with America. Nothing could change that; nothing ever did. To us American could do no wrong. …

What could happen to people there was common knowledge. The religion of their fathers, the faith of our ancestors, once in America it no longer was the same. Incident after incident reaffirmed this lamentable fact; so did many popular stories. Just look at those who had returned from America to visit us. Beards trimmed or shaved off, payes removed, long coats gone. What kind of Jews were these?

It was so. I remember when my brother came for a visit. Saturday arrived, the sacred Sabbath, but he continued to smoke his cigarettes. … Then he had someone go over to the local Polish store and buy pork sausages. What happened to kosher in America? Excuses—all you heard were excuses. It was too hard. It no longer made sense.⁵²
Almost overnight, centuries-old traditions were abandoned by most Jews who immigrated to America from the tradition-laden shtetls of Poland. But within Poland itself there was little tolerance for the idea of assimilation. As Goodhart points out, the so-called Polish-speaking assimilators—“Jews who believe that Judaism is only a question of religion”—were shunned and even despised by the vast majority of Poland’s Jews: “Most of the prominent Jews in Poland are not leaders of their people as is the case in other countries.”⁵³ In view of such credible observations (of which there a plethora), unilateral charges that Poles regarded Jews as “others” and rejected the efforts of Jews to be “accepted” into Polish society are entirely misfocused. An American Methodist missionary who resided in Warsaw in the interwar period drew a similar picture:
Reared in a small American town, I had never thought, before coming to Poland, of Jews as being different, except in religion, from others in the community. In Poland, where they formed nearly 10 per cent of the population, I found them a separate people with a culture of their own. Their religion, language, customs, and garb were all a part of a tradition guarded with jealous pride and handed down unchanged through generations. Except for doctors, lawyers, and others in the professional class, the Polish Jew saw to it that no one mistook him for anything but a Jew.⁵⁴
Raymond Leslie Buell, an American writer, educator and President of the Foreign Policy Association, made the following observations:
The ordinary Jew speaks Yiddish … and is influenced by a particularly formidable type of orthodoxy, or rabbinism, of the Tsadika or Wunderrabi variety. While some Jews contend that the government obstructs assimilation, there is little doubt that the most powerful factor which keeps the Jew separate from the Pole is the type of orthodoxy which dominates a large part of the Jewish population. The American visitor unaccustomed to the Polish tradition wonders why more interracial disputes have not occurred when, on visiting a typical village, he sees the Orthodox Jew, wearing his skullcap, black boots, long double-breasted coat, curls and beard, mingling with the Poles proper. The government may think it is in its interest to support the Orthodox Jews against their more assimilated brethren, but the foreign observer is nevertheless struck by the readiness of the ordinary Poles to accept the assimilated or baptized Jew as an equal. In government departments, in the army, in the banks, and in newspapers, one finds the baptized Jews occupying important positions. This class, which in Nazi Germany is subject to bitter persecution, has been freely accepted in Poland. With the growth of nationalist spirit among both Jews and Poles, the trend toward assimilation seems to have been arrested. It remains true, however, that the Polish attitude towards the Jew is governed by racial considerations to a lesser degree than the attitude of other peoples.⁵⁵
According to that author, the most significant factor that set Poles and Jews apart was grounded in economics, and certainly not race, though religion also played a role.⁵⁶ As W. D. Rubinstein has argued compellingly,
the demonstrable over-representation of Jews in the economic elites of many continental European countries was itself a potent force for creating and engendering antisemitism, arguably the most important single force which persisted over the generations. … the fate of other ‘entrepreneurial minorities’ was, often, similar to that of the Jews in continental Europe. …

Over-representation in the economic elite of a visible ethnic minority of the degree found in Poland or Hungary was certain to cause trouble regardless of the identity of the group …⁵⁷

It was no accident that, with the advent of the Great Depression, which hit Poland harder than any other European country, conditions would take a turn for the worse.⁵⁸ The overall economic situation of the Jews in Poland, however, belies the claim of economic “oppression” that is often levelled in popular literature. According to a study by British economist Joseph Marcus—undoubtedly the most extensive analysis of the economic history of interwar Polish Jewry, the Jewish share of the country’s wealth increased both absolutely and relative to the non-Jewish share in the interwar period. While representing less than ten percent of Poland’s population, Jews held 22.4 percent of the national wealth in 1929 and 21.4 percent in 1938. The average Jews was clearly better off than the average non-Jew. In terms of per capita income, in 1929 the income per caput was 830 złoty for Jews, and 585 złoty for non-Jews, i.e., forty percent higher. Although very many Jews lived in poverty (as did non-Jews), Marcus argues that “the Jews in Poland were poor because they lived in a poor, under-developed country. Discrimination added only marginally to their poverty. … That Jewish poverty was mainly the result of accumulated discrimination against them is a myth and it is time to expose it as such.”⁵⁹ Jews also made considerable inroads into agricultural landholding during the interwar period. The collapse of traditional Polish estates is demonstrated by the fact that by 1939, 14 out of 24 estates in the county of Dąbrowa Tarnowska belonged to Jews, and only 10 to Poles.⁶⁰ Clearly, the economic condition of Jews was not in peril, as some would have it.

The traditional role of the Jews as “middlemen” is one that is not fully appreciated in the scholarship on Polish-Jewish relations. As outside observers who lived in Poland point out, the relationship between the oft-exploiting Jewish usurer and the oft-exploited Polish debtor—using modern parlance, a form of co-dependency—was not a healthy one: