May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

. Race riots occurred in both France and Britain during and after the First World War. During the latter years of the war, conflicts between the French and the nonwhite newcomers escalated into a wave of racial violence, ranging from numerous small-scale incidents to a few major riots. From the spring of 1917, African workers were subjected to increasing street-level assaults in France, which culminated in large-scale riots like those in June and August 1917. Crowds of up to 15,000 people attacked North Africans (Moroccans) in Dijon, LeHavre and Brest. Fifteen people were killed in LeHavre and 7 in Brest. See Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe: 1870–2000 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), 121; Tyler Stovall, “The Color Line behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France during the Great War,” The American Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 737–69. Britain witnessed anti-German riots on a wide scale, the government introduced a policy of mass internment of Germans, and, by 1919, 28,000 had been deported: one-third of the pre-war population. “Economic racism” continued on an extensive scale immediately after the war, as tens of thousands of colonial and white seamen and soldiers were demobilized and found themselves in competition for housing and employment in the major seaports. From January to August 1919, a series of major riots targeting colonial labourers and demobilized seamen erupted in South Wales (Cardiff, Barry, Newport and Cadoxton), Liverpool, London, Salford, Hull, South Shields, Glasgow, Tyneside, resulting in at least five fatalities, as well as vandalization of their homes and properties. In Cardiff, Liverpool and Glasgow large crowds of up to 2,000 people (some estimates say 10,000), often led by ex-servicemen who deployed military tactics, laid siege to the black dockland ghettos, destroying lodging houses and shops. The rioting in Liverpool lasted three days, from June 8 to June 10, 1919. Three Africans were stabbed on June 8 as mobs of well-organized young men roamed the streets savagely attacking and beating any black they could find. In nearly all cases, white crowds numbering in the hundreds and sometimes thousands made up the aggressors and black men and their families their victims, yet nationally police arrested nearly twice as many black men (155) as white men (80) and women (9). The rioters represented a cross-section of the white working class. See MacMaster, Racism in Europe, 122–23; Jacqueline Jenkinson, Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009). On November 5, 1923, a mob numbering in the thousands brutally attacked Jews, killing at least one and severely wounding others, and assaulted and looted Jewish shops (or shops regarded as Jewish) and private homes in Scheunenviertel, an area of Berlin where a visibly large population of eastern Jewish migrants were living. The authorities reacted slowly, which contributed to the spread of violence, and Jews were the first to be arrested. See Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds., Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 130–32. In the mid-1920s student bodies refused to accept Jewish members and violence against Jewish students and professors erupted frequently at German and Austrian universities. See Peter Longerich, The Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 21–22; and the eyewitness account of violent anti-Jewish demonstrations at the University of Vienna in Emanuela Cunge, Uciec przed Holocaustem (Łódź: Oficyna Bibliofilów, 1997), 30. There was an explosion of anti-Jewish violence in German-annexed Austria in 1938, when ordinary people fell upon and brutalized Jews in the streets of Vienna. In November 1938, during the so-called Kristallnacht, violence descended pn the Jews of the entire enlarged Reich, including the Jews of Austria. (Polish students were also assaulted by Germans in the Free City of Danzig. See Maria Wardzyńska, Był rok 1939: Operacja niemieckiej policji bezpieczeństwa w Polsce: Intelligenzaktion (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej–Komisja Ścigania przeciwko Narodowi, 2009), 41.) (Anti-Semitism has a long history in Germany and Austria. Pogroms against Jews, known as the Hep-Hep riots after the perpetrators’ derogatory rallying call, occurred in 1819 in dozens of cities and villages throughout Germany, Austria, Denmark and even Latvia. Many Jews were killed and much Jewish property was destroyed. Jews were terrorized by arson attacks and synagogues were demolished. Often the police appeared too late or stood idly by while the mob raged through the streets. Anti-Jewish violence was repeated in many German towns and villages in 1830. Another wave of anti-Jewish violence occurred during the revolution of 1848. See Hoffmann, Bergmann, and Smith, Exclusionary Violence.) Anti-Jewish disturbances and attacks on Jews, about which there is more later on, were not uncommon in Lithuania in the 1930s. In the summer of 1931, in Thessaloniki (Salonika), Greeks wreaked havoc in the city’s Jewish quarter of Kambel, causing fatalities (one Jew and one Christian were killed) and leaving behind scores of injured Jews. The Jewish neighbourhood was completely destroyed by fire and 500 families left homeless. See Aristotle A. Kallis, “The Jewish Community of Salonica under Siege: The Antisemitic Violence of the Summer of 1931,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 20, no. 1 (spring 2006): 34–56. (Anti-Semitism has a long history in Greece. An 1891 blood libel in Corfu and subsequent mass exodus of many the island’s Jews led to an international boycott against Corfu lemons. See Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia, 135–36.) In neighbouring Turkey, extensive anti-Jewish riots erupted in 1934 in the territories of eastern Thrace. See Hatiice Bayraktar, “The Anti-Jewish Pogrom in Eastern Thrace in 1934: New Evidence for the Responsibility of the Turkish Government,” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 40, no. 2 (2006): 95–111. In October 1936, a legal march by the British Union of Fascists, formed in 1932 by the aristocratic adventurer Sir Oswald Mosley, formerly a Labour Member of Parliament, descended on the East End of London, and provoked the so-called Cable Street Riot. East London was the home of a large Jewish population and a seedbed of anti-Semitism and racist propaganda in general, even though Jews comprised only 0.7 percent of the country’s total population at the time. The British Brothers’ League, founded by ex-army officers in 1900, claimed 45,000 members in the East End. Organized on a semi-military footing, it campaigned against “alien” and especially Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, influencing the passing of the Aliens Restriction Act in 1905. Mosley’s East London campaign began in earnest in the summer of 1936 with a big rally in Victoria Park in June. Through endless street-corner meetings, fire-bombing and smashing the windows of Jewish shops, racist abuse and physical attacks, the fascists worked overtime to create an atmosphere of siege. In late September 1936 the League announced its intention to mount a show of strength on the afternoon of Sunday, October 4, designed to intimidate the organized working class and in particular the local Jewish community. Uniformed fascists were to gather in military formation at Royal Mint Street, where they would be reviewed by their Führer, before marching in separate contingents to four meetings in East London. Despite urgent appeals and petitions the Home Office refused to intervene to stop the march even though its consequences were plainly apparent. In fact, 10,000 police were brought in from all over London and deployed to protect the marchers from the anti-fascists. According to the Daily Herald: “the police precautions enabled the rest of the Fascists to assemble unmolested. They formed in military formation, a column of 3,000 stretching for half a mile, with over 200 black-bloused women in the centre. … The Blackshirts jeered back at distant booing. ‘The Yids, the Yids, we are going to get rid of the Yids’, they chanted, or, ‘M-0-S-L-E-Y, we want Mosley’, to which the crowd shouted back, ‘So do we, dead or alive’. New detachments arrived in the steel-protected Fascist vans, behind steel-wire meshing.” Only towards the evening were the Blackshirts escorted out of Royal Mint Street by thousands of police and diverted down the Embankment—away from East London. As the fascists skulked off towards the West End, “everyone of Jewish appearance was insulted and in some cases they were spat upon.” See Richard Price and Martin Sullivan, “The Battle of Cable Street: Myths and Realities,” Workers News, March–April 1994. Attacks on Jews began in Belgium in the 1930s, taking place in both Antwerp and Brussels. On August 25 and 26, 1939, on the eve of World War II, anti-Jewish riots broke out in Antwerp, and the rioters gained the support of some the city’s press as “justified.” Jewish lawyers were ousted from the Flemish Conference of the Antwerp Bar and the Antwerp Bar Association in May 1939. See Dan Michman, “Why Did So Many of the Jews in Antwerp Perish in the Holocaust?” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 30 (2002): 465–82; Bob Moore, Survivors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 168–69. Of course, all of this pales in comparison to what was happening at the time in countries like Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Spain. The post-World War II era saw no improvement. The postwar record of the French was no better. In the Algerian war of the late 1950s, the French government ordered or tolerated the taking of Arab hostages, the burning of villages, and the torturing of prisoners. In exchange, the Algerian Muslim rebels thre bombs into cafés crowded with pieds-noirs, Europeans living in Algeria. See Deák, Europe on Trial, 216. On October 17, 1961, during the Algerian War, French police took to the streets of Paris to quell an illegal but peaceful demonstration by pro-National Liberation Front Algerians. Many demonstrators died when they were violently herded by police into the River Seine, with some thrown from bridges after being beaten unconscious. Other demonstrators were killed within the courtyard of the Paris police headquarters after being arrested and delivered there in police buses. How many demonstrators were killed is still unclear, but estimates range from 70 to 200 people. A plaque which commemorates the massacre, unveiled 40 years later, states: “In memory of the many Algerians killed during the bloody repression of the peaceful demonstration of 17 October 1961.” However, no one was ever punished for these transgressions.

Much less known is the day-to-day harassment experienced by Jews in contemporary Western Europe. A Jewish student from England who spent six months living in Vienna, reported: “The Jews of Austria are constantly blamed by people of other religions for crimes such as muggings, burglaries and shoplifting. The Jewish family I stayed with received regular intimidation in retaliation for crimes supposedly committed by Jews. I also witnessed several incidents where orthodox Jews were attacked by gangs of youths. The authorities in Vienna take absolutely no notice of this antisemitic behavior, which leads me to believe that they are glad to see our persecution.” See Mervyn S. Feinstein, letter, “Austria,” Economist, July 11, 1987, as quoted in Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, The Jews of Poland: A Documentary History (New York: Hippocrene, 1993), 175. In Sweden, in the spring of 2002, a group of about 100 Jews protesting anti-Semitism was attacked by pro-Palestinian demonstrators who burned their signs and posters as police stood by watching. Jewish school children hide their Star of David pendants under their shirts for fear of being attacked and find their school work desecrated with swastikas and are greeted with “Heil Hitler” salutes by their schoolmates, with principals and teachers refusing to intervene. One Jewish student at an elite high school was told it was a shame that Hitler did not finish the extermination of all Jews, so they would not come to Sweden. See Michael Moshe Checinski, Running the Gauntlet of Anti-Semitism: From Polish Counterintelligence to the German/American Marshall Center (Jerusalem and New York: Devora, 2004), 302. Attacks on Jews in Britain in 2007 reached the highest level ever in the 23 years records have been kept, according to the Community Security Trust, a Jewish defence organization. There were 547 hate incidents against the Jewish community that year, down from 594 in 2006, of which 114 were violent assaults against individuals. Most anti-Semitic incidents are likely never reported. For example, Ryan Craig, a British playwright born in 1972, recalls that, as a boy, non-Jewish children threw bacon and spouted slurs at him as he walked to Hebrew school in North London. In the December 14, 2008 issue of The Jerusalem Post, Manfred Gerstenfeld published a scathing exposé entitled “Norway—a Paradigm for Anti-Semitism,” in which he documents copious examples of blatant anti-Semitism in the mainstream Norwegian media, including an op-ed by Jopstein Gaarder published two years earlier in the conservative Aftenposten, reputedly the “vilest anti-Semitic article published in a European mainstream paper since the Second World War.” He also noted instances of harassment and intimidation of Jews. During the Second Lebanon War, anti-Semitic incidents in Oslo were the most severe in Europe: the synagogue was shot at, the cantor was attacked on a main street, and the Jewish cemetery was desecrated. Gerstenfelds’ article is not without a good dose of hypocrisy, because blatant racist bigotry also emanates from Jewish Norwegians such as Hans-Wilhelm Steninfeld, one of the most profiled reporters in the Norwegian National Broadcasting Corporation NRK. From January through May 2005, Steinfeld made a series of outrageous claims regarding Poles on NRK’s website and in the flagships of the Norwegian press, the dailies Aftenposten and Verdens Gang. Although his claims were dismissed by leading historians, including Jewish ones like Raul Hilberg, Israel Gutman and Antony Polonsky, Steinfeld was defended by his publishers and the Norwegian Press Ethics Board. See “Celebrated Norwegian Journalist Falsifies History,” Internet: