May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles
Yüklə 2,16 Mb.
|
| The goy goes to the tavern/ He drinks a glass of wine/ Oh, the goy is drunk, drunk is he/ Drink he must, because a goy is he/ The Jew goes to the study house/ He looks at a book/ Oy, the Jew is sober, sober is he/ Learn he must, because a Jew is he.183
Dynner then provides an impressive body of evidence that shows that, although they did not do so as much as Polish peasants, Jews did drink frequently.184 For instance, the religious-inspired drinking of the Hasids was not just an allegation of their adversaries (the Maskilim), but a fact supported by Hasidic sources themselves.185 Pointedly, Jewish drinking was less overt, “In fact, Polish Jews—particularly Hasidim—indulged in liquor, and sometimes excessively. Their tendency to do so under regulated religious auspices and within Jewish spaces meant that their drinking was less free and visible to outsiders.”186 The portrayal of Poles, which applied not only to peasants but also extended to the entire Polish society, sometimes took on very extreme forms. Coupled with the stereotype of the mythical Endek (a member or supporter of the National Democratic party), a mindset steeped in the abhorrence of Esau (Jews commonly referred to Christendom as the realm of “Esau”) concocted the following allegorical account of Polish atavism—passed off as fact. An anonymous Jewish boy, a hunchback, is lured to a gathering of Poles by his neighbour, a Polish officer—“a confirmed anti-Semite, and one of the leaders of the Endeks”—and subjected to string relentless humiliations and physical abuse culminating in a mock crucifixion of this hapless victim. The account, however, reveals more about the would-be victim than his cruel—but fictitious—tormentors. One day the officer approached me and invited me to a musical evening he was holding at home. He said he had invited several couples, friends of his who were music lovers and who wanted to meet me, having heard that I had a good understanding of music and also knew a lot about literature. … This was the first time I was to be in enlightened Christian society and I was afraid I might fail. … Now I started to take in the whole parlor … Suddenly the doors of all four rooms opened, and dozens of couples burst out gleefully. Very quickly, with refined, elegant movements, they came to the tables and took their places, without honoring me with even the slightest glance. … I felt lost and miserable. I got up, wanting only to leave this place. At that moment a young man who held a soda siphon in his hand approached me and suggested I have a drink. I refused politely. In response, he started spraying me with soda from the siphon, first on my face and then on my clothes. A roar of laughter, wicked and malicious laughter, burst out all around. And the entire company, some forty in all, men and women, charged upon me and surrounded me in a narrow circle, screaming savagely, “Dance a bit, morda zydowska [morda żydowska] (Jewish dog’s-face), we’ve heard you’re a good dancer!” Suddenly Jadwiga’s husband came up to me, caught me up in his strong arms, lifted me, and stood me on the large table. With a quick sweep of the hand he knocked my hat off my head, at the same time delivering a hard punch to my forehead. At that moment I understood it all. It was clear to me that I’d been tricked, that a trap had been set for me. In all this uproar a verse from Koheleth (9:12) came to me: “As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare, so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falls upon them suddenly.” … I did not have time to think any more than that. Two strong gentiles grabbed my arm, lowered me from the table, and started throwing me to each other as if I were a ball for them to play with. I struggled to evade them, fighting with all my feeble strength, stubbornly and fiercely. I wanted to escape from this parlor which had become a den of beasts and a torture chamber for me. But they didn’t let me slip out of their hands, and there was no way I could free myself. Finally they got sick of it, or grew tired, and left me. Bu then Jadwiga’s husband picked me up again and stood me up on the table, wounded and bleeding. The whole crowd was delighted to see how I stood there, and they chortled and laughed in glee. Several of these “distinguished” guests picked up bottles of wine and cried jeeringly at me, “Dear Jew, drink a bit! This is kosher wine, you’re allowed to drink it.” I tried once more to break free and flee. But the hands, Esau’s hands, held me firmly, binding me as in iron cables, and I was powerless and helpless. I stood there not knowing what to do, beaten, bruised, and shamed, facing this bloodthirsty entertainment-seeking crowd of some forty men and women who were considered “noble” and “enlightened.” They were “fighting” me, a miserable broken Jews, and they saw themselves as heroes. They rushed upon me, forced my mouth open, and started pouring streams of wine into it. I choked and spluttered until I fainted and fell. They hastily poured water over me to bring me back to consciousness, so they could on tormenting me. When they saw that I had regained consciousness and had opened my eyes and was breathing heavily the air suffused with cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes, they burst out laughing wildly again. At that moment a thought occurred to me: Look at their “intelligence,” their “nobility,” their “enlightenment” … No educational framework can cover up their base and primitive urges which find their release in tormenting someone weaker than themselves. Their religion, “the religion of love and mercy,” has not planted these virtues in their hearts. On the contrary, all they desire is atavistic and uncompromising revenge on the Jew, the representative of their “mother-religion,” Judaism. … Now they started stripping off my clothes until I stood there completely naked. I gathered up the remnants of my strength and yelled at them, “For all your torturing and tormenting me, God may take revenge on you!” But on hearing this they all burst out shouting wildly. “Dirty little Jew!” You killed our Savior! You killed Jesus! You’re responsible for the crimes of your brothers, all the Jew bastards! You have to pay for the blood of Jesus which your Jewish brothers viciously shed!” I called on the last remnants of my strength … I shouted into their faces: “Yes, I’m proud that I’m a Jew! And you all, you should be ashamed that a weak little Jew like me had the strength to kill your Savior!” There was a sudden silence in the parlor. They seemed shocked, both by the things I had shouted at them and by the very fact that I still had the strength and the daring to open my mouth against them. But they quickly recovered, and as if driven by some blind force, they fell upon me, almost all of them, and started flinging some kind of sticky paste, which they had prepared in advance, over my naked body. With this paste they smeared and plastered my entire body, covering it all except for one exposed part—my hump. On this they painted, so I felt, two lines—a cross. When they had completed this job, they burst into a great cry or laugh of triumph, unaware all the while of how by doing this they were desecrating their own faith, the religion of love and mercy, and even the cross itself, symbol of their faith. Drunk with triumph, they pulled me to the mirror and made me stand there to see how I looked. Then the “ladies” continued the work. They took me to the wall and “crucified” me, tying my raised hands to hooks in the wall, from which they had taken down the pictures of Schubert and Wagner which had been hanging there. And while I hung there crucified on the wall, my toes barely touching the floor, many of the guests, almost all of them, came up to me, one by one, and hit me on the head or in the face, and spat at me, and some even “contributed” a kick or two. During all the time they performed these “acts of Christian grace” upon me, the phonograph kept playing soft. Pleasant “background music” which served as an accompaniment to the “refined” activities of this “noble company.” Their tormenting me concluded when one of the company picked me up and carried me along the corridor to the door and threw me out onto the landing, naked and bleeding. After me he threw out my wet and torn clothes. Completely exhausted, I crawled to the door opposite and fell, almost dead, into the entrance of our apartment. I don’t know how long I lay there, half conscious, until I got a little strength back. I was bruised and wounded in many places, and it was not easy for me to wash myself and clean off the sticky Christian paste. All this time, I didn’t stop crying. What I felt at this time is quite impossible to convey in words, and I will not try. After a long while, when I had managed to calm down a bit and could think about everything that had happened to me at that “party,” I started to understand that I had only now discovered the true nature of these “noble, cultured, and educated” people. A few minutes before, they had been a fine group of handsome young people, merry and healthy, lacking nothing, enjoying themselves at a cultured social party—and then, all at once, they had turned into vicious beasts, wild animals, reveling in tormenting a weak, wretched, and deformed human being. And most of all I thought of the part played in this metamorphosis by anti-Semitism, the old, ancient hatred of Jews.187 It is little wonder then that a Jewish prisoner of Auschwitz, Adam “Krawecki,” a former student steeped in Jewish philosophy who joined the murderous State Security Office after liberation and became the chief interrogator in the notorious Gliwice prison, claimed to have had the following conversation—steeped in folkloric myth—with an elderly Catholic bishop in Auschwitz, even though the Germans imprisoned no such bishop in that camp: “Why do the gentiles hate the Jews?” Adam asked. “It’s this way,” the bishop said. “A lion is lying in the woods, glutted and gorged, and a deer comes along. The lion isn’t hungry, and the deer isn’t going to harm him. But still the lion pounces on it.” “But why?” “The lion has a bestial instinct, you see, an instinct that tells it to kill that deer. The same with the gentile against the Jew. The Jew isn’t going to harm him, but the gentile still calls him a Schweinhund Jude. He has this instinct against the Jew.” “But where does the instinct come from?” “Maybe,” the bishop continued, “the gentile receives it when he receives his mother’s milk. He hears from the day he’s born that if you don’t eat, the Jew will get you, that if you don’t sleep, the Jew will get you. Maybe that.”188 Poles were also portrayed as the embodiment of Satan—the fountain of evil and sin—in Jewish folklore. A “disgusting shikse” temptress could spell the downfall of righteous Jews: R’ Shmuel Yaakov, that handsome Jew, and Shofar Blower in the synagogue, began to practice on the shofar about two days before Rosh Hashana. In the midst of such a practice session, he noted that Satan was standing near him. … Therefore, R’ Shmuel Yaakov made a special effort to exert himself to assure that his face looked happy and satisfied. He stretched out his hand to Satan, and asked:—How are you, R’ Satan?—Oy, R’ Shmuel Yaakov, I don’t feel good!—Surely, you must have overworked yourself, R’ Satan, because nowadays it is difficult to cause a Jew to commit a sin: it’s no small wonder, after all, it is before the Day of Judgement, and Jews are afraid. Hearing the words from R’ Shmuel Yaakov, Satan burst into laughter, and his laughter was heard in all worlds:—Ay, R’ Shmuel Yaakov, I thought that you were really a clever Jew, because everyone in the shtetl holds you to be so. What do you thing, R’ Shmuel Yaakov, that today is like former, when I had to work so hard before I was able to bring a Jew to commit a sin? You certainly recall that Friday, before dawn, when they caught R’ Shmuel Asher, the Shokhet, in the baths with the shikse, Zuzgeh, the bath-heater. Do you recall how easy it was for me to seduce that Jew, who observed each and every mitzvah as if it were the eye in his head, and who fled from every sin as if from fire, to bring him together with the shikse Zuzgeh? Ay, ay, how much effort I put into this particular matter! Night after night, I would come to him with Zuzgeh, and Zugzeh would take off all her clothes until she was stark naked, and I would say to him:—R’ Shmuel Asher, just take a peek at Zuzgeh’s feet, how beautiful they are, and how red they are! Blood literally spurts out of them. However, R’ Shmuel Asher had shut his eyes, and thereafter shouted out: What does Satan, may his his name be erased, want from me! However, on the third night, he half opened his eyes, and took a look at Zuzgeh’s red feet. A little at a time, he could not tear his eyes away from her feet. When I saw that I had him along a path, I went further:—R’ Shmuel Asher, take a look at Zuzgeh’s breasts. Ach, how beautiful and graciously they stick out from her breast cage. And the same process occurred. … An so, the entire matter went, up till last Thursday evening, at which time, R’ Shmuel Asher the Shokhet not only didn’t close his eyes, to keep him from looking at Zuzgeh’s naked body, but rather clamored into her body with both of his hands, to the extent that I permitted myself to make a joke with him … When it was about two hours before dawn on Friday, I said to him:—R’ Shmuel Asher, let Zuzgeh go; she has to heat up the bath, in order to warm up the mikva for the Jewish women, in honor of the Sabbath. However, R’ Shmuel Asher was no longer the master of his own will. A terrifying passion had taken control of him, and he would not release Zuzgeh from his hands. … My advice is as follows: let Zuzgeh go now to attend to her work. In an hour or so, she will be done, so get yourself dressed, and go to her in the baths, and put a coin in her hand. I assure you, that she will completely surrender herself to you, and you will be able to still your passion. And R’ Shmuel did just that … However, don’t think that this sin came so easily to R’ Shmuel Asher. That is why I am Satan, in order to do evil as much as it is possible for me to do. … On the floor, on which the kapote of R’ Shmuel Asher was spread out, close to the oven, which was full of burning wood, lay R’ Shmuel Asher, sunken into Zuzgeh’s half-naked body. The long feathery fringes of his tallit-katan were wound around Zuzgeh’s body. … As R’ Shmuel Asher, on that Friday before dawn, after this occurrence, ran in the streets of the little shtetl, pale and frightened, I, Satan, stood in his way, and said to him:—Hey, you fine Jew, was it all worth it for that disgusting shikse? Tfui on you, for having lost both worlds!189
David Krelenbaum, from Parczew, believed that the Jewish community leaders deliberately attempted to isolate Jews from Poles in order to prevent Jews from assimilating.192 Poles were often regarded as a nuisance, someone to be avoided except for doing business. In the words of a resident of Wierbnik, “We had a beautiful life … except for having Poles around, which was very unpleasant.”193 Many Jews, especially those from Orthodox backgrounds, shunned the company of Poles all together and projected their antipathy toward Christians onto the Poles. A Jewish woman from a Bundist family in Łódź recalled: While most of the families living in our building were Jewish, there was also one Polish family who lived on our floor. We never talked to them or to their children. I think we were afraid of them. We knew that Poles did not like Jews, and so we stayed away from them.194 Dov Freiberg, a young Jewish teenager from Łódź, recalled the admonition he received from his older brother when the family vacationed at a cottage in the countryside: I made friends with the farmer’s family, especially with one of the sons, who was my age. … My brother Motel would get angry and would tell me not to play with non-Jews and warn me never to eat any of their food, not even a piece of dry bread, because it was not kosher. In the farmer’s house, I was often invited to eat with the family or to taste something that the farmer’s wife had baked. But I always refused, and one day the farmer explained to everyone that “Jews were not allowed to eat with Poles.”195 Kopel Kolpanitzky, from the town of Łachwa in Polesia recalls: My friends and I met every day at school, at the club or movement, and sometimes at each other’s home, but we stayed away from the non-Jewish kids, and did not become friends with the Byelorussian children. The [few] Jewish children who studied at the Polish school, however, became friends with non-Jewish students as well.196 Poles were often ridiculed and dehumanized in Jewish society. Halina Birenbaum states: “The Poles were ‘goys’… who were regarded as pagans, we criticized or ridiculed their tastes, customs, beliefs … We were not taught mutual sympathy for them. They were different, foreign to us, and we to them, often our open or hidden enemies.” When Birenbaum, who lived in Warsaw, visited her grandparents in a small town she was warned not to venture near a church, because that was forbidden by the Jewish religion. “I was eight years old then,” she recalled, “and I was taught to fear ‘goys’ and their distinct character. How then was I to look for or anticipate salvation on the ‘Aryan’ side when we were sentenced to annihilation?”197 Eta Cjat Wrobel recalled that when she took her closest friend, a Catholic Pole, to a Jewish dance, “word got out that there was a shikseleh (a gentile girl) in the crowd. The boys decided to play a trick on whoever she was, and decided it was me. … When the dance was over, I let them have it in Yiddish. I said, ‘That’s not a nice way to treat a young lady, Jewish or not.’”198 Polish children could also become the butt of nasty rhyming ditties, like the one Jewish children sang in front a Polish girl in the Warsaw suburb of Praga: “Raz dwa trzy, katolicy psy, Żydzi monarchy, katolicy parchy.” (“One, two, three, Catholics are dogs, Jews are monarchs, Catholics are scabs.”)199 Traditional values permeated the Jewish community, which was generally hostile towards non-Jews. Christian Poles were regarded as “generally an ignorant lot, especially the peasants,” states Michel Mielnicki, who hails from Wasilków. Mielnicki displays obvious difficulty, even in retrospect many decades later, in rising above the hostility toward Christians that permeated the community. “But I didn’t spit on the ground at the sight of a Roman Catholic nun, as some Jews did,” he makes a point of stating. “And I didn’t think to condemn all Christians for worshipping a false messiah and his mother.”200 William Samelson, from Piotrków Trybunalski, let it be known that he considered most Poles to be uncouth and unclean, when he remarked: “some Polish (Christian) males from more enlightened homes had also been circumcised.”201 Julia Wald recalls turning down an invitation to a Polish wedding, feigning illness: “what could I do there, the only Jewess among a bunch of Catholics and such oafs as well?”202 Abraham Rotfarb describes how his views of Poles developed in the Jewish district of Warsaw where he had spent his childhood:
Haskell Nordon, from a provincial town in central Poland, recalled: I came to believe that non-Jews were all pagans, worshippers of idols, statues and paintings in their churches—was it any wonder, then, that they behaved barbarically? They weren’t really responsible before God for their impulsive lives of drunkenness and violence that could sometimes end in murder. I concluded that Christians must be inherently inferior—how else could they believe in a God who has a Father and Mother, when surely there was only one God, the God who revealed Himself to Abraham one star-studded night in the desert, many thousands of years ago?204 Samuel Honig, who attended a Jewish high school in Kraków, recalled a question that a fellow student wrote on the blackboard for discussion period which was typical of the mindset of even educated Jews: “Why do we claim that the Jewish religion is the true religion and why is Judaism superior to Christianity?”205 Traditional teachings like these translated into full-fledged bigotry when these youngsters grew up. Purim has been traditionally associated with anti-Christian practices.206 Chaim Zhitlovsky, and other cultural critics like him, rejected Purim as a chauvinistic celebration of Jewish vengeance.207 In the popular plays staged during the festival of Purim, the arch-villain Haman (who, in the Biblical story of Mordecai and Esther, was hanged on the gallows that he had planned for Mordecai) would often assume the persona of a Catholic priest. This centuries-old tradition was described by historian Elliott Horowitz: For centuries it had been customary among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe to vent their hostility toward the symbols of their powerful adversaries primarily through the dramatic depiction of Haman on the stage. The classic depiction of the Jews’ archenemy in the often raucous Purimspiels of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries featured an ecclesiastical cross worn prominently on his garments. It was also referred to explicitly in the dramatic text itself as an explanation for Mordecai’s refusal to bow before the king’s new prime minister. … In the Jewish communities of Poland and Ukraine it was common, in the early eighteenth century, to hire a Christian to play the role of Haman in the annual Purimspiel. … Yet even at the end of the nineteenth century, according to Jewish memoirists, it was still common for Haman to be played by a young or poor Christian, preferably Yiddish-speaking. As we have seen Haman was associated with Christianity and its adherents for a number of reasons. Not only was his form of death remarkably similar to that of Jesus, but he is repeatedly referred to in the book of Esther as an “Agagite,” linking him genealogically with the Amalekites and ultimately with Esau, the grandfather of Amalek through his first-born son, Eliphaz. And “Esau” together with “Edom” became, in the early middle ages, the standard Hebrew term for Christendom. Yüklə 2,16 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|