THE JEWISH QUESTION IN INTERWAR POLAND (1918-1939)

• In the late 19^th century, Russian-ruled Polish territories had been colonized by Litvaks–Jews that were variously Russified, indifferent to Poland, and radicalized–to a much greater extent than the “native” Polish Jews (Hirszfeld 1946, 2010, p. 326).
• Jews commonly opposed the resurrection of the Polish state (1918,) as it broke up the Russian Empire, thereby disrupting far-flung Jewish commercial networks (Karlip 2013; Levene 1992).
• No sooner had the new Polish state arisen (1918) than Jews used the League of Nations to try to bully Poland into giving them nation-within-nation rights (Miller 1924) disguised as the so-called Minorities Treaty. These expansive and unprecedented special rights included Yiddish as an official language alongside Polish (Sarolea 1922), separate government-funded Jewish schools intended to promote Jewish separatism, and an upstart Jewish court system (kehillot) running parallel to the Polish court system (Janowsky 1933).
• These onerous Jewish demands generated widespread Polish revulsion. Polish freethinker Jan Baudouin de Courtenay called upon Jews to moderate their separatist demands, and for Jews to accept the Second Republic’s constitutional institutions, civil and criminal legal codes, as well as the state’s right to raise taxes (Aly 2020). Common sense.
• Jews set up a coalition with other non-Poles (National Minorities Bloc) in order to increase their electoral power, enabling them to thwart the will of the Polish majority (Giertych 1995; Super 1951) and to indirectly support German irredentist ambitions against Poland (IPN 2021). This Jewish provocation was a direct assault on the Polish state (Stachura 1998). It led to the assassination of Jewish-elected President Gabriel Narutowicz.
• The long-term Jewish economic dominance of Poland had delayed the development of a Polish middle class, and was a major factor in Poland’s downfall at the time of the Partitions (Laudyn 1920, p. 37; Whitton 1917).
• The Jewish economic dominance of Poland caused the appearance of larceny, receiving of stolen goods, usury, and commercial vice among the village people (Laudyn 1920).
• Polish peasants eventually formed peasant cooperatives that sold produce directly to the consumer, thus displacing the arguably-parasitic Jewish middleman. This loss of Jewish privilege is what caused Jewish poverty (Mendelsohn 1981; Parkes 1946; Zamoyski 2005).
• In the late 1930’s, Jews were 10% of the population yet still controlled 60-85% of Poland’s trade (Dyboski 1937; Kotyllo 1925). Jews maintained their advantage in trade simply because they had been at it longer (Steven 1983).
• In addition, Jewish entrepreneurship tended to stay within extended Jewish families (Marcus 1983, pp. 92-93), making it particularly self-perpetuating.
• Jews were hardly an oppressed people. In interwar Poland, one-quarter of Jews were indeed poor, but one-half of Jews held their own, and one-quarter of Jews lived comfortably (Rabinowicz 1965).
• Jews had it bad in Poland? Compared with whom? Certainly not compared with Poles! Despite the discriminatory measures directed against Jews for the purpose of reining-in Jewish power and privilege, the Jews overall retained a higher standard of living than the Poles (Miller 2010; Hundert 1992; Marcus 1983, p. 41; Mendelsohn 1981).
• Poland’s Sunday closing law served to reduce Jewish economic advantages by handicapping Jewish merchants (Humphrey 1931).
• The numerus clausus at universities, in Poland and in many other nations including the USA (Guesnet 2019), was not gratuitous discrimination. It reduced the privileged Jewish overabundance at universities.
• The numerus clausus wins: The Soviet Communists, who boasted about their “enlightenment” in not discriminating against Jews, were forced to eat their words and to reverse course. Jews (at 4% of the general population) had become 54%-67% of all university students at the Belorussian State University in Minsk (Bemporad 2013).
• The infamous ghetto benches were another means to reduce the Jewish overabundance at universities. Militant student activists harassed and segregated the Jews in order to make them unwelcome (Lazowski 1991). The segregation was unremarkable: Jews already practiced separatism from Poles (and how!), and had segregated seating within their own communities: In synagogues, high-status Jews sat separately from “ordinary” Jews (Assaf 2002), and women sat separately from men (Modras 1994).
• As for the medical school cadaver affair at Polish universities, Poles had rightfully objected to the Jewish racism that exempted Jewish medical students from dissecting Jewish corpses while freely dissecting Polish corpses (Bleich 1995; Shahak 2008).
• Jewish physicians refused to serve in rural areas, where they were needed. For this reason, Poland curtailed the number of Jewish physicians (Hirszfeld 1946, 2010, p. 328).
• In Poland, nearly 100% of the meat used by Jews and Poles alike had originated from Jewish ritual slaughter (Orlicki 1983: Polonsky and Ury 2012, p. 354). The Schechita Law (1937) became necessary because Poles had, by virtue of buying meat, been forced to support the kehillot (Jewish community structures)(ibid, p. 351), including some 100,000 superfluous Jewish intermediaries (Orlicki 1983). In other words, the Jews’ ritual-slaughter establishment had imposed a hidden tax upon Poland, and this had to end.
• Cardinal August Hlond, long faulted for his 1936 statement on “Jews as freethinkers and vanguards of Bolshevism”, was absolutely right. Devout Jews also expressed concern about the Jewish drift towards atheism, especially owing to the powerful leftist Bundist movement (Bacon 1997; Shandler 2002). Socialism and Communism had increasingly become a substitute religion for Jews (Bacon 1997).
• Overt Jewish separatist impulses persisted well into WWII. In Russia, the freed Polish Jews, instead of joining the nascent Polish Army, vainly sought to form a separate Jewish Army parallel to the new Polish Amy (Anders 1949).

Source: http://JewsandPolesDatabase.org  (this website)

Jan Peczkis

Full article here: https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2024/10/29/big-bulletin-the-jewish-question-in-interwar-poland-1918-1939/