Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

For those trying to understand the behavior of Jews in the USA and in Israel, Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles by Mark Paul is helpful.

I disagree with some of the claims, e.g.:

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.

Unfortunately, Paul fails to distinguish properly between ethnic Ashkenazim and Polish Lithuanian Karaite Jewish Tatars.

In addition, the author neither investigates differences among ethnic Ashkenazim living in areas that had been Russian Poland, German Poland or Austrian Poland, nor does he sufficiently address effect of gender or religiousness on the degree of engagement with Polish culture. The author misses the distinction between derflekh, shtetlekh, and genuine cities.

A short discussion of the attitude of ethnic Ashkenazim toward Russian or German culture might have provided a good baseline for discussing the attitude of ethnic Ashkenazim toward Polish culture, and I am fairly certain that urban Poles and urban ethnic Ashkenazim had fairly similar attitudes toward Polish peasants.

Urban Polish culture included a sort of half-caste population descended from Polish aristocrats and Jewish concubines.

In general Polish nationalism in the early twentieth century was more nuanced than Paul indicates.

While the Endeks and some other parties embraced extremist organic nationalism that rejected non-Polish communities, other parties like the Social Democrats rejected ethnic distinctions or like the Polish Socialist Party (at least in the ideological formulation of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz) followed a non-extremist organic nationalism that viewed different ethnic communities as intrinsic parts of a larger Polish nation.

Yet, Paul's paper gives a good sense of old-world ethnic Ashkenazi bigotries and prejudices that have reappeared among ethnic Ashkenazi Americans with increasing Zionization, and he contains a few gems that clearly identify the racist and genocidal nature of Zionism and that help to explain the relationship of many ethnic Ashkenazi Americans to their non-Jewish fellow citizens:

• Isaac Deutscher acknowledges that “From the outset Zionism worked towards the creation of a purely Jewish state and was glad to rid the country of its Arab inhabitants.” See Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 137.

• By far, the most significant factor that set Poles and Jews apart was grounded in economics, and certainly not race, though religion also played a role. 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 …²¹

²¹ W. D. Rubinstein, “Jews in the Economic Elites of Western Nations and Antisemitism,” The Jewish Journal of Sociology, vol. 42, nos. 1 and 2 (2000): 5–35, especially at pp. 8–9, 18–19. The overall economic situation of the Jews in Poland belies the claim of “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. The Jews, who represented 10 percent of Poland’s population, 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 złotys for non-Jews. 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.” See Joseph Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919–1939 (New York: Mouton, 1983), 42 (Table 6), 231, 253–56.

Ethnic Ashkenazim like Jewish Germans and Jewish Ibero-Berbers actually brought capital with them to the USA, and the success of each of the three ethno-religious groups results almost entirely from such economic advantages that they had over other immigrants and from the assistance that older Jewish communities gave to new Jewish communities.

From the earliest immigrations Jews engaged in a form of composite business and social networking that is probably most accurately considered a form of economic warfare against non-Jews and that continues to this day.

[I discuss the anti-Polish racism of Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse in "Jews and Power" versus "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy".] Sphere: Related Content