The Polish-Jewish Daily Press

Summary

In the period between the two world wars, the Polish-Jewish daily press was undoubtedly the most successful example of Jewish cultural creativity in the Polish language. Unfortunately, precious little has been written about this major cultural institution of modern Polish Jewish life. Over and beyond the obstacles to historical research created by the vast destruction of Polish archival institutions in World War II, difficulties which apply, though in different measure, to the reconstruction of both Polish and Polish Jewish history, particularly in the period just prior to the war, there is here a further barrier: the aversion albeit increasingly anachronistic of many Poles and Jews to phenomena whose locus is neither purely ‘Polish’ nor purely ‘Jewish’, as a result of which, the memory of the PolishJewish press has slipped into the void between two mutually exclusive national self-conceptions. Therefore this article. What follows is a sketch based on the skimpy existing literature and a preliminary reading of the Warsaw daily Nasz Przegąd my object is to assemble basic historical data, characterize general tendencies, and suggest areas for further detailed investigation - in short, to trace the rough dimensions of a marvellously complex yet neglected domain of recent Polish Jewish history.

FROM IZRAELITA TO NASZ PRZEGJĄD

The existence of the Warsaw daily Nasz Przegąd [Our Review] (1923-39), along with its sister publications in other large Polish cities, Nowy Dziennik [New Dairy] (1918-39) in Kraków and Chwila [Moment] (1919-39) in Lwów, represents a unique phenomenon in modern Jewish history: a daily press in a non-Jewish language. Ever since the beginnings of the Haskalah Oewish Enlightenment) at the end of the eighteenth century, there had been periodical publications published by and for Jews, at first primarily in the languages of the co-territorial nations, later, towards the end of the nineteenth century and particularly in Eastern Europe, increasingly in the Jewish languages -Hebrew and Yiddish - as well. Periodicals in the non-Jewish languages were published at intervals of a week, a month or more - they were never daily publications since it was assumed that once a Jew could read the language of the country in which he lived, he would avail himself of daily newspapers in that language for general news, and then turn to the Jewish press for subjects of Jewish interest.