Jewish Historiography on Polish Jewry in the Interwar Period

Summary

THE question of the role, status, and fate of the Jews in interwar Poland arouses unusually high passions. It is a historical subject in which many people, including historians, have a considerable vested interest; a subject involving very high stakes. This is true for both Jews and (non-Jewish) Poles. For the latter group the subject is at least potentially threatening, since claims that the Polish state of the 1920s and 1930s discriminated against Jews may be seen as a deliberate effort to blacken the good name of the much-oppressed Polish nation at the very time when, through its great heroism, it had regained its rightful place among the free nations of Europe (obviously, accusations of Polish antisemitism during the period before 1918 carry less weight, since there was then no independent Polish state). It is a subject that tends to put some Polish scholars and publicists on the defensive.

For Jews there may be even more at stake. The ‘Jewish experience’ in interwar Poland is often regarded as having represented a crucial, indeed fateful, test for the major political and cultural positions that had developed in the Jewish world during the nineteenth century. Poland in this sense is regarded as a kind of battleground on which the various Jewish proposals to 'solve the Jewish question’ waged war, the framework in which, for example, the question as to whether the Jews could prosper ‘here', in the east European diaspora, or whether they should do everything in their power to remove themselves and to resettle ‘there', in Palestine, was posed in its sharpest form. The reasons why Poland was singled out for this ‘honour’ by Jewish historians, publicists, and ideologues are fairly obvious: there were more Jews there than anywhere else in Europe, they were free to organize (as they were not in the Soviet Union), and they were not undergoing a rapid process of integration into state and society, as were the Jews of the United States. It was on Polish soil that Orthodoxy and secularism, socialism and anti-socialism, nationalism and ‘assimilationism', Hebraism and Yiddishism, Zionism and diaspora nationalism, sought to impose their way of life and their ‘solutions’ on the Jewish population.