Polish Political Parties and Antisemitism

Summary

IN Polish political life the processes of assimilation and Polonization were the traditional means of solving the Jewish question, a view inherited from the democratic movements of the nineteenth century and from Warsaw positivism.These points of view were characterized by a tolerance of Jews as individuals, as well as by a dismissal of Jewish religious and cultural traditions as manifestations of backwardness. Although the liberal middle class, a weak stratum in Poland, accepted the fact that Jews were religiously distinct, it was felt that, because of ‘Europeanization’ and Polonization, as reflected in the emergence of ‘progressive’ synagogues, culturally the difference was only relative. The Socialists, on the other hand, rejected Judaism along with all religions, and advocated their own vision of assimilation in a radical way. Thus, they did not accept a separate Jewish socialist movement, although the pressures of reality gradually forced them to come to terms with the use of Yiddish for purposes of propaganda and with local party organizations that recruited Jews specifically.The substance of these concessions is revealed in a statement by the anti-nationalist and revolutionary socialist party in the early twentieth century, the Social-Demokracja Królestwo Polskiego i Litwy (SDKPiL: the Social Democracy of the Congress Kingdom and Lithuania): ‘The fact that this unavoidable assimilation takes place in Yiddish does not alter the situation at all.'

An alternative to the assimilationist position was the isolationist one, which called for cultural separation and religious hostility, and condemned all contacts with Jews. Isolationism had a significantly longer tradition than assimilationism, although more as a feature of everyday behaviour by Poles than as a social and political concept. As long as Jews remained deprived of political rights as a social group, they were socially and politically isolated. Only the lifting of various restrictions created conditions which made it possible for Jews to enter the orbit of Polish cultural and economic life. Isolationism now began to be synonymous with the goal of thrusting Jews back behind the ghetto walls.

At the lowest level of ideological consciousness, the economic premises of this isolationism were declared openly (buttressing conservative customs). Such declarations were linked either with instances of conflict among various social groups-for example, in Galicia between peasants and Jews who were known innkeepers, moneylenders, and tenants of estates-or with competitive situations within the trade and craft sectors, and later in the realm of intellectual work.