17 - Lucien Wolf and the Making of Poland: Paris, 1919

Summary

Organized Jewry brought competing formulations to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The Balfour Declaration of November 1917, the disintegration of the old multi-national empires, and the emergence of competing East European and Middle Eastern ethnic nationalism inspired Zionists to make particularly extensive claims. Confident of their friends in high places, especially in the American and British delegations, they pressed their cases with enthusiasm, vigour, and tactlessness. Western Jewish assimilationists, particularly British and French, worked tirelessly and patiently to defuse the Jewish Nationalism, to contain it, and, insofar as possible, to substitute the assumptions upon which Franco- and Anglo- Jewish elites had framed their diplomatic programs for almost half a century as the ‘Jewish desiderata’ for the Peace Conference. For Zionists and Jewish Nationalists such an agenda was worthless; anti-Semitism was ingrained in Western culture and Christian habit, and inescapable in European politics. Jews could never assimilate and remain Jews.

Western acculturated Jews - the self-styled Moderates’ - accepted the assumptions of liberal civilization. While the process might be uneven, moving in fits and starts with occasional regressions, Jews were part of Western culture. The diaspora was a fact of life. ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ was a spiritual aspiration, not a social reality. Education and economic progress would ultimately produce harmonious societies in which Jews could realize themselves within enlightened national cultures while preserving their Jewish identity and religion. Harmonious, well-defined Jewish subcultures had evolved and could thrive in the liberal west. Since all mankind would ultimately see that its best interests lay in the creation of socially harmonious and peaceful national cultures modelled upon that of Western Europe, history was on the side of assimilation and acculturation.

Enlightenment, liberalism, economic development, and social opportunity had not yet, ‘moderates’ conceded, come to all of the European world. But come they would, and once Eastern Europe provided the same economic, social, and political scope that the West already did, Jews would be contented, effective participants in their various national states. Western Jews even sought to expedite the process. Baron de Hirsch spent millions and offered more in an attempt to create opportunities, not merely for Jewish immigrants in new worlds, but for Jews remaining in Russia.