Response to Majchrowski

Summary

Let me begin my response by summarizing what I take to be Professor Majchrowski's main arguments. First, he wishes to impress upon his readers the fact that the ‘Jewish question’ in Poland was very complicated. It was not even clear, he tells us, who exactly the Jews were, since different criteria of identification were employed. This problem ‘is revealed to be a serious one’, chiefly because it renders suspect all generalisations about the Jewish condition and about Polish policy towards the Jews - how can we talk about these matters with any degree of confidence if we are not sure who the Jews were?

Nonetheless, our author admits that it is possible to surmount this obstacle. There were, it seems, definite attitudes towards the Jews as a group, at least on the part of the Polish nationalist camp. Here we come to Professor Majchrowski's next point. The attitude of these nationalists towards the Jews was in fact in accord with the attitude of many Jews, and therefore can hardly be described as anti-semitic. ‘It is difficult to state categorically therefore, that these policies were a threat to the Jews, when in the end it meant putting into effect policies supported by a considerable number of people from within their own group’. Moreover, if certain Polish organizations discriminated against Jews, Jewish organizations did not want to accept gentiles: ‘the entry of ethnic Poles into Jewish political parties … was impossible’. If some Poles were sometimes anti-Jewish, some Jews were sometimes anti-Polish. Some Jews were called kikes, and some Poles were called goyim.

We then arrive at our author's final point. Above and beyond the fact that the Jewish situation was extremely complex, that ostensibly antiJewish policies were actually supported by many Jews, and that Polish anti-semitism was paralleled by Jewish anti-Polonism, the Jewish condition in Poland was really not so bad, and certainly not as bad as many seem to think. The Catholic church, which represented the majority of the ethnic Polish population, was well disposed to the Jews (see the remarks of Bishop Przeżdziecki) and one can make the case that the Jewish ‘church' enjoyed a more privileged status than the Catholic church.