Why Did Assimilation Fail in the Kingdom of Poland between 1864 and 1897?

Summary

IN the aftermath of the January Insurrection, the Warsaw Positivists articulated a democratic vision of a modern Polish nation. Responding to Tsarist Russification policies, the positivists envisaged society as a harmoniously integrated social organism embracing peasants, szlachta, the nascent middle class, women, and Jews. The broadening of the concept of nation to include groups previously apart or on society's margin was to be achieved in the case of the Jews through their assimilation into Polish society. At the same time, assimilation was being discussed and prominently advocated by a small number of Polish Jews. This issue is discussed in an outstanding recent book by Alina Cala.Cala shows that the question of assimilation for Polish Jews was much more complex than sympathetic Polish liberals could have imagined, touching the very nerve of individual self-identification for the largest non-Polish autochthonous group inhabiting the Congress Kingdom. Ultimately, it also raised searching questions about democracy and tolerance in Polish political culture and about Polish nationalism.

Cala's work spans the defeat of the January Insurrection until approximately 1897, when new mass political parties and movements like Zionism, the Bund, National Democracy, and the Polish Socialist Party were constituting themselves as changing social, economic, and political conditions compelled proponents of assimilation to battle not only the Orthodox Jewish community, Polish public opinion, and the authorities, but new ideologies. Dividing her work into two parts, Cala examines first the diversity of attitudes and programmatic positions towards assimilation within the Jewish community, then those of Polish society, including conservatives, positivists, and antisemites. Finally, the author reflects upon the failure of assimilation to find broad support in either society, and the consequences of this for subsequent Polish-Jewish relations.

Formidable factors inhibited assimilation. The changes brought on by capitalism, especially the development of competing middle classes, the policies of the partitioning powers, the persistence of the deeply rooted religious and cultural distinctiveness (polskość and żydowskość’) of both societies, and the prejudice and discrimination that Polonized as well as Russianized Jews encountered, were daunting obstacles which the accompanying psychological stress of assimilation further burdened. Furthermore, unlike German Jews, those in the Polish lands could assimilate into either Polish, German, or Russian culture, a choice with immediate ramifications for relations with their neighbours.