Human beings live without sure knowledge of their futures, but their historians must struggle to achieve comparable innocence. Natalia Aleksiun, the author of this informative “collective biography” (2) of a group of Polish Jewish scholars and students who labored early in the twentieth century to advance “the idea that understanding the place that Jews had occupied over many centuries of Polish history would foster legitimacy and acceptance for them in contemporary Poland” (3), deserves credit for resolutely refusing to let the tragedy that was coming overshadow her subjects’ story. But readers of her well researched and written chronicle may have a harder time doing the like. Her protagonists wrote history in order to simultaneously build bridges between Polish Jews and Gentiles and to enhance Polish Jews’ identity. This was not only a delicate interpretive balancing act, as she shows, but also an optimistic form of “political engagement” (3) that had little chance of success under the unfavorable economic and international conditions that buffeted interwar Poland, a circumstance she does not quite wish to concede. Neither forging a confident common self-image out of Polish Jewry's manifold internal divisions, nor convincing Polish ethnonationalists of Jews’ value to the country was something that books and articles could accomplish in times of acute stress and communal tension. As a result, neither intra-Jewish nor intra-Polish solidarity withstood the test of the Holocaust that German occupation brought in 1939 and thereafter.
Aleksiun is much more persuasive in delineating what her subjects sought, and why and how they did so, than in demonstrating their effects. Her claim that these historians “played a significant role in shaping the consciousness of Polish Jews” (12) remains more asserted than substantiated later in the book and is perhaps undercut by her findings about the considerable difficulty they had obtaining funding, publication, and wide readership. Her celebration of the appointment of a few senior professors of Polish Jewish history at major universities during the interwar years cannot quite outweigh her descriptions of their marginal presence at national academic congresses and in leading journals and the hostile reception that the work of Jewish academics often received.
Aleksiun's principal characters are Majer Bałaban, Ignacy Schiper, Mojzesz Schorr, Raphael Mahler, Filip Friedman, and Emanuel Ringelblum, all of them born or educated in Austrian Galicia, the relatively liberal portion of partitioned Poland, and all but the last two forgotten today. Collectively the group, whose members gravitated to Warsaw in the 1920s, sought to discover and preserve relevant Jewish historical sources, to build a solid foundation of local studies focusing on social, cultural, and economic matters, to highlight Jews’ long-standing presence in and continuous contributions to Poland, and to reach a wide public across communal lines, as well as scholarly audiences. Among their substantive preoccupations were the origins and forms of Jewish cultural autonomy, the ways Jews had generated prosperity and supported the struggle for Polish independence, and the causes of Jewish-Gentile friction and violence, which they tended to locate in differing economic profiles, rival clerical interests and ideologies, and imported ideas. The sometimes explicit, always implicit lesson was that Gentile animosity and discrimination toward Jews were forms of self-harm, as well as deviations from the nation's ancient and noble traditions.
Though widely circulated by Jewish schools, newspapers, and military rabbis, such arguments, Aleksiun's statistics indicate, nonetheless reached only a minority of the Jewish population, and when echoed at the elite and cross-communal level of parliamentary debates, “increasingly fell on deaf ears” (170). The problem lay not with the exceptional energy and persistence of Aleksiun's protagonists or with the tack they took, but with the general poverty of Polish Jewry and the implacability it faced, a product of a proud and embattled sense of national identity among Polish Gentile compatriots. Swimming against these streams, whose strength this book evinces throughout, was a losing proposition.
But one can hardly fault Aleksiun's principal figures for trying or her for sympathizing with and respecting the hopefulness of their project. This reviewer came away full of admiration for writers who believed that “suspicion and distrust … arose from ignorance” and thus had “faith in the transformative power of historical knowledge” (22–3), though constantly reminded of the way conditions in Poland among both Jews and Gentiles frustrated such faith. Hundreds of years of coexistence and mutual dependence, no matter how ably and accurately documented and described, could not overcome inherited, widespread, and oddly cherished images of reciprocal exploitation.
