The Holocaust looms over Polish Jewish history, the interwar period specifically, and the title of this compelling book explicitly. In Conscious History, Natalia Aleksiun explores the “professional trajectories” of a “cohort of university-educated Polish Jewish historians” and their “self-conscious deployment of historical writing” before the Shoah (2). While her narrative focuses mostly on “Jewish scholars, university students, teachers, rabbis, and journalists” in the 1920s and the 1930s (3), awareness of “what comes next” cuts through the body of this monograph and its name. How could it not, we might concede? Most of the public-facing historians in this narrative, like Majer Bałaban, Emanuel Ringelblum, and Mojżesz Schorr died during the Holocaust and we tend to know more about the tragic circumstances of their dying than how they lived before 1939. Drawing from her own dissertation and aligned with the early chapters of Samuel Kassow's excellent book Who Will Write Our History?, Conscious History locates a group deserving of a “collective biography” and uses the lens of this particular “they” to more deeply conceptualize the Polish Jewish experience between the World Wars.
Collective biographies demand overlap and this cohort certainly does. They almost always came from Galicia, professed a particular form of Zionism that allowed for a firm commitment to life in the “diaspora,” and inhabited the same archives, newspaper pages, and seminar rooms. In Aleksiun's telling, this group of roughly a dozen scholars generated a “Jewish communal consciousness”—one that transcended regional, political, ideological, and religious divisions (4) and developed a new conceptual framework for the history of Polish Jewry (6). Poignantly, as they wrote about the Polish Jewish past, this cohort made claims about their own present, argued that Jews were “native to Poland” and had a “rightful place in Polish society” (8), while they publicly disagreed with some Polish historians who imagined Jews as historical and contemporary “foreign elements” (65, 181, 219, and 242). Aleksiun utilizes numerous archival and “popular” sources in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew as well as copious bibliographies of these activist researchers (she surveys sixty sources from Bałaban alone!) to resurrect the achievements of their collective enterprise as well as the individual trajectories of those who made up this cohort.
Beyond this, her five chapters offer a critique of nineteenth century histories covering Jews in the Polish context (written by Jews and non-Jews), explains how this group became professionalized in a particularly Polish way (65), and charts how “their” work impacted governmental, journalistic, pedagogical, rabbinic, and military audiences in the interwar Polish state (162–214). Readers attentive to the historiography of the modern European Jewish experience will be interested to see how this cohort engaged with the writings of Heinrich Graetz (91–93), Simon Dubnow (93–95), and those scholars associated with Wissenschaft des Judentums in the 1800s (15, 91, 93). Others will learn more about responses to the (deteriorating) economic and political climate of the 1930s; how the Warsaw-based Institute of Jewish Studies aligned with other comparable educational institutions across the world (like the chair of Salo Baron, a Galician-born historian, at Columbia University and the establishment of the Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem [124]) in the 1920s and afterwards; and, how “young” scholars from Ringelblum to Jakub Berman (!) debated in seminars on Polish Jewish themes. Using personal conversations at funerals (74), internal discussions from a writing prize competition (70), and unpublished works collected and preserved in the Oyneg Shabes Archive buried under the Warsaw Ghetto, Aleksiun explains how scholarship related to Polish Jews was inspired, adjusted, and gained broader readership (140).
As they wrote “conscious histories,” this cohort faced their own internal disagreements as well as generational, gendered, and geographical distinctions. Aleksiun's close reading reveals how “un-univocal” this cohort could be, like when Bałaban and Ignacy Schorr evaluated “Jewish separateness” differently in their early works (103) or when historians questioned the extent to which “Jews” and “Christians” coexisted across nearly a millennium of history (244–45). Throughout this book, I was humbled to see the pressure of the present on these historians and the limits of the historiographical scaffolding they built. Where, we might ask, was a more “objective” telling of the past that is less tethered to the realities of publishing, politics, and “that” present? While she does offer comparisons to contemporary non-Jewish Polish historians, Aleksiun does not systematically evaluate the histories of this cohort against other tellings or even her own sense of which telling might be more or less true. Additionally, a deeper engagement with some terms and concepts (like “intuitively Jewish,” 12, “rootedness,” 20, “non-Jewish Poles,” 25 and “true Jewishness,” 96) would further distinguish Aleksiun's voice from voices in this “cohort.”
Other “truths,” however, are embedded in this book and they fundamentally shift the way we position interwar Polish Jews and continue to write about them. As Marcin Wodziński's recent article suggests, this shift is necessary and overdue (Wodziński, “Eastern European Jewish Studies: The Past Thirty Years,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 112/2, Spring 2022). Essentially, Conscious History shows that the field of Jewish Studies as we now know it began, partially but significantly, within this cohort. Beyond this, Aleksiun's riveting narrative built on personal relationships, academic professionalization and the struggle inherent in the writing of history helps us recognize the limits of her cohort's historical knowledge and, by default, our own.
