Polish Jews

“ Yet this new science, founded on the study of Israel's glorious past, and warmly welcomed by the intellectual and the cultivated in Western Europe, could not entirely satisfy the intelligent in Polish Jewry. In an environment wholly Jewish, having no reason to nurse illusive hopes of imminent assimilation with their neighbors, from whom they were divided by every possible circumstance, beginning with moral notions and ending with political fortune, the Polish Jews resigned themselves to a sort of Messianic mysticism. ”

“ We came to the conclusion that ... the Polish-Jewish question is really a Russian-Polish-Jewish question, and touches us as much as the Poles. They have not room enough to live, and more and more Jews are coming there. Even democratic organizations are compelled to take cognizance of this. One peasant organization expresses through its organ the idea that it is true that the Jews are a burden to Poland, but it warns the peasants against anti-Semitism nevertheless. ”

“ All of a sudden Polish society opened its arms to those whom it had but recently branded as foreigners, and out of the ranks of Warsaw Jewry came a hearty response, expressing itself not only in patriotic manifestations but also in sacrifices and achievements for the sake of the common fatherland. ”

“ This generous treatment of the Polish Jews, it is said, was partly due to King Casimir IV.’s love for a Jewish mistress. Through her influence the children of Israel obtained many privileges which placed them on a footing of social equality with the Christians. At a time when they were oppressed,104 reviled and butchered in almost every Western country, in Poland their lives and liberties were as safe as those of the nobility itself. ”

“ After the death of this politic king, two opponents arose against them: on the one hand, the clergy, who saw in the favored position of the Polish Jews an offense to Christianity, and on the other, the German merchants, who, long settled in Polish towns, had brought with them their guilds and old-fashioned prejudices, and hated the Jewish traders and artificers from sheer envy. ”

“ Though decimated and impoverished, the Jewish population of Poland exceeded in numbers the Jewish settlements of Western Europe. The chief center of Judaism remained in Poland as theretofore, though it became the center of a more circumscribed and secluded section of Jewry. The extraordinary vitality of the "eternal people" was again demonstrated by the fact that the Polish Jews were able, in a comparatively short time, to recover from their terrible losses. ”

“ These foreign scholars occupied the posts of rabbis, cantors, and school teachers among them, and were remunerated for their services. At the same time studious Polish Jews were in the habit of going abroad to perfect themselves in the sciences, as was also the case with the Jewish settlers in Russia. From the German mother country the Polish Jews received not only their language, a German dialect, which subsequently developed into the Polish-Jewish jargon, or Yiddish, but also their religious culture and their communal organization. ”

“ The original settlement had consisted of cruelly hunted and persecuted small traders, and reinforcements had come from the like stock. It was a community in which Judaism struck deep roots, but the soil was poor to begin with, and was always terribly in want of modern methods of manuring. In theory and practice, in manners, outward appearance, language, views, and opinions, these Polish Jews were most conservative, some might even say stagnant or retrogressive. There came to be among their students many who inclined more to Kabbala than to Talmud, and to Talmud than to Torah ”

“ The birth of an anti-Semitic movement has been disastrous to Polish solidarity during recent years. The Polish nationalists suspected the Jews of working either for German or Russian interests. They were expecially bitter against the Litvak, or Lithuanian and south Russian Jews, who had been forced by Russia to establish themselves in the cities of Poland. Poland is one of the most important pales in the Empire. The Jewish population is one-fifth of the total, and enjoys both wealth and education in the cities. ”

“ Little progress has been made in the last hundred years. Many of the ‘blunders worse than crimes’ of the Middle Ages seem to lead a charmed life in Russia and in Russian Poland, and to be proof against the educating and humanising influences of these latter days. Jews are still confined to mean trades for their sole occupation, and are separate in dress and in social usage from their neighbours. Numberless legal restrictions are in force, which practically shut out Russian and Polish Jews from any worthy ambition, and condemn them to seek inglorious ends by sordid means. ”

“ There was only one country, Poland, in the centre of Europe, where the kings, desiring to build up their cities, invited the Jews, and hither the persecuted race fled from the East before the Russians, and latterly from the West, driven out by the Germans. When finally, a hundred years ago, the remnant of the Polish Empire was divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the Jewish population in this favored area had become the largest aggregation of that people since the destruction of Jerusalem. ”

“ Whilst the native peasants were still treated as serfs, the Jews were allowed the aristocratic privilege of wearing rapiers. Any Jew might, by simply renouncing his religion, become a nobleman. As stewards of the estates belonging to the Polish magnates, the Jews possessed even the power of inflicting capital punishment on the Christian slaves of the soil: so much so that during the terrible pestilence not more than ten thousand Jews were massacred in Poland. ”

“ He responded in a pamphlet, On the Improvement of the Israelites in the Kingdom of Poland,7 in which he declared that the quickest way of "civilizing" the Jews would be to deprive their rabbis of power and influence, to force them to dress in the German fashion, and use the Polish language, to admit them to the public schools and other educational institutions, and, above all, to abrogate the laws discriminating between them and their Gentile countrymen. ”

“ Together with their language the Polish Jews lost that which really constitutes a man, and were thus exposed to the scorn and contempt of non-Jewish society. The Bible had fallen gradually into the background in the course of development since the time of Maimuni ”

“ Notwithstanding the patriotic attitude assumed by many prominent Jews, the number of Hebrews employed by the German forces and occasional cases of denunciation by Jews, added fuel to the flame of prejudice. A sensitive Polish nationalism has been resentful of any self-assertion from a minority whose very language recalls the heavy hand of the oppressor. ”

“ If he will only trust to my love of truth, and regard the separate stories in combination with each other, he will gain a clear idea of the kind of life I describe without any further particulars. I would repeat one sentence, the truth of which is shown in my first book: 'Every country has the Jews that it deserves'—and it is not the fault of the Polish Jews that they are less civilized than their brethren in the faith in England, Germany, and France. At least, it is not entirely their fault.
"No one can do more than his nature permits. ”

“ Nothing is contributed by Jews; nothing is contributed by Poles; nothing by Finns. These people each have their own characteristic separate literature and religion and art. They think in their own tongues, pray in their own churches, have their own characteristic ideas. There is not the blending we have in England, where we include in our national literature the works of, for instance, Disraeli, Zangwill, Conrad, Hueffer, and so forth, proud to be Jewish, proud to be Polish, proud to be German in extraction and yet speaking for England. The Russian idea is something purely Russian. ”

“ The traditional concentration of the Jews in their communities, due to the necessity of maintaining close connection with the synagogue, has given further impetus to the spirit of separatism and cleavage from the rest of the population, which aggravates the Jewish question at the moment. It is frequently alleged that even in the Middle Ages Jewish separatism, commercial competition, and acquisitiveness aroused a certain irritation among the Polish masses, which has persisted as an inherited prejudice to the present day. ”

“ These Litvaks (as they were called) openly professed themselves the partisans of Russia and founded the Jewish press which set to work openly to fight against Polish autonomy. The Poles attacked the Jews before the war by means of a national boycott, the only means by which one subject race could attack another. During and after the war the hostility to the Jews was increased by the fact that in the German occupation the Jew was the willing tool of the invader, and by the close connexion between the Jews and Bolshevism. ”

“ He was invaluable as a messenger,—a spy some might call him,—although he knew no language but Yiddish and Polack, and the queer Russian lingo that was a mingling of all three. But of course he learned a great deal from his fellow Jews. Hunted, persecuted, wretched as they are, the Polish and Russian Jews always have, or can command, money, and the way they get hold of news is nothing short of marvellous,—in the Warsaw Ghetto, anyhow! ”

“ Russian Jews who, in the course of the last few decades, had been chiefly instrumental in the economic advancement of those two centers. The cloak beneath which this agitation was carried on was purely that of Polish nationalism: the Russian Jews were alleged, on the one hand, "to Russify Poland," and, accused, on the other hand, of an opposite tendency, of asserting themselves as the members of a separate Jewish nationality, with a press and a social organization of their own, which refuses to be merged in the Polish people. ”

“ The choir of Polish voices was but faintly disturbed by the opinions expressed by the Jews. An otherwise unknown rabbi, who calls himself Moses ben Abraham, echoes in his pamphlet "The Voice of the People of Israel" the sentiments of Jewish orthodoxy. He begs the Poles not to meddle in the inner affairs of Judaism: "You refuse to recognize us as brothers; then at least respect us as fathers! Look at your genealogical tree with the branches of the New Testament, a d you will find the roots in us." Polish culture cannot be foisted upon the Jews. ”

“ The importance of Jewish immigration for the economic development of Poland was first realized by the feudal Polish princes of the thirteenth century. Prompted by the desire of cultivating industrial activities in their dominions, these princes gladly welcomed settlers from Germany, without making a distinction between Jews and Christians. ”

“ Have the Jews escaped persecutions throughout Christendom any the more because of their imbecility and non-resistance for some centuries past? Poland was comparatively harmless and defenceless when the three great European powers combined to attack and destroy the entire nation, dividing between themselves the Polish territory, and enslaving or driving into exile the Polish people. ”

“ Our conscience bade us to attend to the betterment of this most down-trodden part of our population at the earliest possible moment."
It is worthy of note that the wave of Polish-Jewish patriotism did not spread beyond Warsaw. In the provincial towns the inhabitants of the ghetto were, as a rule, unwilling to serve in the army on the ground that the Jewish religion forbade the shedding of human blood. This indifference aroused the ire of the Polish population, which threatened to wreak vengeance upon the Jews, suspecting them of pro-Russian sympathies. ”

“ On the contrary, the ruling class of landed nobles favoured the new settlers, who, unlike the Polish middle class which had never reconciled itself totally to the new order of things, did not struggle against the exclusive rule of the country by the nobility. Poland had had Jews since the Middle Ages, but their numbers were no larger than in other European countries. ”

“ The majority of these vilifiers agreed in one point, that the defects of the Jews could be cured only by "reforming" their life from above. An ancient historic nation, which had for centuries managed its own affairs, was represented as a kind of riffraff, whose life could be easily recut after a new pattern. To achieve this end, all that was necessary was to let the Polish language take the place of Yiddish, to substitute the official Polish school for the traditional Jewish school, the magistracy for the Kahal, handicrafts and agriculture for commerce. ”

“ The Jews have spread into Russia from Poland, where they enjoyed exceptional privileges, and though they suffered in 1832 for their supposed complicity in the Polish War of Independence, they have generally been protected by the law, and only restricted from settlement in certain parts of the Empire. ”

“ Prior to the insurrection of 1863, the attitude of Polish society towards the Jews was one of habitual animosity, and this notwithstanding the fact that by that time Warsaw harbored already a group of Jewish intellectuals who were eager to assimilate with the Poles and were imbued with Polish patriotism. When, in 1859, the Warsaw Gazette published an anti-Semitic article in which the Jews were branded as foreigners, the Polish-Jewish patriots, including the banker Kronenberg, a convert, were stung to the quick, and they came forward with violent protests. ”

“ As far as economic rivalry and social oppression are concerned, the Jews were able to resist them, either by influencing the Polish governing circles, or by combining their own forces and uniting them in a firmly-organized scheme of self-government, which had been conceded to them in so large a measure. ”