Poles and Polish Jews: A long and complicated relationship
Outlined below is a brief summary of Polish-Jewish relations during consecutive periods of Polish history. Because it is a summary, it does not address all aspects of the more than one thousand years in which Poles and Polish Jews lived so closely together yet so far apart. For the most part, Polish Jews lived in closed, tightly knit, isolated communities largely of their own making. Separateness was fostered by Jewish community leaders and remained the preferred lifestyle for most Jews. Assimilation into Polish society automatically put one outside the mainstream of the Jewish community and even led to ostracization. Jews wanted to have as few dealings with the outside world as possible, except for those necessary to sustain their economic livelihood.
Since the 1100s, Jews in Poland enjoyed extensive autonomy and collective economic prosperity while developing sophisticated institutions of communal governance. Their cultural life included the infrastructure of religious and educational institutions as well as the cultivation of Ashkenazic and other traditions. Later generations regarded the precedents set by Polish Jews in such areas as communal autonomy, education, and Jewish self-definition as classic models.
The first extensive Jewish migration from western Europe to Poland occurred at the time of the First Crusade in 1098. Under the tolerant regime of Bolesław III (1102–1139), Jews settled throughout Poland, which was the only country to accept a massive influx of Jews fleeing the excesses of the Christian Crusades and their aftermath in the 14th and 15th centuries.
The 1264 Statute of Kalisz enacted by Boleslaw the Pious granted Jews special protections when, at the same time, they were being persecuted in western Europe. The Statute allowed Polish Jews to set up a system of self-government with Jewish courts exercising exclusive jurisdiction over religious and cultural matters.
In 1332, King Kazimierz III the Great (1303–1370) amplified and expanded the Statute of Kalisz, and under his reign, Jewish immigrants from western Europe streamed into Poland, which became the center of the world’s Jewish community for centuries. Kazimierz, who, according to legend, had a Jewish lover named Esterka, was especially friendly to Jews, and his reign is regarded as an era of great prosperity for Polish Jewry. Due to his reforms, a majority of the world’s European Jews can trace their ancestry to Poland.
During the era of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1572-1795), the Jewish community developed a vast network of religious, social, and political institutions, which enabled them to enjoy extensive autonomy. Jewish autonomy was further expanded by the creation of the Congressus Judaicus (1594-1764), a Jewish national parliament patterned after that of the Polish parliament. The Congressus Judaicus was unique in the history of the Jewish diaspora. Polish Jews, with Yiddish as their national language and governed by Talmudic law, were by far the largest and strongest Jewish community in the world. In contrast to the small Jewish communities of western Europe, which had to conform to the language and culture of their host nations, Jews in Poland were able to develop a modern national identity, out of which grew the Jewish nationalism on which the State of Israel was founded.
In 1795, Poland ceased to exist after it was partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. A large number of Polish Jews were then forced to live in the Pale of Settlement established by Russia in the former eastern borderlands of Poland. Although Poles and Jews alike were stripped of their freedoms, Poles struggled to rebuild their state. By contrast, the majority of Polish Jews wanted to survive as Jews and therefore sought accommodation with the three partitioning powers.
During the 1800s, when Poles were rallying their forces in the struggle for the restoration of Poland, most Polish Jews were concerned about maintaining their independent identity as Jews. The Polish cause was discredited in Jewish eyes, especially after the defeat of the national uprisings against Russia in 1830 and 1864. Polish Jews who wished to assimilate started to adopt the Russian language and culture rather than Polish. The governments of Austria, Germany, and Russia deliberately encouraged latent tensions between Poles and Polish Jews. Although Poles and Jews had lived side-by-side in these areas for nearly one thousand years, they did not have an intimate knowledge of each other’s culture, and many fell prey to convenient generalizations. Any sign of cooperation with the imperial authorities was seen by Poles as harmful to Polish independence and, thereby, treacherous.
During World War 1 (1914-1918), there were influential Jewish groups who openly opposed efforts to recreate an independent Poland. German Zionist Max Bodenheimer proposed establishing a buffer state within the Jewish Pale of Settlement composed of the former Polish provinces annexed by Russia. This was to serve as a de facto protectorate of the German Empire that would encompass Jews in the region and thereby free them from Russian oppression. That such a proposal had been offered to the German government by prominent Jews confirmed Polish suspicions that most Jewish politicians supported Poland’s enemies.
During the Interwar period (1918-1939), Izaak Grünbaum, a noted leader of the Zionist movement in Poland, went before the Polish Constitutional Committee on behalf of the Association of Jewish National Members of the Polish Parliament with a proposal for Jewish autonomy in the newly-constructed Polish State. Grünbaum proposed that all provinces in which Polish Jews comprised the majority of the population should be designated as autonomous provinces and governed by Jews with their own legislatures. This was fundamentally a demand for co-ownership of the Polish State and naturally caused strong Polish resentment. As a result, a commonly held view was that, during the 123 years that Poland did not exist because of the Partitions, Polish Jews did essentially nothing to help Poles fight for independence. However, when Poland was reborn in 1918, Polish Jews were quick to exploit the country’s newly-won independence.
World War 2 (1939-1945) severely ruptured Polish-Jewish relations, and the war’s emotional aftereffects continued to impede reconciliation efforts. Hitler and Stalin initiated World War 2 to apportion Eastern Europe between them. The secret protocol in their 1939 nonaggression pact prescribed the destruction of the Polish people and the annihilation of the Polish State. In the first two years of the war, Poles were the primary target of a coordinated German and Soviet extermination process designed to annihilate them on both sides of the Ribbentrop-Molotov line. The Red Army committed war crimes against Poles in a wave of arrests and summary executions, while Polish Jews were largely unharmed. Various accounts document Polish Jews, including rabbis, welcoming the Soviets as their liberators, kissing their tanks, and forming militias and revolutionary committees that denounced Polish “class enemies” for deportation to slave labor camps and gulags in the deep Soviet interior. They further identified Poles to the NKVD (secret police) for execution and arrested, robbed, and in some cases, murdered Polish officials, priests, community leaders, and landowners. These actions not only deepened Polish anger but also confirmed doubts about the loyalty of Jews to the Polish State.
During the same two years of the war, Hitler imprisoned virtually all of Poland’s Jews in German-controlled ghettos. To administer the ghettos, the Germans established Jewish Councils (Judenräte), which consisted of Jewish community leaders who largely viewed the war with Germany as a Polish matter. The Judenräte ceased all contact with Polish authorities, negotiated the conditions of Jewish governance of the ghettos, gathered up Jews from small towns, and concentrated them in the ghettos of the larger cities. They further kept ghetto Jews convinced they were being deported to work in German-designated areas in the East. Beginning in early 1942, they directed the Jewish Ghetto Police to forcibly round up ghetto Jews and load them onto the trains destined for the death camps.
While nearly all of Poland’s Jews were imprisoned in the ghettos, and in contrast to invalid Jewish accusations of Poles as “bystanders”, Poles were in a day-to-day struggle for survival because of the brutalities and severe conditions exacted by the occupier. The Germans imposed near-starvation rations, enforced onerous quotas on farmers, confiscated crops and livestock, conducted daily executions to terrorize the populace, randomly arrested and tortured Poles to extract intelligence on the Polish underground, and conducted recurrent round-ups for deportation to concentration and labor camps. Over two million Poles were sent to the camps, while up to 200,000 Polish children were abducted for Germanization under Himmler’s Lebensborn program, and most never returned. A fact often overlooked is that only in Poland did the Germans maintain a standing order that anyone aiding Jews would be executed together with immediate family.
Polish-Jewish relations were further ruptured during the initial years of communist rule in Poland. Following the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe in 1945, large numbers of Jews were installed in high official positions in various countries, including Poland. During the 1939 invasion of Poland by the Red Army, many of the Jews in the Polish Communist Party escaped to the Soviet Union. Directly after the war, they returned to Poland and were assigned high-level posts in the Polish government and Communist Party.
The most-feared government agency during this time was the Ministry of State Security, which was headed by Jakub Berman, a Polish Jew and personal friend of Stalin who spent World War 2 in Moscow. Berman assembled a team of fellow Jews that followed Stalin’s diktat to murder persons suspected of advocating Poland’s independence from Soviet rule, especially members of the Home Army who were now conducting armed resistance against the Communist authorities. The Poles who disappeared during the reign of terror imposed by Berman and his subordinates numbered in the tens of thousands. Some names of Berman’s governmental terror apparatus include Roman Romkowski (born Natan Grünspan Kikiel), Julius Hibner (born Dawid Schwartz), Józef RóżaÅ„ski (born Josef Goldberg), Józef Czaplicki (born Izydor Kurc (Kurtz), Hilary Minc, Anatol Fejgin, MieczysÅ‚aw Mietkowski, (born Mojżesz Bobrowicki), Julia Brystiger (née Prajs), Adam Teofil Humer, Maria Gurowska (née Eisenman), Helena Wolinska (born Faiga Mindla), Józef ÅšwiatÅ‚o (born Izaak Fleischfarb), Zygmunt OkrÄ™t (born Nachaniasz OkrÄ™t), Stefan Michnik (son of Helena Michnik and Samuel Rosenbusch), and Salomon Morel. Stalin judged, quite correctly, that Poles were the people most likely to oppose Soviet rule and were, therefore, to be exterminated. Berman’s Secret Police, the foundation of Soviet rule in Poland, required individuals of unquestionable loyalty to Stalin. This task was assigned to Polish Jews who were members of the outlawed prewar Communist Party because Stalin believed they were free of Polish patriotism, which was the real enemy. It’s important to note that Berman’s subordinates changed their Jewish names to Polish names so as not to advertise their ethnic identities and corroborate the fact that a highly disproportionate share of the Polish Communist government forced on Poland was Jewish.
This summary of Polish-Jewish relations concludes with the first ten years of communist rule in Poland. Polish-Jewish relations in the latter half of the 20th Century and the first part of the 21st Century are addressed in other articles on this page.
Further Reading:
Jews in Poland: The Rise of Jews as a Nation from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel, by Iwo Pogonowski, 1998.
Polish-Jewish Relations, 1939-1945: Beyond the Limits of Solidarity, by Ewa Kurek, 2006.
Traditional Jewish Attitudes Towards Poles, by Mark Paul, 2016.
The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation 1939-1945, by Richard C. Lukas, third edition, 2012.
After the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish Conflict in the Wake of World War II, by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, 2003
Rethinking Poles and Jews: Troubled Past, Brighter Future, Robert Cherry and Annamaria Orla-Bukowska (editors), 2007.
