history of Jews in Poland
| This article is part of the History of Jews in Poland series. |
| Main article |
| Timeline of Jewish Polish history |
| The Holocaust camps and Poland |
| Jewish Polish current events |
| List of Polish Jews |
 |
| History of Poland |
|---|
| Chronology |
|
Until 966 |
| Topics |
|
Culture |
The history of Jews in Poland dates back over a millennium.[1] It ranges from a long period of religious tolerance and prosperity for the country's Jewish population to the nearly complete genocidal destruction of the community by Nazi Germany in the twentieth century during the German occupation of Poland and the Holocaust.
From the founding of the Kingdom of Poland in the eleventh century through the early years of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth created in 1569, Poland was one of the most tolerant countries in Europe.[2] Known as paradisus Judeorum (Latin for Jewish paradise) it became home to one of the world's largest and most vibrant Jewish communities. With the weakening of the Commonwealth and growing religious strife (due to the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation), Poland’s traditional tolerance[3] began to wane from the seventeenth century onward.[4] For centuries Poland was unique shelter for prosecuted and expelled European Jewish communities. Famous rabbi of Kraków Moses Isserles living in XVI century concluded: "had not the Lord left us this land as a refuge, the fate of Israel would have been indeed unbearable".[5] In 1568 Polish King Sigismund II Augustus issued privilege de non tolerandis christianis for Jewish inhabitant of Kazimierz. It was an extraordinary prohibition for Christians to enter Jewish town. After the partitions of Poland in 1795 and the destruction of Poland as a sovereign state, Polish Jews were subject to the laws of the partitioning powers, primarily the increasingly antisemitic Russian Empire,[6] but also Austro-Hungary and Prussian/German Empire. Still, as Poland regained independence in the twentieth century, immediately prior to World War II, it had a vibrant Jewish community of over three million, one of the largest in the world, though anti-Semitism, both political and from the general population, common throughout contemporary Europe, was a growing problem.[7]
Over 90% of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland were killed during the Holocaust. There was no collaborationist government in Poland, and relatively little collaboration by individual Poles with the Nazis in Poland, including the Holocaust.[8][9] The attitude of non-Jewish Poles ranged from extreme cases of participation in massacres such as the Jedwabne pogrom and similar pogroms in 22 other Polish towns,[10] through cases of blackmail[11] (szmalcownik) of Jews hiding from Nazi persecution (condemned by the Polish Underground State[12] and punished by death), indifference to the plight of the Jews or unwillingness to help due to fear for ones own life, to active assistance in evading and resisting the Germans such as Irena Sendler, who saved about 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.[13] 6,004 Poles have received the honor of being named Righteous Among the Nations,[14] the highest number of any other nation. Poland, along with territories of today's Belarus and Ukraine included in the General Government, was the only occupied country in Europe in which anyone caught aiding a Jew was automatically subject to the death penalty[15][16], along with all family members of the same residence and often neighbors as well [citation needed].
The Nazi occupation of Poland resulted in the death of one-fifth of the population, some 6 million people, half of them Jewish.
In the postwar period, many of the approximately 200,000 survivors chose to emigrate from the communist People's Republic of Poland to the nascent
State of Israel,
Early history to Golden Age: 966–1572
-
For more details on this topic, see History of the Jews in Poland (966-1572).
Early history: 966–1385
The first Jews arrived in the territory of modern Poland in the tenth century. Travelling along the trade routes leading eastwards to Kiev and Bukhara, the Jewish merchants (known as Radhanites) also crossed the areas of Silesia. One of them, a diplomat and merchant from the Moorish town of Tortosa in Spanish Al-Andalus, known under his Arabic name of Ibrahim ibn Jakub, was the first chronicler to mention the Polish state under the rule of prince Mieszko I. The first actual mention of Jews in Polish chronicles occurs in the eleventh century. It appears that Jews were then living in Gniezno, at that time the capital of the Polish kingdom of the Piast dynasty. The first permanent Jewish community is mentioned in 1085 by a Jewish scholar Jehuda ha-Kohen in the city of Przemyśl (nevertheless it was Ruthenian town in this time).
The first extensive Jewish emigration from Western Europe to Poland occurred at the time of the First Crusade in 1098. Under Boleslaus III (1102–1139), the Jews, encouraged by the tolerant régime of this ruler, settled throughout Poland, including over the border into Lithuanian territory as far as Kiev. At the same time Poland saw immigration of Khazars, a Turkic tribe that had converted to Judaism. Boleslaus III on his part recognised the utility of the Jews in the development of the commercial interests of his country. The Jews came to form the backbone of the Polish economy and the coins minted by Mieszko III even bear Hebraic markings. Jews enjoyed undisturbed peace and prosperity in the many principalities into which the country was then divided; they formed the middle class in a country where the general population consisted of landlords (developing into szlachta, the unique Polish nobility) and peasants, and they were instrumental in promoting the commercial interests of the land.
The tolerant situation was gradually altered by the Roman Catholic Church on the one hand, and by the neighbouring German states on the other. There were, however, among the reigning princes some determined protectors of the Jewish inhabitants, who considered the presence of the latter most desirable insofar as the economic development of the country was concerned. Prominent among such rulers was Boleslaus the Pious of Kalisz, Prince of Great Poland. With the consent of the class representatives and higher officials, in 1264 he issued a General Charter of Jewish Liberties, the Statute of Kalisz, which granted all Jews the freedom of worship, trade and travel. During the next hundred years, the Church pushed for the persecution of the Jews while the rulers of Poland usually protected them.
In 1334, Casimir III the Great (1303–1370) amplified and expanded Bolesław's old charter with the Wiślicki Statute. Casimir was especially friendly to the Jews, and his reign is regarded as an era of great prosperity for Polish Jewry, and was surnamed by his contemporaries "King of the serfs and Jews." Nevertheless, while for the greater part of Casimir’s reign the Jews of Poland enjoyed tranquillity, toward its close they were subjected to persecution on account of the Black Death. In 1347 the first blood libel accusation against Jews in Poland recorded, and in 1367 the first pogrom, in Poznań.[17] Later the massacres occurred at Kalisz, Kraków, Głogów, and other Polish cities along the German frontier, and it is estimated that 10,000 Jews were killed. Compared with the pitiless destruction of their co-religionists in Western Europe, however, the Polish Jews did not fare badly; and the Jewish masses of Germany fled to the more hospitable lands of Poland.
The early Jagiellon era: 1385–1505
As a result of the marriage of Wladislaus II to Jadwiga, daughter of Louis I of Hungary, Lithuania was united with the kingdom of Poland. Although, in 1388, rights were extended to Lithuanian Jews as well, it was under the rule of Wladislaus II and those of his successors that the first extensive persecutions of the Jews in Poland commenced, and the king did not act to stop these events. There were a number of blood libels and riots against the Jews, and official persecution gradually increased, especially as the clergy pushed for less tolerance. Hysteria caused by Black Death led to additional fourteenth-century outbreaks of violence against the Jews. Traders and artisans fearing Jewish rivalry supported the harassment. I
The decline in the status of the Jews was briefly checked by Casimir IV the Jagiellonian (1447–1492), but to increase his power he soon issued the Statute of Nieszawa.[18] Among other things it abolished the ancient privileges of the Jews "as contrary to divine right and the law of the land." The policy of the government toward the Jews of Poland was not more tolerant under Casimir's sons and successors, John I Olbracht (1492–1501) and Alexander the Jagiellonian (1501–1506), who expelled the Jews from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1495.
Center of the Jewish world: 1505–72
Alexander reversed his position in 1503, just as the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, as well as from Austria, Bohemia and Germany, thus stimulating the Jewish emigration to much more tolerant Poland. Indeed, with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Poland became the recognized haven for exiles from western Europe; and the resulting accession to the ranks of Polish Jewry made it the cultural and spiritual center of the Jewish people.
The most prosperous period for Polish Jews began following this new influx of Jews with the reign of Zygmunt I (1506–1548), who protected the Jews in his realm. His son, Zygmunt II August (1548–1572), mainly followed in the tolerant policy of his father and also granted autonomy to the Jews in the matter of communal administration and laid the foundation for the power of the Kahal, or autonomous Jewish community. This period led to the creation of a proverb about Poland being a "heaven for the Jews". Additionally, some Polish words may reveal that the exiled Jews coming from Spain brought with them onions (and possibly more then-exotic plants or foods), as onions are called "Cebula" in Polish ("Cebolla" in Spanish).
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: 1572–1795
-
For more details on this topic, see History of the Jews in Poland (1572-1795).
The Warsaw Confederation
Following the childless death of Zygmunt II, the last king of the Jagiellon dynasty, Polish and Lithuanian nobles (szlachta) gathered at Warsaw in 1573 and signed a document of limited toleration in which representatives of all the major religions pledged each other mutual support and tolerance. The edict did not include the Polish Brethren, an anti-Trinitarian that would later become known as Socinians, who formed roots for the modern Unitarian church in the US.
Increasing isolation: The traditional view and recent scholarly challenges
The simplistic earlier narrative of Jewish life in Poland emphasized the rise of anti-Jewish sentiments (sometimes anachronistically labelled "anti-semitic") by focusing on the rise of anti-Jewish libels (host desecration and ritual murder accusations). That narrative tended to highlight persecution, and Jewish isolation and autonomy. Yet, recent scholarly works (Fram, Hundert, Rosman, Teller, and Teter) have shown that Jews were not isolated from their Christian neighbours. For example, Jews spoke local languages (although they did retain Yiddish), shared sense of fashion (for example Christian borrowed clothes from Jews to go to church, see a responsum no. 86 by Benjamin Slonik), they shared spaces too (rabbis and the clergy were increasingly worried that Jews and Christians lived together under the same roof). Contrary to the common view of total Jewish autonomy and isolation, historical evidence shows that Jews often used gentile courts against other Jews, and frequently summoned Christians both to lay and Church courts (see works by Judith Kalik, Adam Teller, and Magda Teter). The existence of the Council of Four Lands has often been cited as a pinnacle of Jewish autonomy and self-government in Poland. Yet both the creation and the dissolution of the council are linked to the fiscal transformations of the Polish state. Similarly, while traditional scholarship has promoted an idealized view of Jewish rabbinic culture and self-government, focusing on rabbinic sources, recent works by scholars have shown that this was also a period of transformation if not outright decline of rabbinic authority (see for instance books and articles by Adam Teller). In short, scholars in recent decades have created a much more textured picture of Jewish life in premodern Poland-Lithuania that has gone far away from the view of isolation and persecution. Since late XIV century native Polish merchants became powerful enough to compete with Jewish businessmen, and in the XVI century Jews were barred from the guilds, and large Polish towns limited Jewish entrepreneurship.
The Cossack uprising and the Deluge
In 1648 the Commonwealth was devastated by several conflicts, in which the Commonwealth lost over a third of its populations
(over 3 million people), and Jewish losses were counted in hundreds of thousands. First, the Chmielnicki Uprising when Bohdan Khmelnytsky's
Then the incompetent politics of the elected kings of the House of Vasa brought the weakened state to its knees, as it was invaded by the Swedish Empire in what became known as The Deluge. The kingdom of Poland proper, which had hitherto suffered but little either from the Chmielnicki Uprising or from the recurring invasion of the Russians, Crimean Tatars and Ottomans, now became the scene of terrible disturbances (1655–1658). Charles X of Sweden, at the head of his victorious army, overran Poland; and soon the whole country, including the cities of Kraków and Warsaw, was in his hands. The Jews of Great and Little Poland found themselves torn between two sides: those of them who were spared by the Swedes were attacked by the Poles, who accused them of aiding the enemy. The Polish general Stefan Czarniecki, in his flight from the Swedes, devastated the whole country through which he passed and treated the Jews without mercy. The Polish partisan detachments treated the non-Polish inhabitants with equal severity. Moreover, the horrors of the war were aggravated by pestilence, and the Jews and townsfolk of the districts of Kalisz, Kraków, Poznań, Piotrków, and Lublin perished en masse by the sword of the besieging armies and the plague.
As soon as the disturbances had ceased, the Jews began to return and to rebuild their destroyed homes; and while it is true that the Jewish population of Poland had decreased and become impoverished, it still was more numerous than that of the Jewish colonies in Western Europe; and Poland remained as the spiritual center of Judaism, and through 1698, the Polish kings generally remained supportive of the Jews, despite a hostile clergy and nobility. It also should be noted that while Jewish losses in those events were high, estimated by some historians to be close to 500,000, the Commonwealth lost 1/3 of its population — approximately 3 million of its citizens.
Decline under the Saxon dynasty
With the accession to the throne of the Saxon dynasty the Jews completely lost the support of the government. The szlachta and the townsfolk were increasingly hostile to the Jews, as the religious tolerance that dominated the mentality of the previous generations of Commonwealth citizens was slowly forgotten. In their intolerance, the citizens of the Commonwealth now approached the "standards" that dominated most of the contemporary European countries, and many Jews felt betrayed by the country they once viewed as their haven. In the larger cities, like Poznań and Kraków, quarrels between the Satins and the Jewish inhabitants were of frequent occurrence. Attacks on the Jews by students, the so-called Schüler-Gelauf, became everyday occurrences in the large cities, the police regarding such scholastic riots with indifference. In the XVI and XVII centuries Jews were expelled from the number of Polish towns, and victimized by pogroms usually organized by local merchants and artisans.[19]
The partitions
Disorder and anarchy reigned supreme in Poland during the second half of the eighteenth century, from the accession to the throne of its last king, Stanislaus II Augustus Poniatowski (1764–1795). In 1772, in the aftermath of the Confederation of Bar, the outlying provinces of Poland were divided among the three neighboring nations, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Jews were most numerous in the territories that fell to the lot of Austria and Russia.
The permanent council established at the instance of the Russian government (1773–1788) served as the highest administrative tribunal, and occupied itself with the elaboration of a plan that would make practicable the reorganization of Poland on a more rational basis. The progressive elements in Polish society recognized the urgency of popular education as the very first step toward reform. The famous Komisja Edukacji Narodowej ("Commission of National Education"), the first ministry of education in the world, was established in 1773 and founded numerous new schools and remodeled the old ones. One of the members of the commission, kanclerz Andrzej Zamoyski, along with others, demanded that the inviolability of their persons and property should be guaranteed and that religious toleration should be to a certain extent granted them; but he insisted that Jews living in the cities should be separated from the Christians, that those of them having no definite occupation should be banished from the kingdom, and that even those engaged in agriculture should not be allowed to possess land. On the other hand, some szlachta and intellectuals proposed a national system of government, of the civil and political equality of the Jews. This was the only example in modern Europe before the French Revolution of tolerance and broadmindedness in dealing with the Jewish question. But all these reforms were too late: a Russian army soon invaded Poland, and soon after a Prussian one followed.
A second partition of Poland was made on July 17, 1793. Jews, in a Jewish regiment led by Berek Joselewicz, took part in the Kościuszko Uprising the following year, when the Poles tried to again achieve independence, but were brutally put down. Following the revolt, the third and final partition of Poland took place in 1795. The great bulk of the Jewish population was transferred to Russia, and thus became subjects of that empire, although in the first half of the nineteenth century some semblance of a vastly smaller Polish state was preserved, especially in the form of the Congress Poland (1815–1831).
The development of Judaism in Poland and the Commonwealth
The culture and intellectual output of the Jewish community in Poland had a profound impact on Judaism as a whole. Some Jewish historians have recounted that the word Poland is pronounced as Polania or Polin in Hebrew, and as transliterated into Hebrew, these names for Poland were interpreted as "good omens" because Polania can be broken down into three Hebrew words: po ("here"), lan ("dwells"), ya ("God"), and Polin into two words of: po ("here") lin ("[you should] dwell"). The "message" was that Poland was meant to be a good place for the Jews. During the time from the rule of Sigismund until the Nazi Holocaust, Poland would be at the center of Jewish religious life.
Jewish learning
Yeshivot were established, under the direction of the rabbis, in the more prominent communities. Such schools were officially known as gymnasiums, and their rabbi principals as rectors. Important yeshivot existed in Kraków, Poznań, and other cities. Jewish printing establishments came into existence in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. In 1530 a Hebrew Pentateuch (Torah) was printed in Kraków; and at the end of the century the Jewish printing houses of that city and Lublin issued a large number of Jewish books, mainly of a religious character. The growth of Talmudic scholarship in Poland was coincident with the greater prosperity of the Polish Jews; and because of their communal autonomy educational development was wholly one-sided and along Talmudic lines. Exceptions are recorded, however, where Jewish youth sought secular instruction in the European universities. The learned rabbis became not merely expounders of the Law, but also spiritual advisers, teachers, judges, and legislators; and their authority compelled the communal leaders to make themselves familiar with the abstruse questions of Jewish law. Polish Jewry found its views of life shaped by the spirit of Talmudic and rabbinical literature, whose influence was felt in the home, in school, and in the synagogue.
In the first half of the sixteenth century the seeds of Talmudic learning had been transplanted to Poland from Bohemia, particularly from the school of Jacob Pollak, the creator of Pilpul ("sharp reasoning"). Shalom Shachna (ca. 1500–1558), a pupil of Pollak, is counted among the pioneers of Talmudic learning in Poland. He lived and died in Lublin, where he was the head of the yeshivah which produced the rabbinical celebrities of the following century. Shachna's son Israel became rabbi of Lublin on the death of his father, and Shachna's pupil Moses Isserles (known as the ReMA) (1520–1572) achieved an international reputation among the Jews as the co-author of the Shulkhan Arukh, (the "Code of Jewish Law"). His contemporary and correspondent Solomon Luria (1510–1573) of Lublin also enjoyed a wide reputation among his co-religionists; and the authority of both was recognized by the Jews throughout Europe. Heated religious disputations were common, and Jewish scholars participated in them. At the same time, the Kabbalah had become entrenched under the protection of Rabbinism; and such scholars as Mordecai Jaffe and Yoel Sirkis devoted themselves to its study. This period of great Rabbinical scholarship was interrupted by the Chmielnicki Uprising and The Deluge.
The rise of Hasidism
The decade from the Cossacks' uprising until after the Swedish war (1648–1658) left a deep and lasting impression not only on the social life of the Polish-Lithuanian Jews, but on their spiritual life as well. The intellectual output of the Jews of Poland was reduced. The Talmudic learning which up to that period had been the common possession of the majority of the people became accessible to a limited number of students only. What religious study there was became overly formalized, some rabbis busied themselves with quibbles concerning religious laws; others wrote commentaries on different parts of the Talmud in which hair-splitting arguments were raised and discussed; and at times these arguments dealt with matters which were of no practical importance. At the same time, many miracle workers made their appearance among the Jews of Poland, culminating in a series of false "Messianic" movements, most famously as Sabbatianism was succeeded by Frankism.
In this time of mysticism and overly formal rabbinism came the teachings of Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov, or BeShT, (1698–1760), which had a profound effect on the Jews of Eastern Europe and Poland in particular. His disciples taught and encouraged the new fervent brand of Orthodox Judaism based on Kabbalah known as Hasidism. The rise of Hasidic Judaism within Poland's borders and beyond had a great influence on the rise of Haredi Judaism all over the world, with a continuous influence through its many Hasidic dynasties including those of Chabad-Lubavitch, Aleksander, Bobov, Ger, Nadvorna, among others. More recent rebbes of Polish origin include Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn (1880–1950), the sixth head of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic movement, who lived in Warsaw until 1940 when he moved Lubavitch from Warsaw to the United States. See also: List of Polish Rabbis
Jews of Poland within the Russian Empire (1795–1918)
-
For more details on this topic, see
History of the Jews in Russia and Soviet Union .
Official Russian policy would eventually prove to be substantially harsher to the Jews than that under independent Polish rule. The lands that had once been Poland were to remain the home of many Jews, as, in 1772, Catherine II, the tzarina of Russia, instituted the Pale of Settlement, restricting Jews to the western parts of the empire, which would eventually include much of Poland, although it excluded some areas in which Jews had previously lived. By the late 1800s, over four million Jews would live in the Pale.
Initially, Russian policy towards the Jews of Poland was confused, alternating between harsh rules and somewhat more enlightened
policies. In 1802, the Tsar established the Committee on the Improvement of the Jews in an
attempt to develop a coherent approach to the Empire's new Jewish population. The Committee in 1804 suggested a number of steps
that were designed to encourage Jews to assimilate, though it did not force them to do so. It proposed that Jews be allowed to
attend school and even to own land, but it restricted them from entering Russia, banned them from the brewing industry, and included a number of other prohibitions. The more enlightened parts of this
policy were never fully implemented, and the conditions of the Jews in the Pale
gradually worsened. In the 1820s, the Cantonist Laws passed by Tsar Nicolas kept the traditional double taxation on Jews in lieu of army service, while actually
requiring all Jewish communities to produce boys to serve in the military, where they were often forced to convert. Though the
Jews were accorded slightly more rights with the emancipation reform of
1861, they were still restricted to the Pale of Settlement and subject to
restrictions on ownership and profession. The status quo was however shattered with the
assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, an act falsely blamed upon the
Jews.
Pogroms
The assassination prompted a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots, called pogroms, throughout 1881–1884. In the 1881 outbreak, pogroms were primarily limited to Russia, although in a riot in Warsaw twelve Jews were killed, many others were wounded, women were raped and over two million rubles worth of property was destroyed. The new czar, Alexander III, blamed the Jews for the riots and issued a series of harsh restrictions on Jewish movements. Pogroms continued in large numbers until 1884, with at least tacit government approval. They proved a turning point in the history of the Jews in Poland and throughout the world. The pogroms prompted a great flood of Jewish immigration to the United States, with almost two million Jews leaving the Pale by the late 1920s, and the pogroms set the stage for Zionism.
An even bloodier wave of pogroms broke out from 1903 to 1906, and at least some of the pogroms are believed to have been organized or supported by the Tsarist Russian secret police, the Okhranka. Some of the worst of these occurred on Polish territory, where the majority of Russian Jews lived then, and included the Białystok pogrom of 1906, in which up to a hundred Jews were killed and many more wounded.
Haskalah and Halakha
The Jewish Enlightenment, Haskalah, began to take hold in Poland during the 1800s, stressing secular ideas and values. Champions of Haskalah, the Maskilim, pushed for assimilation and integration into Russian culture. At the same time, there was another school of Jewish thought that emphasized traditional study and a Jewish response to the ethical problems of anti-Semitism and persecution, one form of which was the Mussar movement. Polish Jews generally were less influenced by Haskalah, rather focusing on a strong continuation of their religious lives based on Halakha ("rabbis's law") following primarily Orthodox Judaism, Hasidic Judaism, and also adapting to the new Religious Zionism of the Mizrachi movement later in the 1800s.
Politics in Polish Territory
By the late 1800s, Haskalah and the debates it caused created a growing number of political movements within the Jewish
community itself, covering a wide range of views and vying for votes in local and regional elections. Zionism became very popular with the advent of the Poale Zion
socialist party as well as the religious Polish Mizrahi, and the increasingly
popular General Zionists. Jews also took up
Unsurprisingly, given the conditions under Imperial Russia, the Jews participated in a number of Polish insurrections against the Russians, including the Kościuszko Insurrection (above), and the January Insurrection (1863) as well as the Revolutionary Movement of 1905.
Interwar period 1918–39
Independence and Polish Jews
Jews also played a role in the fight for independence in 1918, some joining Józef Piłsudski, while many other communities decided to remain neutral in the fight for a Polish state. In the wake of World War I and the ensuing conflicts that engulfed Eastern Europe — the Russian Civil War, Polish-Ukrainian War, and Polish-Soviet War — many pogroms were launched against the Jews by all sides. As a substantial number of Jews were perceived to have supported the Bolsheviks in Russia, they came under frequent attack by those opposed to the Bolshevik regime.
Just after the end of World War I, the West became alarmed by reports about alleged massive pogroms in Poland against Jews.
Pressure for government action reached the point where President Woodrow Wilson sent an
official commission to investigate the matter. The commission, led by Henry Morgenthau,
Sr., announced in its report that the reports of pogroms were exaggerated, and
in some cases may even have been fabricated (Morgenthau Report). It identified eight major incidents in the years 1918–1919, and estimated the number of victims
at 200–300 Jews. Four of these were attributed to the actions of deserters and undisciplined individual soldiers; none were
blamed on official government policy. Among the incidents, in Pińsk a Polish officer accused a
group of Jewish civilians of plotting against the Poles and shot thirty-five of them (Pinsk
massacre). In Lviv (then Lwów) in 1918, after the Polish Army captured the city, hundreds of people were killed in the chaos, including some
seventy-two Jews. In Warsaw, soldiers of Blue Army assaulted
Jews in the streets, but were punished by military authorities. Many other events in Poland were later found to have been
exaggerated, especially by contemporary newspapers such as the New York Times,
although serious abuses against the Jews, including pogroms, continued elsewhere, especially in Ukraine.[20] The result of the concern
over the fate of Poland's Jews was a series of explicit clauses in the
Jewish and Polish culture
The newly independent Second Polish Republic had a large Jewish minority – by
the time World War II began, Poland had the largest concentration of Jews in Europe.
According to the 1931 National Census there were 3,130,581 Polish Jews measured by the declaration of their religion. Estimating
the population increase and the emigration from Poland between 1931 and 1939, there were probably 3,474,000 Jews in Poland as of
September 1, 1939 (approximately 10% of the total population).
Jews were primarily centered in large and smaller cities: 77% lived in cities and 23% in the villages. In 1939 there were 375,000
Jews in Warsaw[2] or one third of the city's population.[3] Only New York City had more Jewish residents than Warsaw. Jewish religious groups,
political parties, newspapers and theatre thrived. Most Warsaw Jews spoke Yiddish, but Polish was increasingly used by the young
who have not had a problem in identifying themselves fully as Jews, Warsavians and Poles. Polish Jews were entering the
mainstream of Polish society, though many thought of themselves as a separate nationality within Poland. During the school year
of 1937–1938 there were 226 elementary schools[4] and twelve high schools as well as fourteen vocational schools with either
Yiddish or Hebrew as the instructional
language. The YIVO (Jidiszer Wissenszaftlecher Institute) Scientific Institute was based in Wilno
before transferring to New York during the war. Jewish political parties, both the
The Jewish cultural scene[6] was particularly vibrant and blossomed in pre-World War II Poland. There were many Jewish publications and over 116 periodicals. Yiddish authors, most notably Isaac Bashevis Singer, went on to achieve international acclaim as classic Jewish writers, and in Singer's case, win the 1978 Nobel Prize. Other Jewish authors of the period, like Janusz Korczak, Bruno Schulz, Julian Tuwim, Jan Brzechwa (a favorite poet of Polish children) and Bolesław Leśmian were less well-known internationally, but made important contributions to Polish literature. Singer Jan Kiepura was one of the most popular artist of that era and pre-war songs of Jewish composers like Henryk Wars or Jerzy Petersburski are still widely known in Poland today. Scientist Leopold Infeld, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam or professor Adam Ulam contributed to the world of science. Others are Moses Schorr, Georges Charpak, Samuel Eilenberg, just to name a few from the long list of Polish Jews who are known internationally. The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), a Polish-Jewish legal scholar. Leonid Hurwicz was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics. The Main Judaic Library and the Institute of Judaic Studies were located in Warsaw, religious centers had at their disposal Talmudic Schools (Jeszybots), as well as synagogues, many of which were architecturally outstanding. Yiddish theatre also flourished; Poland had fifteen Yiddish theatres and theatrical groups. Warsaw was home to the most important Yiddish theater troupe of the time, the Vilna Troupe, which staged the first performance of The Dybbuk in 1920 at the Elyseum Theatre.
Some future Israeli leaders studied at University of Warsaw - Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir.
Growing anti-Semitism
Persecution of Jews in Poland was most visible during the early and latter years of the Second Republic. Jews were often not identified as true Poles; a problem caused by both Polish nationalism, supported by the Endecja government, and the fact that a substantial proportion of Jews lived separate lives from the Polish majority: 85% of Polish Jews listed Yiddish or Hebrew as their native language, for example[citation needed]. The matters improved for a time under the rule of Józef Piłsudski (1926–1935), who opposed anti-Semitism. Piłsudski replaced Endecja's 'ethnic assimilation' with the 'state assimilation' policy: citizens were judged by their loyalty to the state, not by their nationality.[21] The years 1926–1935 were favourably viewed by many Polish Jews, whose situation improved especially under the cabinet of Pilsudski’s appointee Kazimierz Bartel.[22] However a combination of various reasons, including the Great Depression,[21] meant that the situation of Jewish Poles was never too satisfactory, and it deteriorated again after Pi