Resistance (6 page)

 

I
N THE PERIOD
between the two world wars, Polish Jewry, and especially the Jews of Warsaw, played a central role in Jewish life throughout the world. Second only to New York in the size of its Jewish population, Warsaw contained a Jewish life that was both traditional and creative, religiously conservative and nationalist. Despite intense involvement in Polish culture, Jews in Poland saw themselves primarily as part of the Jewish people dispersed throughout the world and less as an integral part of Polish society.

From 1918 onward, Warsaw was the capital of an independent Poland, which comprised areas that for more than a century had been occupied by foreign powers intent on undermining Polish nationalism. Under Russian occupation Warsaw had been the major target of a policy designed to eradicate all evidence of Polish nationalism. Nevertheless, despite Russian efforts, the younger generation remained politically oriented and nationalistically inclined. Warsaw was also the scene of economic development and drive.

As in Western Europe, Jewish entrepreneurs played a trailblazing role in banking, railroads, international finance, and new industries. Jewish families figured largely in establishing a capitalist economy in Warsaw and in expanding it throughout Poland. Many of these economic pioneers were surrounded by aides and loyal agents, most of whom were Jews. Like the "uptown" Jews of New York City, some members of these leading families converted to Christianity when they were still young, while others of the second or third generation assimilated into the Polish aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Others remained within the Jewish community.

The impact made by these individuals and families was extended to the advancement of cultural and artistic institutions, journalism, and publishing. In philanthropy, Jews contributed extensively to education and to the founding of hospitals and public welfare institutions. Their charitable gifts also enabled like-minded Jews to advance in Polish society, yet their progress often attenuated their ties, loyalty, and utility to the Jewish community. Still, when these families were at their prime, their members gave generously to the public needs of both the Polish population and the Jews. Some of them—but by no means all—were also active in the affairs of the Jewish community.

The growth of Warsaw as an influential Jewish community was the result of Jewish migration over several generations. In 1781, when Poland was on the verge of losing its independence, there were 2,609 Jews in Warsaw. In Praga, a suburb of the city on the eastern banks of the Vistula River, the Jewish community numbered 244. On the threshold of the twentieth century, in 1897, the Jewish population of the city had reached 219,128. At the outbreak of World War I, the Jews of Warsaw made up 38 percent of the entire population of the city, a percentage that was to become even larger when refugees and displaced persons streamed into Warsaw during the war. In the independent Republic of Poland of the interwar years, the number of Jews living in Warsaw grew in absolute terms, but there was a comparative decline in the Jewish component of Warsaw's population. In 1921 the Jewish community comprised 310,300 people, or 33 percent of Warsaw's 936,700 inhabitants. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, there were some 375,000 Jews living in Warsaw, and they composed 29.1 percent of the city's 1,289,000 inhabitants.

Numbers alone do not reflect the importance of the Jewish community of Warsaw between the wars. Jewish Warsaw lacked the tradition and distinction that characterized other Jewish communities in Poland such as Cracow, Lublin, and Lwow, where Jews had lived for generations. Warsaw had neither ancient buildings nor the aura of glorious memories, the vestiges of an influential past. There were no ancient synagogues such as the one in Cracow; none that had been the home of world-renowned scholars. There was no tradition of greatness. In fact, the oldest tombstone in the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw was dated 1807. Nevertheless, there was ample opportunity for newcomers to make their impact, and the city had the feel of a community coming into its own. Warsaw's comparatively new facades and its fast-growing strength were a source of openness. New inhabitants and casual visitors could feel welcome. Social change was more prevalent than stability.

Partly owing to Polish society's rejection of these would-be assimilationists, ideas flowing from the East—regions of Russia and Lithuania, where Jewish nationalist culture had already taken on varied organizational forms and ideological maturity—gained increasing influence in Warsaw's Jewish community. Jewish life was characterized by a large number of political parties, overlapping institutions, violent public debates, and private quarrels.

Three far-sighted and politically realistic Jewish movements emerged on the eve of Poland's independence: Zionism, with its various orientations; the Bund and its organizations; and Agudath Israel, which united Orthodox, Hasidic, and
mitnaged
(Orthodox opponents of Hasidism) elements of Polish Jewry. All three movements viewed the Jews as a distinct nation separate from the Poles, though their differing definitions of what constitutes a distinct nation caused the three groups to be at times bitter rivals.

The Zionist movement in Poland adopted two fundamental principles: the resettlement of Jews in Palestine, and the national rights of Jews living in the Diaspora. The Zionists believed that a national renaissance in Palestine would also have to provide the Jews in the Diaspora, outside Palestine, with a sense of their national unity during their seemingly lengthy sojourn in Europe. In Poland, Zionism undertook intensive activity within Jewish society in the Diaspora as "work for the present," with settlement of Palestine as the future goal (though in the interwar period Hehalutz and other Zionist youth movements actively engaged in fostering immigration to Palestine as a "present-day activity"). Hebrew was revived as a spoken language, but Yiddish remained the movement's working language.

The Bund, the General Jewish Workers Union devoted to secular Jewish nationalism, used Yiddish both for organizing Jewish workers into a separate framework and for disseminating the idea of socialism among Yiddish-speakers. The Bund soon advocated national rights founded on national and cultural autonomy: the right of the individual or group of individuals to maintain a separate language, culture, and social life in a specifically socialist state.

The Bund worked on a national scale throughout Poland, and its primary connections were often class based. Thus, the Bund preferred to work with local non-Jewish socialist parties rather than with bourgeois Jewish organizations. At the same time, many Polish Jews converged in a separate socialist party, which rested on a national Jewish base rather than on international foundations. This phenomenon was unknown in Western Europe, yet it became a movement of considerable strength and impressive achievements in interwar Poland.

Agudath Israel—the Orthodox party that included large Hasidic groups—adopted certain aspects of modern political organization similar to those of other political parties despite its attachment to tradition and its meticulous observance of Jewish law. These aspects included representation in government institutions and limited reforms in the educational system. Agudath Israel had its own press, political leaders, and patronage system. For the most part, Orthodox Jewry rejected Zionism, for it sought the return of Jews to their land by human efforts rather than through divine fiat. Quietistic in its religious orientation, Agudath Israel believed in the return to Palestine and the renaissance of Jewish nationhood as a divine act.

Only a small but disproportionately influential group of religious Jews, organized in the Mizrachi movement, sided with the secularist Zionists. They opposed Agudath Israel by their advocacy of Zionism, and they opposed the secular Zionists with whom they worked closely and cooperatively by pressing for a religious and cultural character to the Zionist efforts.

The guiding principles of the political ideology adopted by the Polish Jews in the period between the wars was that Judaism was not only a religion defined by its rituals, beliefs, and practices, but that Jews constituted a national entity pursuing nationalist politics, education, and culture.

Warsaw was the seat of political party headquarters, representatives, and institutions of the state; the administrative center of welfare and self-help organizations; the hub of educational and cultural networks of varying kinds, writers' groups, and admirers of the Yiddish and Hebrew languages. Most of the newspapers and books were published in Warsaw, to be distributed throughout Poland and sent abroad.

The attraction of training for the free professions brought many Jewish students from Warsaw and other parts of the state to study at schools of higher learning. In some years, Jews composed a substantial percentage of the graduates of all high schools and universities, including many women. Jewish graduates applied to the universities to continue their studies in medicine, pharmacy, law, the humanities, chemistry, the Polish language and literature. The percentage of Jews in higher education began a steady decline in the period between the wars. In the years 1921–22, Jews composed 24.6 percent of all students; in 1925–26, 20.7 percent; in 1934–35, 14.9 percent; and in 1937–38, 9.9 percent.

During the last years of Polish independence prior to World War II, the number of Jewish students filled the limit laid down by quotas, a policy never formally authorized but carried out in practice. Bearing in mind that the percentage of students from the city areas was well above that of students from provincial districts, it appears that the number of Jewish students dropped in relation to the strata of the population to which they belonged.

Jewish students organized their own association, and founded the Academics' House, a boarding school for three hundred students and an assembly hall for many others. From 1928 until the outbreak of war, Jewish historian and Zionist leader Yitzhak Schiper was its last director. An umbrella organization of Jewish students and organizations, it was concerned not only with the defense of students who had come under attack from malevolent groups of Polish youths, but also with initiating cultural activities and sporting events.

At all levels, studies were conducted in the Polish language, even in the independent schools. Some mistakenly view this extensive use of Polish, especially as the everyday idiom of the young people, as indicative of spreading assimilation among the Jews in general and particularly among those in Warsaw. But the Jews were not drawn to assimilation. On the contrary, assimilation was on the decline in interwar Poland. Jews spoke Polish, and they were avid readers of Polish literature and Polish writers, who often portrayed Jews in a very positive light. Many Jews also supported the Polish struggle for independence. Yet, at the same time, they were conscious of their Jewishness, joined Jewish organizations, and thought in terms of the Jewish future. Unlike many German Jews, who thought of themselves as Germans, Polish Jews absorbed Polish culture but did not assimilate into it. For the most part, the assimilation of the Polish-speaking Jews was no more common than the assimilation of the English-speaking Hasidim of Brooklyn. Yet there were notable exceptions.

The contribution of Jews and those of Jewish origin to Polish literature, particularly to poetry in the period between the wars, was distinctive. Unlike American Jewish novelists in the post-World War II period, such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud, few of the major writers of Jewish origin dealt with Jewish subjects and some even converted to Christianity. Even those who used Jewish themes portrayed Jews as figures outside their own spiritual world.

Despite political instability and economic weakness, Jewish culture in Warsaw had a unique vitality. Warsaw was the largest and most important center of creative and cultural activities in both Hebrew and Yiddish. Hebrew, the holy tongue, recalled the days when Jews were in their own land, a time of greatest creativity for the Jewish people. It was the language of the Book and of prayer—but Hebrew had become a dim memory in the minds and tongues of the Jews. The revival of Hebrew in the Diaspora in the nineteenth century was accompanied by attempts to renew the language in literature and periodicals. Popular in intellectual circles, it did not capture the masses and become the language of the people. Only when Hebrew was adopted by the Zionist movement and became an integral part of the national and social renaissance did it change from a symbol to a living language. The Zionists were the primary advocates of the Hebrew language. In contrast, the Bund opposed Hebrew, and certain elements of Agudath Israel were opposed to the secularization of the holy tongue.

In the Diaspora, especially in Poland, Yiddish remained the language of the people. Between the wars, the Jewish languages flourished in Poland, and in Warsaw in particular, even as they were being abandoned in the Soviet Union and the West. Outside immigrant circles in the United States, the use of the languages declined. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Yiddish literature reached maturity, and in the twentieth century, literature, newspapers, and other publications developed culturally and commercially.

Most writers and poets, journalists and publishers in Warsaw were not natives but were drawn to the city from outlying eastern districts, from Lithuania, and from the provincial towns of Poland. The growth and consolidation of Warsaw as a cultural hub derived not only from its being the seat of the largest urban Jewish population in Europe, but also because of its stimulating social-nationalist tendencies and its shifting lifestyles.

In independent Poland there was an abundance of Jewish dailies and weeklies, most in Yiddish but some in Polish and Hebrew. In addition to the commercial press, daily party newspapers were also published. In the years shortly before World War II, according to YIVO, there were 2.30 newspapers in Yiddish, including 27 dailies, 100 weeklies, 24 biweeklies, and 58 monthlies throughout Poland. Evidently, these figures included short-lived publications as well as permanent institutions. Most of the larger papers appeared in Warsaw, where publishing houses also found markets for the original works of well-known Yiddish writers, as well as translations of fiction and nonfiction.