Black Earth(21)

Poland was a new state drawing together territories from three former empires: Russian, Habsburg, and German. Jews were present in large numbers in almost the entire country, so interaction with them was a part of daily life for the other citizens of Poland. Jews were most of the doctors, lawyers, and traders, and so mediated in contacts with the broader worlds of knowledge, power, and money. Jews paid more than a third of the taxes in Poland, and firms owned by Jews were responsible for about half of the foreign trade. There were about as many assimilated Jews in Poland as there were in Germany; the difference was that for every assimilated Polish Jew there were ten more who spoke Yiddish and were religiously observant in one traditional form or another. Jews in Poland had parallel systems of schooling, a parallel press, and a parallel party system.





The question of loyalty to the Polish state was not resolved simply by answers to census questions about language or religion. It is to yield to ethnic nationalism to imagine that all people who spoke only Polish identified with the Polish state and that people of other backgrounds necessarily did not. Not everyone who spoke Polish was loyal to the new state or even identified with it. Most Poles were peasants, and most peasants awaited some gesture from the state that would arouse their loyalty. The Polish countryside was massively overpopulated, and rural unemployment was staggeringly high. Land reform was halting and insufficient. Rather than redistributing land from the large estates, the Polish state acted as a broker in negotiations for purchases and a source of credit for purchases. Peasants were dissatisfied by slow transactions, and hurt when credits were withdrawn during the Depression. Most peasants wanted both their own plot of land and their traditional rights to shared use of common land, desires that were contradictory in ideology but understandable in practice. When all land was treated as private property with defined owners, ancient rights to the use of pastures and forests could not be enforced. Polish peasants had been immigrating to America in large numbers for half a century, but in the 1920s and 1930s new American laws held them back. Independent Poland assimilated and integrated large numbers of peasants, but had to deal with considerable dissatisfaction in the countryside.

Polish patriotism spread outward from the intelligentsia, a large social group mostly composed of the children of noble landholders and of the rising middle classes, including the children of prosperous Jews. Polish political society was divided into two major orientations with opposing ideas about the design and purposes of the new polity. The most popular movement among Poles was known as National Democracy and led by Roman Dmowski. It favored land reform but only insofar as this helped Poles rather than Ukrainians and Belarusians, who were in some eastern regions of Poland more numerous and just as poor or poorer. The second major formation, descending from the Polish Socialist Party of Józef Pi?sudski, supported land reform in principle, but in power yielded to the voices of the noble landholders it came to see as bastions of the state.

The differences between the two movements on the national and Jewish questions were fundamental. The National Democrats began from the idea that Polish traditions of toleration had doomed the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eighteenth century, and that only ethnic Poles could be trusted. National Democrats tended to emphasize the need to create a nation from Polish-speaking peasants, to regard Ukrainians and other Slavs (perhaps a quarter of the population) as possibly assimilable, but to see Jews (about a tenth of the population) as foreigners. Although the movement was founded by secular nonbelievers influenced by a Social Darwinist conception of life as struggle, with time it assimilated traditional religious antisemitic ideas, such as the responsibility of Jews for the death of Jesus. Like the Roman Catholic Church, National Democrats tended to associate Jews with Bolshevism. The significant presence of Jews in Poland made antisemitism more politically salient there than in Germany, but it also made it more difficult for antisemites such as Dmowski to present Jews in an entirely uniform, stereotyped way. Although conspiratorial thinking and the Judeobolshevik conception were certainly present in religious and secular propaganda, Polish antisemites tended to think of Jews as a Polish rather than a planetary problem.

Dmowski’s opponent, Józef Pi?sudski, began his conception of politics from the state rather than from the nation. He tended to value the traditions of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and to believe that its legacy of toleration was still applicable. He saw individuals as citizens of the state, with reciprocal obligations. He began as a socialist revolutionary, and even as he moved away from his youthful ideals he maintained the conviction that revolutionary violence was justified. Though his supporters were probably less numerous than Dmowski’s, he usually had the tactical advantage of the initiative. Whereas Dmowski tended to think that the Polish nation had to be raised from its peasant roots before statehood could be achieved, Pi?sudski was ready to rally the forces that were available at any given time.