From Galicia to Warsaw: Interwar Historians of Polish Jewry
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chapter 15 From Galicia to Warsaw: Interwar Historians of Polish Jewry Natalia Aleksiun Recalling Poland in the aftermath of the First World War, the distinguished Yiddish poet and journalist Melech Ravitch, a native of Galicia (born Zekharye Khone Bergner, in Radymno, near Jarosław), observed: Soon after the First World War, when Galicia was united with Poland, Jewish Galician youth flocked to Warsaw, Białystok and even Wilno [Vilna]. Galicia had always had an excess of educated Jews. [. .] With one sweep, they infiltrated the important positions. [. .] They were quiet and polite, but would conquer stronghold after stronghold.1 Although colored by a slight disdain for Jews from Congress Poland and Lithuania and a good dose of hyperbole, Ravitch’s remarks pointed to an impor- tant but lesser known phenomenon in the aftermath of the First World War. Reminiscent of the more familiar “Litvak invasion” of prior decades (see previ- ous chapters in this volume), Galician Jewish intelligentsia gravitated toward urban centers of the former Russian partition of Poland, especially to the capital of the newly resurrected Polish Republic, drawn in by professional and educational opportunities. Thanks to their education in Polish gymnasia and universities, Galician Jews took leading positions “as teachers in state schools for Jewish children, Jewish secondary schools, and administrators in vari- ous Jewish institutions.”2 University-trained Galician Jews not only “conquered” Jewish institutions in Warsaw as educators, teachers, and journalists, but also 1 Israel Kahan, Sefer buchach: matsevet zikaron le’kehila k’dosha (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1956), 227. Ravitch, born in 1893, settled in Warsaw in 1921, where he belonged to the literary group Di khaliastre. From 1924 to 1934 he served as secretary of the Jewish PEN Club (Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists) at Tłomackie 13 in Warsaw. In 1924, he co-founded the journal Literarishe bleter. 2 Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 19. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�9�8��_0�7 From Galicia To Warsaw: Interwar Historians Of Polish Jewry 371 played a crucial role in creating them. This Galician Jewish network included major historians dedicated to researching the history of Jews in Polish lands. Since Warsaw emerged as the new political, cultural and intellectual center of Polish Jewry, the city proved especially attractive to Galician intellectuals because it offered them positions in Jewish institutions and opportunities to teach and preach Polish Jewish history. It is these historians and their contri- bution to the emergence of Polish Jewish historiography, first in Galicia and then in Warsaw, that this paper highlights. This is not to say that they were the only ones who exerted considerable influence, or that Warsaw was the only center of Jewish history writing at the time. But Galician historians were par- ticularly well-positioned to fill the vacuum that had existed in Congress Poland. While the Russian authorities had closed down Warsaw University to allow its reopening as a Russified Imperial University, Polish universities in Cracow and Lwów had flourished. The prior absence of formal academic institutions encouraging the study of Polish history, combined with the prior lack of an open academic environment in the last decades of the 19th century, encour- aged a veritable “Galician flood” into the field of Polish Jewish history. The historians who became the beacons of Polish Jewish historiography— Mojżesz Schorr (1874–1941), Majer Bałaban (1877–1942), and Ignacy Schiper (1884–1943)—arrived in Warsaw to assume academic, communal and political positions. Schorr, who taught at Lwów University from 1896 to 1922, moved from Lwów to Warsaw, where he became the preacher at the Tłomackie Great Synagogue. In 1925, he was invited to teach at Warsaw University. Bałaban moved first to Częstochowa to head its Jewish Gymnasium, and in 1922, to Warsaw to run the new rabbinical school, Tachkemoni, associated with the Mizrachi religious Zionist movement. Schiper moved to Warsaw around 1919 to carry out his political and academic activities. A leading member of Poalei Tzion in Warsaw, he served as a representative in the Polish Parliament until 1927. He then became director of the Jewish Academic Center in Warsaw (Żydowski Dom Akademicki), reopened that year in a newly established building with a conference room and a dormitory for male Jewish students. Employment opportunities in the Jewish secondary schools in the capital of the Second Polish Republic attracted Galician graduates of the University of Vienna such as Raphael Mahler (1899–1977), who earned a doctorate in 1922 and began teaching Polish and Jewish history, among other topics, at the Gymnasium for Boys of the Ascola Association in Warsaw in 1924.3 3 Askola (Prywatne Gimnazjum i Liceum Towarzystwa “Askola” nr 102, ul. Tłomackie 11)—a private Jewish highschool, founded in 1916 in Warsaw by Zvi Zvulun Weinberg (1884–1971), and Shmuel Weinberg (1888–1938), with funds inherited from their father. Zvi Zvulun served .