Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles: the Black Legend and the Search for Haman1

REVISED AUGUST 2020 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles: The Black Legend and the Search for Haman1 by Mark Paul “...a Jew from Poland is not and never was simply Polish. … it was clear to Jews and Poles alike that they were two very different peoples who happened to share the same piece of territory. They could be neighbors and business partners, but they were seldom friends and almost never relatives or social or legal equals.” 2 Adam Kirsch, American poet and critic The ethno-nationalist spin for this state of affairs: “It’s all the Poles’ fault!” “Their animus, which carries Polish nationalism into such an aggressively xenophobic articulation, springs primarily from a deep pool of ethnic-cum- religious hatred, which is indigenous to Poland and has historically been aimed at Jews.”3 Jan T. Gross, American sociologist “…the sort of primitive anti-Polish sentiments that too often characterize those whom I shall call ‘professional Jews’.”4 French-Jewish historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet “…it is possible for Jewish people to be racist, just as it is possible for people of other faiths to be.” 5 John Bercow, former Speaker of U.K. House of Commons Herschel Greenbaum tells Ben that he, Ben, may be may be “stupider than a Polish person and they are THE stupidest.” Herschel later refers to Mary, Jesus’ mother, as a prostitute who made up the story of the immaculate conception to cover for her whoring. “An American Pickle,” a 2020 American film directed by Brandon Trost and written by Simon Rich, based on his 2013 short story “Sell Out.” The dialogue about Poles was reported in a matter-of-fact manner by Tablet Magazine (August 10, 2020)—clearly they have a resonance even among Jewish intellectuals 1 The Biblical arch-villain. In Rabbinical tradition, Haman is considered to be an archetype of evil and persecutor of the Jews. 2 Adam Kirsch, “A Cruel and Elusive Family History,” Tablet, January 2, 2018. 3 Jan T. Gross, “Poles Cry for ‘Pure Blood’ Again,” The New York Times, November 16, 2017. 4 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 182. 5 Rachel Cooke, “John Bercow: ‘I may be pompous and an irritant. But I am completely authentic’,” The Guardian, November 10, 2019. 1 Mutual prejudices and stereotypes have been harboured by both Poles and Jews in regard to one another for long centuries. Few scholars in the West, however, have recognized that Jews, no less than Poles, adopted parallel, reciprocal views about the other community.6 A much overworked theme in studies of Polish-Jewish relations is that of the “Other,” with its exclusive focus on Polish attitudes toward Jews. Nowadays, condemnation is often expressed at the very notion that Poles were seen as the “Other” by the 6 A belated recognition by a Jewish American scholar pays lip service to this fact, but he does not explain how it impacted day-to-day relations between these two groups. In fact, the tenor of the memoir to which he wrote the introduction represents the very antithesis of this recognition. At the same time, the views which the two groups held of each other were marked by deeply entrenched prejudices. The peasants and the Gentile populations of these smaller towns despised the Jews for their lack of connection to the land, and distrusted them as cunning and trustworthy trading partners, although their business skills were sometimes admired. The attitude of the Jews toward their Christian neighbours was equally contemptuous. This contempt was mitigated by a feeling of pity resulting from their awareness that the peasants were even poorer than they were themselves. The religious divide reinforced the wide gap between the two groups. The peasants saw the Jews as adherents of a religion which was not only false but deicidal, and found Jewish religious practices bizarre and incomprehensible. To the Jews, Christianity was both idolatrous and hypocritical, since in their eyes it combines a call to “turn the other cheek” with encouragement of violent anti-Semitism. See Antony Polonsky, “Introduction,” in Rubin Katz, Gone to Pitchipoï: A Boy’s Desperate Fight for Survival in Wartime (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), xvi. Two examples of the author’s numerous false and thoroughly discredited claims follow: General Komorowski, the head of the Home Army at the time, “ordered” his men in 1943 “to kill Jews sheltering in the forests”; the Irgun, which perpetrated the infamous 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, “didn’t target civilians.” Ibid., 194, 303. Polonsky expressed no qualms about such blatant fabrications in his introduction. 2 Jews.7 Poles are condemned for not embracing Poland’s Jews as Poles and for not including Jews within the 7 This focus is rather surprising given what well-regarded Jewish writers have said about the Jews themselves. Maurice Samuel (1895–1972), widely celebrated in Jewish circles in his time, referred to the Jews as “the most clannish of peoples.” He stressed the vast divide that separates the Jews from the Gentiles and emphasized that the difference between them is primal and irreconcilable. Furthermore, Jewish ways and Gentile ways are offensive to each other. Samuel went on to say: “We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. Nothing that you do will meet our needs and demands. We will forever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which is not in your nature to build.” See Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1924), 9, 12, 21, 23, 23, 92, 110, 155. Although Samuel states that neither side is superior to the other, at other times, Samuel makes it clear that, if his analysis of Jewish thinking is accurate, the Jews do in fact consider themselves above the goyim, as shown in the following paragraphs. In common with many other authors, Samuel exalts the Jewish belief in social justice (p. 34), but also goes a step further. He suggests that the embrace of social justice is genuine in Jews, but something that is forced in gentiles (pp. 151–53). The theme of the brutish goy, as contrasted with the ethically superior Jew, comes up in Samuel’s characterization of the Jew. When the goy is bad, he is relatively innocent, because he is doing something that is consistent with his base instincts. When the Jew is bad, he is doing something contrary to his higher nature, and this makes the bad Jew really bad. Thus, Samuel writes, “The vulgar type of gentile is not repellent: There is in him an animal grossness which shocks and braces, but does not horrify: He carries it off by virtue of a natural brutality and brutishness which provides a mitigating consistency to his character. But the lowest type of Jew is extraordinarily revolting. There is in him a suggestion of deliquescent putrefaction. The Jew corrupts into vulgarity—he has not a gift for it.” (Pp. 181–82.) Samuel stresses the anti-military mindset of the Jews (pp. 51, 50). Moreover, he sees no real distinction between Jewish cosmopolitanism and Jewish particularism, as neither causes the Jew to loose his innate identity (pp. 122, 150, 152). Thus, in effect, Samuel questions the Jews’ ability to assimilate into another society, something that non-Jewish nationalists also held. Based on the foregoing, Jan Peckis draws the following implications for Polish-Jewish relations: To the extent that Maurice Samuel’s characterization of the Jewish mindset is accurate, it adds stark clarity to much of the Jewish aloofness and hostility to Poles and Poland, and the resulting Polish anti-Semitism that it had provoked. Samuel’s analysis of Jewish cosmopolitanism sheds unmentioned light on the Jewish coolness to Polish efforts to regain independence during the time that Poland was under foreign rule after the Partitions (1795– 1918). Since, to a Jew, all gentiles are quite alike, it really did not matter to the local Jew (except in matters of self-interest) whether Poland was ruled by Poles, or by Prussians, Russians, Austrians, or any other nationality. To the international Jew, it mattered still less whether or not there was a Polish state. The logic was elementary. Why should a Jew die in an insurrection, or devote his life to an independentist effort that, if successful, would merely replace one gentile rule with another gentile rule? Why participate in, much less celebrate, acts of military and patriotic heroism when these are foreign to Jewish thinking in the first place? The Jewish attitude towards the military helps explain other things. For instance, for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews were commonly seen, if not exactly as cowards, as not particularly compatible with military service. During the 1930’s, Endeks complained that even assimilated Jewish writers in Poland write in an insensitive or derogatory way about things which were noble and heroic in Poland’s past. [More recently, we have seen attacks, by Jewish writers, on the onetime idea of Poland as the “Jesus Christ of Nations.”] Samuel’s insights into Jewish anti-militarism and anti-heroism make this very clear. Nowadays, the Endeks are excoriated for believing that an unbridgeable chasm existed between the Jewish soul and the Polish soul, and that mass assimilation and conversion of Poland’s Jews, were it to take place, would not (usually) transform Jews into Poles. As is true of some of their counterparts today, some National Democrats and traditionalist Catholics expressed concern over the “infiltration” of Polish society and the Catholic Church by Polish-acting Jews. Clearly, this attitude was nothing more than a mirror image of the attitudes of many Jewish thinkers, including Maurice Samuel, “Repudiation of the Jewish religion or even of Jewish racial affiliation does not alter the Jew.

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