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Contested Jewish Polishness: Language and Health As Markers for the Position of Jews in Polish Culture and Society in the Interwar Period

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Contested Jewish Polishness: Language and Health As Markers for the Position of Jews in Polish Culture and Society in the Interwar Period Contested Jewish Polishness: Language and Health as Markers for the Position of Jews in Polish Culture and Society in the Interwar Period KATRIN STEFFEN he period between 1918 and 1939 was one of transition in Poland. These Tyears were dominated by the complex transformation of the different areas that had formerly been ruled by Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. The new Poland, as defined by the Versailles Treaty and the Treaty of Riga which ended the Polish–Soviet War, was not a nation-state, but rather, with 30 percent of its population made up of national minorities, to use the termi- nology developed by Roger Brubaker, a nationalizing state.1 Nevertheless, for many people—especially those on the political right—and increasingly after the assassination of President Gabriel Narutowicz in November 1922, who was accused of having been elected by minorities, the state was mainly con- ceptualized as an ethnic nation-state—the kind that the elite of the country, the inteligencja, had desired for a long time.2 And like other nation-states of the region that emerged from the breakup of the tsarist, Habsburg, and German 1 Rogers Brubaker, “Nationalizing States in the ‘Old New’ Europe—and the New,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 19, no. 2 (1996): 411–437. 2 Denis Sdvižkov, Das Zeitalter der Intelligenz. Zur vergleichenden Geschichte der Gebildeten in Europa bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg [The era of the intelligentsia. A comparative history of the educated classes in Europe down to the First World War] (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 135–36. Contested Jewish Polishness 367 empires, this state, as a political entity, had constantly to prove its superiority to the empires that had formerly ruled its territories. The almost always con- tested states of the region felt a strong need to prove their legitimacy, and there was considerable pressure to ensure that this was accomplished successfully. In addition, the interwar years constituted an “area of possibility,” a space full of opportunities and challenges, in which established social, political, economic, ethnic, and gender relations could be ordered anew. In this way the interwar period became, in Samuel Kassow’s words, “a living laboratory” for experi- ments in modern life, for Jews and non-Jews alike, producing new models of politics, self-help, culture, and identification.3 When we take a closer look at the quite diverse Jewish community in Poland, one of those phenomena was the increasing use of Polish as a first lan- guage by a growing number of Jews, sometimes alongside Yiddish and some- times replacing it. The majority of Polish Jews who underwent this linguistic transition continued to regard themselves as Jewish, thereby creating a cultural and political space of “Jewish Polishness.”4 When it comes to research about the life of Jews in Poland during the interwar period, the questions of Polishness and the use of the Polish language within Polish Jewry still needs further inves- tigation since we need to know more about what language change meant for ways of thinking and for social and cultural relations between all citizens of Poland, including Ukrainians, Germans, and Belarusians. In addition, the ques- tion of what Jews thought about Poles, directly linked to the question of their Polishness, and how they perceived the Polish nation and the Polish people, has not yet been in the center of historical investigation.5 We still know more about 3 Samuel Kassow, “Oyf der yidisher gas/On the Jewish Street 1918–1939,” in Polin: 1000 Year History of Polish Jews, ed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Antony Polonsky (Warsaw: POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2014), 227–85, 227. 4 See Katrin Steffen, Jüdische Polonität. Ethnizität und Nation im Spiegel der polnischsprachi- gen jüdischen Presse 1918–1939 (Jewish Polishness: Ethnicity and nation in the light of the Polish-language Jewish press 1918-1939; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 11; and Katrin Steffen, “‘Żydowska polskość’ jako koncepcja tożsamości w polsko-ży- dowskiej prasie okresu międzywojennego i jej dziedzictwo w ‘Naszej Trybunie’ w latach 1940–1952” [“Jewish Polishness” as a conception of identity in the Polish-Jewish press of the interwar period and its inheritance by Nasza Trybuna in the years 1940–1952] in Żydowski Polak, polski Żyd. Problem tożsamości w literaturze polsko-żydowskiej [Jewish Pole, Polish Jew. Problems of identity in Polish-Jewish literature], ed. Alina Molisak and Zuzanna Kołodziejska (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2011), 140–53. 5 Those questions have been raised in my book, Jüdische Polonität (2004), but they still need further investigation. In that book, I acted on the assumption that the mutual per- ception of Jewish Poles and non-Jewish Poles cannot be separated. I took an integrative 368 Part Two Historiographic Questions how Poles thought about Jews and also what divided Jews and Poles rather than what united them—for example, when they met at markets, in courts or shops, when they studied together, and when they played on the same soccer field. One important but under-researched area is the field of public health. Here it quickly becomes apparent that Polish Jewish history during the interwar period was deeply affected by transnational entanglements and transfers of knowledge especially (but not exclusively) from neighboring countries, which should be taken into account in explaining many developments within Polish Jewry to a greater extent than has so far been the case. Although there are some integrated perspectives on the interwar period as a whole, for example, in urban or local history, in other fields such as the history of public health, simultaneous devel- opments both in the majority population and within minority communities have not yet been adequately linked. In this essay, I first reflect on the different contexts of the phenomenon of language change within Polish Jewry. I understand these contexts as one part of a discourse on the position of Jews in Polish culture and society, a discourse made up of components created by Jews and non-Jews alike.6 Following this, I attempt to extend the discourse on Polishness in the interwar period by high- lighting a further component, namely the “Jewish body” and Jewish health. Jewish bodies in a very concrete, anthropological sense, but also as a metaphor, can be seen as collective projections about Jews in Poland and their position in society. Finally, I attempt to unite both components in their relationship to Polishness. approach, including the question about how Jews perceived Poles, Polish politics, Polish anti-Semitism, and Polish history, because this perception formed an important and inte- gral part of “Jewish Polishness.” So the assumption by Anna Landau-Czajka, who takes up similar questions in her recent publication Polska to nie oni. Polska i Polacy w polsko- języcznej prasie żydowskiej II Rzeczypospolitej [Poland is not them. Poland and Poles in the Polish-language Jewish press of the Second Republic] (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2015), that I had shown only the “second side” of the medal, namely, how Jews presented Jewish life to a Polish audience (8), seems to be a crucial misunderstanding. 6 Partly, this articles translates from Katrin Steffen, “Umstrittene jüdische Polonität: Sprache und Körper als Unterscheidungsmythen in der polnischen Kultur” [The debated Jewish Polishness: Language and bodies as myths of difference in the Polish culture], in Aleksander Brückner revisited. Debatten um Polen und Polentum in Geschichte und Gegenwart [Aleksander Brückner revisited. Debates about Poland and the Poles in the past and present], ed. Yvonne Kleinmann and Achim Rabus (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015), 99–122. Contested Jewish Polishness 369 JEWISH POLISHNESS AND LANGUAGE CHANGE IN A MULTILINGUAL ENVIRONMENT The term Jewish Polishness was coined retrospectively in 1946 by the Polish Jewish journalist Jakób Appenszlak, former chief editor of Nasz Przegląd (Our Review), the leading Jewish Polish-language daily newspaper of the interwar period in Warsaw, while he was living in exile in New York. After arriving in New York in 1939, Appenszlak quickly returned to his prewar occupation as a journalist for the Polish Jewish press. In November 1940, together with the sociologist Aryeh Tartakower, he founded the Polish-language paper Nasza Trybuna (Our Tribune), a paper with a print run of some two thousand copies that circulated in the United States and elsewhere until 1952. As an editor, Appenszlak received many letters from his readers that testified to the exis- tence of a community of interpretation, grounded in the readership of the former Nasz Przegląd. In those readers, Polish Jews from all over the world, and in himself, Appenszlak recognized many sentimental feelings for Poland. He analyzed them as follows: In spite of everything, the number of subscribers of Nasza Trybuna in the world, the yearning with which the readership is waiting for the next issue to appear, the letters of gratitude . all of this demonstrates how deeply one part of our intelligentsia has grown into Polishness, or into this specif- ically Jewish Polishness [żydowska polskość].7 For Appenszlak the devotion of the readership to his émigré journal was an incentive to continue his work in exile and to try again and again to find finan- cial support for the newspaper. In the letter in which he coined the term “Jewish Polishness,” he admitted: “I am working very hard to keep alive this irrational project, a Polish Jewish newspaper in America. Naturally it pales in comparison to the Nasz Przegląd, but I cannot break my ties to Poland. .” It is very difficult to define exactly what Polishness is and to know if it relates mainly to the nation, the state, society, religion, culture, or history, or to each one of those components. In addition, we do not know what Appenszlak had in mind by speaking of “Jewish Polishness.” However, he named as one—if not the most important part—the Polish language, which he used for his arti- cles throughout the interwar period in Poland and after 1939 also in the United 7 Steffen, Jüdische Polonität, 11.
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