Polish Intellectuals and Anti-Semitism

...As of this writing, the "left-of-center" political coalition ROAD, which opposes Walesa, has not said a word about the new regulations and laws on religion, divorce, or abortion...

...upon the local authorities to remove the anti-Semitic slogan...

...See Gazeta wyborcza, June 24, 1990, and my article "Look at Lech Walesa Now," The Washington Post, August 14, 1990...

...But it was a weakened Solidarity, with a reduced number of bona fide members...

...On the Jewish side, there was the emergence of the Haskalah (Enlightenment), assimilation, and the Industrial Revolution, in which Jews played an active role—all part of the vast process of modernization that was sweeping Europe...

...by the late 1930s Jewish lawyers and doctors were excluded from professional organizations...

...In the Soviet Union, where there is also rampant anti-Semitism, the liberal intelligentsia has waged an open, unqualified battle against it...

...avenue to social distinction...

...Let me return to the Polish intelligentsia of today...

...Many Ministry of Health officials are likewise known to oppose obscurantist legislation on abortion...

...Yet, although there are more "liberals" in the intelligentsia now than before, attitudes toward Jews seem more complicated and ambivalent than half a century ago...

...After the war, the church became, for virtually all Poles, a haven for the poor and the persecuted, a defender of national values, and an implacable enemy of communism...

...If anti-Semitism were atypical or even (as some Poles maintain) unpopular, then surely Lech Walesa, head of Solidarity, would hardly permit himself to voice sentiments offensive to Jews—and get away with it.* Nor would a * According to Walesa, the charge that a gang of Jews "had gotten hold of the [country's] trough and is bent on destroying us" applies not to "the Jewish people as a 72 • DISSENT Polish Intellectuals and Anti-Semitism patently malicious homily by the Polish primate, Jozef Glemp, be greeted with so much public approval or passed over with scarcely a word of reproof by the country's intellectual and political authorities...

...In addition, the Polish nobility vested the Jews with economic functions it disdained itself to engage in...

...Politically, of course, Solidarity seemed victorious...

...The irony—if that is the word—is that anti-Semitism now seems more insidious than under the communist regime, which many Poles and Jews regarded as the major catalyst of anti-Jewish hatred for nearly half a century...

...And while many priests supported Solidarity, the church as such kept its distance.* Nevertheless, in the public mind, including large sections of the intelligentsia, the church was sacrosanct, and every criticism of it—including criticism of church-sponsored anti-Semitism—was taboo...

...Some observers have argued this is largely due to Poland's self-image—not without basis in fact—as a victim of history...

...During the martial law period that followed, the Church became, in the eyes of a majority of Poles, the major bulwark against a totalitarian (and "Godless") regime...

...Anti-Semitism is now the dominant reaction to any remotely ominous situation...

...In independent Poland they were met increasingly with hatred bordering on the pathological, most of it emanating from the ranks of the nationalist-conservatives...

...More recently, Walesa advanced the novel notion that anti-Semitism is "provoked by Jews who hide their nationality" (see "Poland's Jewish Uproar, And With So Few Jews," by Stephen Engelberg, the New York Times, Sept...

...Such sentiments hardly ever relate to live human beings—that is, the few Jews still in Poland's public life—but rather to phantoms of the past, what Professor Kersten calls "the very embodiment of [the country's] fears...

...If they loved Poland and wished to remain near it, they could take advantage of the hospitality of the Swedish socialists...

...As long as the Jews constituted a separate caste, with their own language, religious customs, and communal institutions, they were not perceived as a serious threat to the Polish nation...

...It is now a distinctively Polish issue...

...WINTER • 1991 • 75 Polish Intellectuals and Anti-Semitism myths are more tolerable than disagreeable truths...

...In Germany acts of contrition have been accompanied by educational efforts to make the population aware of the German responsibility for the Holocaust...

...An example is the Polish government's sponsorship in 1983 of the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—this after a period of officially tolerated "anti-Zionist" diatribes in the press...

...And during Jaruzelski's martial law period, the primate, Jozef Glemp, made it clear that he regarded abortion, divorce, and the "threat" of atheism far more important than the struggle against the regime...

...Many Poles, quite unaware of these mechanisms, would be genuinely shocked if told that their views are not grounded in demonstrable facts and logical argument but in obsessive fears...

...More than twenty years after the frenzied anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, which brought about the exodus of nearly all remaining Polish Jews, hardly a week goes by without some antiSemitic incident either in the capital or in a provincial city...

...Into the void left by the collapse of communism in 1989 stepped a triumphant church...

...Under the pressure of the church, the Senate has recently passed a law making it more difficult to obtain divorces...

...In Mloda Polska, Warsaw, April 28, 1990, as cited by Mina Grabowska in Po prostu, July 19, 1990...

...For an answer, we need another brief glance at the past...

...A good part of the liberal intelligentsia, then, is burdened both by past myths and more recent ones, as well as by an elaborate set of mechanisms for evading reality...

...Among young ones there are many with a genuine interest in and sympathy for Jewish culture and history...

...Janusz Korwin-Mikke, head of an extreme conservative group called "Union for a Realistic Policy," is a commentator given to anti-Semitic diatribes...

...q WINTER • 1991 • 77...

...The liberal intellectual, therefore, was inclined either to keep silent or devise ways to obscure and downplay repugnant policies...

...Under the same pressure, Mazowiecki's government has issued new regulations (without any discussion in the parliament) restricting a woman's access to abortion...

...Kersten: The Poles' perception of the Jews as aliens remains as deeply rooted as before, and the pre-war malevolent stereotype of the Jews as a "nation of pedlars" marked by . . . selfishness, stinginess, craftiness, greed and a penchant for helping only their own kind continues to flourish to this day...

...This image, Professor Samsonowicz maintains, derives from Jews, though not, he explains in a novel twist, from Jews of Polish descent but from those "connected with German or Russian culture . . . who assimilated the stereotypes which Prussian literature and historiography . . . formulated," later joined by the "leading American-British circles," which with typical "Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy" have accused the Poles of not helping the Jews during the war in order to disguise their own failure to do so...

...But open opposition to the church comes hard to most Poles...

...They lie, it seems to me, in Poland's political culture and in the role played by the Catholic church...

...the others, while disapproving of such "provocations," provide him with a forum and even honor...

...It was the church...

...Let me now turn to the way anti-Semitic stereotypes manifest themselves in the "cream" of Polish society, the intelligentsia...

...But this is small comfort for many of those, like myself, who would want to wish Poland wel1...

...The public imagination is obsessed with Jews in the government, in parliament, in the press, in television, and God knows where else...

...His paper, Gazeta wyborcza, has reported faithfully on anti-Semitic outrages, but its criticisms have been hobbled by some of the stereotypes to which a good part of the intelligentsia is addicted...

...But anti-Semitism in Poland after World War II was not simply a creation of the communist regime...

...The situation now is radically different...

...And it is no less revealing that an association of journalists should bestow upon its author an award named after the great Polish poet Antoni Slonimski, himself a frequent target of anti-Semitic attacks before the war and after...

...The Latvian parliament recently passed a law condemning anti-Semitism and providing penalties for incitement to ethnic hatred...

...The relationship between Jews and communism is another case in point...

...In 1985, to take a salient example, a chorus of protest greeted the appearance of Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, which at first nearly all Polish intellectuals, with two prominent exceptions (Jerzy Urban and Artur Sandauer, both Jews), described as a sinister attempt to defame Poland...

...I have dealt thus far with the more extreme "popular" aspects of anti-Jewish bigotry...

...But, inasmuch as they called attention to the central role of antiSemitism in Polish life, at least some liberals preferred to see discussions of anti-Semitism as expressions of "anti-Polonism...

...Gone were apprehensions about the church's agenda: divorce, contraception, "a proper Catholic education," and so on...

...Thus, in the writings of Polish liberals, the Jews' alleged hatred for all things Polish is too often condemned as if it is morally equivalent to Polish anti-Semitism...

...The Jews have become the very embodiment of our fears...

...The attitudes of the intelligentsia toward anti-Semitism are as tangled as they are extraordinary, for one thing because of the role Jews have played in the formation of this social stratum during the nineteenth century, and for another because Polish popular attitudes about Jews and other matters have largely been shaped by the intelligentsia and by the church—often by the two together...

...Our underground passages," she said, "are littered with hundreds of thousands of signs and no one pays any heed...

...Here is an example...

...Nor is this view just a minor aberration, says Ms...

...By the 1930s the only parties opposed to persecution of Jews were the Polish Socialist party, the minuscule Democratic party, and most unambiguously the even smaller Polish Communist party...

...Jewishness came thereby to represent a stigma...

...Three years ago KorwinMikke, in the Catholic-nationalist weekly Lad (September 7, 1988), warned that the behavior of Israel toward Arabs was so bound to inflame Polish opinion that "we shall again have to hide Jews in our cellars, as we did during the war...

...One can identify roughly two groups that arose at that time: the nationalist-conservatives and the liberals...

...The answers were not difficult to fathom...

...Before the war, the demonic image of the "communist Jew" as the enemy of Poland (a metamorphosed anti-Christ) was disdained by the liberals...

...Complacent * In 1950, for instance, in return for a number of concessions, the church pledged itself not to oppose govemment policies, including collectivization, and to apply canonic sanctions against priests involved in anticommunist activities...

...As for anti-Semitism— an organic component of the new political ethos—it would be wrong to suggest the myths and stereotypes of the past are shared by all Poles, liberals or not...

...When Cardinal Glemp delivered his anti-Semitic homily, Premier Mazowiecki, known for his dislike of anti-Semitism, was unable (or unwilling) to protest...

...To this add the image of the Jew as middleman and moneylender—professions largely forced upon the Jews because of their exclusion, by law and common practice, from most other pursuits (as well as from owning land...

...One municipal official, Ewa Domanus, wondered what the fuss was all about...

...But as long as the liberal intelligentsia is reluctant to turn its attention to the historical record and present role of the church, and as long as it refrains from courageously examining its own record, not much change can be expected...

...The French Catholic thinker Jacques Maritain once noted that in Poland "the most odious events are those which occur in circles that, presumably reserved to science and culture, transform themselves into vehicles of racist influence and provokers of passions...

...As it turned out, there was yet another price to pay—the repudiation of Jewish values (again, except for religion...

...It has brought religion back to the classroom, which in Poland means further isolating nonbelievers and non-Catholics and subjecting them to the mercies of a largely intolerant public (there have been several reports of Jewish children set upon by schoolmates, with virtually no rebuke from teacher or principal...

...Which is to say, the price of tolerance was Polonization...

...Jewish writers were subjected to abuse, students physically attacked and forced to occupy special "ghetto benches" at the universities...

...If the country is replete with rumors not only that the Solidarity leader Jacek Kurori and Premier Mazowiecki are Jews but even that Cardinal Glemp is also a Jew, and if walls are plastered with Nazi-style slogans, then we are faced with a kind of mass hysteria...

...The "liberals," on the other hand, spurned any form of national or religious hatred, arguing for tolerance of all minorities, including the Jews...

...In the government daily, Rzeczpospolita (August 11-12, 1990), Krystyna Kersten, a scholar not given to overstating the magnitude of Polish anti-Semitism, writes: In a country practically devoid of a Jewish minority, anti-Jewish paranoia is once more on the rise...

...This perception was only partly correct...

...Before the war, anticlericalism was the stock-in-trade of the left, what with the church firmly on the side of the large landowners and the right-wing political parties...

...Where does the liberal intelligentsia stand on these issues...

...In the twentieth century almost all political parties in Poland incorporated anti-Semitism into their political programs...

...Three and a half million Jews less and half a century later, much the same could be said about Poland today...

...There is much to this theory—but there are other causes too...

...Only this lack of protest can explain the fact that a Solidarity activist, Piotr Krasucki, could tell a foreign journalist, "in what he meant to be a wisecrack," that the "only people" in favor of abortion "were Jews and communists...

...Consumed by fatigue, disenchantment, cynicism, and spreading corruption, one part of the population sank into a stupor, while another rallied around the comforting symbols of Eagle and Cross...

...The church, no longer needing to maintain a modus operandi with a hostile regime, has returned to its real agendas with a vengeance...

...During the legal Solidarity period (September 1980–December 1981) there was a hope that Poland would gradually get out from under the ideological domination of the church and evolve toward a more open and tolerant system...

...In a recent colloquium at Columbia University, Bronislaw Geremek, the chair of Solidarity in the Polish parliament, for years Solidarity's chief intellectual adviser, and a man who spent some of his childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto, urged his listeners not to be preoccupied so much with anti-Semitism in Poland...

...One would have thought the gas chambers, all on Polish soil, and the millions of corpses should have served as a shattering lesson about the horrors of racism...

...Of course the twentieth century has seen infinitely more horrifying outbursts of this madness, but it is precisely the fact that the resurgence of bigotry is taking place in the post-Holocaust and posttotalitarian era that makes it so ominous...

...A number have even learned Hebrew and Yiddish, to produce scholarly works on Jewish subjects—something that would have been utterly unthinkable in prewar Poland...

...In recent decades, the latter have been faced with the question of why a disproportionate number of Jews flocked to communist banners after the war and why some played a prominent role in the ruling apparat...

...It continues to participate in "dialogues" with rabbis and the like, but these leave little imprint on the faithful, including the lower clergy...

...The liberal Catholic weekly Tvgodnik powszechny has a good record in this area, except that it generally refrains from criticizing the church...

...They brought to it a high regard for learning as an * The term zydo-komuna is pieced together from "Zyd" (Jew) and "komunist" (communist...

...It took several attempts to prevail * Two weeklies also comment regularly on anti-Semitic incidents—Polityka, for years a liberally oriented communist, now independent, journal, and the left-of-center Po prostu, which takes its name from the Marxist revisionist magazine that championed "humane socialism" in the 1950s...

...A year later Korwin-Mikke accused "the international Jewish left" of having dragged "Poland into a war with Hitler" (it would have been wiser for Poland to join Hitler against the WINTER • 1991 • 73 Polish Intellectuals and Anti-Semitism Bolsheviks, he wrote...

...Many Ministry of Education officials are known to have opposed the reintroduction of religion on school premises...

...This year he wrote in Mloda Polska (April 28, 1990): The plain truth, of course, is that after 1968 the aggrieved [Polish] Jews went to Israel or to Brooklyn, to do business, like normal people...

...During the four decades of Communist rule there were periods of organized hatred, such as the 1968 campaign, far more openly vicious than anything at present...

...Public attitudes toward Jews were often antagonistic, shaped by Christian myths of the Jew as killer of Christ and corrupter of Christian values...

...Peggy Simon, "Poland's 'Morality Lesson' . . . Abortion, Divorce Are Harder to Obtain in the New Regime," the Washington Post, Sept...

...This helps to explain why a disproportionate number of Jews were in the Polish CP...

...The views of the intelligentsia were not uniform, of course...

...Both the church and the nationalist intelligentsia shaped the popular image of the Jew as not only a contemptible figure but as an enemy of Christendom and of the Polish "national essence" (a term favored by Roman Dmowski, father of the xenophobic National Democratic 74 • DISSENT Polish Intellectuals and Anti-Semitism party—the "Endeks" —founded in the late nineteenth century and holding steady to this day...

...The slogan "A good Jew is a dead Jew" (Dobry Zyd to martwy Zyd)* was daubed over the monument's inscription that "this was the path of suffering and death taken by over 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Nazi extermination camps in the years 1942-1943...

...Even the secular intelligentsia, in the past at least passively 76 • DISSENT Polish Intellectuals and Anti-Semitism anticlerical, was now swept into a religiousnationalist euphoria...

...Korwin-Mikke turns out anti-Semitic invective...

...Although the nineteenth-century Polish liberals repudiated national or religious bigotry, they still had one thing in common with the nationalists: an assumption that the Jews could or should be integrated into Polish society only if they were prepared to become fully assimilated—not religiously, but culturally, linguistically, and socially...

...The tendency to apportion guilt on both sides—the Jewish and the Polish—as well as the general tendency to whitewash Polish anti-Semitism by finding all manner of "rational" reasons for it has taken many forms, the theory of a Jewish conspiracy to defame Poland being one of them...

...For "fears," read "mass paranoia...

...That Jews formed a sizable portion of the nascent intelligentsia in Poland is a fact...

...The communist managers are gone...

...And Michnik's paper has been timorous in criticizing the Church...

...It is a commentary on the editors of Mloda Polska— among them distinguished scholars such as Professor Andrzej Stelmachowski, currently Marshal of the Senate, and the legal expert Jan Olszowski —that they thought it fitting to publish a piece containing standard fascist abuse ("zydo-komuna...

...Some have protested, and some have not hesitated to point to the church as a major source of the new authoritarianism sweeping the country ("a black dictatorship is no better than a red dictatorship" is the way they put it...

...Even the by-now historic discussion of Polish-Jewish relations that in 1987 appeared in the Catholic weekly Tygodnik powszechny, while distinguished for trying to face this topic honestly (especially in the opening essay by Professor Jan Blonski), is not devoid of attempts to place the blame on others...

...The situation had the marks of unrequited love: many Jews desperately tried to become part of Polish culture and society but almost always their efforts met with scorn and hostility...

...whole" but only to those "who are looking out for themselves while giving not a damn about anyone else...

...With nearly all Jews also gone, political manipulation of anti-Semitic sentiments has become less important than its popular survival...

...Of course, Polish anti-Semitism today bears no comparison to its prewar version (where there were plenty of Jews to hound), nor certainly with the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany (where there were enough Jews to kill...

...17, 1990...

...People who had seldom been seen inside a church suddenly became converts—some out of genuine conviction, some for opportunistic reasons...

...Communist anti-Semitism was also rooted in the Polish political culture of the past two centuries, and its rhetoric often resembled that of the prewar "National Democrats" (endecja).*** To the extent that communists could tap popular hatreds, they could also keep them under control—or even, where convenient, switch to a "pro-Jewish" position...

...In fact, the church was ready to collaborate with the communists as long as its institutional demands were met...

...One can account for the behavior of the first group, but what accounts for that of the second...

...The Jew remained a stranger, but a stranger now thrust into the center of Polish life...

...But in those months of Solidarity strength, the church was in no position to impose its dogmas on Polish society...

...A victim will resent the idea that he may himself also victimize others and develop a propensity for self-righteousness and martyrology...

...The church played a constructive role during this period, granting its facilities to dissident writers and artists, lending support to what the opposition then called the "selflimiting revolution...

...The true winner was neither the Jaruzelski regime, whose authority sank to near zero, nor Solidarity, which was torn by bitter feuds...

...On the Polish side, the disintegration of the Polish state at the end of the eighteenth century gave rise to a fiercely nationalistic movement that saw Poland as the victim of history and conspiratorial forces (in the first place, the Jews...

...The situation of the Jews in Poland began to change radically by the mid-eighteenth century and reached a point of crisis about a century later...

...Po prostu's stand is most uncompromising of all...

...Neither did Adam Michnik, the liberal publicist...

...But most have, in effect, capitulated...

...Korwin-Mikke—to return to the present—is a typical representative of the first group while Stelmachowski and Olszowski, mentioned earlier, and many in the journalists' association belong to the second...

...The Jew, that archetypal figure, thus became a problem—a problem, as many Poles saw it, for the survival of Polish identity that included economic competition, interpersonal relations, and politics...

...On the other hand the wanton zydo-komuna, pardon: zydo-socl, had gained control over "Free Europe" and "the Voice of America" —which wasn't hard for these intellectuals, since in America nearly all of them are leftists—and in addition political journalism is almost entirely in Jewish hands.* In late 1990, the Association of Polish Journalists presented Korwin-Mikke with the Antoni Slonimski award for his "intellectual provocations" —a phrase suggesting that this anti-Semite's "provocations" are somehow legitimate or even to be valued...

...In 1956 it supported Gomulka in return for permissions to teach catechism on school premises...

...The Czech intelligentsia has done the same...

...On September 5, 1990, for instance, Gazeta wyborcza —the only daily (edited by Adam Michnik) reporting regularly on such incidents— published a photograph of the Warsaw Monument to the Ghetto Fighters, defaced (not for the first time...

...How to deal with this problem became one of the major concerns—one might say obsessions— of the Polish intelligentsia...

...The first became, next to the Catholic church, the major source of anti-Semitism in Poland...

...2, 1990...

...An essay by the eminent historian Stanislaw Samsonowicz, "The Deep Roots and Long Life of Stereotypes," while exposing the persistence of anti-Semitic stereotypes, "especially among certain circles of young people in the countryside and small towns," nevertheless ends with a peroration on the ostensible Western image of a Pole, "that coarse, uneducated, avaricious simpleton, brute, drunkard—if not gangster— and . . . anti-Semite...

...Only in Poland have the political authorities and the country's intellectual leaders been reluctant to examine themselves and their past critically...