Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

On The Edge Of Destruction: Jews Of Poland Between The Two World Wars, by Celia Stopnicka Heller. 1976

Very Polonophobic Tone. Jews Screwed Poland: Candor on Jewish Disloyalty to Poland in the Crucial 1920 Bolshevik War

Celia Heller combines a great deal of detail on Jewish life in prewar Poland with an over-reliance on selectively negative anecdotes, from individual Jews, archived in the leftist-oriented YIVO Institute, and her complete avoidance of anecdotes from the Polish side. How about, for instance, some testimonies of Poles who had been driven out of business, and reduced to penury, by unfair Jewish competition? Or is it where, if a Jew is harmed it is a tragedy, but if a Pole is harmed then it is no big deal?

The very title of the book is an Orwellian fiction. It is a German guilt diffusion tactic in that it implicitly connects pre-WWII Polish Jews under Poland with their experience under Nazi German rule. It is as Nazism and the Holocaust had been caused by “Polish antisemitism”.

JEWS SCREWED POLAND: 1920 JEWISH COLLABORATION WITH THE SOVIET INVADERS OF POLAND

Heller (p. 310) translates and cites philo-Semite Pilsudski’s comments on Jewish behaviors during the 1920 Polish-Soviet War: “The Jews did not behave badly everywhere. In the [towns of] Lomza and Mazowiecki they bravely opposed the Bolsheviks…But strange, as many things in Poland are, in the neighborhood [of Lomza] in [the towns of] Lokow, Siedlce, Kaluszyn, Bialystok, Wlodawa, there were numerous, even massive betrayals on part of Jews.”

JEWISH SEPARATIST DEMANDS AGAINST POLAND WERE NOT EVEN INTERNALLY CONSISTENT

With reference to the so-called Minorities Treaty around 1918, Heller faults Poles for being unwilling to step aside and bestow upon the Jews a nation-within-nation status. Yet the balkanization of Poland that this would have caused would have included a linguistic fragmentation, not only Poles from Jews, but also Jews from Jews. She notes: “However, one must also admit that had the Polish government followed a policy of implementing for Jews the [Minority] Treaty’s provision of public schools in the minority’s language, the task would have been far from easy. There was bitter strife among Jews over the language of instruction (Yiddish or Hebrew) and over the general orientation (traditional or secular). Each side tried to press on the Polish government its own conception of Jewish schools, after the Minorities Treaty was signed.” (p. 220).

JEWS, TOO, CAN BE PREJUDICED

Heller’s preoccupation with popular Polish prejudices against Jews is counterbalanced by her inadvertent admission of reciprocal ones: “It was considered repulsive and un-Jewish for a man to get drunk. Of anyone who did, it was said, ‘He drinks like a gentile.'” (p. 150).

JEWISH ASSIMILATION DID MAKE A DIFFERENCE AFTER ALL

In her efforts to paint Polish Jews as the inevitable victims of anti-Semitism no matter what they did, Heller bends over backwards to find anecdotal examples of assimilated Polish Jews experiencing prejudice. But, by her own admission, there were only, at most, 200,000 assimilated Jews (p. 188), which constituted a mere 6% of Poland’s Jews. How could such a tiny fraction of Jews enjoy the full benefits of the Polish nation when they were, to begin with, conceptually attached to such a heavy ballast of unassimilated Jews? Heller does not help her case when she quotes Hartglas, an assimilated Jew (pp. 208-209) who recoiled at Polish injustices to Jews in general, while admitting: “I personally did not experience them.” Now, if injustices to Polish Jews were routine, even to assimilated Jews, as Heller would have her readers tacitly believe, how could this possibly be true?

EXTREMIST POLISH VIOLENCE AGAINST JEWS WAS MARGINAL

Heller also undermines her doom-and-gloom portrayal of Polish Jewry when she discusses Jews organizing defenses against violent attacks by Polish hoodlums and nationalist extremists in the 1930’s (pp. 286-291). Small groups of Jewish men, usually armed with such meager things as clubs and perhaps a few firearms, were often successful in preventing or driving off such attacks. Now, were the attacks anything other than unorganized, uncommon, and small-scale, how could such defenses possibly enjoy success?

SHOULD POLAND HAVE FOREVER SUBMITTED TO THE JEWISH YOKE?

Heller suggests that, instead of trying to force Jews to emigrate, Poles should have welcomed the Jews’ predilection for commerce to help lift Poland out of poverty. But, even if successful, this would have relegated the Poles to permanent economic underclass status in their own nation. She disingenuously contrasts Polish boycotts of Jews with the favorable acceptance of Jews by Czechoslovakia and America. But, unlike in Poland, Jews were only a tiny percentage of these nations, and the latter, very unlike Poland, enjoyed a vast and rapidly-expanding economy.

Author Celia Heller falsely charges the Polish nationalists (presumably some of the Endeks) with wanting to force all Jews out of Poland. In fact, nationalists were willing to retain some 500,000 Polish Jews (out of the 3,300,000). Minorities, when small, posed no problems. For instance, there never was a significant body of Polish prejudices directed against endogenous Polish Muslims, the descendants of Tatars, or against Armenians.

MORE OBJECTIVE BOOKS AVAILABLE

Heller’s disastrous portrayal of Poland’s prewar Jewry contrasts with that of Polish-Jewish scholar Joseph Marcus and his book, SOCIAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE JEWS in POLAND, 1919-1939. Contrary to Heller’s focus on Jewish poverty, Marcus shows that Polish Jews remained, on average, wealthier than Poles. According to Marcus, the main factors hindering Poland’s Jews were the poverty of Poland as a whole and the excessive numbers of Jews crowded into Poland, not Polish discriminatory policies designed to limit Jewish economic dominance:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/average-jew-better-off-than-average-pole-marcus/

See also Abramsky:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/1930s-poland-jewish-economic-hegemony-harms-nonjews-abramsky/