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

Studies in Polish Life and History, by A.E. Tennant. 1924

Pre-Mieszko Slavic Achievements. Jewish Complicity in Partitions. Jews and the Pre-Partitions Decay of Poland. Jews and the Crusades

This work is a Scottish perspective on the history of Poland. It covers many subjects in its broad sweep of Polish history (review based on the original 1924 edition). It contains a wealth of information. For instance, author Tennant evaluates the “Poland as Jesus Christ of Nations” concepts of Krasinski (lesser form) and that of Mickiewicz and Towianski (more extreme form). Both stemmed from the attempt to understand why God was allowing Poland to undergo so much injustice and undeserved suffering. (pp. 234-235).

There was no connotation, as so often insinuated by many Jews and cultural Marxists in academia today, that “Poland as Jesus Christ of Nations” meant that Poles think that they never did anything wrong. The nowadays-customary hostility to Poland the Jesus Christ of Nations owes to the fact that it does not fit the standard narrative of the victim Jew and the Polish Catholic villain.

POLAND’S STRENGTHS AND POLAND’S LIABILITIES

The author repeatedly focuses on Polish individualism and love of freedom–one that was both a strength and a weakness. Tennant also considers Slowacki the Polish Shelley. (p. 242).

EARLY POLISH (OR PROTO-POLISH) SLAVS: THE “GERMANS BUILD POLAND” AND “JEWS BUILD POLAND” MYTHS DEBUNKED

Some authors had advanced the rather offensive notion that the early Slavs were backwards savages, and that only the influences of the Germans (and Jews) civilized them and enabled them to achieve anything. Tennant implicitly challenges this racist notion. He notes the distinctive character of the Poles as one that had long preceded the reign of Mieszko I (962-999), as he comments, (quote) There are many interesting tales, more or less legendary, of his predecessors during the three hundred years from the establishment by Lech I of his capital at Gnieszno [Gniezno]. These tales show that the Poles had even then marked individuality and a democratic ideal of government rare in the world at any time, and unique in those early ages. The person of a prince, or the preservation of a dynasty, was of small account to them. Over and over again, the people took matters into their own hands and changed political methods or governors that did not suit them. (unquote). (p. 34).

For more evidence that there was a substantial Polish culture long before the appearance of German and Jewish influence, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/germans-built-poland-is-a-myth-piskorski/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/germans-built-poland-is-a-myth-macinnes/

JEWS AND CRUSADERS: NOT BLACK AND WHITE

Tennant quotes a figure of 12,000 Jews massacred in Germany during the First Crusade (p. 39), but cites no source for this number. [Much lower more-recent figures have been cited.] He also credits the influence of St. Bernard in preventing a repeat of this tragedy during next Crusade (1146 A. D.). These events led many Jews to seek safety in Poland.

DID JEWS SIGNIFICANTLY CONTRIBUTE TO THE PRE-PARTITIONS DECLINE OF POLAND?

Nowadays, the Jews in Poland are depicted as more or less the puppets of the nobility, and as ones that merely transmitted and enacted the ruinous and exploitive policies of the nobility to others. In contrast Tennant, when describing the decline of Poland in the decades leading up to the Partitions, portrays the situation as multifaceted, and more as one in which the nobility were relatively uninvolved, and in which the Jews largely were acting on their own. Thus, he writes, (quote) The soil, cultivated by inefficient and uneconomic self-labor, was neglected and unproductive. Industry and commerce languished in the hands of Jews and foreigners. The nobles, who alone had capital, took no part in such matters, and the disfranchised and degraded descendants of the older race of enterprising burghers had neither spirit nor money wherewith to engage in or extend business. (unquote). (p. 80).

In thinking about all this, we must not confuse cause and effect. For instance, did the inertia of the Polish nobility encourage Jewish economic dominance, or did the Jewish economic dominance encourage the inertia of the Polish nobility?

SERFDOM: ITS BEGINNING AND ITS END

Villeinage had a late appearance in Poland. Before the 15th century, there was a very large class of working people in existence that was not of noble birth, yet were freemen. These workers, called KMETONES or PLEBEII in legal documents, paid rent to their landowners. Unlike serfs, they were free to live where they chose. In 1496, the ownership of land by plebeians was outlawed, and these people were forced to give up any land they already owned. In addition, they were now forbidden from moving from place to place without the permission of the landlord, a permission that was rarely granted. That was the beginning of legal serfdom in Poland. (p. 164).

Tennant considers serfdom ended in 1794 in Poland, before that in Prussia (1823), Austria (1848), and Russia (1861). In 1794, Kosciuszko restored freedom of movement to the peasants, and gave them a right in perpetuity to the usufruct of their land, even though compulsory labor still existed. (p. 171).

However, other authors do not consider serfdom ended until peasants can own their own land. This latter definition is followed in the ensuing section of this review.

PRUSSIAN CLASS-AGAINST-CLASS POLICIES BACKFIRE

The Partitioning powers, employing a divide et impera policy, played off one Polish social class against another, notably through the emancipation of the peasantry. In German-ruled northwest Poland, the ending of serfdom had the opposite of the intended effect. Tennant comments, (quote) In 1823 the peasants’ tenures were converted into freehold, and very soon there were thousands of peasant proprietors whose former lords were “compensated” by being allowed to retain one-third of their lands in their own hands! These peasants, previously indifferent to national ideals, were won in church and school for Polish nationalism, and in 1830 twelve thousand Poles of Posen [Poznan] took part in the rising in the Kingdom…The educational and economic policy of Prussia had transformed the serfs into prosperous small-holders and urban workers, educated and lifted out of their former degraded condition. They had ungratefully become, not good Germans, but a Polish middle class with a strong national feeling totally opposed to Prussia. (unquote). (pp. 156-157).

THE POLISH NATIONAL MOVEMENT FIGHTS BACK

By the beginning of the 20th century, Endek policies were already bearing substantial fruit. Tennant comments, (quote) The attempted conversion of the peasants into good Russians, alluded to above, had no greater success. The schools were neglected and deserted, their influence in introducing Russian culture nil. Clandestine instruction in Polish was given to the peasants, and the object of the National League, which was formed for the purpose, was political. It aimed at keeping nationalism alive among the people, and so successful that its leader, M. Dmowski, averred “they were the army of the national movement” during the Russian revolutionary crisis in 1905. At the elections to the first Duma in 1906, a solid body of thirty-six National Democrats was returned from Poland, which formed a separate party whose vote was often a casting one. (unquote). (p. 153). [No wonder that the Jews supporting their own candidate, in the 1912 Duma elections, was a big political loss to Poland, thus provoking Dmowski’s selectively-condemned retaliatory boycott of the Jews.]

THE GERMANS STEAL COPERNICUS

Tennant is quite trenchant about this matter, (quote) Germany, after her manner, lays claim to him as one of her sons because he was born at Thorn [Torun] and sat for a time in the Prussian Landtag. She omits, however, to mention that at the time of his birth Prussia was a fief of the Polish crown, for in 1466 the Teutonic Order had definitely ceded West Prussia, of which Thorn is a chief town, to Poland; that Copernicus’s father was a native of Cracow who had settled in Thorn as a wholesale merchant, and that the famous astronomer wrote the word “Polonos” after the Latinized form of his name. Germany’s claim may therefore, we think, dismissed without appeal! (unquote). (p. 214).