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

Insiders and Outsiders: Dilemmas of Eastern European Jewry, by Richard I. Cohen et al. (eds.), 2010

An Exotic Rarity: Jewish Scholar Accepts Collective Jewish Accountability for the Crimes of the ZYDOKOMUNA (Judeo-Bolshevism)

In typical discourse, everything negative in past Polish-Jewish relations is reflexively blamed on the Poles. This book is a refreshing exception.

JEWISH COMMUNISTS WERE CERTAINLY JEWS

Author Ruth R. Wisse comments, “True believers in applied Marxism resembled the early Christians in claiming to be BETTER Jews or better THAN Jews transposing the merely parochial and limited ethical teachings of Judaism into a universal and practical system.” (p. 197; Emphasis in original).

LASTING IMPLICATIONS OF JEWS IN LEADERSHIP POSITIONS IN COMMUNISM

No one is suggesting collective guilt, or that the sons are responsible for the deeds of their fathers. However, all nations are a community, and the community must accept collective accountability for the deeds of its members, be they good or bad. In nearly all of the discourse that takes place in academia and media, the well-worn phrase, “coming to terms with the past”, is one-sided. It is almost always applied to something that a non-Jew did to a Jew, and never to something that a Jew did to the GOY. This book contains a rare exception: It is a chapter Jonathan Frankel, which evaluates the famous Russian author Solzhenitsyn’s claims in his 200 YEARS TOGETHER [See my review].

Whether or not Jewish Communists are, according to somebody’s opinion, “real” Jews, is irrelevant. Author Jonathan Frankel is brutally frank as he writes, “In the light of these developments, Solzhenitsyn’s insistence that the Jewish people cannot simply shrug off the Trotskys, Uritskys, and Yagodas as ‘non-Jewish’ or outsiders, is certainly persuasive. If Jews take pride in Heinrich Heine, Felix Mendelssohn, Benjamin Disraeli, and Boris Pasternak, who were Jews birth but were baptized into the Christian faith, can it be logical–as distinct from comfortable–to disown the ‘non-Jewish Jews’ who as Bolsheviks participated in destroying Russia’s emergent democracy in 1917; in establishing a brutal (albeit ‘proletarian’) dictatorship; and in provoking a ferocious civil war across the length and breadth of that vast country?’ (p. 185).

Frankel makes this conclusion even stronger as he continues, “This point was made Daniil Pasmanik in the early 1920s when he wrote: ‘Does the Jewish people [EVREISTVO] bear responsibility for Trotsky? Without a doubt, it does. As a rule, nationally minded Jews choose to include within the fold not only the Einsteins and the Ehrlichs, but also Borne and Heine, who opted for baptism. In that case, though, they do not have the right to dissociate themselves from Trotsky and Zinoviev.'” (p. 185).

CONFRONTING TALMUDIC RACISM AND DISOWNING IT

Author Rachel Manekin evaluates the AGUDAT AHIM (AGUDAS ACHIM), a Jewish organization, in late 19th-century Austrian-ruled Galicia, that sought to integrate the Galician Jews into Polish-ness. She focuses on the efforts of Baerish Godenberg, a Galician maskil (enlightened Jew): “In an effort to counter the most popular anti-Semitic accusations of his day, Goldenberg proposed that the government convene a rabbinical synod that would offer a ‘canonical interpretation’ of those passages in the Talmud and other rabbinic works that pertained to non-Jews. The synod would see to it that the proper norms of behavior, as well as correct attitudes toward the state and the non-Jewish population, would be written down in a book available in Yiddish and the language of the country, which would become required reading in all the HEDERS and TALMUD TORAHS (lower-level religious schools) and other Jewish schools.” (p. 123).

ASSIMILATION DOES NOT NECESSARILY TRANSFORM A JEW INTO A MEMBER OF THE POLISH NATION

The Endeks nowadays are often condemned for once suggesting that a Jew who assimilates into Polish culture and society is less interested in “becoming a Pole”, and is more interested in escaping the confines of the ghetto and functioning effectively in broader Polish society–for his own ends. Author Rachel Makekin indirectly touches on these issues.

To begin with, “assimilation” is itself an amorphous term, and much of what passed for assimilation was a superficial and outward Polonization. Rachel Manekin comments, “Goldenberg considered that, with regard to Jews, assimilation should be limited to the spheres of language and dress.” (p. 123).

Manekin writes about how the maskil Goldenberg assessed the assimilation of Galicia’s Jews, “On the face of it, the intelligentsia’s god was assimilation, but what they were really looking for was influence, status, and opportunities. The simple Jew was satisfied if the legal restrictions against him were lifted; he left his political representation to the country’s nobility.” (p. 123).