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

Poland Reborn, by Roy Devereux. 1922. Chapman and Hall, London

Jewish Separatism. Jewish Vocations. Bogus Pogroms. Jewish Coolness to the New Polish State. Judeo-Bolshevism

My review is based on the original 1922 edition. The author had extensive firsthand familiarity with Poland. [Roy Devereux is the pseudonym of Margaret Rose Roy (McAdam) Pember-Devereux, a British travel writer and novelist.]

POLES DID NOT PUT JEWS INTO GHETTOS. JEWS DID IT THEMSELVES (SELF-SEGRATION, EVEN SELF-IMPOSED APARTHEID)

Devereux writes, “The quarters, or Ghettoes, in which they lived apart were created solely by the Jewish tendency towards segregation. So little, indeed, did the Poles desire to isolate the Jews from the rest of the population that the Four Years’ Diet–which lasted from 1788 to 1791–passed measures with the object of assimilating them.” (p. 198).

POLAND’S JEWS, WITH SOME EXCEPTIONS, WERE NOT POLISH

Were some of Poland’s Jews descended from the Khazars? Whatever they were, they had minimal ties to Polishness, even after so many centuries. Devereux notes that, “And the great majority of them are not more civilized or more Polish than they were when the two streams, one wandering Semitic merchants from the Rhine, the other Judaized Tartars [Tatars] from the East, met and settled in Poland at intervals during the past eight hundred years.” (p. 201).

JEWISH OCCUPATIONAL STRUCTURE: IT CREATED A CODEPENDENCY

The author thus characterizes the Jews, “These people, including the Nationalist and Zionist factions, number roughly 4,000,000, mostly middlemen and small traders, for the Eastern Jew is hardly ever a producer and never a tiller of the soil.” (p. 201).

Devereux interviewed a Polish landlord, who said, “‘It will take a generation at least to make capable business men out of Polish middle-class youth. Hitherto any landlord who tried to dispense with the Jewish broker would have been ruined. One would have lost far more through the incapacity of the Christian than one lost through the dishonesty of the Jew.'” (pp. 202-203).

JEWISH PROFITEERING AND THE INFANT NEW POLISH STATE

Devereux comments, “The first action of the new Government was to commandeer a percentage of the foodstuffs produced in the country, but the rations, issued gratuitously in the most afflicted regions, and at a fixed maximum price elsewhere, were insufficient to keep body and soul together. Furious speculation, chiefly conducted by Jewish middlemen, sent up the price of the remaining stocks, sold in an open market, to fantastic heights.” (pp. 135-136).

A few years later, according to Devereux, “Since the conclusion of the Peace of Riga with the Soviet representatives a considerable amount of illicit bartering, conducted principally by Jews, has gone on between the two countries.” (p. 169).

JEWISH DISLOYALTY TO POLAND (1914-1920)

Devereux continues, “At Wloclawek, as I was told by an eye-witness–who, by the way, was not a Pole–the Jewish inhabitants welcomed the German officers on their knees and kissed their hands. From that moment they became the accomplices and agents of the enemy. In Galicia thousands of Poles were denounced by the Jews to the Austrians and suffered in consequence imprisonment and death. Later on at Ziedlce–I have it on the authority of a Red Cross Commissioners of neutral nationality who related what he had himself seen–hundreds of Poles were disarmed by the Jews who had joined the ranks of the Bolshevik invaders.” (p. 199).

BOGUS POGROM ACCUSATIONS DEBUNKED (1918)

The author thus describes the investigative missions of Henry Morgenthau and Sir Stuart Samuel, “In response to accusations of having instigated pogroms–accusations emanating from Germany and echoed by sections of the Jewish and Liberal Press here and in America–M. Paderewski invited representatives of both nations to come to Poland for the purpose of investigating these charges…The results was a complete vindication of the Polish authorities…” (p. 200).

THE SO-CALLED MINORITIES TREATY (1918): EXPANSIVE SPECIAL RIGHTS FOR JEWS

Poland’s Jews were not seeking the rights of a cultural and religious minority–rights that they already freely had. They were seeking separatist rights. Devereux sagely comments, “Its leaders demand the recognition of the Jews as in independent national minority with its own schools, tribunals, and even its own Diet, all under the exclusive control and direction of freely elected representatives of the Jewish community. The preposterous nature of these pretensions becomes evident if we transport them from Poland to England or to America. What should we say to our Jews if they were to propose the erection of a State within our State wherein the Jewish population would cease to be amenable to our laws or to our social regulations? It is obvious that the Poles will never, and could never, consent to such an abrogation of their rights of sovereignty, and that the agitation for this autonomy only serves to envenom their animosity towards the alien subjects of the Republic.” (p. 206).

ZYDOKOMUNA: IN MAINSTREAM JEWISH POLITICAL PARTIES

The Jewish love affair with Communism went far beyond membership in the Communist Party. It is also true of large, conventional Jewish political parties, such as the Bund. Devereux thus describes it, “But the most formidable instrument of Jewish Communism is the Bund, the Trade Union of the Jewish industrial workers, which also receives its inspiration from Moscow…The birthplace of the Bund was Russia, where its adherents took part in the revolutionary struggle of 1905 and 1906.” (p. 207).

ZYDOKOMUNA (JUDEO-BOLSHEVISM): THE BRAINS BEHIND COMMUNISM

With reference to the 1920 Polish-Soviet War, Devereux writes, “The fact that Jews play so large a part in the maintenance of the Bolshevik regime is not likely to dispose Polish national sentiment in their favor. In some degree the identification of the Jews with Bolshevism must be attributed to their superior education…As in the proletariat of  Eastern Europe only the Jews possessed these qualifications, the Moscow dictators enrolled them by the thousand.” (p. 205).

Devereux concludes that, “Whether or no [not] Bolshevism is, as the majority of Poles believe, a Jewish invention, the fact remains that the Jewish political leaders have never publicly repudiated it and that Communism as a creed has found its only genuine disciples and propagators in Poland among the Israelitish communities.” (p. 205).

THE HOLOCAUST, AS VENGEANCE FOR THE ZYDOKOMUNA, PROPHESIED

Devereux writes, “According to a very intelligent Assimilator in Warsaw, any catastrophic end to the Soviet regime would precipitate a pogrom on a gigantic scale, for among the refugees who are continually crossing the frontier between Russia and Poland are an increasing number of Jews, intent on escaping the vengeance which the Russian peasant has begun to visit upon their race. ‘We are prepared,’ he said, ‘for a massacre that will wipe out at least 15 per cent of the Jewish population in Russia.'” (p. 208).

Twenty years later it happened, albeit in a somewhat different way. The Nazi German invader recruited many Ukrainians, Baltics, and others to join them in the mass murder of the local Jews. Before that, innocent locals had long been dying because of the deeds of the Jewish Communists, and now the wheel had turned: Innocent Jews would die in similar collective retaliation for the crimes of the Jewish Communists.

ROMAN DMOWSKI: A GIFTED LEADER

Devereux knew Roman Dmowski, and characterized him as follows, “Intelligence adorned by culture, expressing itself through the medium of incisive wit and a rather erratic brilliance in conversation–these qualities M. Dmowski possesses in an eminent degree, as I was able to judge at the time of our meeting in one of those rare London drawing-rooms where conversation is a habit.” (p. 39).