‘The spiritual/cultural gulf between Poles and Jews was chosen by both sides’

Ira Katznelson's lecture at Columbia the other night on the expulsion of Jews from England has prompted my friend Mark, who is half-Polish, to reflect on anti-Semitism in Poland.

I've done a fair amount of reading, although haphazardly, in this area, so your comments raised all sorts of issues for me. One way to address my thoughts would be to quote an author--Israel Shahak--whom you often cite. He's writing about the 1648 Cossack rebellion against and horrifying massacres of the Polish landowners and their (predominantly) Jewish servants:

This typical peasant uprising against extreme oppression, an uprising accompanied not only by massacres committed by the rebels but also by even more horrible atrocities and 'counter-terror' of the Polish magnates' private armies, has remained emblazoned in the consciousness of East-European Jews to this very day -- not, however, as a peasant uprising, a revolt of the oppressed, of the wretched of the earth, nor even as a vengeance visited upon all the servants of the Polish nobility, but as an act of gratuitous anti-Semitism directed against Jews as such.

This was before peasant emancipation and land redistribution. It's a valid point, I think, and the events have been mirrored several times in history. Polish memories of these events are probably equally as one-sided as Jewish memories--the fault is one-sidedly attributed by both groups to Cossack savagery alone, and each group sees itself as martyrs. None of the three groups are entirely wrong, but certainly none are entirely right, either.

I recently came across an interesting book, Shattered Faith, by a Holocaust survivor. For me the description of shtetl life in the inter-war years was fascinating. The author references this matter of Jewish servants of Polish landlords--as well as a lot about Jewish attitudes toward Poles--and he notes that few of the peasants (who were equally Polish and Ukrainian--in fact, all the author's non-Yiddish quotes are actually in Ukrainian, not Polish) ever came in contact with their "own" local Polish nobility, but only with the Jews who were employed by the nobility--and by the Jews they were kept strictly at arms length. (Incidentally, the author claims the Polish word cham--the ultimate "fighting word" in Polish--comes from am ha'aretz, and was the common Jewish expression for Polish peasants!)

Norman Davies has also written about the inter ethnic warfare that went on in the borderlands during WWII: three cornered between Ukrainians, Poles, Jews. Jews and Poles were the big losers. You wouldn't know this outside of Poland, but stupefyingly large numbers of Poles were butchered--and these were ordinary peasants, not landowners. Something like half a million in Galicia alone. As Eva Hoffman (who survived the war in those areas as a young child) notes, Poles feel bitter that they're not even supposed to mourn their own dead.
As Hoffman also notes, each group has its own memories, and each largely ignores those of other groups. I think that's the point of a lot of what Finkelstein says about the Holocaust (haven't read him, just seen references).
Perhaps you'll indulge me this lengthy quote from a lecture Hoffman gave: Contested Memories. She writes very well, and makes some profound points that I believe are central to much of your own project, as well as that of Avraham Burg and some others:

In an eye-opening book, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, the historian David Biale gives an account of Jewish political life in the Diaspora, and shows that through the long centuries of exile, Jews used conscious political theories and political institutions to negotiate their own affairs and relationship with the governing powers of the countries in which they found themselves. Biale’s account is not so much in argument with Yerushalmi’s thesis as an important supplement to it. The interests of Diasporic Jews ran mainly to the preservation of a traditional, religious, separate identity; so politics was used, one could say, in the service of destiny—in the service of maintaining that ahistorical vision of their fate that Yerushalmi describes. In this fundamental aim, the Jews of Poland to a large extent succeeded, though it was success that carried its own price. However, the shtetl, judged by these criteria, was a remarkably resilient social formation, preserving its structures and its religious, legal and educational autonomy over centuries. In the Jewish imagination, the shtetl has become the locus of nostalgia and the metaphor of loss; it is usually seen as a quaint realm, either of Chagall-like innocent spirituality, or of Cossacks and pogroms. But one of the features of the shtetl which struck me was its high level of organization. Symbolically, life was structured by a system of religious belief that governed every aspect of behavior, from eating, to sexuality, to the shaping of the day, the week, the year. More concretely, the shtetl was organized into a network of brotherhoods, societies, and associations, ranging from the important burial brotherhoods to societies for the aid of poor finances and later, cooperative banking associations.
It is quite possible that these communal organizations were a precursor and a preparation for the amazing explosion of Jewish political life which took place in Poland in the interwar period. This interval of Polish independence saw both the rise of ideological, nationalist anti-Semitism, and an exfoliation of Jewish life and creativity, which included the formation of many political parties, the election of numerous Jewish representatives to the Polish parliament, and ongoing, heated debates about the proper relationship between the Jewish minority and the Polish majority.
 ...[O]ne of the fervently debated questions in the field of Polish-Jewish relations is whether there was any continuity between pre- Holocaust Polish history and attitudes, and Polish behavior during the Holocaust itself. The nature of that behavior is also the subject of painful disputes.
The behavior in fact covered the entire spectrum of human possibilities— much as it did in other countries. In the shtetl which I studied, I was told of the kinds of episodes which were reenacted in countless localities throughout Poland. There were Poles who helped rescue Jews, sometimes on an impulse, and some- times with the full knowledge that they were endangering their own and their families’ lives; there were those who informed on their Jewish neighbors, or colluded more actively in anti-Jewish violence, with a variety of motives: for payment, for petty revenge, or out of sheer anti-Semitism. There was a story I was told by a survivor whose entire family was killed in one moment by the local Gestapo, who had probably been notified of their whereabouts by a Polish passer-by. He and another man were kept alive by a family of Polish peasants who built a special hiding place for them, and took enormous and conscious risks over a period of nearly two years to aid them. I think it needs to be remembered that in the awful calculus of the time, it took one act of meanness to end the lives of many; it took the efforts of many to save one Jewish life.
Still, the question of continuity between Polish history and Polish behavior during the Holocaust—that is, the question of intrinsic Polish anti- Semitism—is one on which the views of the various participants most painfully diverge. The Polish participants remind us that Poland was the only country that experienced two invasions—one from Germany, and the other from the Soviet Union. They would say—they have said—that the Jewish populations of the eastern shtetls actively welcomed the Soviets, who were Poland’s historical enemy and occupiers. The Jewish inheritors of this history reiterate that it made sense for Jews to welcome the Soviets, who were seen by them as a much lesser evil than the Nazis, and who brought with them the promises of universal equality and the erasure of ethnic and class differences. Once the Nazi occupation went into full effect, it created unprecedented conditions, which were perhaps more horrifying than anywhere in Europe. In terms of attitudes towards Jews, the situation imposed by the Nazi occupation was one of grotesquely warped morality. Within the Nazi universe, helping and rescuing Jews was punishable by death, whereas giving one’s Jewish neighbors away was rewarded—albeit very poorly. Within this perverted framework, there were people who behaved odiously, and people who behaved heroically; and there was the great majority which was indifferent or indeed ignorant of the tragedy happening in its midst. In their own terms, both parties are right. How can one, then, evaluate—never mind reconcile—their claims, the claims of still living, still rankling memories?
Or, to put this question differently: Can one, in interpreting this extremely difficult past, move beyond the point of view of its participants? Can one, in particular, step away from the perspective of the most victimized subjects? Until now, it has seemed indecent to do so. In our thinking about memory, the perspective of the victims has been the touchstone—and this to some extent has remained untouchable; it has seemed beyond interrogation. And I believe that on the individual level, it should be. The testimony of personal suffering—especially of the degree endured during the Holocaust—should not and cannot be questioned “objectively.” It can, at best, be listened to and understood. And, on the individual level, acts of violence or cruelty against the victims can only be condemned.
But on the collective level, in situations and histories as complex and contested as the Polish one, I think one has to gain a more holistic, more contextual understanding: to understand the interaction of various participants, and the structure of the situation as a whole. Otherwise, one runs the risk of only repeating the separate narratives, and replicating the lack of understanding between them. The historian Saul Friedlander in his book, Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews, speaks of the impossibility of thinking about the Holocaust outside one’s own subject position. Nor do I think for a moment that I could step outside my own subject position—outside my actual experience and family memories, in other words—or that it is desirable for anyone to do so. I think that, in any case, there is hardly such a thing as impartial thinking; unless we are writing from a very long temporal or affective distance, we almost necessarily begin from a mental location, so to speak, and a point of view. On the other hand, there is no contradiction between point of view and strenuous thought. And I think that if one presses one’s own subject position far enough, one eventually always encounters the Other. For no history, and certainly no Jewish history, has taken place in isolation. Now, encountering the Other cannot always lead to reconciliation. There are situations in which the injustices committed in the past, or the inequities of power, are so extreme, that a structural understanding can lead only to an acknowledgment of the wrongs of the past. Of course, if such acknowl- edgment is made by both sides, that can be helpful and can even aid in healing. But in histories as entangled as the Polish-Jewish one—histories which resemble more closely the tangled politics of our own societies—to think of any one group’s memory without taking the other into account is to deny the real conditions of that group’s existence. And I think that if one does examine any one subject position far enough, one also comes upon one’s own weaknesses, or prejudices and projections towards the other—for no one, not even minority groups, are without them.
Since the history of Polish-Jewish relations is so long and varied, it offers a very large field within which one can start asking certain basic questions. One underlying question which concerned me as I was thinking about this past is: what makes for harmonious cross-cultural relations, and what makes them break down? Certainly, the elements of religious and later ideological anti-Semitism in the majority culture affected the relationship between Poles and Jews greatly. And yet, despite this, there were decades and even centuries in their common history when the two groups lived side by side amicably, or at least in a state of benign indiffer- ence. This is something that I think needs to be taken into account. We tend to parse the past through its climactic moments—that is, the moments of violence and conflict. But the long phases in which nothing very notable happened between Poles and Jews suggest to me that the instinct of tolerance is as basic as its opposite, and that when hostilities are not actively stimulated, people and groups are capable of accepting each other, for all their cultural and spiritual differences. The eruptions of active hostility within Polish society usually took place during periods of heightened economic competitiveness, or marked conflict of interest— and there were times, as during various Russian occupations of Poland, when actual Polish and Jewish political interests diverged to a considerable degree.
Still, the deepest and the most obvious factor affecting Polish-Jewish coexistence—a factor which may seem so self-evident as not to bear noting—was that separateness and the failure to create a common sphere of interests and concerns. The cultural and spiritual gulf may have been breached by daily familiarity; but on the fundamental level, it was largely chosen on both sides. The barriers on the Polish side to full Jewish inclusion were high and well fortified; but the determination of most Jews to remain a “nation” apart from the surrounding majority was just as strong. I think that this sustained separateness led to what Zygmunt Bauman in his brilliant book Modernity and the Holocaust calls “the production of distance,” and that it had a great bearing on what happened during the Holocaust. At the moment of greatest danger and vulnerability, it took qualities of exceptional moral strength and courage for a Polish person to help a Jewish one. In the eyes of most Poles, Jews were not within their natural sphere of responsibility; they were not, in the Polish expression, “ours.”
What, then, can we in the “post-” generation do? What attitude should we take towards this painful history—and perhaps towards others? We are not in a position to demand justice, since the wrong was not done to us. And we are not in a position to forgive, since the wrong was not done to us. These are moral rights which belong to the participants in the events themselves; to assert or arrogate such rights for ourselves is, I think, an instance of false appropriation. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission is possible only in the immediate aftermath of horrific events. The privilege of demanding justice, and the magnanimity—I sometimes think the saintliness—of going beyond justice and choosing forgiveness over redress, belongs to those who have suffered. Any attempt to administer trans- generational justice is bound to get caught up in the cyclical logic of revenge—a logic evident, for example, in the recent wars in former Yugoslavia, in which the Serbs, with the help of a very long and stubborn collective memory, have been able to hearken back to their great defeat at the Battle of Kosovo in the fourteenth century as if it were a still present past, and could therefore view themselves as martyrs still at Muslim hands, and frame their campaigns of aggression as wars of redress.
These are some of the things we cannot do. But I think that the task in our generation is exactly to examine the past more strenuously, to press the questions raised by our memories—or, more frequently, received ideas—further; to lift, in other words, our own prohibitions on thought.