A couple of weeks back I did a post on the fact that by and large my ancestors in eastern Europe were not peasants. Here's a historical paper that explores some of the same terrain, titled "Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles," by Mark Paul, from a Polish-American perspective. I haven't read it yet; it is booklength. But it goes into a lot of the casual smearing of Poles among Jews that I grew up with--and that MJ Rosenberg once explained to me was the backdrop to some of the anger toward Zbig Brzezinski. I see that the paper refers to jokes about Polocks told by the late Ann Landers (Eppie Lederer) and Senator Arlen Specter.
The paper was brought to my attention by my friend Mark, a Catholic with Polish ancestry, who writes:
It's full of anecdotal recollections that paint a picture of Jewish life in Poland (as well as Polish life, for that matter) that covers the spectrum of rich, middle and poor, Chasidic, orthodox and secular, Yiddish and assimilated. When I studied Polish, two of my teachers were Polish Jews--one had fled east and the other survived the war with Polish families--so I learned a bit about this stuff from them.
This was published in English in a Polish journal called Glaukopis. The web site is in Polish and doesn't seem to include a statement of purpose, but the archives are rather wide ranging as regards topics that are covered. I found an article at Sarmatian Review that describes Glaukopis as a "socio-historical" journal and "dedicated to decommunization of Polish and world memory concerning Soviet-occupied Poland and its neighbors." I recognize some of the names associated with the journal, and it appears to be fairly mainstream Polish nationalism, i.e., not an anti-semitic journal. Mark Paul has written extensively (book length) pieces re prewar Polish-Jewish relations which appear to be very well researched and documented and balanced in their presentation.
One interesting piece i need to read is The Massacre At Koniuchy. This is an account of a massacre of as many as 300 Polish peasants (mostly women and children) by pro-Soviet "partisans." What that means is this: during the war there were groups of pro-Soviet "partisans" (many of them Jews) who lived in the forests of eastern Poland, mostly what's now Byelorussia, Lithuania and NE Poland. They lived by "foraging:" i.e., robbing the peasants who themselves lived on the knife's edge of starvation, caught between the German Nazis and the Communist "partisans." If the peasants voluntarily surrendered supplies they were accused of colaboration by the Nazis, if they resisted they were accused of collaboration by the communists. This massacre, according to the diaries and accounts of Jewish participants, was expressly designed to teach the peasants in the area a "lesson."
Here's my special interest. I first got involved with neocons over the Scooter Libby business. You'll disagree, but I think he was a victim of prosecutorial and investigative misconduct. I freely grant that in the big scheme of things he probably got what he deserved, but I stand on the principle that justice must be meted out according to the law, not vigilante style. Anyway, I'm way, way off that reservation now, and I was always upfront that I drew a distinction between opposing Zionist ideology and anti-semitism--or even support for the state of Israel; I maintained that one could oppose Zionist ideology but still support a state of Israel.
My closest contact was a woman whose parents survived the holocaust in Poland. Scratch the surface and she was rabidly anti-Polish: she even quoted with approval (Yitzhak Shamir) the old saw that Poles "sucked in anti-semitism with their mothers' milk." Specifically, she blamed Poles for killing her cousin, a heroic partisan in eastern Poland. I gently pointed out that many of these "partisans" were hated by the peasants because 1) they lived by preying on the peasants like brigands, and 2) their goal was to establish a Soviet-dominated Poland after the war. She wouldn't listen: the Poles could only have acted out of the basest anti-semitism and her heroic cousin could never have rationally been perceived as anything but pure and noble. There could have been no question of anything approaching legitimate grievances against her cousin for anything he had done or participated in during the war.
These types of accounts of extreme human situations interest me for what they tell about human nature.
The longer essay by Mark Paul is well worth reading–though I may only have looked at a fraction of it. It stands against a lifetime’s worth of history from the only perspective on the subject Americans ever hear, and seems suitably restrained and well-footnoted. So it is revisionist in the best sense, and I hope the guy succeeds in making a name for himself in academia.
Some years ago I read a book by an American Jew traveling in Eastern Europe in 1937 and/or 1938 who was interested in the status of European Jews but, unlike his father, was not sympathetic to Zionism. He quoted a Polish woman, a member of the Polish aristocracy if I remember correctly. She said the Polish aristocracy used the Jews to suck what they could out of Polish peasants and then when no more could be extracted discarded the Jews the way you would a worn out sponge.
It was called the Arenda System where Jews collected taxes from the Polish peasants.
link to shtetlinks.jewishgen.org
For a long time, the Katyn Forest massacre was blamed on the Nazis because, well, they were the Nazis.
Glad to see Phil researching/posting issues that speak to the complexity of Polish-Jewish relations. I think it’s quite pertinent to our understanding of the present blinkered, ethnocentric and often chauvanistic, mindset in Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians. The denigration and demonization of ‘the Other’ is quite an important tactic in the zionist playbook and, I might add, very effective. One wonders what could be achieved if the average American would just one day peer over that brick wall of mischaracterization that prevents him from actually seeing a real Palestinian.
(interesting that ‘the other’ is often the one with the names name calling direct at them at them i.e. anti-semite, teorrorist, racist. Define the subject(s) before it defines you.)
You are a sick man Phillip Weiss. I’ve never called anyone a self-hating Jew, but you are the epitome. What are you trying to do w/ this post or this site? Its gone from Anti-Israel to Anti-Judaism. When I read this post, I leave w/ a post by a person who is trying to excuse the actions that took place amongst Poles during the Holocaust.
And Pollock jokes? C’mon Weiss, you make it sound like Jews were the only ones telling these jokes, have you ever been to the Midwest? You are a hack.
Where the hell you coming from, yonira, saying this was so “Anti-Judai[c]“? Due to the article’s talk about the voluntary insularity of the jewish community in Poland? Do you really dispute it? In the face of damn near no-one denying it? Menachem Begin *bragging* that his Polish father absolutely refused to speak Polish?
And indeed why is it such a slander anyway? Every group has the right to be insular if it wants. Indeed the descriptions that are given of this insularity in Poland sounded amazingly like the insularity that those jewish folks desired in Iowa in that recent book “Postville.” Nothing wrong with insularity all by itself: Look at the Amish here in America.
Nor do I see Paul trying to “excuse” any actions, instead merely trying to note the fullness of the Polish-jewish history which apparently insults some anti-commonsensical fantasy you apparently wish to cherish so of … “Poles bad, jews good.”
Haven’t you ever heard of the unbelievable over-representation of Polish jews amongst the Bolsheviks when Stalin handed Poland over to the latter? And then their over-representation once-again in the Bolshevik security services that tormented Poland for so long? The accounts of non-jewish Poles being tortured at the hands of Bolshevik jewish Poles who needed interpreters because they couldn’t ask their questions in Polish even and only spoke Yiddish or Hebrew? Just as this article details the deep and widespread inability to speak Polish in the Polish-jewish community? Or to even recognize the Polish flag? And what about the article’s mention of the predominantly jewish communist partisans during the war, terrorizing the local non-jewish communities?
C’mon dude, no story is absolutely one-sided. Or was the author of “Postville” a self-hating jew too? And all those jewish sources quoted by Paul in his piece?
Like I say, how come you seem to so cherish the utterly one-sided account? Damn near like some religious thing. And then, of course, that’s not even to mention the smell of anti-slavic racism about it. Speak so generally, negatively about “jews” or even “Israelis” and wham, you’re an anti-semite. But apparently talking of something ugly running in Polish “mother’s milk” is just hunky-dory, huh?
“Just as this article details the deep and widespread inability to speak Polish in the Polish-jewish community? Or to even recognize the Polish flag?”
Of course, this is just their right, and any irritation that the Poles might have felt at having their language and their society spurned by people living among them is just another manifestation of innnate Polish anti-semitism.
RoHa wrote:
“… any irritation that the Poles might have felt at having their language and their society spurned by people living among them is just another manifestation of innnate Polish anti-semitism.”
A.) Foolishly untrue: What society of any appreciable size *wouldn’t* see some manifestations of irritation at having it “spurned by people living among them”? Might not be right, but it would be true of any society and any people I think so clearly wasn’t jewish-specific.
B.) But devastating if it is true: I.e., if the irritation at having jews who spurned their language and society living amongst was indeed innate (anti-semitic) racism of “the Poles,’” what’s that say about the positive horror “the jews” feel about *anyone* other than jews living amongst them in Israel? (Speaking so generally about “the jews” only as Ro did about “the Poles.”)
Wouldn’t just be race hatred against *one* other race, but indeed the very definition of a belief in one’s racial supremacy over *everyone* else.
Kinda like … the same sort of belief that German guy with the funny mustache had about Aryans some time ago.
“What society of any appreciable size *wouldn’t* see some manifestations of irritation at having it “spurned by people living among them”? Might not be right, but it would be true of any society and any people I think so clearly wasn’t jewish-specific. ”
Gasp! Are you suggesting that the Polish Jews are at least partly to blame for the anti-semitism they faced?
I was going to make a post on the belligerent and knee-jerk problems people like Phil or academics face when even lightly brushing by a similar topic. Thanks, yonira, for making far more eloquently than I.
When your logic fails to convince, what is left but to call the other person a “self-hating Jew,” a nonsensical term older that “asymmetric warfare.”
And the leaders of Israel came from the thick of this: Bialyst0ck.
From Tony Karon, link to tr.im
Curiously, both the Mark Paul essay and the Karon comment above seem reasonable arguments in favor of Zionism–though not of course of the occupation.
I wonder if the director of Defiance (2008) was aware of this when producing his film?
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The association of “communists = Jews” is racist and innaccurate.
Its old, maybe the basis of other reactionary hateful themes, in reaction to reaction to reaction to reaction.
Better to move on from that ping-pong.