Search Results

This chapter studies the academic agenda of professional Jewish historians who received their training before 1918, in the imperial context of Austria–Hungary, at the universities of Lwów, Kraków, and Vienna, and the social and political contexts in which they were active. It shows that Polish Jewish historiography emerged as a field of interest among the Polish intelligentsia and the enlightened Jewish elite throughout partitioned Polish lands in the early to mid-nineteenth century. This new cohort boasted professional university training and saw themselves as part of the guild. In the early works of Schorr, Schiper, and Bałaban in the first decade of the twentieth century, a more substantial and critical scholarship on the history of the Jews of Poland emerged. The chapter then argues that their understanding of Polish Jewish history was shaped by their immersion in Polish historical writing and by their responses to political developments in Galicia, such as the emergence of the Jewish national movement and the increasingly complex position of the Jewish community in the region in relation to the Polish and Ukrainian national narratives.

This chapter looks at the tensions between popular and scholarly writing on Polish Jewish history. The chapter follows the channels through which Polish Jewish historical scholarship reached a broader public in Poland. Although ideologically animated, this historical discourse often served practical political purposes. Polish Jewish historians worked in close relationship with Jewish communities, and they believed that by pursuing a scholarly course they were fulfilling an important social, cultural, and political mission. It further discusses a new generation of university-educated rabbis who delivered sermons for Jewish schoolchildren and soldiers and participated in public ceremonies commemorating events of Polish Jewish history. The chapter reflects how private and state schools for Jewish children commemorated national Polish holidays, taught Polish and Polish Jewish history, and took students on historical tours. Time and again, Jewish representatives at both the local and national level referred to history to strengthen their political claims.

This chapter focuses on the foundations of the study of Polish Jewish history in the second half of the nineteenth-century. It argues that modern interest in Jewish history in Poland emerged at a time of acute political crisis, as members of the Polish elite studied the rise of Poland as a regional power in the early modern period and its subsequent collapse at the end of the eighteenth century. The chapter examines the emergence of scholarly writing on the history of Jews in the Polish lands and the ideas that drove the development of this new field. It tracks the ways in which non-Jewish Polish writers such as Tadeusz Czacki, Wacław Aleksander Maciejowski, and Władysław Smoleński engaged with the subject of the Jewish past in the Polish lands. The chapter demonstrates how their programmes, questions, and biases spurred Polish Jewish authors, such as Aleksander Kraushar and Ludwik Gumplowicz, to bring a historical dimension to their public discussions about the place of the Jews in the Polish lands and to their agenda for recasting Jewish relations with the surrounding society.

This chapter recalls the emergence and dissemination of academic and popular writing of Polish Jewish history by university-trained Jewish historians in interwar Poland, tracing the development of the field from its early beginnings in the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War and the Holocaust. It discusses how Polish Jewish historians were driven by the hope that their work would have political implications beyond the Jewish community, by influencing Polish historical scholarship and Polish intellectual elites. In explaining the Jews and the so-called Jewish question to a Polish audience, national Jewish historians followed — without acknowledging it — in the footsteps of nineteenth-century integrationist authors. The chapter then highlights how they emphasized the Jewish connection to the country and the flourishing of Jewish culture in the periods of Poland's prosperity, and explores how they underlined the Jews' contribution to the country's economic development. The chapter looks at how historians played an active role in shaping the self-understanding of Jewish citizens of the Second Polish Republic into a decidedly Polish Jewish identity.

This chapter examines some problems posed by the Jewish pluralism paradigm. With regard to the metasolution of influence, there is a firm article of faith shared by practically all of today's Judaica scholars that, in all times and places, pre-modern or ‘traditional’ Jews lived in intimate interaction with surrounding cultures to the point where they may be considered to be embedded in them and, consequently, indebted to them in terms of culture. This contrasts with an older conception of Jewish culture which represented Jews as living in at least semi-isolation from the non-Jewish world. The chapter thus demonstrates that there are more than these two possible approaches to the history of Jewish culture, and that these two themselves should be understood in a more sophisticated way. It asserts that the first approach (universal cultural influence, in its incarnation as hybridity theory), when applied mechanically, unimaginatively, and uncritically can be as ideological, dogmatic, and inappropriate as the second (Jewish cultural autonomy) often has been. The chapter next contemplates the metahistories implied by the various approaches to Jewish cultural history and their relationship to intellectual presuppositions for engaging in Jewish studies in the academy.

This chapter cites the book written by Michael C. Steinlauf called Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (1997), which is considered a classic study of the place of the Holocaust in Polish historical consciousness. It analyzes the challenges that confront the pioneering museum of the history of Polish Jews from the unique vantage point of an American Jewish specialist in Polish Jewish history. It also talks about the active collaboration of Poles and Jews from Poland, Israel, and Western countries that has characterized every stage of the museum since its inception. The chapter describes that the exhibitions in the museum not only display the assaults on Jews and the destruction of Jewish civilization, but centuries of Jewish life as well. It mentions Steinlauf's vision of having the museum correspond to the Jews' own definition of poylishe yidn.

This chapter studies Jehiel Isaiah Trunk's Poyln and its place in Jewish Polish history. Trunk's Poyln is more than just an autobiography. In the words of Trunk's nephew, the historian Isaiah Trunk, it is an artistic description of the life of Polish Jewry: ‘the Trunk saga became an epos of Polish Jews’. To call a work an ‘epos’ or ‘epic poem’ implies that it has many parts and cuts a broad swathe through history. It may also be written and rewritten over long periods of time. The chapter adds to the knowledge of the history of Polish Jews, based on the epos of Poyln and other writings by J. I. Trunk.

This chapter discusses Yitzhak Schiper's study of hasidism in Poland. By the beginning of the Second World War, Yitzhak (Ignacy) Schiper was a recognized authority on Polish Jewish history. In the very midst of the war, while incarcerated in the Warsaw ghetto, Schiper kept up his research and continued to write, persisting up to the very end. It now appears that most of Schiper's manuscript on hasidism survived. Two of the original three bulky notebooks into which Schiper had copied his completed work were discovered several years ago by a young student of Hebrew at Warsaw University, Zbigniew Targielski. Schiper's monograph is a brand plucked from the fire, a remnant of the fine historiographical literature produced by Polish Jewry, and testimony to the author's refusal to abandon the historian's mission even in the face of disaster and destruction.

This chapter focuses on Urke Nachalnik, who began an eight-year sentence in Rawicz Prison in 1927 for a bank robbery in Warsaw. Urke Nachalnik belongs to the underworld, perhaps even more so today than in his own time in Poland between the wars. Equally out of place in the sentimentalized shtetl and among the heroes and heralds of progress, he belongs to the unwritten part of the Jewish past that has nearly faded from collective memory. However, there is very little written about the Jewish underworld or Jewish criminals in Poland. Two reference works, a new dictionary of Polish Jewish history and culture and an essential monograph on Jewish literature between the wars, do not mention Nachalnik at all. There are two accounts of Nachalnik's life, an apologetic one by Abram Karpinowicz and a critical one by Stanisław Milewski. Both, however, are literary in character. They lack sources, they differ in significant details, and they are inconsistent with other sources, including Nachalnik's own autobiography. Even Nachalnik's real name differs in the accounts of his life.