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This chapter investigates how the roughly half-century before the First World War was a period of striking change for the Jews resident in the Polish lands. While even in 1914 the majority of Polish Jews remained Orthodox in religious observation, followed everyday lives quite different from those of their Christian neighbours, and spoke Yiddish as their primary tongue, even a cursory comparison of the situation in 1914 to the situation in 1860 reveals processes of thorough-going transformation that would become even more pronounced by 1939. At the beginning of this period, Jewish emancipation and equal rights were being discussed but had not yet — even in the legal sphere — been realized for most Polish Jews. On the eve of the First World War, in contrast, most Jews in the Polish lands enjoyed some form of legal equality. The only exception was within the Pale of Settlement of the Russian empire where restrictive laws continued in force. In short, Jews were becoming integrated — at least on a legal level — with the rest of society. This process of integration — and challenges to it — characterizes the period discussed here.

This chapter assesses the position of Jews in Poland between the two world wars, which differed considerably in the various partitions. Polish Jews were largely urban. In 1931, over three-quarters lived in towns and less than a quarter in villages and in the country. As one would expect, therefore, Jews were found mainly in urban occupations. In Galicia, however, where the granting of civil rights had enabled Jews to buy land, a class of Jewish land-owners grew up. Jews also formed a significant part of the Polish intelligentsia. Meanwhile, Jewish political life was highly factionalized. There was a multiplicity of Jewish political parties, reflecting deep divisions within the community over religion and class, and attitudes to the Polish state and to the Jewish national movement. Indeed, Jewish political life was characterized by a threefold division between Zionism, Orthodoxy, and socialism, although within each of these ideological camps there was a plethora of subgroups.

This chapter describes the interaction of law and Holocaust memory from a different angle. It examines the post-war trials of putative Jewish collaborators in both the Polish state judicial system and the Jewish citizens' tribunal that the Central Committee of Polish Jews established in 1946 to investigate to try fellow Jews suspected of co-operation with the German enemy. It also looks into the survivors' bitter memories of the collaboration of some Jews with the Germans, which bred a fair dose of inwardly directed anger within the post-war Jewish community. The chapter explains how the presence of suspected collaborators tarnished the memory of Jewish heroes and martyrs, which the Central Committee of Polish Jews worked so hard to promote. It mentions the Polish regime that showed a minimal amount of interest in suspected Jewish collaborators, while the Jewish community was deeply perturbed by their presence.

This chapter addresses the knowledge of foreign language among eighteenth-century Jews. Polish Jews were not isolated in the eighteenth century or in previous centuries. They inhabited an international society of business, medicine, politics, and scholarship. Jews published their works in Hebrew and circulated them across the European continent. Jews also took a major part in international business networks, which carried Jewish merchants to other lands with their Jewish servants and labourers. Within Poland, Jewish occupations demanded extensive contact with the non-Jewish world, as did the political requirements of maintaining a Jewish communal identity. As such, the chapter suggests that there were many individual cases of Jews who had learned the language of their neighbours. It then assesses the degree to which Polish Jews knew Polish and European languages such as German, French, and Latin, as well as east European languages such as Russian and Hungarian.

This chapter provides a general introduction to the issues that shaped Polish policy towards Jews. It emphasizes the most general policy objectives and their implementation, as well as on the way the Jewish community was perceived. Many Polish reformers envisaged that Polish Jews should become “civil Christians”, that is distinct from their Polish Christian neighbors only in their private religious beliefs. The chapter also talks about the proposed new “Mosaic” religion that was essentially devoid of religious ritual and with a minimum of institutional structures. It explains the Mosaic religion as a state-sponsored campaign to purge Judaism of its content so as to facilitate the reform of Jewish society.

In July 1941 Moscow acknowledged a vested British interest in Poland. If Polish soldiers were not pressed into Soviet service or placed under Soviet political discipline, Moscow would feel the lack of Polish tools. The Polish Embassy threw a social security net across the USSR to catch tens of thousands of Poles who were released from camps and prisons in Siberia and Kazakhstan. The Anders army was indiscreet, anti-Soviet, and immune to political reorientation; the soldiers had been drawn back from a lost world, and they were difficult to intimidate; their Polish nonchalance was flourished under the noses of the NKVD. Stalin's attitude to the London Poles was at best ambiguous. The Polish Embassy was never allowed contact with Jewish citizens from eastern Poland, but the Russians sent a surprising number of Polish Jews to Polish army recruitment centres.

The chapter discusses the implementation of the pogrom by the Nazis and the destruction it brought upon the Jews. In early 1938, the Nazi government intensified its campaign of discrimination against the Jews through the enactment of several laws that essentially stripped them of any social, economic, or political rights. The series of events leading up to the violent pogrom of November 1938 are related, beginning with the expulsion of “foreign” Jews — including Soviet and Polish Jews — until the fateful shooting of a German diplomat by one Herschel Grynszpan. Instances of brutality and violence towards all Jews, regardless of age or sex, are recounted. A section is also devoted to the reactions of the Germans, which seemed to be contradictory due to stories of random acts of kindness amidst the violence and persecution. The actions and reactions of Jewish women are also presented, along with the obstacles to emigration.

This chapter assesses the meetings of the Polish Jewish refugees with the German Jews on the ground in the communities of the Holy Roman Empire. It begins by examining the chapbook Di bashraybung fun Ashkenaz un Polak (The Description of a German and a Polish Jew). Published in Prague sometime in the second half of the seventeenth century, it provides a satirical look at the interaction of the Polish Jewish refugees with the German Jews they met on their travels in the empire. The satirical poem presents this in two large blocks: the first gives the point of view of the Polish Jew and his complaints about his reception in the empire; the second brings the perspective of the German Jew and his opinions of the indigent refugees with whom he is faced. The chapter then determines the extent to which the chapbook was an accurate portrayal of the mid-seventeenth-century reality, considering the Jewish refugees in Frankfurt a.M. and Hamburg, as well as in Vienna.

This chapter examines several aspects of the lives and experiences of the survivor community in Poland. Much has been written about relations between the new regime in Poland and the Jewish survivors, the formation of the relief committees, the political entities, the beriḥah (‘flight’) apparatus, and the revitalization of youth and political movements. The main characteristic in any historical analysis of a collectivity’s daily life is an examination of long-term processes taking place within the society in question. Such a perspective, however, does not apply to the situation of the Jewish survivors in Poland. The most consistent factor in their lives was instability; theirs was a life of reconstruction and entrenchment within a reality of deconstruction and departure.

This chapter explores how rates of Jewish suicide in Europe began to rise along with the rates of non-Jewish suicide — though later and slightly more slowly — first in the west and centre and spreading to the rest of the continent over the course of the nineteenth century as industrialization increased and the population grew dramatically. The suicide patterns of Polish and Hungarian Jews reflected developments within their respective wider societies. Using press reports, statistics, and individual accounts, the chapter investigates the responses to and contemporary understanding of increases in suicidal behaviour and of suicide itself among Jews in the Hungarian and Polish capitals between the wars. Hungary, and Budapest in particular, had been plagued by suicide to such a degree that the international hit song 'Gloomy Sunday', first recorded in Hungarian in 1935 and in English the following year, was internationally known as the 'Hungarian Suicide Song', lending weight to the idea that the country was more prone to self-destruction. Yet Polish Jews, and seemingly the rest of the Jewish world, were focused on the perception of an epidemic of suicides in Poland and especially Warsaw.

This chapter highlights the ambitious mission of documenting the martyrdom and heroism of Polish Jewry under the sponsorship of the Central Committee of Polish Jews. It details how the Central Jewish Historical Commission mobilized scores of survivors to retrieve, organize, and reconstruct the memories of more than 7,000 Polish Jewish survivors. It also mentions the publication of books on various aspects of the destruction of Polish Jewry. The chapter emphasizes how the prodigious undertaking of the commission dispels the impression of quiescent survivor communities that are preoccupied solely with resuming normal life in the post-war world. It draws attention to the prosecutorial dimension of the commission's work.

This chapter discusses Jewish marriage in eighteenth-century Poland. Jews, as well as many non-Jews, acknowledged that Jewish marriages embodied a good, stable model and praised them as examples to be emulated in an era when immorality and marital breakdown seemed to threaten the institution. Even in much earlier times, Jewish marriages, particularly those of Polish Jews, were recognized as embodying all desirable matrimonial attributes. In the course of the eighteenth century, Jewish marital practices attracted the attention of all levels of Polish society, as well as of leading maskilim in other countries. It was during the period of the Polish Enlightenment that the model of Jewish marriage was promoted on a wider scale because it conformed to popular ideas based on contemporary mercantilist and cameralist principles. The chapter then considers the convergence of opinion between Jewish and Christian Enlightenment representatives on some aspects of marriage in Jewish society, and looks at the incidence of early marriage in the Jewish population and the vicissitudes in the practice of young couples living in the home of their parents.

This chapter examines the Kielce pogrom. On July 4, 1946, the most horrifying outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in post-war Poland took place in Kielce. On that day, ordinary citizens of this central Polish town, together with soldiers and militiamen, murdered forty Polish Jews and injured more than a hundred. This was not an isolated act of anti-Jewish violence in this early post-war period, but one of many such events which took place between 1945 and 1947. Nevertheless, it was striking because of its dimensions, because of the brutality with which it was accompanied, and because of the participation of local forces representing the new communist authority. The Kielce pogrom was the most powerful indicator that Jews were not to be welcomed to restore their lives among the ethnic Polish population. The chapter then assesses the extent to which anti-Jewish attitudes were prevalent among Polish society during and after the Kielce pogrom.

This chapter identifies some methodological problems of the study of Jewish history in Poland between the two World Wars. The growing public interest in the history of Polish Jews between the wars has been the reason for the publication of many books and articles. Some are based on only a superficial survey, others present a deep and penetrating analysis of specific problems. This body of literature deserves methodological consideration, together with a critical review of the most important sources, so that some queries, doubts and suggestions can be raised. During at least the past hundred years, a tradition developed in some Jewish and Polish political circles of treating the Jews as a kind of alien body within Polish society. This attitude can also often be observed in contemporary historical studies, despite the authors' declared intentions. This can partly be explained in terms of the distant past, when Jews constituted a distinctly different class of people with its own legal status and institutions, but there is no reason to maintain such an approach when investigating the history of the 20th century.

This chapter studies the role of Italian Jewry in ransoming Polish Jewish captives. In truth, the most important use for the pidyon shevuyim money as far as Italian Jewry was concerned had nothing to do with Polish Jews and their problems. Instead, ransom money was used primarily to redeem Jewish maritime merchants and travelers who were preyed on by pirates, particularly the Knights of St. John on Malta. This desire to prioritize the needs of the captives on Malta did not mean, however, that Venice totally ignored all other causes. Moreover, the Italian communities in general, though they seem to have understood the benefits of having Venice manage the ransoming on Malta, were not willing entirely to give up their autonomy in how they used their philanthropic funds. This was good news for Polish Jews because it improved their chances of receiving financial support from Italian Jewry. Their requests for that can be divided into two main groups. The first were made by individuals, asking for help with their personal issues. The second were requests for larger groups, most often communities in Poland–Lithuania that were struggling with the costs of recovering from the war or communities outside eastern Europe that were dealing with an influx of Polish Jewish refugees.

This chapter presents a background of the relationship between German Jews and Polish Jews before 1648. Polish Jews were well aware that their ancestors had originated in the German lands and, long before the refugee crisis brought large numbers of them back there, knew a great deal about Jewish society in the empire. Much of what they knew came from meetings with German Jews, often in pursuit of trade, or from the stories of those who had traveled the relatively short distance to the German lands. Though there was much that separated them, both groups understood that they also had a great deal in common in cultural and religious terms. The meeting of Polish and German Jews in the mid-seventeenth century, for all its economic, social, and religious difficulties, was undoubtedly colored by this sense of kinship and belonging. To understand its significance, the chapter looks at the history of the connections between the two groups of Jews and the ways in which those connections were perceived by each side. In the years after 1648, this history of the connection between German and Polish Jews seems to have created a range of expectations on the part not only of the refugees but also of those in the empire who were to take them in.

This chapter reviews Agata Tuszyńska's book Lost Landscapes: In Search of the Jews in Poland (1998). In Lost Landscapes, Tuszyńska pulls together diverse threads: a literary and historical contextualization of the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, contemporary Poles' current views on Jews, and Polish Jewish survivors' perspectives on Poland and on Singer's writing. The essays are not connected as a single narrative, but hang together as a book through the implication of the continuing connection between Jews and Poles. For Poles, the old Jewish communities' absence in most of Poland has left a shadow. For Polish Jews, memories of Poland, its land and language, persist like an echo. The landscapes of the title unite both groups, as surviving expatriate Polish Jews of Singer's generation remember Poland, and Poles remember their absent and murdered Jewish neighbours.

This chapter discusses Bernard Singer. The works of Bernard Singer belong to the Polish–Jewish cultural border, and enriched both cultures. He wrote articles for Jewish periodicals in Polish, informing the Jewish reader about Polish political affairs, aware that Poles also read his work. Like other great Polish Jews, he bore the ‘stamp of Polish noble culture’, but although he wrote mainly on Polish matters, he never renounced his Jewishness. He was, as this chapter shows, an ace reporter. Bernard Singer's reputation derives principally from his career as the political, economic, and cultural commentator of Nasz Przegląd. Published in Warsaw from 1923 to 1939, Nasz Przegląd was a newspaper addressed to well-to-do and ‘enlightened’ assimilated Polish Jews. Its mission was to reclaim these Jews and bring them back to the nationalist idea.

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 presents an interview with István Deák. Deák outlines several reasons why there have been many more students writing about Poland than Hungary, or certainly about Polish Jews than Hungarian Jews. First, the great majority of American Jews are of Polish, Lithuanian, or Russian origin; relatively few are from Hungary. Second, the tragedy of Polish Jewry is better known; therefore, when people talk about the Holocaust, they mean Poland, even though many were killed who were not Polish Jews. The Hungarian Holocaust became widely known later, only in the last few decades. Another reason is that Polish Jews were not as assimilated as many Hungarian Jews were. The Hungarian situation was very different, because the Hungarian Jews' relationship with the Hungarians was much more controversial, much more complicated, and so many Jews did not want to admit that most Hungarians had been antagonistic to them. For an assimilated Hungarian Jew, it was a very painful thing to talk about.