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The First World War paved the way for Polish independence. The leaders of the Second Republic struggled to forge a stable state, which enabled Piłsudski to come to power. Catholic leaders carved out a privileged position for the church in public life, which alienated non-Catholics. Despite abundant evidence of the church’s flourishing, Poland’s Catholics generally remained captive to outsized fears of real and imagined enemies, including Freemasons, socialists, and Jews. This period came to a sudden end in September 1939 with the German and Soviet invasions of Poland. The barbarism of next six years resulted in the death of some six million Polish citizens and the decimation of its culture and institutions, including the Catholic Church.

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 looks at the model of Orthodox female education developed in Kraków, where the teachers' seminary was adopted as the highest learning institution for young Orthodox women. It discusses the rebellion of the daughters in Habsburg Galicia that continued until World War I as many young daughters, even young men, from Orthodox Jewish homes abandon the ways of their parents. It also points out how the phenomenon of Galician young Jewish females running away and seeking refuge in the Felician Sisters' convent eventually stopped. The chapter explores how the First World War changed the map of the Habsburg Empire and made Galicia in 1918 part of the newly created Second Polish Republic. It elaborates how the laws in the Second Polish Republic eliminated the legal conditions that facilitated the runaway phenomenon.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the Vilna Education Society from the peculiar situation of the war and the subsequent incorporation of Vilna into Poland. It demonstrates the Vilna Education Society's attempt to champion nonpartisan Jewish cultural autonomy as an outgrowth of the particular circumstances and personalities in Vilna. It also highlights how the Vilna Jewish community had to adjust its goals and expectations to those of the country they were now a part of. The chapter explores how education, youth, and a preoccupation with the future of Polish Jewry were intensely intertwined with the political and cultural rights of the Polish Jewish minority in the Second Polish Republic. It mentions Jewish pedagogues and intellectual and political leaders that considered language as the basis for identity formation, especially in the city of Vilna with its multi-ethnic population.

This introductory chapter describes the public concern over the problem of prostitution in Poland from the 1880s to the country's founding years of the Polish Second Republic during the twentieth century. Residents of Warsaw complained that every other house had become a brothel and that the cacophony of singing, dancing, and brawling was disrupting their orderly lives. They were worried over the mass kidnapping of virgin women, as well as gang-related sexual violence—as demonstrated by the Alfonse Pogrom in 1905 which had left dozens of casualties. In addition, syphilis raged throughout the city and the country, infecting huge portions of the population. Hence, an exploration of Poland's prostitution industry can assess the country's difficult transition to modernity in context of its struggling movement for political independence.

This chapter details Betar's activities in the twilight years of the Second Polish Republic. With Hitler's rise to power, a surge in anti-Jewish riots across Poland, and the escalating conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Jews in Mandate Palestine, numerous Betar leaders were calling for Zionist youth, no matter their location, to turn to acts of revolutionary violence to defend Jews from attack. Some of them wondered aloud whether their potential targets could include their Jewish rivals. The chapter follows Betar's overlapping conversations about their use of violence in Poland and in Palestine. Ultimately, it reveals how right-wing Zionist debates about violence in Poland and elsewhere in Europe helped lay the groundwork for justifying acts of terrorism during the Arab Revolt in Mandate Palestine (1936–1939).

This chapter provides a comprehensive account of Jewish musical organizations in interwar Galicia. It investigates the various types of Jewish musical organizations and how they implemented their cultural policies. It also shows the wealth and variety of the musical life of the Jewish communities from the four south-eastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic: Lwów, Kraków, Stanisławów, and Tarnopol. The chapter looks into the goal of the Jewish Music Society in Lwów in order to unite the local Jewish musical community and represent the Jewish community in the city's musical life. It analyzes different musical interests and visions of society's cultural role that explain the different activities of symphony orchestra, choir, mandolin orchestra, and chamber orchestra.