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Poland's Threatening Other
The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present
By Joanna Beata Michlic
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2006
University of Nebraska PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8032-3240-3
Chapter One
Introduction The Concept of the Jew as the Threatening Other
and Modern Nation Building in Poland
This book is a synthetic study of the nature and significance of modern Polish
anti-Jewish tropes, which first arose in the post-1864 period among conservative,
traditionalist, and Roman Catholic circles. In the 1880s the core ethno-nationalist
Polish movement National Democracy (Narodowa Demokracja)
introduced anti-Jewish images and stereotypes into the discourse of national
politics. The National Democracy movement made anti-Jewish ideas a major
part of its ideology. Through the National Democrats anti-Jewish tropes became
a powerful emotive tool for nation building, based on a vision of Poland
that excluded Jews and lacked tolerance of the cultural and religious diversity
represented by other minorities. These anti-Jewish idioms, as the National
Democrats transformed them, had their strongest political and social influence
in interwar Poland (1918-39), particularly in the post-1935 period, and
continued to influence Polish political culture, attitudes, and behavior toward
Jews during both World War II (1939-45), when Poland was occupied by two
totalitarian regimes, Nazi Germany (1939-45) and the Soviet Union (1939-41),
and the postwar Communist period (1945-89). In Communist Poland
anti-Jewish idioms were part of the language and imagery of the anti-Zionist
campaign of 1968-69, which resulted in the forced exile of the majority of the
remaining post-1945 Polish Jewry. The Communist regime employed the same
anti-Jewish rhetoric in the 1970s and 1980s against its political opposition: the
Committee for the Defense of the Workers (Komitet Obrony Robotników,
kor) and the first Solidarity movement (Solidarnosc). Finally, anti-Semitic
tropes reemerged openly in the anti-Communist camp, particularly in the
right-wing sections of the Solidarity movement and in the so-called Closed
Catholic Church, during the political and economic transformation of Poland
in 1989 and 1990, which led to Poland's regaining full sovereignty. Yet in the
new post-Communist Poland important groups of public intellectuals, politicians,
and Roman Catholic laypersons and clergy representing the Open Catholic
Church have critically discussed, powerfully challenged, and rejected these
recurrent anti-Jewish cultural images as never before. Nonelites, particularly
youth engaged in activities such as Colorful Tolerance (Kolorowa Tolerancja)
and affiliated with organizations such as the Wroclaw-based scholarly circle
of students called Hope-Hope (Hatikva-Nadzieja), have also taken part in the
open examination and rejection of anti-Jewish tropes.
The process of challenging and deconstructing anti-Jewish idioms and images
is part and parcel of another post-1989 process, which can be thought
of as the rebuilding of Poland on the model of civic nationalism, which does
not define Polishness in a narrow ethno-national sense. Moreover, this model
treats with respect the variety of minority cultures and faiths that have existed
and still do in the Polish territories, along with their memories. Cultivating
respect for the memories of minorities is particularly important in the Polish
case, given the fact that contemporary Poland is one of the world's most ethnically
homogenous nation-states, with national, ethnic, and religious minorities
accounting for only approximately 4 percent of the population. Upon his
appointment on 24 August 1989 as Poland's first non-Communist prime minister,
Tadeusz Mazowiecki (1927-) articulated his desire to rebuild the post-1989
Polish nation on the model of civic nationalism and a culture of pluralism. In
one of his parliamentary speeches in 1989 Mazowiecki, a politician and writer
representing the liberal Catholic intelligentsia in the first Solidarity movement,
stated: "The Polish state cannot be an ideological or religious state. It has to
be a state in which no citizen will experience discrimination or be treated in
a privileged way because of his ideological convictions.... The government
wishes to cooperate with the Roman Catholic Church and all other denominations
in Poland.... Poland is a homeland not only of Poles. We live in this
land together with representatives of other 'national groups.' The government
wishes that they would see themselves as a part of Poland and would cultivate
their languages and their cultures, and thus enrich our common society."
One good illustration of the close link between challenging anti-Jewish
idioms and rebuilding Poland on the model of civic nationalism is the new
language being used in reference to Jews past and present by leading politicians
such as Aleksander Kwasniewski, former president of Poland; representatives
of state institutions such as Leon Kieres, former chairman of the Institute of
National Memory (Instytut Pamieci Narodowej, IPN); and representatives of
important social and religious institutions such as Father Adam Boniecki, the
editor in chief of Tygodnik Powszechny, a leading social and cultural weekly
of the Open Catholic Church. Their descriptions of Jews as "Polish Jews,"
"our cocitizens," and "costewards of this land" reflect the inclusion of Jews in
the realm of Polishness and the firm rejection of an ethno-nationalist vision of
Poland in which there is only room for a single culture and a single faith, ethnic
Polish and Roman Catholic. Another important illustration of this link is the
affirmation of regret for sufferings inflicted upon Polish Jews by members of
the ethnic Polish community, voiced by public intellectuals such as Jan Tomasz
Gross, Maria Janion, the late Father Stanislaw Musial, Hanna Swida-Ziemba,
and Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, among others. Memories of suffering inflicted
upon others, described by certain American scholars as "dangerous ... because
they call the community to alter ancient evils," are important to the contemporary
civic and pluralist model of Poland and its advocates. Such memories
do not exist in the ethno-nationalist vision of Poland, which preserves only the
memory of suffering received.
Aims and Approach
In Polish history attitudes toward Jews and other minorities have constituted
a litmus test of democracy, which is embodied in the concept of modern civic
nationalism. The presence of anti-Jewish idioms in Polish cultural and political
life, in contrast, can be seen as one of the chief markers of the modern Polish
ethno-nationalism that began in the late nineteenth century as a manifestation
of the wider European phenomenon of exclusivist ethno-linguistic or integral
nationalism. The key underlying assumption of this book is that in order to
fully grasp the nature, continuity, and longevity of Polish anti-Jewish representations
and their significance, one has to take into account their role in
the process of Polish nation building. In the late nineteenth century and the
first half of the twentieth ethno-nationalism became the dominant model in
the formation of modern Polish national identity. During this period, in the
painful struggle over the vision of Poland and its people, ethno-nationalism
gained the upper hand over modern Polish civic nationalism. The latter form
of nationalism was most clearly pronounced in Józef Pilsudski's model of a
federalist Poland in the interwar period, which traced its cultural roots to
Jagiellonian Poland (Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów). Many champions of
civic and pluralistic Poland in the post-Communist era have "rediscovered"
the cultural traditions of Jagiellonian Poland and view them as a historical
heritage on which a new civic and pluralistic Polish society might be based,
constituting an alternative to the ethno-nationalist model of society. Their
turning to the heritage of a premodern multiethnic and multicultural Polish
state indicates the importance of a distinctive past in reshaping contemporary
Polish national identity. It is a manifestation of the reselection, recombination,
and recodification of previously existing symbols and values.
Although major theories of nationalism generally take for granted the
"other" in the formation of national identity and nationalism, scholars from
various fields have recently turned their attention to the problem of the "other"
evaluated as a rival, adversary, or enemy and the formation of modern national
self-identity. Drawing on Fredrick Barth's classic theory of ethnicity, sociologist
Anna Triandafyllidou argues that the external or internal "threatening
other" is an important part of the process of the formation and reevaluation
of national identity and that in some cases an imagined "threatening other"
can be as important in influencing the self-conception of the nation as an
actual "threatening other." Polish scholars of various disciplines-sociology,
the history of Polish literature, and social history-have long argued that the
division between "ourselves" (swoi) and "the other" (obcy) is an important
feature of modern Polish collective self-identification and memory. Jan Stanislaw
Bystron and Aleksander Hertz conducted the first major sociological
studies of the division between "us" and "them" and Polish national identity
in the interwar period. Both scholars concentrated on discussing the impact
of the "other" on pre-1939 Polish national identity and voiced criticism of the
division between "us"-ethnic Poles-and "them"-other groups dwelling in
Poland. Their criticism of the role of the "other" in political culture focuses
on moral issues rather than empirical matters. These scholars were, in particular,
critical of the use of the "other" (evaluated as a "threatening other") in
political culture for the purpose of increasing national awareness and cohesion,
a phenomenon that they witnessed in daily life in interwar Poland. In spite
of strong normative judgment, their sociological analyses remain valuable for
the study of the other in Polish society.
Historical literature on Polish (ethno)-nationalism hardly discusses the use
of anti-Jewish cultural representations as fundamental to the process of the
formation of national identity. Rather, it takes one of two general approaches,
representing two opposite normative positions. The first approach, which deplores
and rejects ethno-nationalism, recognizes anti-Semitism as a key aspect
of the doctrine of the National Democracy movement and its offshoot radical
organizations. However, it tends to ignore the broader cultural origins and
scope of ethno-nationalist thinking, the impact of National Democracy on
modern political culture and society at large. The second approach, which
to varying degrees endorses the ethno-nationalist vision of Poland advocated
by the National Democracy movement, tends either to neutralize the role of
anti-Semitism as a key concept in the doctrine of National Democracy or to
endorse it, using it to explain anti-Jewish practices and policies.
A few Polish scholars have indicated the importance of anti-Jewish tropes in
the formation of modern Polish national identity based on the matrix of ethno-nationalism,
though they do not conduct a detailed empirical analysis of the
problem. In her article "The Question of the Assimilation of Jews in the Polish
Kingdom (1864-1897): An Interpretive Essay" Alina Cala, a social historian of
modern Jewish history, suggests that "anti-Semitism strengthened the role of
the Jew (or rather his myth) as a determinant of Polish national consciousness.
Whole social groups discovered their national allegiance as an offshoot of the
feeling of separateness from the Jews.... It could be said metaphorically that
they entered the national sacrum, although in this sphere they most often took
on the character of the devil. The Jewish question became an integral part of
the Polish complex."
The issue of shaping Polish national identity and the identification of the
Jew as the archetype of everything defined as "not-Polish" or "anti-Polish" is
also indirectly indicated by Michael Steinlauf, an American scholar of Eastern
European Jewish culture and society. In his pioneering book on the memory of
the Holocaust in post-1945 Poland he argues that the concept of national conflict
between Jews and Poles gave Polish anti-Semitism a unique logic that made
it different from other European anti-Semitic movements. Steinlauf makes a
persuasive case for the longevity, persistence, and centrality of the concept of
national conflict between Jews and Poles in Polish anti-Semitism, though not
for its uniqueness. Recent sociological studies show evidence for Steinlauf 's
assertions about the persistence of Polish anti-Semitic ideas, demonstrating
that "remnants" of the long-lasting effect of the polarization of Poles and Jews
on the collective self-definition of Poles were still detectable in the late 1980s
and early 1990s. For example, according to a survey conducted in Poland in
May 1992, Jews were still viewed as competitors in a moral-cultural sense.
Polish social historian Marcin Kula surveyed a social group representing the
so-called philosemitic voice, condemning anti-Semitic discourse in the 1980s
and 1990s, and found within this group a widespread "silent assumption" that
Jews, even those most assimilated into Polish culture, failed to be the same as
ethnic Poles, constituting a lesser category of citizens.
Though culturally assimilated Polish Jews and Jewish converts to Roman
Catholicism played an important role in the development of modern Polish
"high culture" and in democratic political trends, Poles have historically
considered them not entirely Polish. This has been true since the nineteenth
century. This problem resulted from two interrelated cultural trends: the majority
of Polish Jews maintained a strong moral-cultural identity, and large
segments of Polish elites perceived Jews as a "proto-nation" or "a nation culturally
incompatible" with a Polish nation. German and Russian nationalist
discourse also influenced Polish ethno-nationalist discourse. The exclusionary
ethno-nationalist position toward assimilated Polish Jews and Jews of Polish
origin was particularly acute in interwar Poland, when anti-Semites conducted
intense yet unsuccessful attempts to exclude these two social groups from
playing any role in Polish culture. In his memoirs Richard Pipes, an American
scholar of Russian and Soviet history who was born and grew up in interwar
Poland, also reflects on this problem: "The population at large was imbued
with a hostility towards Jews, instilled in it over centuries by the Catholic
Church. It was not racial anti-Semitism but it was only slightly less painful
since it could be averted only by renouncing one's own religion and one's
own people, and even then, in Polish eyes, one never quite got rid of one's
Jewishness."
The presence of anti-Jewish traditions in post-1945 Poland has sometimes
been referred to as "anti-Semitism without Jews." The reoccurrence of anti-
Jewish discourse in the public sphere in the late 1980s and early 1990s was particularly
puzzling to many scholars and observers both in Poland and abroad
since it occurred in a social environment in which Jews constituted a numerically
insignificant portion of the population. In the aftermath of the
forced exile of thirty thousand individuals in 1968-69 the remaining Jewish
community is now estimated at between five thousand and twenty thousand
individuals in a population of close to forty million. Some scholars describe
the persistence of such phenomena as "anti-Jewish paranoia," an obsession
with Jewish omnipresence and omnipotence. Attempting to explain the
recurrence of anti-Jewish sentiment in the 1980s and early 1990s, Marcin Kula
attributes it to the heritage of the interwar period, claiming that such beliefs
and sentiments have a self-reproducing character. Jolanta Ambrosiewicz-Jacobs
and Anna Maria Orla-Bukowska draw similar conclusions in "After the
Fall: Attitudes towards Jews in Post-1989 Poland": "What has once entered the
cultural subconscious cannot easily be removed."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Poland's Threatening Other
by Joanna Beata Michlic
Copyright © 2006 by University of Nebraska Press.
Excerpted by permission.
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