Today we're going to talk about the Jews of Eastern Europe in between the two world wars, that is, roughly between 1918 and 1939. There is a tendency today to view interwar East European Jewry from the perspective of the Shoah ____________ or of the Holocaust, and we are tempted to label this period "The Last Chapter." We see it as a period of impending doom because we know the horrible destruction that followed it. But we have to remind ourselves that at that time, most people then and there didn't see that way. They did not see themselves as being the victims of the forthcoming Holocaust, although some predicted it and tried to act on that assumption. If I were to generalize on this period of roughly 20 years and about this region of six or seven countries, I could say that this is a period of great creativity amidst repression. That would have been true of much East European history in the 19th Century as well. But it's also a period of modernization and secularization at a rate which was far greater than that which would be observed in the late 19th Century by and large, it is also a period of searching by Jews for a place in newly independent states, and in societies which are themselves undergoing very traumatic, turbulent processes of modernizations...away, in some instances but not in all, from an agricultural economy and toward an urban industrial economy...and with all the cultural and social upheaval that that transition entails.

The Interwar period, brief as it was, was a very exciting one, and the major issues of that period were not by and large settled by September 1, 1939, when the German armies invaded Poland and began to write what has been called The Last Chapter, I think erroneously perhaps, of the East European Jewry. One of the points I'm consistently emphasizing in this course is that Jewish history and developments in Jewish society do not occur in a vacuum; that developments within the Jewish population are, to a great extent, influenced by the environment in which they take place, and in order to understand Interwar East European Jewry, let me first say a few things about the states of Interwar Eastern Europe, many of which emerged from the shards of the destroyed empires:

* The Ottoman
* The German
* The Hapsburg
* and the Russian Empire

Indeed, most of the states of Interwar Eastern Europe had not existed, or had not been independent, before 1918-1919; and a major issue, if not *the* major issue of the Interwar period, was the formation of these states, the establishment of their boundaries, the establishment of their particular political, social and cultural identities, and for the Jews the implications were, where do they fit in to this picture?

Generally speaking, we might think of how states manage ethnicity. About 97% of the states in the world today are multi-ethnic states. There are almost no mono-ethnic states. And therefore, every state is challenged to deal with the reality of several ethnic groups inhabiting it. And states have historically and contemporaneously adopted different strategies for dealing with this heterogeneity.

|| Forced Assimilitation || Repression || Neutrality || Federalism || Autonomy || Multiculturalism ||

You can think of it as a spectrum ranging from forced assimilation of the minority groups, through repression, and in the middle of the spectrum you can think of neutrality, that is, the state takes no position vis a vis these minorities or nationalities; and then on the other side of the spectrum, institutional arrangements such as federalism, which accommodate different peoples on different territories, give them some latitude and autonomy; various schemes of autonomy, whether it be territorial or cultural; and, finally, the active promotion of what the Canadians call multiculturalism, that is, not just tolerating or accommodating heterogeneity in ethnicity and its related cultures, but even promoting and nurturing those different cultures.

The East European states in the Interwar period definitely fell on one side of the spectrum-the side involving forced assimilation and repression, or at best neutrality. In Yugoslavia, for example, it was the Serbs who completely dominated the other nationalities-Slovenes, Croats, Montenegrins, Bosnians and so on. In Poland, despite the fact that one-third of the population of Interwar Poland was not ethnically Polish but was rather German, Jewish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Byelorussian, the Polish state acted as if the society were homogeneously Polish, and repressed the non-Polish nationalities politically, culturally and religiously. The Romanian state repressed the Hungarians or the Magyars and the Jews within its boundaries. The one exception-and it's the exception to every generalization made about Interwar Eastern Europe-is, of course, Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia, in which the non-Czech and non-Slovak nationalities formed a significant proportion of the population, mostly Germans but also Hungarians, Gypsies, Jews and Ruthenians, Czechoslovakia was most tolerant of the non-Czech populations, including the Slovaks who didn't see it that way, and it is perhaps not accidental that Czechoslovakia is also the only democratic system in Interwar Eastern Europe.

Why is it that these states repressed rather than accommodated their ethnic groups? These states, by and large, chose to be what political scientists call "ethnic states" and not "civic states." That is to say, they identified the interests of the state with the interests of one nation and one nation only; the purpose of the state, the goal of the state, was to serve the interests of a particular group; whereas civic states, such as the United States, are states whose citizens are bound together and bound to the state not by a common ethnicity, because it doesn't exist, not even by common language or religion or even culture, but rather by allegiance to a common political idea; allegiance, in the case of the United States, to the Constitution and to the political institutions which flow from that Constitution. What makes one an American, in other words, is political identity; is allegiance to a set of political ideals and certain political behaviors. What makes one a Pole, on the other hand, is ethnicity; blood; descent; culture; language; and in the case of the Poles, in the modern era, Polishness comes to be identified exclusively with Catholicism.

Poland, among other East European states, has historically been an ethnic state, and for that reason, Jews, who have lived in Poland since approximately the 10th century, never could be Poles in the way that Jews in the United States could be Americans. They could be citizens of Poland, but they were never Poles; nor could Poles be Jews, because these are ethnic and not civic concepts. That doesn't mean, however, that a state which is ethnic need be repressive of members of minority nationalities. Why, then, did the Interwar East European states pursue a repressive policy vis a vis the non-majoritarian peoples?

I think, primarily, because they were insecure about their own existence and their own legitimacy. Czechoslovakia had been created de novo out of two territories, the Czech and the Slovak territories, which were linguistically and ethnically related but which has been separated politically for a thousand years, and whereas the Czechs had been ruled by the Austrian part of the Hapsburg Empire, the Slovaks had been ruled by the Hungarian part.

Poland, the largest state in Interwar East Central Europe, was a country which had lost its independence between 1772 and 1795, and for over a century did not exist as an independent state. And it was recreated in 1918 only because of the collapse of the three empires which had originally conquered it-the German, the Russian, and the Hapsburg or Austro-Hungarian. There remained a fear in Poland and in Czechoslovakia-indeed, a fear which was not unwarranted-that the former masters of these countries would seek to regain their mastery over these states, and to destroy them and reincorporate them into an empire-as the Nazis did, beginning in September 1939, and even earlier in March of 1939, or you might say in 1938 with the Munich Pact vis a vis Czechoslovakia.

They were insecure not only about the former empires, but about their neighbors-neighboring states which had claims on them. Hungary coveted the lost territories of Transylvania, which was now in Romania; of Slovakia, which was now in Czechoslovakia. Russia, presumably, wanted to regain eastern parts of Poland-which indeed it did, beginning on September 17, 1939, when it annexed eastern Poland and called it west Byelorussia and west Ukraine. Their neighbors were not to be trusted, nor were the national minorities within their borders. They suspected those minorities, for example Hungarians in Slovakia, or Hungarians in Transylvania, of sympathizing with the mother country-the Germans, say, in western Czechoslovakia, the so-called Sudetenland. And in some cases, those suspicions were warranted, that these national minorities were not interested in allegiance to the new states, but retained an ethnically and culturally-based allegiance to the homelands, and they would seize every opportunity to undermine the new states and seek to dissolve them and reunite them with the homelands. This attitude to the minorities only exacerbated the alienation the minorities felt from the new states. It precisely did not win them over. Their alienation, in turn, fed the suspicions of the majority, and one had then a vicious cycle of distrust by the majority for the minority, and by the minority for the majority, a distrust which fed on itself and which spiraled and which escalated, certainly, in the 1930's.

A third reason that this particular kind of policy was pursued vis a vis the national minorities was perhaps a psychological one. Peoples deprived for so long of statehood, peoples who are subordinate for so long, tend to overindulge in power. People who have not had power for a long time enjoy the exercise of that power, even if it is against their own citizens.

A fourth factor which needs to be mentioned is the rise of fascism in Italy first, and then in Germany. Fascism spread the idea of exclusivist nationalism. It disseminated notions of ethnic and racial superiority, of the right of a particular group of people, however defined, to rule over another group of people. There is some parallel of course with Communism, which defined those groups in terms of class, but Fascism defined them in terms of ethnicity or, to use the Fascist term, race.

Then, too, there was the problem of democracy which I hinted at a moment ago. Generally speaking, democracy, pluralism, tolerance, are not traditional values in East Central Europe. These were not, as Westerners often think, deviations from the norm, but they are indeed historically and spatially the norm. Democracy is the form of government which is a freak. Democracy is a form of government which did not exist, perhaps with the dubious exception of classical democracy in ancient Greece, did not exist until the advent of the 18th Century with the revolutions in France and in the United States. And if you look at a map of the world today, you will see that the majority of the states in the world are not democratic. So in this regard, being undemocratic, Interwar Eastern Europe was not exceptional. Czechoslovakia was exceptional in being democratic. And, generally speaking, ethnic groups, particularly ethnic minorities, fare better under democratic systems, for fairly obvious reasons, than they do under authoritarian ones.

Finally, the behavior of the East European states vis a vis the national groups was exacerbated by the economic crises of the 1930's. The Depression, which began in Central Europe in 1931, made large sectors of the populations of Eastern Europe economically miserable, socially frustrated, and that made them fertile ground for ideologies which pointed to scapegoats as the cause of their troubles. Particularly with unlettered, illiterate, unsophisticated, undereducated populations-which is true of most of the populations of East Central Europe, perhaps with the exception of the Czechs-to understand the subtleties of international economics would be beyond their ken. But, to understand their troubles as arising from a conspiracy on the part of a group which already had been designated for many centuries as a conspiratorial, deviant, anti-Christian, malevolent, satanic group would be perfectly comprehensible. The Jews classically historically play the role of scapegoat, not only in European Christian societies but in others, and, perhaps, in the 1930's in particular, this was a time when the Jewish role as scapegoat could logically be played out. This, then, in very rough and overly simplistic terms, is the setting in which we want to look at the Jewish populations of the Interwar East European states.

The largest such population was, of course, Polish Jewry. Polish Jewry numbered some 3,350,000 in 1930, roughly the midpoint of this period. The importance of Polish Jewry goes beyond its magnitude. It, following the Russian Revolution of 1917, became the most creative, productive, effervescent Jewish population in cultural terms. And it is from Polish Jewry, particularly from its culture and its politics, that much of North and South American Jewish culture and politics, and certainly Israeli politics and culture, derive for a very long period.

Polish Jewry had been split along the same lines as the Polish state in the late 18th century, among Russia, Prussia and Austria. The largest number of Jews were in the Russian-controlled part of Poland, where they had fewer political rights than in Austrian Poland or Hapsburg Poland, but where they did participate in the industrialization of the Russian-controlled Polish territories, particularly in the city which is sometimes called the Manchester of Poland, the city which in Poland is known as _____________ ["Wooj"] and Yiddish as ________________ ["Lodj"], where Jews constituted both the working class of the textile industry as well as the owning and managerial class. And you had enormous contrasts of wealth and poverty in the Jewish population of [Wooj or Lodz]. The great magnates, people like [Poznianski], who had at least four palaces-and they really were palaces, one of them I saw recently in [Wooj] occupied a huge square block-to the very poor textile workers who lived in the [baluta] section, a poor slum area where, not accidentally, the ghetto was created by the Nazis during the Second World War. The industry of Bialystok, of Warsaw-these Polish cities, their industries were developed by Jewish entrepeneurs and worked, to a great extent, by Jewish proletarians.

The Jews in the southern part of Poland, what is known as Galicia, lived under Austro-Hungarian rule. This part was controlled by the Hapsburg Empire---quite poor, but on the other hand they had greater political freedoms and cultural freedoms than the Jews living under Russian rule. The western part of Poland was controlled by Prussia or Germany, and that had the smallest number of Jews. Culturally speaking, they were more akin to German Jews than they were to the East European Jews. They liked to speak German, regarding German as "haute culture," whereas Polish was "the language of the peasantry." Yiddish was not even a language but they called it "jargon," some kind of patois spoken by the unwashed masses of the East. And you can even look at the architecture of, for example, synagogues in places like [Poznein] and [Vrotzwaf]-I'm using the Polish names of cities which were known in German as Pozen and Breslow-to see that they were very much influenced by German Jewry, indeed for example the Reform Movement existed in this part of Poland whereas it did not to the east, rather than by the East European traditions further east.

When these three parts of Poland-German-dominated, Russian-dominated and Austro-Hungarian-dominated parts-came together to form the renewed Polish state in 1918, the Polish state faced the problem of integrating three administrative traditions, three political traditions, and, as I said earlier, a population which was about one-third non-Polish. One of the consequences of this heterogeneity in political tradition and in ethnicity was a multiplicity of political parties. There were well over 30 political parties vying for power in the new Polish state. And in the period between 1919 and 1926, a period of seven years, there were 14 governments, 14 cabinets, formed, collapsed, and re-formed in Poland, because there were so many parties that coalitions needed to be built, and coalitions were fragile. Distrust among the population of Poland was very high, among the politicians was even higher, and coalitions came and went.

This democratic parliamentarian period of Polish history came to an end when, in May of 1926, the great national hero of Poland, Marshall Jozef Pilsudski [__________________], who had led the Polish legions in the struggle for independence but had then retired to his country estate, disgusted by the instability in the parliamentary system, pulled a coup d'etat, seized power, dissolved the parliament, and tried to institute a more stable form of government. Curiously, Pilsudski who had started life as a socialist and a leading member of the PPS or Polish Socialist Party, was very much admired by the Jews, and that admiration was reciprocated, and despite the fact that you now entered a period of dictatorship, the Jewish situation in Poland was reasonably tolerable. However, Pilsudski died in 1935 and was succeeded by a military regime known as "The Regime of the Colonels," and it is his death which marks a turning point for the worse for the Jews of Poland, because this new military government was rather xenophobic, chauvinistic, anti-Semitic, reactionary in cultural and social policy.

There are two traditions in Poland which we have alluded to earlier regarding the Jews. There is a philo-Semitic tradition and an anti-Semitic tradition. In generalizing very roughly, one can say that in the modern period, the philo-Semitic tradition gradually receded and the anti-Semitic tradition [tape ran out and then starts up...] ...and I would say continued to do so to this very day.

At the very beginning of the Polish state in 1918-1919 there were pogroms, attacks on the Jews, in cities such as [Kieltze], [Vulf], [Vilno], using the Polish names of these cities, and despite the fact that the Constitution of 1921 guaranteed equal rights to the minorities, these guarantees were never honored, and indeed were renounced in the 1930's. The war between Russia and Poland in 1920, between Bolshevik Russia and Catholic Poland, exacerbated Jewish-Polish tensions, as the Poles assumed that the sympathies of the Jews lay with the Bolsheviks-an incorrect assumption in many instances.

Some restrictions, going back to Tsarist times, remained in force. Jews were forbidden to own land, and that decree was abolished only in 1921. Jews were underrepresented in the civil service. They were dismissed from the civil service in Galicia, where they had been allowed in by the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, and the old policy favored by the Tsars, which we can call the "numerus clausus" or the quota system, restricted the number of Jews and the proportion of Jews in the professions and in higher education, and this was continued in the Polish state and certainly in the 1930's was enforced.

In 1920, a Sunday Rest Law was passed, forcing the Jews to close their businesses and their places of work two days a week, because of their Sabbath observance on Saturday and on the Christian Sunday, thereby disadvantaging them in the competition with non-Jewish businesses. In 1936, the Polish state passed a law abolishing ritual slaughter of meat, shechita [_____________]. This was done on ostensibly humanitarian grounds, but its aim clearly was to discomfort that majority of the Jewish population which abided by the Jewish dietary laws, the laws of kashrut. In the late 1930's as well, even those Jews who managed to study in the universities were restricted to so-called "ghetto ventures." In the United States, the parallel to this system was known as the Jim Crow system, where African-Americans for example had to sit in the back of the bus, Jewish students in Poland had to stand in the back of the classroom in the universities. And some Polish academics, some Polish professors, showed their solidarity with the Jews and their protest against this discrimination by lecturing from the back of the room.

The Regime of the Colonels tolerated and perhaps even abetted pogroms, boycotts of Jewish stores and factories, and various local and unofficial restrictions against Jews. One of the ironies of this period was that the Polish anti-Semites popularized a slogan, "Zydzi do Palestyny,"-"Jews, go to Palestine," get out of here! And this is one instance where the interests of some Poles and the interests of some Jews coincided rather nicely. Indeed, Jews wanted to go to Palestine. But the British mandatory power which then ruled Palestine had issued a White Paper, under Arab pressure, restricting the number of Jews who could enter Palestine in any one year. So that, whereas some Jews wanted to leave Poland, and some Poles wanted them to leave, there was no place to go. The United States had closed its doors after 1924 to all immigration but the desirable racial types, that is, the northern Europeans. They certainly didn't want East Europeans, South Europeans and Jews. And Palestine was very restricted in terms of its immigration.

Some Poles, and the Polish government, were so interested in getting rid of their Jews that in 1938, the Polish government sent a mission to the island of Madagascar to explore the possibility of sending the Jews there. One might reflect on the irony of this, and think about if this plan had worked, how many Polish Jews would have been saved from the grasp of the Nazis which was to envelop them a year later.

Let's look at the Jewish population of Poland in order to see, within this rather dismal context which had its bright points too, how this population fared and how it conducted itself.

In 1921, there were 2.8 million Jews in Poland, constituting about 10.5% of the population. In 1939, there were 3,350,000, constituting somewhat less than 10% of the population. So that the number of Jews grew, but the proportion of Jews in the population declined somewhat due to higher birth rates and growth rates among others.

In 1931, the Jews made up about 27% of the urban population, that is in towns of 20,000 or more, and in the previous decade they had been nearly 1/3 of the urban population. Again, what was happening was that the Polish population in particular but some of the other ethnic groups as well was growing and becoming more urbanized. Nevertheless, in the 1930's Jews were still a very significant portion of the urban population, so while they were about ten percent of the population as a whole, they were about thirty percent or more of the urban population.

As urbanites, most Jews derived their income from commerce, and more than two-thirds derived their income from industry handicrafts. About two-thirds of the Jewish salaried workers and wage earners in 1931 were manual workers. One quarter were white collar workers and professionals, and the rest were domestics and home workers. There was indeed a decline in Jewish proprietorship. There was a growing reluctance to employ Jews in industry and handicrafts in the 1930's, but Jews remained dominant in crafts. It's estimated that about 80% of all the tailors in Poland, that means about 4 out of 5 tailors in Poland, were Jews. Forty percent of the shoemakers, twenty-five percent of the butchers and bakers, and, curiously, three-quarters of the barbers in Poland in the Interwar period were Jews. The number of Jewish students in higher education decreased from over 9,000 in 1922-23 to 4,000 in 1938-39. Now this is the reverse of the trends that we have seen, curiously enough, at the same time as we are talking about in Poland, in the Soviet Union, where the number of Jewish students increased, and certainly in most Western countries, where the number of Jewish students and hence the number of Jewish professionals increased, in Poland the reverse was the case. And clearly, this anomalous trend is the result of policy by the state and society, rather than the result of spontaneous developments within the Jewish population.

Only a very small percentage belonged to what we might call the wealthy or the middle classes. About 7% of the Jewish urban population belonged to the employer class. The bulk of the population, as you can see in pictures and photographs of the times, were poor, low middle class, or poor proletarian.

Jewish poverty can be exemplified in a survey done in 1926 of 77 towns. Among young workers, only 5% live in their own rooms. Forty-eight percent, nearly half, shared a room with five or more people. Nearly sixty percent shared beds. And, curiously, this compares unfavorably with the Polish population. Seventeen percent of Polish workers had their own rooms.

In Lodz [Wooj] in 1930-32, in a survey of over 5,000 dwellings, seventy-three percent consisted of one room, and eighteen percent were either cellars or attics. And about a third of these dwellings served as work places as well, as you can see in some of the photographs. People are selling clothes, or making shoes, in their bedrooms or in their apartments which consist of one room which serves as bedroom, living room, dining room and workplace.

I mentioned the economic depression of the 1930's. In 1934, one-quarter of the Jewish population did not have sufficient means to buy the necessities for Passover-that is, the wine, the matzoh and a few other items of food. And they had to apply to the communities for Passover relief. In 1937, in the city of Bialystok-eastern Poland, now just beyond the border of Byelorus-thirty-eight percent of the population applied for Passover relief, and in the city of Lvov, now called [View] in Ukraine, forty percent, two out of every five people, applied for Passover relief. So that, what you have, in sum, is a picture of economic tribulations and an economic picture which is worsening, rather than improving, over the period we are talking about.

We can turn now to the internal life of the Jewish population and look at the Jewish community. Building on a tradition that goes back at least to medieval times, and probably earlier, the Jewish population in Poland formed in each locality a kehilla [_______________________] or communal organization or organized community. The kehillot were generally confined to religious affairs, whereas in the 18th century and earlier their purview had been far wider, and the religious Jewry as well as the government was perfectly content to have it that way. What did these kehillot do? Well, if you look at the distribution of expenditures of kehillot in 1929 this gives you a fairly accurate picture. About one-third of their expenditures were for religious functions, and nearly 20% were for social welfare-assistance to the needy, to orphans, to widows, provision of medical assistance to those who couldn't afford it-and about 10% of these expenditures were for education. Needless to say, this was Jewish education. About 5% was for public health, and about 7% was invested for future income; 11% percent toward retiring debts, and about 14% for administration. So basically, the kehilla functioned as a religious body and as a social welfare and educational body.

What was new, beginning with the late 19th century and developed to its greatest extent in Interwar Poland and in the other countries was Jewish political parties. These, in a sense, were the parallel to the kehillot. The kehillot, which earlier had also functioned as the representatives of the Jews to the state-they had so-called shtadlanim or shtadlonim [________________], intercessors who represented to the community to the local or national ruler; the kehillot had collected taxes both for internal Jewish use as well as for the government; the kehillot had exercised civil law and criminal law functions-these were now taken away from them, and they were as I said, restricted largely to religious and educational functions. The Jewish political parties now assumed the tasks, the political and the social tasks, which had previously been undertaken by the kehillot. And, goes this traditional saying in Yiddish, [vee es Christlzakh as a Yiddlzakh], which means that, roughly translated or paraphrased, "the way it goes with the Christians, that's the way it goes with the Jews." There's a parallel in Jewish political life to Polish political life. Just as Polish political life was splintered, fractionated, contentious, lively, so too was Jewish political life.

There was a club of Jewish deputies in the Polish parliament-the parliament was known as the Sejm in Polish-and all of the Jewish parties, with one or two exceptions, belonged to this club of Jewish deputies. But, this unification was more apparent than real, because among the Jewish parties there were deep divisions and severe disputes. I'd like to survey now the political parties, one by one, to give you an idea of the heterogeneity and the character of Jewish political life. We can begin with the party known as Agudas Yisroel [____________________], using the Ashkenazic pronunciation which was the pronunciation used in Poland at the time. Today in Israel, this party is known as Agudat Israel, a party that could fairly accurately in the 1920's lay claim to representing the largest single number of Polish Jews. This was a religious party, needless to say an Orthodox religious party because conservative Judaism did not exist at all in Interwar Eastern Europe; Reform Judaism existed only on its western peripheries or in central Europe, places such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary to some extent, and very little in Poland.

This party basically had one item on its agenda, and that was the protection of Jewish religious rights and the promotion of Jewish religious life. Therefore, it was, without passing judgment, it was an opportunist party. That is to say, most other issues it had no interest in and could sacrifice for the sake of advancing its own particular agenda. It was the only party to split off from the club of Jewish deputies in the Sejm, and it even joined the front organization of the Regime of the Colonels. It was prepared to deal with anti-Semites, as long as the Jews generally and the Jewish religious interests in particular were served. Nevertheless, it failed to prevent the anti religious slaughter or the anti shechita legislation which I mentioned.

Agudas Yisroel was militantly anti-Zionist. Its anti-Zionism was derived from the religiously-based belief which was not shared by all Orthodox Jews but was a belief held by most of them, that it would be a messiah who would return the Jews to their homeland and at that point the Jewish state would be constructed. To attempt to do so by human rather than divine force, prior to the arrival of the messiah, would be a religious violation which could only end in disaster.

Agudas Yisroel in the very last years of the period, in the late 1930's, did see immigration to Palestine as the only way out of economic and political persecution. But it remained in principle opposed to the creation of a Jewish state, and that opposition did not end until after 1945. After 1945, Agudas Yisroel became non-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist; that is to say, it took a neutral position on whether or not a Jewish state should exist, and in the 50 years' existence of the state of Israel, it has been highly ambivalent toward participation in Israeli governments-sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, and it is certainly to this day not a Zionist party.

It was supported by the vast majority of the Chassidic dynasties. Chassidism as we learned earlier in this course was particularly powerful in southern and central parts of Poland, and nearly all of the Chassidic dynasties threw their support to Agudas Yisroel. Agudas Yisroel produced a few outstanding personalities, parliamentary leaders as well as religious leaders, but it aroused the hostility of much of the rest of Polish Jewry, particularly that part of Polish Jewry which was interested in the general democratization of Polish life or in Zionism, or, at the other end of the spectrum, social democracy as manifested by the Bund, which we'll talk about in a moment.

Another political party were the General Zionists. They adopted a dual program of autonomy in the diaspora-that is, that the Jews in a place like Poland should have the autonomy to run their internal affairs-but also Jewish statehood in Palestine. They fought for civil and national rights of Jews in Poland. They advocated Hebrew and Hebrew culture, not only in the future Jewish state but in Poland, and they fought against anti-Semitism. They believed that the Jewish autonomy in Poland could be based on the kehilla, on a secularlized, expanded kehilla. These General Zionists generally drew their support from the Jewish middle class, but they had support from other segments of the population as well, and in most national and local elections they won a considerable number of votes, sometimes even a majority. Their outstanding leader was a man named Yitzhak Grinboim, who became known as one of the outstanding leaders of Polish Jewry.

There was another kind of Zionist group-Labor Zionists, socialist Zionists who, in ways which we have explored before, tried to combine either Marxist Socialism or non-Marxist Socialism with Zionism. The Labor Zionists were made up of several parties-we won't detail them now, we will just mention the Poale Zion, the Zeirei Zion, Left Poale Zion-their social base was generally white collar workers, young people, intelligentsia, and some working class people. Because of their fragmentation, they seldom elected anyone at the national level, but they did succeed in many local elections.

Another Zionist grouping was the Mizrachi. These were religious Jews, Orthodox Jews, but in contrast to Agudas Yisroel, they were Zionists. They believed that, even though the ultimate redemption might come with the Messianic age, there was an immediate and crying religious need, and certainly a political and social need, to establish a Jewish state or at least a Jewish haven in Palestine for those Jews who needed and wanted to go there. The Mizrachi was caught in the dilemma of being attacked by Agudas Yisroel for its Zionist heresy and for not being religious enough, and on the other hand being attacked by the Socialists and the non-Zionists as being too religious and too Zionist.

A fourth Zionist grouping were the Revisionists. They really appeared in strength only in the 1930's, and their strength grew rapidly in the 1930's because of the environment in which they operated. The Zionist Revisionists were a militant, anti-Socialist, even a militaristic movement, which urged evacuation, and they used that term, evacuation of Jews from what they saw as a doomed Europe. Under the brilliant leadership of Vladimir Zhabotinsky, a Russian-born, Ukrainian-born, highly assimilated Jew, the Revisionists foresaw a catastrophe in Europe for the Jews and urged a mass migration immediately to Palestine. The only way that could be accomplished would be to combat directly and militarily the British occupation authorities as they saw them. The main enemy for the Revisionists were not the Arabs in Palestine but the British Mandatory Authorities, which had restricted immigration. Menachem Begin, later a Prime Minister of Israel, was a member of the Revisionists, a leader of its Youth Movement called [Beyta].

If you pause for a moment to think about these parties which I've mentioned, you will realize that every one of them has an incarnation in the present-day Israeli political system. Agudas Yisroel exists, participates in the Israeli government; General Zionists-the Mizrachi is now the national religious party; the Labor Zionists are now the Labor Party, [Apan], the Revisionists are now the present-day Likud. So that the major players in Israeli politics today, with the one exception of the [Shass] Party, which is based on people of Afro-Asian origin in Israel, with that one exception the major parties in Israel today derive from the Polish Jewish political scene, and in fact for the first 20 or 30 years of Israel's existence, not only did the parties and their ideologies derive from Poland, but their leadership did as well--as I mentioned in the case of Menachem Begin, and one can multiply that several fold.

Beyond the Zionist parties, and outside the current Israeli spectrum for what will become obvious reasons, was the Jewish Labor Bund. The Bund was founded in 1897 in Vilna, which in the Interwar period was in Poland and is now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. And the Bund was a Socialist, democratic, anti-Zionist, areligious, some might say anti-religious party. It was a party which advocated a program for national cultural autonomy for Jews in the diaspora. It did not look to the creation of a Jewish state; it believed that the Jews could live out their lives peacefully and creatively, as long as they would have cultural autonomy within the states of the diaspora. That culture would be based not on Hebrew, which was seen as an ancient, dead language used only for religious purposes, but on Yiddish, the living language of the Jewish masses. Zionism, in their view, was a mirage, a chimera, an unrealistic illusion about creating a Jewish state in some remote area of the world, unattractive economically, unrealistic politically.

The Bund cooperated closely with the Polish socialist party, and it looked toward the creation of a democratic socialist Poland as the solution not only to the Jewish Problem, so-called, but to all the ills which beset the Polish state and its population. With the increasing immiseration of the Jewish population in the 1930's, with the growth of the Jewish proletariat, with the growth of anti-Semitism, both externally coming largely from Germany and internally, the Bund gained in popularity. Its ideology seemed to make the most sense. If Zionism could not be implemented because of the British [brokat?] on immigration, then perhaps Bundism, the struggle against anti-Semitism, the struggle for autonomy.

The Bund controlled most of the Jewish trade unions. It had nearly 100,000 members in those unions in 1939. It organized the artisans, the home workers, and even the white collar workers, which was if you are familiar with American trade unions know as a big job. The Bund was at first purely proletarian, although led by the intelligentsia, but later expanded both its social base and its constituency for which it fought. By 1939, the Bund became the single most popular party.

In the 1934 municipal elections, 43% of the votes among the Jews were won by the Zionists, 18% by Agudas Yisroel, 21% by other middle class groups, including the Mizrachi, and only 10% by the Socialist Bund. By the late 1930's, however, in the municipal elections of 1938 and 1939, the Bund got more votes than any other Jewish party, and that change should be explained, I think, by the deteriorating economic and political situation of Polish Jews.

I should hasten to say that Jews were active and supported not only Jewish parties but other parties as well, most notably perhaps the Polish Socialist Party. There were Jews who considered themselves Poles of the [Mosaic] Faith. They were Poles culturally, linguistically, they liked to think of themselves as part of the Polish society, and the only thing that differentiated them from the other Poles was religion. Just as there were [Deutscheberger Mozaischenglaubens], German citizens of the Mosaic Faith who thought of themselves as Germans in every respect, until they were told otherwise beginning in 1933, so too there were Polish Jews who considered themselves to be Polish-Polish in culture, even Polish in ethnicity but not in religion. Needless to say, there were also Polish Jews who became Polish not only in ethnicity and in culture, but as they saw it, in religion is well, that is, people who converted to Catholicism. These Poles of the Mosaic Faith did not identify with any of the Jewish parties but rather with one or another of the Polish parties.

There is another marginal group of Polish Jews, and that was the Communists. The Communist Party of Poland, like all other Communist parties in the region except for the one in Czechoslovakia, was illegal. It was an underground party, hounded by the police. It has been estimated that about one-third of the membership of the Polish Communist Party in the 1930's was Jewish. Of somewhere around 30,000 Communists, approximately 10,000 were Jewish. This fact has been seized upon by various Polish political observers to buttress the idea, or the myth, of the "zydokomuna" [___________], what might be called the "kike" or "Jew Commie." That is to say that Communism was somehow a Jewish ideology, that Bolshevism was a Jewish invention, that Jews by their very nature, by something intrinsic to them, were Communist and hence atheist, anti-Catholic, anti-Polish, pro-Russian. While it is true that Jews were disproportionately represented in the Communist Party, that is a third of the Communist Party roughly were Jews or of Jewish origin, as a proportion of the Jewish population they were a tiny fraction-ten thousand out of nearly three and a half million. So to say that Jews were somehow naturally or innately inclined to Communism is not borne out by the numbers.

Why, nevertheless, were Jews over-represented in the ranks of the Communist Party? One could speculate that, for many Jews, the situation of Jews in Poland was intolerable; that if immigration was not desirable or not possible, and if there was no prospect of gaining autonomy and equal rights under the present Polish regime, the obvious solution would be to change Poland, and to change Poland radically; and the way to do that would be to make a revolution, and guarantee, as the Soviet Constitution did, equal rights for all peoples. The fact that Soviet practice increasingly diverged from Soviet ideology within the Soviet Constitution was ignored by these people. They saw the resolution of Poland's problems, and they put Poland's problems ahead of Jewry's problems. The resolution or the solution of Poland's problems would be a Socialist, that is to say a Communist, revolution. That would solve the economic problem, it would solve the ethnic problem, it would solve the political problem. And, by the by, it would also solve the problems of the Jews, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Lithuanians and Germans, that is, of all the non-Polish minorities.

This illegal Communist Party was heavily faction-ridden; it had a severe Trotskyite deviation within its ranks, at least according to Stalin; and, it was the only party in the history of the Communist movement to be dissolved by that movement in 1938, because it was so hopelessly fractionated, so hopelessly infiltrated from the Stalinist point of view by Trotskyites, this party was abolished, to be reconstituted only in 1943-1944 when it looked like the Red Army would conquer Poland and there was a real possibility for the first time of reestablishing the Communist regime. That episode, the reestablishment of the Communist regime in Poland in the mid-to-late 1940's also had its Jewish aspects and also aroused various forms of anti-Semitism, but that is a topic we will take up later.

In brief then, the Jewish political spectrum ranged from radicalism as embodied by Communism, and to a lesser extent by Bundism, to a conservative, narrow, religious focus as exemplified by Agudas Yisroel. And, in between, a wide variety of choices and options for Jews to express their political and cultural ideas.

Looking now at culture, education and welfare within the Jewish community, the government of Poland had been obliged by the Minorities Treaty of 1919 to provide schooling in their native languages for the minority groups. It did not do so at all for the Jews, and only minimally for the other minorities. Some small subsidies were granted to Hebrew and Yiddish schools, but these were later withdrawn.

The Jewish school situation, like everything else about Jewish life perhaps, was heavily politicized. Each party, it seemed, or each ideological camp, established its own schools, its own school network. Agudas Yisroel established a network of schools for boys and a separate one for goals. The school network for boys was called Khorev [____________], which is a synonym for "Sinai," and for girls the school network was called Baisyakov [________________], "House of Jacob." Rather an innovation in the 20th Century, that is, providing religious education for girls beyond the very minimal learning of the prayers. This is something that was initiated in Europe only in the 20th Century among Orthodox Jews.

These schools of Agudas Yisroel taught the bare minimum of secular subjects, just enough to gain state recognition and to free students from attending state schools. By 1937, this school system had about 818 institutions with 109,000 pupils. This was one of the two largest school systems which Jews attended. It's very interesting to note that about 100,000 Jewish students attended the Agudas Yisroel schools, and 100,000 attended Polish public schools. So you have this, to make a bad pun I suppose, polarization-100,000 in the least-acculturated, least-assimilated school network, paying the least attention to Polish culture, and an equal number in the Polish school network, paying the most attention to Polish culture and the least attention to Jewish culture.

In between, one had the Mizrachi schools, the religious Zionist schools, and these constituted a network known as Yavneh [_____________]. Yavneh is the town in Israel where the center of Jewish learning was shifted following the disruption of the Second Temple in the year 70, and the name Yavneh represents the continuity of rabbinic Jewish learning, even in difficult conditions. In the Mizrachi schools, more stress was laid on modern Jewish history. Hebrew was taught as a language of vernacular usage, not just as the language of prayer or of religious texts which was the way it was treated in Agudas Yisroel schools, and secular subjects were taught on a more intensive basis and on a higher level than in the Khorev schools. The Yavneh network had 134 institutions with about 15,000 pupils.

The third form of school was the Tarbut school or Tarbut [_______________], meaning culture in Hebrew. These were rather extraordinary schools because they taught all subjects except those required by the Polish state to be taught in Polish, in the Hebrew language. History, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, these were taught in the Hebrew language-which after all was not the language of daily intercourse among most Polish Jews. There were nearly 200 primary schools and nine Hebrew secondary schools, in addition to an agricultural school which operated in Hebrew, and the total number of students in all of these schools was about 45,000.

Then there was a network of Yiddish schools-of course, non-Zionist by and large, although there were some Zionist Yiddish schools-and they were organized in the spirit of the Bund, in a network called Cyszo, an acronym for Central Yiddish School Organization. These were secular schools, humanistic schools some might call them, teaching Yiddish literature and Jewish history in addition to the usual subjects. Some recent research has show that even these avowedly secular schools nevertheless taught, indirectly, Jewish religion, customs, traditions, through the medium of teaching Jewish folklore and literature and Jewish history, so that "secular schools" is perhaps somewhat of a misnomer. Since Jewish culture is so heavily religious, even the secular school could not avoid teaching things such as the holidays, say, such as Passover, or various other customs and traditions. The Cyszo network had about 180 institutions with a student population of some 16,000.

Finally, there were also schools which were bilingual. Generally these schools were affiliated with the Zionist movement, and they used a Hebrew/Polish bilingual system. Almost all of these were secondary schools, and they had about 16,000 students.

One should mention two other kinds of Jewish educational institutions. One is the Yeshiva. The Yeshiva is school of higher religious learning, as we have discussed earlier. In some senses, this is an elite school. Religious children, that is to say the majority of Polish Jewish children, went first to the Cheder, or the small one-room classroom, and when they graduated the best and the brightest of them went on to Yeshiva, the higher school of religious education which goes all the way back at least to the Babylonian exile, which began in the year 586 BCE. Poland had many famous Yeshivas or Yeshivot in places, very often tiny towns like [Mir], [Radin], larger cities such as [Lumja], Krakow, certainly Warsaw, and many others, [Baranowicz]. These were exclusively male institutions, and they produced not simply rabbis but also people who became businessmen or took other positions in the secular world, but were highly learned in traditional Jewish texts, in Jewish law, in halakha [Jewish law].

This institution, this kind of institution, had existed in Poland since at least the 16th Century if not earlier, but a new kind of institution also developed as a higher Jewish educational institution and that developed in Interwar Poland. In 1925, in the then Polish city of Vilna [_____________], now the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, the "yivo" was founded, which in Yiddish stands for yiddische vissenschaftike institute, Jewish Scientific Institute. It exists in New York today; it was destroyed by the Nazis during the war. Remarkably, many of the materials in the Yivo which were presumed to have been lost and destroyed, have recently been rediscovered in Vilnius, and much of that material has been copied and transferred to the Yivo Institute in New York.

What kind of an institution was this? It was designed to be the center of the social scientific study of Jewry, of East European Jewry-anthropology, folklore, literature, sociology, economics-these were the subjects of research and of teaching at the Yivo Institute. It also regularized the grammar and the orthography of the Yiddish language, and established the standards for Yiddish today. In Warsaw, there was an Institute for the Scientific Study of Judaism, [keina vissenschaftess judentuss, mahonlema da eha yahadut], an Institute for the Science of Judaism, which resembled some of its West European, Viennese and other counterparts.

There were hundreds of private and communal chadorim, that is, little cheders; scores of small yeshivas, especially in Warsaw; kindergartens, summer camps, most of which were organized, as you can predict by now, along party lines; even sanatoria and orphanages, largely run by the Bund or by Zionist organizations. In Vilnius, Vilna, Vilno, there was a superb vocational high school called the [Teknikum], vocational training institutions. All in all, well over half of the Jewish school population received a Jewish education of some sort, and almost half of the money spent on communal purposes in all of Poland went to education.

Another aspect of Polish cultural life, Jewish cultural life in Poland, was the press. There were no less than 30 Yiddish daily newspapers, and five Jewish daily newspapers in the Polish language; 112 Yiddish weeklies; four Hebrew weeklies; 14 Polish Jewish weeklies--a tremendously vibrant, contentious, lively press, ranging from highly sophisticated press aimed at the intelligentsia, to a fairly low-life, vulgar entertainment for the masses. Some of this was of great, very high quality; some of it was not. And there were monthlies, there were weeklies.

There was, of course, a very vibrant Yiddish theatre. This is one of the only remnants of Yiddish culture in Poland today. The state Jewish theater was constructed by the communist state after the war. It continues to exist and performs in Yiddish, although a large portion of the actors are themselves not Jewish, and the greatest number of audiences are also not Jewish, and listen to the Yiddish in simultaneous Polish translation. This is a direct heir of the Yiddish theatre in Poland founded by Esther Rokhel Kaminska, whose grave is in the Warsaw Jewish cemetary, and whose daughter is perhaps better known to contemporary Jews, Ida Kaminska, who starred in the Warsaw Yiddish Theatre but also in the Czech film from the 1960's called Shop on Main Street.

There were theaters in many cities, there were travelling theaters in Yiddish. There was also significant Jewish scholarship in Poland of the Interwar period. Such historians as Moses Schorr, Ignatzio or Yitzhak Schipper, Meyer Balaban, people who wrote largely on Polish Jewish history and who wrote both in Polish and in Yiddish, and curiously enough today their works have been republished, in Polish especially in contemporary Poland, and are read avidly, mostly by non-Jews. Editions of their works have now been photocopied and are available in scholarly Polish bookstores.

A younger generation of historians including Beyer Mark, who documented and wrote about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and who died in Warsaw in 1966, where he was head of the Jewish Historical Institute, and perhaps better-known, Emmanuel Ringelblum, the young historian who kept a diary of the Warsaw Ghetto and who formed a group called [Oineg Shabbes], "Joy of the Sabbath," an ironic name, which documented what was happening in Warsaw in the 1940's, and hid these materials in milk cans, some which-but not all of them-have been discovered and unearthed in Warsaw after the war. Ringelblum was betrayed in the Aryan sector of Warsaw during the war and was murdered by the Nazis.

Between 1930 and 1934, an average of 430 Yiddish and Hebrew books were published each year. Great writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer and his brother, [Yudyud Zinger] who wrote a book called The Brothers Ashkenazi which is a remarkable description of both the Jewish proletariat and the Jewish magnates of Lodz, [Aharon Tseitlin, Jozef Fahatoshu, Hillel Tseitlin], these were great writers across the spectrum of Jewish life, religious writers, socialist writers, Yiddish writers, Hebrew writers, poets, prose, a tremendously active literary establishment. And the union of Jewish writers and journalists in Warsaw was the hub of a tremendously vital literary and artistic life.

In sum, what we see in Poland in the Interwar period is economic privation on the one hand, political persecution, coexisting on the other hand with the most vital diaspora community perhaps of modern times. We see also, however, a trend toward gradual secularization, increased Polandization, the adoption of the Polish language by increasing numbers of Polish Jews, what one might call acculturation-not assimiliation, not the loss of identity as Jews, but the adoption of another culture, of Polish culture, and in many cases the loss, deliberate loss, of Jewish culture, the substitution, one might say, of Polish culture for Yiddish culture and Hebrew culture. And there are figures, such as the writer Bruno Schultz, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, and many others, the poet Liljan Tubin, not to speak of Antony Srenimski who became a Catholic, who move from Jewish culture, although they themselves are Jews, into Polish culture, and become not only consumers of Polish culture but producers of it. Had the war not intervened, it is highly likely that increasing numbers of the younger generation in particular would have moved to the Polish language, to Polish culture. Many would have straddled the two cultures; others would have abandoned the Jewish culture for the Polish culture.

Secularization can be seen also in the declining number of votes for the religious party and the increased number for the Bund. In the early 1930's, a new type of yeshiva was established by Rabbi Meyer Shapiro in the city of Lublin. The yeshiva was called [Yeshivat Khakh May Lublin], Yeshivas khakh may Lublin, "The Yeshiva of the Wise Men of Lublin." The building of that Yeshiva remains today. It is now the radiology department of the medical school of Lublin University. One can see, even today, that this Yeshiva was of a new type. It was a large, by the standards of that time a magnificent building; it had provisions for a dormitory, for feeding the students properly; it was clean, it was well-run; and the reason this yeshiva was established was that Rabbi Shapiro realized that the old-style yeshivas and chadorim were alienating the new generations of Jews. This was an attempt to keep them in the fold, to present a modernized, not intellectually or religiously modernized but physically modernized yeshiva, where they could study with the same degree of comfort and material support as they would in a Polish school. That was a symptom of the crisis that was being perceived in the religious community.

The last aspect of Polish Jewry that we should mention in conclusion is the constant fragmentation of this community, what some might regard as its political immaturity. Small wonder, because after all these parties, these movements, could not exist in completely legal form all over Poland before 1902. And just as the Polish polity was being constructed and Polish politicians and the Polish population was feeling its way, so too were the Jews. On the one hand, this fragmentation produced a great deal of vibrance, of life, of competition which produced creativity. On the other hand, it also weakened the Jewish community, faced as it was with the challenges from the economic situation which I described, and the political establishment, and from Polish society as a whole.

One doesn't know, of course, in what direction Polish Jewry, and Poland in general, would have moved beyond September 1, 1939. The story was cut off artificially and abruptly by the invasion of Poland on that date by the German armies, and by the summer of 1944, when Poland was liberated from German occupation, 90% of the Jews who had lived in Poland before the war had been murdered, had been systematically exterminated. About a quarter of a million people had found refuge in the Soviet Union, people particularly who had lived in Eastern Poland and were annexed by the Soviet Army, beginning September 17, 1939, and there are estimates of somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Jews who had managed to survive in Poland itself, either in hiding or by successfully passing themselves off as Aryans, or by fighting as partisans against the Nazi regime. But the loss of Polish Jewry was nearly total, and Polish Jewry, though it exists and is somewhat recovering its cultural heritage, will never come back to the magnitude and the vibrancy which it experienced in the Interwar period.