Where Is Poland? | Jews and Poles

Chapter 7

Jews and Poles

Jews did not just live in isolated communities, but also resided in the cities alongside the Poles. In the nineteenth century, ongoing modernisation led the Jews to make choices decisive for their identity. Thecommonexperience of living under systemic oppression brought the two nations closer together.

Rzeszów - Market square, postcard from 1916. Source: Polona.pl

Not only in the shtetl

In many large Polish cities, the Jews made up a significant percentage of the population. They very frequently lived close together, forming whole Jewish quarters and neighbourhoods. In the Russian-held partition, the Jewish communities in Warsaw and Łódź grew most in the nineteenth century. At the end of the century, Warsaw was home to the largest community in the world (more than 300,000 in 1910, representing 39% of city inhabitants), whereas Łódź in 1910 had 166,000 Jews, representing 41% of the city’s population. Large Jewish districts appeared in both cities.

In other cities of the Russian partition, such as Białystok (situated just beyond the eastern border of the rump Kingdom of Poland), Jews accounted for 69% of the population on the eve of World War I.

Kraków, one of the oldest sites of Jewish settlement, was home to 25,000 Jews at the start of the twentieth century, which represented 28% of the whole population. Lwów, a city twice the size, had some 45,000 Jewish residents in 1900, again 28% of the population.

The Jews in the cities also came under the influence of modern movements and ideologies, to a much greater degree than their brethren out in the shtetels. Breaches in the traditional Jewish culture of the cities were caused by the assimilation movement, Zionism, and left-wing political parties.

Poalei Zion members in Warsaw, 1905. Source: Kvutzat Kinneret archive / Wikicommons

Modern challenges

The nineteenth century was a time of great change for traditional Jewish society. Jewish life was transformed by the Haskalah – a Jewish enlightenment movement which strove for greater integration with non-Jewish communities and improved education on secular subjects.

At the same time, rapid modernisation was coming from outside, in the form of such social processes as emancipation, industrialisation and urbanisation. During the course of the nineteenth century, Jews gained citizenship rights in the Austrian and Prussian partitions, and also in the Russian-held Kingdom of Poland. That meant access to education and opportunities to emerge out of the ghetto of the traditional Jewish identity. They take part in the process of industrialising the country – both as investors and as workers.

Jews living in the cities increasingly faced a choice: many opted to become Polonized (often while retaining their religion), others assimilated to Russian or German culture – even while a majority of Jews still lived in shtetls.

The Jews who emerged from the ‘ghetto’ of the shtetls became part the newly forming classes: a small bourgeoisie, but also an intelligentsia and proletariat. With time they began to create political parties that illustrated the diversity of attitudes among the Jewish community: ranging from the conservative, religious Agudat Yisrael, to the socialist Bund, to the leftist-Zionist Poale Zion.

'Polish youth of Mosaic faith invites fellow countrymen to a service for the prosperity of our homeland,' postcard, Warsaw, 1861. Photo: Polona.pl

More than one nation without a state

The partitions meant that from now on, the Poles were – much like the Jews – a nation without a state. To a certain degree, this situation brought the two nations closer together. Jewish volunteers fought in the Kościuszko Uprising, the most famous of them being Berek Joselewicz. Mickiewicz included the Jewish character Jankiel in his Pan Tadeusz and saw the Jews as elder brethren who deserved full civic rights. In the time of national mourning, immediately prior to the eruption of the January Uprising, Jews took part in patriotic demonstrations, prayed for the good fortune of the homeland in synagogues and out of solidarity attended masses at Catholic churches.

This so-called Polish-Jewish ‘fraternization’ strengthened the integration and Polonization of the Polish Jews, especially the increasingly more integrated Jewish intelligentsia – but it also represented the culmination of such processes. At the same time, as Andrzej Żbikowski points out, in the late 1860s the Jewish population in all the partitions already held equal legal status with the rest of the inhabitants of the Polish lands. However, those rights had been granted to them by the occupying powers, and this had indeed been done against the desires of a significant segment of society. This state of affairs did not bode well for the peaceful coexistence of the two nations. The closer the end of the nineteenth century drew, and the more modern nationalism and antisemitism developed, the more the pace of assimilation processes (the Polonization of the Jews) slowed down.