Draft:Antisemitism in Poland

Data and analysis
Sociologists Ireneusz Krzemiński and Helena Datner conducted survey research in 1992, 2002 and 2012 examining the prevalence of antisemitic and anti-antisemitic attitudes in Polish society. The latter were attributed to people who did not accept any antisemitic statements. The researchers examined the incidence of traditional antisemitism (referring primarily to Christian religious stereotypes, such as the accusation that Jesus Christ was murdered by Jews) and modern antisemitism (stereotypes referring to Jewish influence on the economy, media and politics). The research shows a general decline in traditional antisemitic prejudice, an increase in modern antisemitic attitudes in 2002 and a significant decline in 2012. There was a significant increase in the number of people without any antisemitic prejudice throughout the period.

The research also showed a close correlation between education level and antisemitism, those with lower education, were more likely to declare antisemitic views, primarily when it comes to traditional antisemitism.

Middle Ages
During the Middle Ages, Poland was inhabited by a relatively small number of Jews. By the mid-14th century, they were present mainly in Silesia. The development of Jewish settlement in Poland accelerated in the later period, but their number was still not large in the middle of the 16th century and, according to Henryk Samsonowicz, amounted to about 20 thousand. They lived mainly in cities, in the territory of the Crown (excluding the Ukrainian lands annexed after the Union of Lublin) the presence of Jews is documented in 294 cities out of a total of 1076. Jews settled mainly in Poland due to the persecution they suffered in Western Europe during the Crusades (12th century) and the Black Death (14th century). Polish rulers fostered this process by issuing a number of privileges for Jews, the first being the Statute of Kalisz of 1264 issued by Bolesław V the Chaste, later confirmed by King Casimir III the Great (in 1334, 1364 and 1367).

The accumulation of privileges granted by the Polish rulers led to the de facto separation of the Jews in Poland and Lithuania as a separate estate. Unlike in Western Europe, they had the status of guests and were subject to the protection of the prince or king. In return for paying a special tax, they had almost complete freedom of movement and choice of profession. Murder of Jews was subject to the same punishment as murder of a nobleman. The institution of the kahal, which did not exist outside of Poland, gave the Jews a large degree of self-government and took them out from under municipal law. The social status and political position of the Jews was much higher than that of the peasants who were serfs. The Jews themselves compared their position to the nobility, on whose lifestyle they modelled themselves. At the beginning of the 16th century, Jews living in noble private estates were taken out of the royal jurisdiction, this led to a further improvement in their situation as they were able to negotiate more favourable rights than those received from the king.

Jewish privileges were met with displeasure by the nobility and the Catholic clergy. The chronicler and clergyman Jan Długosz, writing in the second half of the 15th century, expressed the opinion that King Casimir III granted privileges to Jews at the request of his Jewish concubine Esterka; according to him, these privileges were "regarded by many as false, and in which there was no small harm and offense to God. These abominable endowments still exist to this day." Earlier, the Church had tried to limit Jewish freedoms by threatening excommunication for those Christians who interacted with Jews and ordering that Jewish settlements be separated from Christian ones. These principles, enacted by the two Lateran Councils of 1179 and 1215, were transplanted to Polish soil by the synods of 1267 and 1285. However, these provisions were never implemented in Poland.

Elements of anti-Judaism, infiltrated Poland from Germany and gained particular popularity in lands where the German townspeople dominated, above all in Silesia, which had been moving politically away from Poland since the 14th century. From the middle of the 14th century to the end of the 15th century, there were 20 anti-Jewish riots on the territory of Poland and Lithuania; while from 1534 to 1717 there were 53. During that time, anti-Jewish sentiments were significantly related to Christian anti-Judaism, collectively blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus Christ. In some cases, Jews were taken to court on suspicion of host desecration and ritual murder. There are 17 documented accusations of the host desecration, 8 of which went to court, 3 cases ended in acquittal. In 1556, the first death sentence was passed in Sochaczew. The last investigation took place in Łubno in 1744. The first allegations of ritual murder by Jews were recorded in the chronicle of Jan Długosz. In 1547, the first trial of the case took place in Rawa Mazowiecka. By the middle of the 17th century, 62 such slanders and 28 trials were recorded. Thirteen cases resulted in executions and eight in acquittals. The highest number of slanders was recorded for the years 1590-1620 in central Poland (Mazovia, Kujawy and Podlasie), then they began to appear more frequently in the east, mainly in Ukraine. The last trial in the lands of the Commonwealth took place in 1786.

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
While the kings and magnates of Poland tolerated the Jews as a useful source of revenues and services, the city burghers loathed them as competitors in trade and crafts. Exacerbated by the Church, hostility towards Jews was also widespread among peasants, especially when their lords had placed them under the supervision of Jewish bailiffs and leaseholders. The stereotype of the Jewish innkeeper profiting from the peasants' drunkenness and indebtedness was also very present in Polish folklore, popular mythology and literature. Unlike in other European countries, in the Polish Commonwealth Jews were not regarded as an entirely foreign or illegitimate component of society; alongside an array of overlapping taxes, prohibitions, quotas and other burdens and humiliations, they were also granted certain privileges and warranties by the law of the land, to the point that they were "virtually one of the established estates of the realm". However, they were constantly exposed to the arbitrary exercise of power by the rulers and occasionally subjected to outright persecution. This was often related to jealousy, as exemplified by the Paradisus Judaeorum pasquinade from early 17th century, likely penned by a Catholic townsfolk criticial of groups he deemed as unfairly competing with his bretheren. That poem exaggerated the Jewish position in early modern Poland, claiming that Poland was a "paradise for the Jews". In fact, while Jews were comparatively privileged compared to many other classes in the Commonwealth, and to the Jewish position in many other contemporary countries, their situation in the Commonwealth was hardly idyllic.

The 17th and 18th century Poland-Lithuania was the central point of blood-libel cases. At the instigation of the clergy, especially the Jesuits, false accusations of ritual murder were made against the Jews, often leading to torture and murder. In 1758, a spokesman for the Polish Jews was sent to Rome to plead their cause before the pope. According to the plea, the life of the Polish Jews had become miserable because "as soon as a dead body is found anywhere, at once the Jews of the neighboring localities are brought before the courts on these charges of murder". In reponse to that plea, in 1759 Cardinal Ganganelli, the future Pope Clement XIV, issued a report on the ritual muder libel declaring that the accusations against the Jews of Poland were unfounded and based on prejurice: the Jews of Poland were "malignantly traduced with various calumnies (...) by the ignorant populace and by certain persons hostile to them through private malice; in particular on the charge that they are accustomed to use the blood of Christians in their rite of Unleavened Bread".

The status of the Jews was the subject of political debate at the Great Sejm (1788–1792). Along with the usual themes of anti-Jewish press, there were also some tendencies in favour of greater integration of Jews into Polish society, which, however, never went so far as to consider the possibility of their emancipation, such as that recently decreed by the National Assembly in 1791 revolutionary France.. Scipione Piattoli spearheaded a plan for bold reforms to improve the condition of the Jews that ultimately failed in the face of strenuous opposition from the middle-class burgher estate.

Polish Jews in 18th century Poland were

Partitions of Poland
Klaus-Peter Friedrich traces the origin of modern Polish antisemitism, "based on ethnic and political prejudice and antagonism", to the period of late partitions of Poland period, particulary in the Russian governed territories. According to Friedrich, the situation worsened in the first half of the 20th century, during the periods of interwar Poland and World War II and "alienation grew when economic, social and psychological factors superseded traditional antijudaism". One of the key anti-semitic activist of that time was journalist Jan Jeleński who argued (often in his magazine Rola (weekly)) that Poland had to defended from "Jewish influence", and that Jews unfairly dominated the economy and exploited the peasantry. His activities resulted in the creation of an "all-encompassing world view" of Polish antisemitism. Similar anti-semitic publications of that period included magazins Głos and the Przegląd Wszechpolski. Such antisemitic attitudes became popular in the conservative Christian political movment of National Democracy (known in Poland as endecja) which became a major force in Polish politics by the early 20th century. National Democracy associated Polishness with Roman Catholicism, and effectively failed to see Polish Jews as Polish people, and instead argued that Jews, whether assimilated or not, are harmful to the Polish society. Roman Dmowski, chief ideologue of the early endecja, declared around the turn of the century that "The Jewish population is undeniably a parasite on the social body of whichever country it inhabits".

Second Polish Republic (1918–1939)
In the Second Polish Republic that was established at the end of the First World War, Jews accounted for about 10 per cent of the state population and were one of the main components of the country after ethnic Poles (about 70 per cent) and Ukrainians (14 per cent). In 1939, Poland's 3.3 million Jews constituted by far the largest Jewish community in Europe, with 30% of the population in Warsaw and other major cities; in some parts of eastern Poland, Jews were the majority of the resident population. The Polish Jewish community was one of the most vibrant and free in Europe. Most of its members (85 percent) spoke Yiddish as their first language and the community was generally considered a national rather than a religious minority: a "nation within a nation", according to ethno-nationalists of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Antisemitism was widespread in political communication and had a strong grip on the deeply Catholic population imbued with feelings of religious anti-Judaism. Jews were accused of being an anti-national force, linked either to the German enemy or to Russian Bolshevism, and were subjected to harsh forms of discrimination. While the Polish Socialist Party was not antisemitic and maintained relations with the Jewish socialist movement, right-wing parties such as Roman Dmowski's National Democracy were a vehicle for antisemitic propaganda. They believed that most Jews were unassimilable and could never become Polish and that Jews were an anti-national force hostile to the Polish cause. Dmowski wrote that "in the character of this race [the Jews] so many different values, strange to our moral constitution and harmful to our life, have accumulated that assimilation with a larger number of Jews would destroy us, replacing with decadent elements those young creative foundations upon which we are building the future".

In the first decade of the second republic, hostility towards Jews by both the authorities and the population found expression in systematic discrimination and widespread antisemitic violence, such as the series of antisemitic outrages that followed the end of World War I, in the context of the Polish–Ukrainian War (1918-1919), in which between 350 and 500 Jews lost their lives. Lwów and other Galician cities were then the scene of pogroms perpetrated both by soldiers and civilians and in 1919 the wave of anti-Jewish violence spread to Polish-controlled Lithuania, hitting Lida, Vilna and Pinsk, where thirty-five Jews, including women and children, were executed by the army.

Also in 1920 the Polish army, allied with the anti-communist Ukrainian government of Symon Petliura, actively participated in the pogroms that targeted the Jewish communities in the course of the Polish–Soviet War. The war between Poland and Russia negatively affected Polish-Jewish relations especially in the ethnically mixed areas east of Poland's heartland, such as eastern Galicia and Lithuania. The Poles were angered by the desire of Jews to maintain a neutral position in the national conflict. Moreover, anti-communist propaganda sought to discredit the postwar revolutionary wave as a primarily Jewish phenomenon, since in Russia and Poland a significant part of the communist leadership was of Jewish origin, and some Jews had openly welcomed the October Revolution. The żydokomuna stereotype, "the new catchphrase of Poland's antisemites", emerged at that time.

The incidents in Pinsk, Vilna and and Lwów aroused shock and indignation in Western Europe and the United States, and in May 1919 prompted the US president Woodrow Wilson to set up a commission, led by Henry Morgenthau, to investigate "alleged Polish pogroms" and the "treatment of the Jewish people" in Poland.. The resulting Morgenthau Report, issued in October 1919, identified eight major incidents in the years 1918–1919 and estimated the number of victims at between 200 and 300 Jews, including the Lwów pogrom (1918). In Morgenthau's view, the antisemitic attacks were "the chauvinist reaction created by [Poland's] sudden acquisition of a long-coveted freedom" and the consequence of "a widespread anti-Semitic prejudice aggravated by the belief that the Jewish inhabitants were politically hostile to the Polish State".

Sanacja

With the coup d'état of General Józef Piłsudski the situation of the Polish Jews improved and some concessions were made, such as the recognition of the cheder, the Jewish primary schools, but after the dictator's death, the birth of the Camp of National Unity resumed a conservative agenda full of anti-Jewish hatred.


 * wave of anti-Jewish violence between 1935 and 1937 (ex. Przytyk pogrom)
 * anti-Jewish quotas it schools and universities (Numerus clausus)
 * right-wing National Party's economic boycott of the Jews
 * nationalisation of industries in which Jews were predominant
 * limitations to ritual slaughter
 * proposal of making Madagascar a Polish colony were the Jews could be resettled (see details/sources at Colonization_attempts_by_Poland)
 * "When war broke out in 1939, the Polish government was actively considering its own version of the Nuremberg Laws"

Occupation of Poland (1939–1945)
To do: Write about Jedwabne pogrom and similar.

Post-World War II Poland
"The difficult problems raised by the Nazi Holocaust in Poland, and, above all, the vexed question of the Polish response to the mass-murder of the Jews have long been a sore point in Polish-Jewish relations"

Kielce pogrom
Excerpts from Gross, Fear

People's Republic of Poland (1956–1989)
Friedrich notes that in the People's Republic of Poland, "the Jewish issue was time and again exploited in political machinations".

1968_Polish_political_crisis

Post-1989 Poland
In modern Poland, Friedrich observes, antisemitism is related to an apologetic current often associated with the National Democratic ideology, which often attempts to minimize "excessively critical statements".