Talk:Anti-Semitism in Poland

From VfD

 * Anti-Semitism in Poland, the article has very little to do with a significant topic. It is just a laundry list of hate crimes in the past 5 years, and has nothing about any truly significant events. It should be deleted and replaced with an article on the History of the Jews of Poland. Danny 13:21, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)
 * This does seem to be raw data, rather than information. Might be better to redirect to Poland for the time being. Martin 13:49, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)
 * An article on the history of the Jews of Poland would not be a bad idea. However, it should include the information (in some form) that we presently have in the current article. It is an important topic that much has been written on. RK 14:39, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
 * Delete. It's more journalistic than encyclopedia. -- BCorr ¤ &#1041;&#1088;&#1072;&#1081;&#1077;&#1085; 21:03, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)
 * My instincts are that the US State Department (or any country's equivalent) should not be treated as NPOV and their text should not just be copied and pasted in. I'm sorry if this offends some American Wikipedians. Secretlondon 21:12, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
 * I disagree, but yours is a valid pointof view. Like all of our articles, this one is not set in stone. If you believe that it contains a POV problem, please feel free to mention it, and/or make an edit to fix things. Just be aware that many Wikipedians use the public domain text from a number of US Government websites as starting material for an article. RK 21:20, Oct 26, 2003 (UTC)
 * I think pasting in is fine, as long as some NPOVing is done. If you feel this biases Wikipedia towards the US POV, perhaps you should convince your country's equivalent to open their content as generously as the US does. We'll be happy to add public domain content from any other country's state department as well, as long as it has some reasonable basis in fact, but currently the vast majority of states prohibit us from doing so. --Delirium 06:23, Oct 27, 2003 (UTC)
 * An article of this name would be fine if it contained a balanced article. At the moment it is pathetic.  Why do we need to know that in 1998 someone threw a rock through a window?  The only way to fix this article would be to trash most of what is there and start again. --Zero 01:09, 28 Oct 2003 (UTC)
 * Keep and improve Lirath Q. Pynnor

Moved to Religious_freedom_in_Poland.

Further comments should be made at Talk:Religious_freedom_in_Poland.

Revert
Reverted because user:Piotrus has made substantial changes to the article during VfD voting. Please refrain yourself from doing so until the voting is concluded. In my opinion material related to Polish anti-Semitism from anti-Semitism article should be relocated to History of the Jews in Poland and other existing articles rather than here creating a precedence (the only article on wiki about anti-Semitism in a specific country). --Ttyre 10:41, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
 * You have a point that this would make old votes partialy invalid, although I am not sure if there is a policy (should this page be protected, perhaps?). In future, do copy the reverted material to talk, so it can be possibly reinstated after the vote has ended. My version (in nowiki tags) below. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 11:21, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Rewritten
{main|Anti-Semitism}}

Anti-Semitism in Poland has a long history. Persecution of Jews took place both before, during and after the Second World War.

Desiring to emerge from the Dark Ages as a prominent European power, Poland took notice of the typically advanced education of Jews (particularly their literacy) and their competence in financial management. In 1264, King Boleslaus V of Poland legislated a charter for Jewish residence and protection, hoping that Jewish settlement would contribute to the development of the Polish economy. This charter, which encouraged money-lending, was a slight variation of the 1244 charter granted by the King of Austria to the Jews. This charter was also adopted (with variations) in Hungary, Lithuania, Bohemia, and Silesia. While Jews were not granted the same degree of protection as other citizens, and while Jews were excluded from privileges afforded Christian merchants and burghers, the charter decreed by Boleslaus V precipitated a major improvement for Jews over conditions in twelfth century Europe. The charter included recognition of legal testimony of Jews, fines for harming Jews or Jewish property, prohibition of blood libels, and equal commercial rights. (The charter rights were unfortunately not always observed by everyone. One such incident occurred in Poznań in 1399, when the local rabbi and thirteen other members of the Jewish community were tortured and burned at the stake after being accused of "Host desecration" ). Due to the attractive opportunities Poland offered for Jews, as well as extreme persecutions in much of western Europe, a burgeoning Jewish population developed in Poland. Jews were allowed to open Yeshivas and had a measure of independence regarding judging religious legal cases. By the sixteenth century, Poland had become the center of European Jewry and the most tolerant of all European countries regarding the matters of faith. It was the only country where Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Jews and even Muslims coexisted peacefully.

At the onset of the seventeenth century, however, the tolerance began to give way to increased anti-Semitism. Elected to the Polish throne King Sigismund III of the Swedish House of Vasa, a strong supporter of the counter-reformation, began to undermine the principles of the Warsaw Confederation and the religious tolerance in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, revoking and limiting priviliges of all non-Catholic faiths. In 1628 he banned publication of Hebrew books, including the Talmud. Acclaimed twentieth century historian Simon Dubnow, in his magnum-opus History of the Jews in Poland and Russia, detailed:
 * "At the end of the 16th century and thereafter, not one year passed without a blood libel trial against Jews in Poland, trials which always ended with the execution of Jewish victims in a heinous manner..." (ibid., volume 6, chapter 4; "thereafter," in the above quote, refers to no later than 1918, when Dubnow's work was published).

In the 1650s the Swedish invasion of the Commonwealth (The Deluge) and the Chmielnicki Uprising of the Cossacks resulted in vast depopulation of the Commonwealth, as over 30% of the ~10 million population has perished or emigrated. In the related 1648-55 pogroms led by the Ukrainian Haidamaks uprising against Polish nobility (szlachta), during which approximately 100,000 Jews were slaughtered, Polish and Ruthenian peasants often participated in killing Jews (The Jews in Poland, Ken Spiro, 2001). The besieged szlachta, who were also decimated in the territories where the uprising happened, typically abandoned the loyal peasantry, townsfolk, and the Jews renting their land, in violation of "rental" contracts. The Jewish Encyclopedia explains why Jews were targeted in the Cossack massacres:
 * "The Jews increased rapidly in the Little Russian territories at the beginning of the seventeenth century. They farmed not only the taxes, but even the revenues of the Greek Orthodox Church. At every christening or funeral the peasants had to pay a fee to the Jew. The lords were the absolute rulers of their estates, and the peasants their dependent subjects. When a lord or any other member of the nobility leased his villages or estates to a Jew, his authority also was delegated to the latter, who even had the power to administer justice among the peasants ("Yewen Mezulah," p. 2a). The extravagant life of the Polish landlords, who spent most of their fortunes abroad, frequently placed them in pecuniary difficulties, and their Jewish tax-farmers were often forced into exactions against the advice and warnings of the wise leaders of the Council of Four Lands, and the Jews of the Ukraine often suffered grievously for the sins of individuals of their race. The uprising of the peasants in the Ukraine has been ascribed by most historians to their oppression by Jewish leaseholders, as well as to the privileges granted to the latter by the kings and nobles of Poland. Recent historical research, however, indicates that the Jews living in the cities, particularly in those of the Ukraine, were not afforded the protection enjoyed by other citizens, and moreover were excluded from the privileges granted to the Christian merchants and burghers (Antonovich, "Monografii po Istorii Zapadnoi i Yugo-Zapadnoi Rossii," i. 188). Notwithstanding this, the Jews managed to gain control of the commerce of the country, as is evidenced by the complaints of the Christian merchants of Lemberg, Kamenetz, Kiev, and many other cities, shortly before the Cossack uprising ("Archiv Yugo-Zapadnoi Rossii," v., part i., xxxiv. 134, xl. 156, cxxi. 323; "Starożytna Polska," 11, 1023, 1369; "Sbornik Mukhanova," p. 192; Antonovich, l.c. p. 189). It was the combined opposition to the Jews of the urban and the peasant populations that made it possible for Chmielnicki to arm the entire country against them within so short a time. "

Historian Jacob Rader Marcus summarizes the situation as follows:
 * "In 1654 neighboring Russia turned against Poland, a year later the Swedes poured in from the north, and all these groups, including the native Poles, ravaged and massacred defenseless Jewish victims throughout the land" (The Jew in the Medieval World, 1896).

The Eyewitness Chronicle detailes:
 * "Wherever they found the szlachta, royal officials or Jews, they [Cossacks] killed them all, sparing neither women nor children. They pillaged the estates of the Jews and nobles, burned churches and killed their priests, leaving nothing whole." (Eyewitness Chronicle)

The deathtolls of Chmielnicki uprising, as many others from the times of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, vary. Historian Subtelny, in his acclaimed Ukraine: A History (p.127&#8211;128), notes:
 * "Jewish losses were especially heavy because they were the most numerous and accessible representatives of the szlachta regime. Between 1648 and 1656, tens of thousands of Jews&#8212;given the lack of reliable data, it is impossible to establish more accurate figures&#8212;were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytsky uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history. Estimates of Jews killed in the uprising have been greatly exaggerated in the historiography of the event. According to B. Weinryb, the total of losses reported in Jewish sources is 2.4 million to 3.3 million deaths, clearly a fantastic figure. Weinryb cites the calculations of S. Ettinger indicating that about 50,000 Jews lived in the area where the uprising occurred. See B. Weinryb, "The Hebrew Chronicles on Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Cossack-Polish War," Harvard Ukrainian Studies 1 (1977): 153-77. While many of them were killed, Jewish losses did not reach the hair-raising figures that are often associated with the uprising. In the words of Weinryb (The Jews of Poland, 193-4), "The fragmentary information of the period&#8212;and to a great extent information from subsequent years, including reports of recovery&#8212;clearly indicate that the catastrophe may have not been as great as has been assumed."

At the other extreme, some modern academic sources place the Jewish death toll in the hundreds of thousands. One source, The Jew in the Modern World (Oxford University Press), states that the uprising "left in its wake hundreds of thousands of of Jewish dead, and, according to one witness, 744 Jewish communities destroyed." While the Jewish Encyclopedia considers the figure of 744 destroyed communities "unreliable," it views authoritatively "chronicles" which state that approximately 500,000 Jews were killed.

In the aftermath of the Deluge and Chmielnicki Uprising, many Jews fled to the less turbulent Netherlands, which had granted the Jews a protective charter in 1619. From then until the Nazi deportations in 1942, the Netherlands remained a remarkably tolerant haven for Jews in Europe, excedeeing the tolerance extant in all other European countries at the time, and becoming one of the few Jewish havens until nineteenth century social and political reforms throughout much of Europe. Many Jews also fled to England, open to Jews since the mid-seventeenth century, in which Jews were fundamentally ignored and not typically persecuted. Historian Berel Wein notes:
 * "In a reversal of roles that is common in Jewish history, the victorious Poles now vented their wrath upon the hapless Jews of the area, accusing them of collaborating with the Cossack invader!... The Jews, reeling from almost five years of constant hell, abandoned their Polish communities and institutions..." (Triumph of Survival, 1990).

Throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth century, many of the szlachta mistreated peasantry, townsfolk and Jews. One rabbinic responsum from the 1680's details an account of a Polish suzerain taking hostage the community rabbi and Jewish council for the sake of capturing a Jewish girl. A Polish peasant had claimed that the girl had agreed to marry him, despite her vehement denials (Beit Hillel, Rabbi Hillel ben Naftali Hertz). Threat of mob violence was a specter over the Jewish communities in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the time. On one occasion in 1696, a mob threatened to massacre the Jewish community of Posin, Vitebsk. The mob accused the Jews of murdering a Pole. At the last moment, a peasant woman emerged with the victim's clothes and confessed to the murder. One notable example of actualized riots against Polish Jews is the rioting of 1716, during which many Jews lost their lives. Later, in 1723, the Bishop of Gdańsk instigated the massacre of hundreds of Jews. John Toland, a prominent Enlightenment figure in Ireland, wrote in 1714 that Polish Jews "are often exposed... to unspeakable Calamities."

The legendary Walentyn Potocki, a Polish nobleman who converted to Judaism, is said to have been burned by auto da fe on May 24, 1749. In 1757, at the instigation of Jacob Frank and his followers, the Bishop of Kamianets-Podilskyi forced the Jewish rabbis to participate in religious dispute with the quasi-Christian Frankists. Among the other charges, the Frankists claimed that the Talmud was full of heresy against Catholicism. The Catholic judges determined that the Frankists had won the debate, whereupon the Bishop levied heavy fines against the Jewish community and confiscated and burned all Jewish Talmuds. Polish anti-Semitism during the seventeenth and eighteenth century was summed up by Issac de Pinto as follows: "Polish Jews... who are deprived of all the privilages of society... who are despised and reviled on all sides, who are often persecuted, always insulted.... That contempt which is heaped on them chokes up all the seeds of virtue and honour...." (Issac de Pinto, philosopher and economist, in a 1762 letter to Voltaire).

On the other hand, it should be noted that despite the mentioned incidents, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a relative haven for Jews when compared to the period of the partitions of Poland and the PLC's destruction in 1795.<!--Regarding primary sources documenting 18th-century Poland, some historians have raised concerns about the existence of 18th-century accounts that were spread by partitioners, who these historians claim used propaganda in an attempt to create a false image of the PLC as a backward, anarchical, and dangerous country. This was ostensibly done to justify dissolution of a major European country and change in the European balance of power.

Anti-Jewish sentiments continued to be present in Poland throughout most of the 20th century. One notable manifestation of these attitudes includes numerus clausus rules imposed, with government support, by almost all Polish universities in the 1930's. As the Journal of Modern History details:
 * "In Poland, the semidictatorial government of Pilsudski and his successors, pressured by an increasingly vocal opposition on the radical and fascist right, implemented many anti-Semitic policies tending in a similar direction, while still others were on the official and semiofficial agenda when war descended in 1939.... In the 1930s the realm of official and semiofficial discrimination expanded to encompass limits on Jewish export firms... and, increasingly, on university admission itself. In 1921-22 some 25 percent of Polish university students were Jewish, but in 1938-39 their proportion had fallen to 8 percent."

These sentiments started to diminish only with the end of communist rule in 1989. Anti-semitism in Poland in 21st century is marginal (1 major violent anti-Semitic incident in 2004) compared to countries with Jewish populations many times the size of Poland's, such as France (96 incidents), Canada (52 incidents) or Germany (50 incidents). Polish government approved a National Action Program against racism in 2004.

Polish Catholic Church widely distributed materials promoting the need for respect and cooperation with Judaism. Still, according to recent (June 7, 2005) results of research by B'nai Briths Anti-Defamation League, Poland remains among the European countries (with others being Italy, Spain and Germany) with the largest percentages of people holding anti-Semitic views.

VFD
On 10 July 2005, this article was nominated for deletion. The result was no consensus. See Votes for deletion/Anti-Semitism in Poland for a record of the discussion. – ABCD✉ 17:57, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

See also Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 18:41, 25 July 2005 (UTC)