ÎÁÙÅÑÒÂÎ "ÅÂÐÅÉÑÊÎÅ ÍÀÑËÅÄÈÅ"
Description of the Course
In the Jewish world, Poland has often been seen as a by-word for anti-semitism. In the view of many Jews, the independent Polish state which emerged after the first world war waged an increasingly successful campaign against its Jewish minority of over three million people (ten per cent of the country's population). On the eve of the second world war, a majority of Polish political parties held the view that the only 'solution' to the country's 'Jewish problem' lay in the emigration of the bulk of its Jewish community. During the second world war, most Poles were indifferent to the fate of the Jews and a minority actively cooperated in the anti-Jewish genocide carried out by the Nazis. Even after the war, in which more than ninety per cent of Polish Jewry perished, anti-semitism remained strong and the immediate post-war period was characterised by large-scale anti-Jewish violence. The worst incident was the pogrom in the town of Kielce on 4 July 1946, when a mob incited by fears that the local Jews had kidnapped a Christian child, murdered 42 Jews. Most Jewish survivors now fled Poland, but the country remained plagued by the phenomenon of 'anti-semitism without Jews'.
Most Poles reject this analysis as one-sided and over-simplified. Jews settled in Poland when they were persecuted elsewhere and created on Polish soil a unique Jewish civilization. By the end of theeighteenth century, over a third of all Jews in the world lived in Poland. Polish-Jewish relations were exacerbated by foreign rule in the nineteenth century, when the powers which had partitioned Poland, above all the Russians applied the well-known tactic of 'divide and rule' and set Poles and Jews against each other. In the interwar period, the problems of the Jews resulted far more from the poverty of Poland and the impact of the Great Depression than from official or popular anti-semitism. Jewish accusations that the Poles failed to help them during the Nazi occupation fail to take into account the scale of Nazi terror andthe isolation of the Jews which the Nazis created. In the post-war period, it was the communists who exploited the Jewish issue, both to compromise their democratic opponents and to obtain legitimacy in the eyes of Polish society.
This course will attempt to examine how these two diametrically opposed views of Polish-Jewish relations have come to be current and how much truth lies behind the stereotypes.
Topics to be discussed
1. Legacies of the Past; Cultural Stereotypes; Building Nation-States in Multi-ethnic Societies.
2. Poland and its Jewish Community in the Aftermath of World War I.
3. The Sanacja Regime and Politics in the 1930s
4. Parallel Histories: Jewish and Polish Communities during World War II.
5. Polish-Jewish Relations under German and Soviet Occupations
6. Stalinism and the Post-war History of the Jewish Community in Poland
7. The Crises of 1956 and 1968: Anti-semitism without Jews
8. The Human Rights Movement and the Emergence of Civil Society
9. The Solidarity Movement
10. Politics in Independent Poland: 1989 to the Present
11. The 'Jewish Question' and Jewish Identity in Independent Poland
12. Outstanding Issues
Bibliography
Specific readings will be assigned for class meetings and a course pack will be prepared with readings from books which are out of print.