Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland

Description

From the Middle Ages until World War II, Poland was host to Europe's largest and most vibrant Jewish population. By 1970, the combination of Nazi genocide, postwar pogroms, mass emigration, and communist repression had virtually destroyed Poland's Jewish community. Although the Poles themselves were subjected to enormous cruelties in the twentieth century, questions about the extent of their antisemitism and its role in the fate of Polish Jewry are today hotly disputed. Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland serves as an effective guide to some of the most complex and controversial issues of Poland's troubled past. Fourteen original essays by a team of distinguished Polish and American scholars explore the different meanings, forms of expression, content, and social range of antisemitism in modern Poland from the late nineteenth century to the present. The contributors focus on both the variations in antisemitic sentiment and those Poles who opposed such prejudices. Central themes of this significant, balanced, and timely contribution to a contentious and often emotional debate include the deterioration of Polish-Jewish relations in the era of national awakening for both the Poles and the Jews, the meaning of the various forms of violence against the Jews, intellectual movements in opposition to antisemitism, the role of the Catholic Church in promoting antisemitism, and the prospects for the Church to atone for this shameful chapter in its recent history. Contents Preface Introduction 1 Assimilation, Nationalism, Modernization, Antisemitism: Notes on Polish-Jewish Relations, 1855-1905 2 Jews as Middleman Minorities in Rural Poland: Understanding the Galician Pogroms of 1898 3 Resisting the Wave: Intellectuals against Antisemitism in the Last Years of the “Polish Kingdom” 4 Criminalizing the “Other”: Crime, Ethnicity, and Antisemitism in Early Twentieth-Century Poland 5 Antisemitism and the Search for a Catholic Identity 6 The Moral Economy of Popular Violence: The Pogrom in Lwów, November 1918 7 Anti-Jewish Legislation in Interwar Poland 8 Clerical Nationalism and Antisemitism: Catholic Priests, Jews, and Orthodox Christians in the Lublin Region, 1918-1939 9 “Why Did They Hate Tuwim and Boy So Much?” Jews and “Artificial Jews” in the Literary Polemics of the Second Polish Republic 10 Gender and Antisemitism in Wartime Soviet Exile 11 Antisemitism, Anti-Judaism, and the Polish Catholic Clergy during the Second World War, 1939-1945 12 The Role of Antisemitism in Postwar Polish-Jewish Relations 13 Fighting against the Shadows: The Anti-Zionist Campaign of 1968 14 Memory Contested: Jewish and Catholic Views of Auschwitz in Present-Day Poland 15 Works on Polish-Jewish Relations Published since 1990 A Note on the Contributors Index