Anti-Semitism in Poland,yesterday and today

Representatives of the extreme Right in Europe have recently made attempts to modify and ‘civilise’ their public image by replacing anti-Semitism with Islamophobia (as the National Front did in France). This trend does not, however, extend to right-nationalist circles in all states.

In Poland, reluctance to accept refugees from North Africa and the Middle East remains strong, as shown in surveys, but this does not mean that the upsurge of Islamophobia has chased away the ghosts of anti-Semitism. The Jew remains a powerful symbol of the ‘other’ in Polish society. What are the roots of Polish anti-Semitism?

Three different books answer this question.* The first, Poland’s Threatening Other: the image of the Jew from 1880 to the present, by Joanna Beata Michlic, was originally published in English, and has been published in Polish more recently. The author presents a synthetic analysis of modern anti-Jewish themes and motifs. She recognises that Polish anti-Semitism arouses emotions leading to descriptions that are often too simplistic, or trivialise the phenomenon. On the one hand, due to these simplifications, Polish anti-Semitism is often presented in the context of the Nazi ideology and practice during the second world war. On the other hand, by trivialising and minimising its importance, some writers try to rationalise and play down this phenomenon as just one of many prejudices in the modern world. Neither of these approaches brings us closer to the sources of anti-Semitism in Poland. This book is thus particularly relevant today, as it attempts to explain and deal with various manifestations of anti-Semitism.

According to Michlic, in the second half of the nineteenth century, before the construction of the myth of the Jew as the main component of an ethno-nationalistic Polish identity, it had a basis in the pre-modern working-class and ecclesiastical literature. Anti-Jewish prejudices were widespread among Catholics in the seventeenth century, as a result of tensions associated with economic competition and growing xenophobia. Michlic cites Janusz Tazbir’s opinion that ‘xenophobia and ethnocentrism are culturally inherent aspects of the victory of the counter-reformation in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the seventeenth century. Strengthening the idea of the fusion of Poland and Catholicism was one of the main achievements of the Counter-Reformation’ (p. 56).

In the eighteenth century, these counter-reformation prejudices were reinforced by imagery of the Jew as the enemy of the Polish nation:

In anti-Jewish publications of the late eighteenth century, the clergy and townspeople shaped a particular model of thinking about Jews, which had an impact on Polish culture in the nineteenth century, and even in the twentieth century. There is a striking similarity between the eighteenth-century rhetoric used in polemics, in which the Jews are made responsible for all the misery of the Polish Christian population and the whole country, and the strategy of integral nationalists from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which scapegoated the Jewish Community and made it guilty of all national disasters and problems. (pp. 63–64)

Michlic is right when she points out that the language of exclusion, used in the eighteenth century, permeates the anti-Semitic slogans of modern nationalists. There are many phrases from the eighteenth century which associate the Jewish community with dirt and pollution, such as ‘voracious locusts’ or ‘dirty Jews pollute the air with their stench’. It is worth noting that this language of exclusion is universal. Very similar or identical slogans were and are still used to describe refugees, the marginalised, the homeless, criminals and also sexual minorities in many countries. The excluded are always depicted as dirty, morally corrupt, lazy, sexually promiscuous and ‘other’.

After Poland regained independence in 1918, the Catholic Church, the Catholic press and the growing nationalist movement were the main centres of Polish anti-Semitism. It was represented particularly by National Democracy (ND) led by Roman Dmowski. The nationalists allied with the Church soon after. As a consequence, even today this Catholic nationalism affects the identity of the contemporary conservative-national Right Wing in Poland. In the 1920s and 1930s, priests not only agitated for the ND and created its propaganda, but also stood as candidates in elections from the lists of the ND and sat in parliament.

Although the ND had approximately 200,000 members just before the outbreak of the second world war, it was unable to exercise power in the interwar period (1918–1939). However, this movement nevertheless had a strong impact on the political atmosphere in Poland, the nature of public debate and the attitude towards national minorities at that time. The whole Catholic press (Prąd [The Current], Odrodzenie [The Revival], Mały Dziennik [The Little Daily] and Przegląd Powszechny [The Common Review]) was under the influence of nationalists. Members of the ND used religion to justify their attitudes towards the Jews and, after 1933, Catholicism was tactically used as a means to illustrate the difference between Nazi anti-Semitism in Germany and the anti-Semitism of Polish nationalists. The latter, it was emphasised, was not based on racial arguments, but was rather part of ‘their service to the nation’. The ND argued that ‘nationalism was consistent with Catholicism and, as a hostile and alien element, the Jews acted to the detriment of European civilisation and culture. Such reasoning led to the conclusion that the fight against the Jews did not discredit Poles in the eyes of the Church, but even served its interests’ (p. 127).

At that time, in addition to the ND, there were also other nationalist Right Wing groups in Poland, which expressed their anti-Semitism even more fervently. In 1934, as a result of a generational split in the ND, younger activists who had left its ranks formed the National Radical Camp (ONR). The new organisation soon broke into two: ONR ABC, led by Henryk Rossman, which remained in opposition to Sanation’s rule, alongside the ND; ¹ and ONR Falanga, headed by Boleslaw Piasecki and co-operating with the Camp of National Unity (OZN), a Right Wing group that ruled Poland between 1926 and the outbreak of the second world war.

ONR Falanga was a typical fascist organisation led in an authoritarian manner, partly militarised and with a hierarchical structure. This organisation and its ideology have been described in Jan Józef Lipski’s book, first published in 1994 and updated in 2015–testifying to its relevance and usefulness for understanding contemporary rightwing nationalists in Poland. Its late author was a historian, an opposition activist in the communist period, a co-founder of the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) and the chairman of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), reactivated in 1987.

Anti-Semitism occupied a privileged position in the ideology of ONR Falanga. It was a conscious and deliberate worldview, incorporating social engineering techniques combined with a rich repertoire of brutal methods (p. 18). The 1937 issue of Młoda Polska [Young Poland], ONR Falanga’s paper, contains a programme article stating that, ‘The very contact with the completely different civilization and the alien and incomprehensible Jewish culture has a decaying effect on the Polish soul, destroying its idealism and capability of romantic achievements. Products of Jewish art that are published in Poland are striking and pathological examples of this situation’ (p. 19).

Interestingly, Lipski also analyses the connection between anti-Semitism and simultaneous criticisms of communism and capitalism. This is worthy of investigation, as the contemporary extreme Right quite often combines nationalism with anti-communism and a critique of liberal capitalism. Lipski cites Wojciech Wasiutyński’s justification of anti-Semitism in the context of the economic programme developed by ONR Falanga: ‘The destruction of Jewish influence on the political, cultural and economic life, and therefore the fight against today’s capitalist regime must be common to all national movements’ (p. 21). The simple conclusion was that ‘those who want to destroy the capitalist system must be anti-Semites’. In a brochure entitled Przełom narodowy (The National Breakthrough), Bolesław Piasecki, then leader of the group, wrote that their goal was to ‘fight against the Jews, Freemasonry, communism, as well as all systems and people serving them’ (p. 23).

Although nationalists criticised capitalism, they wanted to replace class struggle with ‘national struggle’. They claimed ‘The Jewry will always cope in the capitalist system. The motto of the Polish working masses is to destroy the Jewry along with capitalism! And this is not a class struggle, but a national struggle. Poles fight the Jews’ (p. 28). In this sense, capitalism is only an ‘artificial division of the nation into classes’ (p. 292).

The nationalist criticism of communism, as found in the publications of ONR Falanga, was based on the assumption that ‘Marxism deepens class interests created by capitalism and even more distinguishes workers from the Nation to use them as a professionally organized social group for their political gains’ (p. 293). The ideal of a classless nation provided the opportunity to reconcile criticism of capitalism with criticism of communism and anti-Semitism. As Lipski notes, columnists of the Falanga (Phalanx) magazine had no doubt that ‘Marxism was derived from “the Jewish spirit” and the traditions of Judaism, and they were even convinced that Marx developed his doctrine specifically to dismantle the Aryan state for the benefits of the Jews’ (p. 28).

At the level of international politics, Polish nationalists treated Germans, Russians and Jews as the main enemies of Poland, but did not hide the hierarchy of their opponents. In his article entitled ‘Wyznanie wiary’ (The Creed), published in Falanga in 1936, one nationalist claimed, ‘I know that the Jews are the most dangerous of the three enemies of our nation – Germans, Russians and Jews’ (p. 29). Nationalists believed, however, that the Jews could not be combated effectively in one country alone. Hence, they called for the support of nationalists in other countries. As noted by Lipski, analysis of the foreign policy programme developed by Falanga shows that establishing a common European front to combat the Jews was more important to them than the security of Poland. Indeed, as they wrote in 1939, three months before the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, ‘due to our internal policy and in particular the possibility of solving the Jewish question on an international scale, it is desirable to form as many nationalist countries in Europe as possible’ (p. 32).

For leader Piasecki, the fight against the Jews and communists was not only a means and a goal of political struggle. It also, he wrote, ‘unified common Poles in civilizational terms. Mental processes, caused by fighting the enemy, must not only result in its destruction, but they also lead to a creative mental uniformity of the Nation-winner’ (pp. 85–86).

When the words of hatred turned into deeds – Jewish students and their supporters beaten, small Jewish shopkeepers attacked, their belongings burnt – Alfred Łaszowski, one of the more cynical ONR journalists, wrote in his 1939 article for Falanga, ‘Anti-semitism is not racism’, that

We do not want to fight the Jews. We just want to remove and expel them from the body, which they poison … They say that anti-Semitism preaches hatred and therefore collides with religion. This is another popular folly. We put the matter differently, soberly and practically. Poland is overpopulated. Someone has to emigrate. We have a lot of minorities. Disruptive foreigners should leave our country to make room in commerce, industry and liberal professions … We will love them at a distance. (pp. 84–85)

The atmosphere created and the language used by ONR nationalists, along with their calls for exclusion, are not just memories from the dim and distant past, as evidenced by Żydzi – problem prawdziwego Polaka (The Jews – a problem for the real Poles), edited by Ireneusz Krzemiński. The book presents the results of research on contemporary anti-Semitism in Poland and attempts to explain its current scale. The author hypothesises that there are two types of anti-Semitism – traditional and modern – which can be distinguished in the ways in which anti-Semitism is justified. Indicators of traditional anti-Semitism include opinions expressed regarding the Jewish ‘deicide’ or the belief that the Jews themselves are to blame for anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Modern anti-Semitism, on the other hand, Krzemiński associates with assigning Jews negative traits and their special influence on the economy, politics, the media and general world events. In Eastern Europe, this orientation also involved accusing Jews of communism and support for the revolution, which destroyed the established civilisational order rooted in Christianity. Hence, the pejorative term ‘Żydokomuna’ (Judeo-Communism) is very common in Eastern Europe. As highlighted by Krzemiński, ‘blaming Jews for communism was somehow not in conflict with the anti-Semitic accusations that the Jews possessed capital’ (p. 17).

Interesting analyses show a correlation between levels of anti-Semitism and political preferences in the modern Polish context: traditional anti-Semitism is a popular attitude (18.5 per cent) towards Jewish people among the supporters of Law and Justice (PiS), the conservative-nationalist party, which has been in power in Poland since October 2015. Modern anti-Semitism is also the most common such attitude among the voters of PiS (41 per cent) and the Polish Peasant Party (PSL) – approximately 32 per cent of supporters. The fewest anti-Semites are among the electorate of the left-liberal party, Palikot’s Movement (about 2 per cent).

According to Krzemiński, anti-Semitism in Poland generally goes hand in hand with acknowledged religious devotion, frequency of religious practice, listening to Radio Maryja (an influential religious broadcaster representing Catholic fundamentalism in Poland), lower education levels and poor economic circumstances. All these elements influence the formation of the worldview in Polish society designated as ‘national-Catholic’ by the author, the strongest exponent of which is the ruling PiS. Moreover, an anti-Semitic orientation correlates with antipathy toward refugees, sexual minorities and other ethnic minorities, thereby engendering cultural and political authoritarianism. This set of attitudes remains popular in Polish society and is now supported by the state as managed by PiS.

Therefore, the opinions expressed by Joanna Beata Michlic at the end of her book regarding the withering of anti-Semitism in Poland and the building of civic rather than ethnic identity after 1990 now seem premature. It is true that in Poland, a country of 38 million residents, Jewish people comprise a tiny group (estimated at 10–25,000 people), yet this does not impede the social reproduction of ‘anti-Semitism without Jews’.

Social factors that could undermine the basis for anti-Semitism in Poland might include growing secularisation of society, provision of greater social security, general decline of conspiracy theories, greater cultural diversity and a stronger civic sphere allowing for the creation of social ties based on co-operation rather than threat. That is, however, a topic for yet another book.