between general ethnic-minority solidarity against Polish domination on the one hand, and occasional efforts to come to a particular arrangement with the ruling Poles on the other—an arrangement by which they would hope to trade their endorsement of the state’s territorial and political integrity and of its governments in return for special recognition of their cultural peculiarities and educational needs. Alas, as rightist ideology permeated Polish society ever more deeply, the governments, in turn, somewhat reluctantly acceeded to popular anti-Semitism and rebuffed such overtures for an authentic accommodation. Hence many Jews sought a third alternative, Zionism.
Already at the moment of Poland’s rebirth, the Jews had been caught in the crossfire of Polish, Ukrainian, Bolshevik, and White Russian armies and bands: 1919 was a traumatic year in East European Jewish history. Later, they were held responsible for inducing the Paris Peace Conference to impose on Poland the Minorities Protection Treaty of June 28, 1919, which was intended to shelter the minorities against coerced assimilation by guaranteeing them legal equality as well as civil and political rights. Poland resented this treaty as implicitly denigrating her sovereignty, since the established powers, many of whom also housed substantial ethnic minorities, did not commit themselves to the same international legal obligations as they enjoined upon the new states. The frequent petitions filed against Poland under the terms of this treaty at the League of Nations, both by the minorities themselves and by interested (malevolently interfering, in the Polish view) states, embittered the Poles. And, as neither the treaty nor the League had enforcement teeth, eventually the minorities became cynical. Finally, on September 13, 1934, Poland unilaterally refused further cooperation with the international bodies that monitored the treaty, pending the universalization of its obligations to all states.
The vast bulk of Polish Jewry was culturally unassimilated, and the pattern of its economic structure was almost the reverse of the general society’s (table 4). The high, and allegedly provocative, prominence of Jews in the developing urban economic sectors of commerce, industry, culture, and communications, and their virtual absence from agriculture can be illustrated even more vividly through the proportions of adherents to the various religions engaged in the several economic sectors (table 5). In other words, whereas table 4 gives the total Jewish and Gentile populations across the various economic sectors, table 5 gives the religious distribution within these sectors. (Economic identification by linguistic criteria would have been more helpful than by religious ones for reconstructing the separate economic profiles of the other minorities and of the Polish majority, but unfortunately it was not available.)
TABLE 4
POPULATION BY ECONOMIC SECTORS (INCLUDING DEPENDENTS). 1931 CENSUS
TABLE 5
ECONOMIC SECTORS BY RELIGION. 1931 CENSUS (IN PERCENTAGES)
Lest, however, an erroneous impression be here conveyed, that a thoroughly affluent and powerful Jewish minority dominated the modern nerve-centers of interwar Poland, the following considerations should serve as correctives: (a) the census category of “Mining and Industry” included many small and technologically obsolescent sweatshops and handicraft establishments; (b) Jews, like the other minorities, were emphatically underrepresented in the public services, which the Poles understandably wished to monopolize in a Polish state; (c) the Jewish community maintained an extensive school system with only a pittance in state financial support; (d) poor Jews were numerous—one-third of the Jews were on charity—and just as poor as poor Gentiles; (e) the Jews were originally invited into Poland by medieval rulers precisely to develop its commerce and trade, which the szlachta then disdained—hence, their overrepresentation in this sector was historically as much a result of Polish as of their own preferences.
From his seizure of power in 1926 until his death in 1935, Piłsudski had sought to honor the nonexclusivist traditions of the old commonwealth in its age of glory. His epigoni, however, not only encouraged economic discrimination against Jews, including boycotts which occasionally degenerated into quasi-pogroms, but also tolerated explicitly political anti-Semitic violence, especially at the hands of nationalistic university students. Here the supposedly “strong” government of 1936-39 showed itself suspiciously weak in failing to curb or apprehend the culprits. While it refrained from racially anti-Semitic legislation, this regime did indulge in administrative policies intended to weaken and damage the Jews’ role in the economy and the free professions, even to a degree that was irrational from the perspective of Poland’s own interests. Experienced Jewish entrepreneurs, who often employed Poles and extended credit to them, were taxed into oblivion on behalf of clumsy and unprofitable state monopolies. In a country desperately short of physicians, engineers, and other professionals, Jews were virtually excluded from such academic studies. Their proportion of the entire university student body was reduced through a numerus clausus from 20.4 percent in the academic year 1928-29 to 9.9 percent in 1937-38; the latter percentage was about the same as the Jewish proportion of the entire population but far under the Jewish proportion of the urban population, which classically furnishes the academic youth. Within the university walls, the rightist student body was allowed to impose ghetto benches and other humiliations, including frequent beatings, on their Jewish classmates.
The economic and social context partly explains, but does not justify, this malevolence. Poland’s slow recovery from the depression threw Polish workers, craftsmen, peasants, entrepreneurs, and intelligentsia into severe competition with the highly visible Jews for the limited supply of employment, credit, entrepreneurial, and professional opportunities. There was real, if misplaced, anxiety lest the Poles become a nation of peasants, proletarians, and officials while the Jews flooded commerce and the free professions. Nevertheless, thoughtful members of the Polish elite became concerned that the specifically anti-Semitic violence might eventually degenerate into a broader rightist assault on all political rivals and, indeed, on public order per se. As war clouds darkened the horizon in 1938-39, even some government leaders indicated misgiving lest anti-Jewish excesses identify Poland with, and undermine her vis-à-vis, Nazi Germany.
Interwar Poland’s German minority, being economically prosperous and socially well-balanced, and enjoying more political support from the Weimar Republic—and later in a different way from Nazi Germany—than the other minorities were given by any external power, complained primarily about educational discrimination. Especially in Silesia was it subject to a vigorous effort at cultural polonization. The manner in which land reform, industrial investment, and bureaucratic recruitment were administered also aggrieved the Germans, many of whom emigrated to Germany. In the 1930s, those who remained divided politically into Nazi (the majority), bourgeois-nationalist, Catholic, and Socialist groups. As the Polish government was then cultivating good relations with Berlin under the rubric of their joint Non-Aggression Statement of January 26, 1934, it did not support the Catholic and Socialist parties against the pressure of the Nazi-controlled one. By the same token, the latter cooperated with the Polish government rather than with other minority parties and, being unable to win parliamentary representation under new and restrictive electoral laws of 1935, it thereafter accepted two appointive senatorial seats from the hands of the Polish president.
The poor and heavily illiterate Belorussians were regarded by the Polish authorities as having the lowest degree of political consciousness of all the state’s minorities. At the beginning of the interwar era, when the still embryonic Belorussian nationalist awakening was expected to develop primarily into a sense of differentiation from Russia, the Polish Left and the Piłsudskists had even nursed it along. By the second half of the 1920s, however, this potential accommodation had soured as the Belorussian peasants became offended by
