The First World War was a turning point in Jewish history, especially for East European Jewry. It was accompanied by a sudden erosion of liberal attitudes and the maturing of processes which had begun towards the end of the 19th century. There was little anti-semitism in the Reich directly before the war, but immediately afterwards it developed to a marked degree. The Jewish vision of Germany and its culture began to collapse. The life of Jews in Russia, too, underwent a complete change. In Central Europe, small nations attained a voice, repressed by hundreds of years of oppression. The independence of Poland also brought many changes for Polish Jews, no more so than in Warsaw, one of the largest centres of Jewish life in the world, popularly known as ‘the mother-city of lsrael’. This article is an attempt to understand the scope of the changes effected by the First World War by outlining what Jewish life was like in Warsaw in the two generations before 1914.

The failure of the 1863 uprising had spelled disaster not only for the Poles of Warsaw, but for the Jews as well. The difficult situation of the town, caused by disturbances in the functioning of the economy and the continuing state of martial law, worsened the renewed atmosphere of hostility towards the Jews. The Polish-Jewish fraternity of 1861 was forgotten, together with the contribution of the Warsaw Jewish populace to the conspiracy and armed struggle. It was said that, since the Poles had lost the uprising, the Jews could just as well lose the equal rights they had been granted. Berg, the Russian governor-general, was asked not to allow Warsaw to be overrun by Jews. The Jews lived in a state of uncertainty concerning their legal status and experienced difficulties when buying houses and properties outside the restricted area. The guilds, too, did not want them as members. The future editor of Rola,Jan Jeleński, published a book in 1870, The Jews, The Germans and Ourselves, in which expressions of sympathy towards assimilation were already accompanied by the slogan of ‘the nationalising of trade and industry’.