Between the wars, the small but picturesque town of Kazimierz-on-theVistula was a favourite holiday resort of artists and writers. It was also extremely popular among Jews, who predominated among the local population. Adolf Rudnicki dedicated to Kazimierz his charming essay, 'Summer’ written in 1938. 1 He pointed out two seemingly contradictory phenomena in connection with the town. In the first place, ‘the ghetto was triumphant'. Why? Because ‘prodigal sons’ were returning to it, seeking shelter from increasing anti-semitism. They wished to feel at home and to find a firm base among their own people, in the faith and customs of their fathers that survived only among the simple and uneducated. Yet upon their return they found that change had come to their stable backwater, for now ‘the Jewish masses usually speak Polish, their everyday life is conducted in this language’ (even though this Polish was often poor and rather limited). Paradoxically, the growth of nationalism among the Jews was accompanied by the gradual abandoning of their distinctive language.

Rudnicki noticed similar contradictions among the elite. The assimilated intellectuals ‘as they returned to the faith which, they had hoped, they had abandoned once and for all … found that their thinking, until then sharp and clear, rational and materialistic, became touched with … that despondency that kills all belief in the feasibility of progress.’ And what of artists and writers? Those who expressed themselves in Yiddish (or avoided all association with Poles) ‘displayed their own complexes towards Poles. Generally speaking these amounted to nothing more than the complex of the poor.’ It was not surprising that ‘the works of the assimilated justify the specific role of Jewry in the world, while the purists only add to their specific fields some works which are usually untranslatable.’ In other words, the generation born about 1910 found propitious conditions for the creation of a ‘Jewish school’ in literature. Life - including their most inner life - was lived through the Polish language. Yet this life was marked by unexpectedly strong Jewish features.

Jews had certainly made themselves felt in Polish literature much earlier. Already at the turn of the century, writers of Jewish descent played an important role in the intellectual elite. Their role was to increase considerably in independent Poland.

Between the wars, the small but picturesque town of Kazimierz-on-the- Vistula was a favourite holiday resort of artists and writers. It was also extremely popular among Jews, who predominated among the local population. Adolf Rudnicki dedicated to Kazimierz his charming essay, ‘Summer’ written in 1938. He pointed out two seemingly contradictory phenomena in connection with the town. In the first place, ‘the ghetto was triumphant’. Why? Because ‘prodigal sons’ were returning to it, seeking shelter from increasing anti-semitism. They wished to feel at home and to find a firm base among their own people, in the faith and customs of their fathers that survived only among the simple and uneducated. Yet upon their return they found that change had come to their stable backwater, for now ‘the Jewish masses usually speak Polish, their everyday life is conducted in this language’ (even though this Polish was often poor and rather limited). Paradoxically, the growth of nationalism among the Jews was accompanied by the gradual abandoning of their distinctive language.

Rudnicki noticed similar contradictions among the elite. The assimilated intellectuals ‘as they returned to the faith which, they had hoped, they had abandoned once and for all … found that their thinking, until then sharp and clear, rational and materialistic, became touched with … that despondency that kills all belief in the feasibility of progress.’ And what of artists and writers? Those who expressed themselves in Yiddish (or avoided all association with Poles) ‘displayed their own complexes towards Poles. Generally speaking these amounted to nothing more than the complex of the poor.’ It was not surprising that ‘the works of the assimilated justify the specific role of Jewry in the world, while the purists only add to their specific fields some works which are usually untranslatable.’ In other words, the generation born about 1910 found propitious conditions for the creation of a ‘Jewish school’ in literature. Life - including their most inner life - was lived through the Polish language. Yet this life was marked by unexpectedly strong Jewish features.

Jews had certainly made themselves felt in Polish literature much earlier. Already at the turn of the century, writers of Jewish descent played an important role in the intellectual élite. Their role was to increase considerably in independent Poland.

This chapter looks at how Poland’s relationship with the Jewish people and more specifically the Holocaust has been used politically by the Law and Justice government. Many of the Nazi death camps were located in Polish territory, but it was not until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the restoration of scholarly freedom that significant research was conducted in this area. This research challenged Poles’ long-standing view that they were innocent victims in the Second World War by bringing to light incidents such as the Jedwabne pogrom, where Polish people actively participated in the massacre of Jews. When Law and Justice came to power in 2015, they quickly set about reversing the work of the preceding thirty years, seeking to reassure the Polish people that they bore no responsibility for the Holocaust. The most concrete instance of this came in 2018, when a law was passed making it illegal to accuse the Polish government or nation of complicity in the Holocaust. This law caused an international scandal, inviting accusations of antisemitism and significantly weakening Polish soft power. Domestically, however, Law and Justice’s approach was largely successful, as it chimed with the view of many ordinary Poles.

In one of her feuilletons published on dwutygodnik.com, Joanna Tokarska—Bakir included—as an illustration—an image of a Polish village or a small town. The drawing—made by the hand of a child—depicts a road, houses, a horse pulling a cart. What differentiates this cultural text from the sketches of other children drawing their environment?

This horse, these roads, these houses would not be in this picture if it were not for Jewish culture. The composition of the picture is literally based on the Star of David, whose edges are demarcated by the contours of the roof, and the animal. It easy to speculate that the drawing, centering the symbol of a society whose historical existence was denied in the Polish collective consciousness for years, and “did not enter into the canon of thought,” might be a classroom illustration, created for the educational needs of the youngest members of the cultural group. This hypothesis becomes stronger when Tokarska-Bakir mentions that the drawing was found not far from a trashcan near the memorial to the Heroes of the Ghetto. Isn't this “strange drawing” a reflection of the Polish cultural imaginary and the role Jewish people play in it?

It has always been possible to treat museums and cultural events as an indicator of the historical imagery of a given society in a particular moment in time. The “museum boom” that took place in Poland after 2004, when the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising was created, makes this even more evident. The idea of “universal” museums devoted, for example, to rural culture, the history of a city, or a stage of social development like feudalism was abandoned in favor of museums addressing narrower themes, identity groups, or event horizons. Examples of such institutions are the Museum of Emigration in Gdynia (2015), the Przełomy [Upheavals] Center for Dialogue in Szczecin (2015), the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk (2007), the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (2005) and the Galicja Jewish Museum in Kraków (2004). How did the “new museology” movement influence the way cultural life is presented in museums that followed an older, Enlightenment- era paradigm?

The Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum of Kraków was founded in 1911 on the initiative and passion of its namesake.

In the twentieth century the antisemitism either directed at Jews in Poland or which was more broadly at work within ideological systems was largely disavowed, deployed for political point-scoring or simply prohibited from critique in public discourse. In chapter 5, the focus on Polish-Jewish relations gives particular attention to the public debate provoked by the publication of the historian Jan T. Gross’ Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001), which attributes guilt for the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom to ethnic Poles rather than the German fascists. The publication of Gross’s monograph caused mass outrage, provoking Joanna Michlic to identify the debate around the pogrom as the most important and long-standing in postcommunist Poland. A large number of productions by artists such as Krzysztof Warlikowski, Jan Klata, Tadeusz Słobodzianek, Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk, Artur Pałyga and Marcin Liber appeared within an environment of public outrage and recriminations over culpability for antisemitic violence in Poland over the course of the last century that gave voice to alternative and often repressed histories, Jewish lives and experiences, and which mark a haunting and acutely felt absence of Jewish populations after the Holocaust and the purges of 1968.

There are currently more than forty festivals of Jewish culture throughout Poland, most of them initiated in the mid-2000s. The interest in Jewish culture is noticeable all year long, however, as can be observed from the commercial success of klezmer music, the proliferation of Judaica bookstores and Jewish-style restaurants, the opening of new museums, memorials and memory spaces, the growing engagement of artists and public intellectuals with Poland’s Jewish past and Polish-Jewish relations more broadly, and the emergence of Jewish studies programs at multiple universities (Gruber 2002; Lehrer 2013; Waligorska 2013; Wodziński 2011; Zubrzycki 2016). The historian and Jewish studies scholar Marcin Wodziński (2021) found that between 2011 and 2021, approximately one hundred books and several hundred articles on Jewish topics were published every year, many written to be accessible to a broader public. The last indicator of this cultural phenomenon, about which there are no official statistics, is the modest but rising number of conversions to Judaism. These converts are often people who discover Jewish roots and feel compelled to “return to the source,” but sometimes they are Poles without Jewish ancestry who are nevertheless called or seduced by the appeal of Judaism.

To be sure, the twin rebirth of Jewish communal life and non-Jewish Poles’ interest in all things Jewish are facilitated by the specific historic juncture brought about by the fall of communism and EU accession, which I discuss elsewhere (2016, 2022). My focus here, however, is on non-Jewish Poles’ rediscovery of Poland's Jewish past and their resurrection of Jewish culture in contemporary Poland. That process cannot be reduced to the commodification of Jewish culture, nor does it merely mark the anti-Semitic folklorization of Jews and things Jewish—a point Erica Lehrer has convincingly drawn out in her work (2003, 2013). Neither should it be read as a solely Polish outlet to address cultural trauma or reckon with a difficult past. No doubt some of these feelings fuel the multipronged Jewish turn, but I find it is primarily related to a broader attempt and long-standing efforts by both Jewish and non-Jewish cultural elites, social activists, ordinary citizens, and some state agencies to expand the symbolic boundaries of Polishness that the political right seeks to harden and shrink using a conservative, nationalist version of Catholicism as its primary tool.

In the period between the two world wars, the Polish-Jewish daily press was undoubtedly the most successful example of Jewish cultural creativity in the Polish language. Unfortunately, precious little has been written about this major cultural institution of modern Polish Jewish life. Over and beyond the obstacles to historical research created by the vast destruction of Polish archival institutions in World War II, difficulties which apply, though in different measure, to the reconstruction of both Polish and Polish Jewish history, particularly in the period just prior to the war, there is here a further barrier: the aversion albeit increasingly anachronistic of many Poles and Jews to phenomena whose locus is neither purely ‘Polish’ nor purely ‘Jewish’, as a result of which, the memory of the PolishJewish press has slipped into the void between two mutually exclusive national self-conceptions. Therefore this article. What follows is a sketch based on the skimpy existing literature and a preliminary reading of the Warsaw daily Nasz Przegąd my object is to assemble basic historical data, characterize general tendencies, and suggest areas for further detailed investigation - in short, to trace the rough dimensions of a marvellously complex yet neglected domain of recent Polish Jewish history.

FROM IZRAELITA TO NASZ PRZEGJĄD

The existence of the Warsaw daily Nasz Przegąd [Our Review] (1923-39), along with its sister publications in other large Polish cities, Nowy Dziennik [New Dairy] (1918-39) in Kraków and Chwila [Moment] (1919-39) in Lwów, represents a unique phenomenon in modern Jewish history: a daily press in a non-Jewish language. Ever since the beginnings of the Haskalah Oewish Enlightenment) at the end of the eighteenth century, there had been periodical publications published by and for Jews, at first primarily in the languages of the co-territorial nations, later, towards the end of the nineteenth century and particularly in Eastern Europe, increasingly in the Jewish languages -Hebrew and Yiddish - as well. Periodicals in the non-Jewish languages were published at intervals of a week, a month or more - they were never daily publications since it was assumed that once a Jew could read the language of the country in which he lived, he would avail himself of daily newspapers in that language for general news, and then turn to the Jewish press for subjects of Jewish interest.

POLISH-JEWISH relations tend to be treated in a one-sided way, from the standpoint of Poles and their attitude towards the Jews, so that the converse relationship-the attitude of the Jews towards the Poles-has been neglected. This one-sided approach to the question was introduced into the historical literature by Emanuel Ringelblum when in 1944, in his unfinished ‘Polish-Jewish Relations’, he concerned himself exclusively with the extent of friendship or hostility shown by the Poles. No one was prepared to depart from this precedent, and this is how the problem has continued to be approached in the intervening fifty years, both in Jewish and in Polish literature.

In Poland various other factors influenced the adherence to this traditional approach: the main ones were the language barrier, which made it impossible for many historians to take advantage of relevant sources, and censorship, an even more insurmountable obstacle. There were certainly other causes besides. The fact that Jewish historiography has kept silent on the subject is something for Jewish historians to explain.

In ‘The Polish Underground and the Extermination of the Jews’, included in the present volume, Shmuel Krakowski is perfectly justified in his decision not to concentrate on the question of Jewish attitudes. The main subject of his article is the antisemitism which found expression in the Polish underground press and equally in the dearth of concrete help from the Home Army and the People's Guard for the ghetto fighters and fugitives. Krakowski has assembled in telling fashion a number of quotations from articles published between 1942 and 1944. These texts are known to Polish historians involved in research into the period of German occupation, and many (if not all) have already been published, primarily in monographs and professional journals, though never in such a concentrated form. It is precisely this concentration which intensifies their expressive power.

Krakowski does mention, albeit briefly, the problem of Jewish involvement in Polish affairs. He approaches it in the following way. Originally, the sole reason for the positive sentiments of many Jews towards the Red Army which had invaded eastern Poland was their fear of Nazi Germany. Later, in Nazi-occupied Poland, contacts with the Polish radical Left amounted to a tactical move, occasioned by the need to find assistance in view of the lack of help from the Home Army.

In the period between the two world wars, the Polish-Jewish daily press was undoubtedly the most successful example of Jewish cultural creativity in the Polish language. Unfortunately, precious little has been written about this major cultural institution of modern Polish Jewish life. Over and beyond the obstacles to historical research created by the vast destruction of Polish archival institutions in World War II, difficulties which apply, though in different measure, to the reconstruction of both Polish and Polish Jewish history, particularly in the period just prior to the war, there is here a further barrier: the aversion albeit increasingly anachronistic of many Poles and Jews to phenomena whose locus is neither purely ‘Polish’ nor purely Jewish’, as a result of which, the memory of the Polish- Jewish press has slipped into the void between two mutually exclusive national self-conceptions. Therefore this article. What follows is a sketch based on the skimpy existing literature and a preliminary reading of the Warsaw daily Nasz Przeglpd; my object is to assemble basic historical data, characterize general tendencies, and suggest areas for further detailed investigation - in short, to trace the rough dimensions of a marvellously complex yet neglected domain of recent Polish Jewish history.

FROM IZRAELITA TO NASZ PRZEGLĄD

The existence of the Warsaw daily Nasz Przeglad [Our Review] (1923-39), along with its sister publications in other large Polish cities, Nowy Dziennik [New Daily] (1918-39) in Kraków and Chwila [Moment] (1919-39) in Lwów, represents a unique phenomenon in modern Jewish history: a daily press in a non-Jewish language. Ever since the beginnings of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) at the end of the eighteenth century, there had been periodical publications published by and for Jews, at first primarily in the languages of the co-territorial nations, later, towards the end of the nineteenth century and particularly in Eastern Europe, increasingly in the Jewish languages - Hebrew and Yiddish - as well. Periodicals in the non-Jewish languages were published at intervals of a week, a month or more – they were never daily publications since it was assumed that once a Jew could read the language of the country in which he lived, he would avail himself of daily newspapers in that language for general news, and then turn to the Jewish press for subjects of Jewish interest.

In the sixth decade of the nineteenth century a revised stereotype of the Jew began to gain ground in Polish literature. Novels such as J. I. Kraszewski's Metamorfozy (Metamorphoses) and Choroby wieku (Ills of the Age), J. Korzeniowski's Krewni (The Relatives) and J. U. Niemcewicz's Rok 3333 (The Year 3333) emphasized the Jews’ increasing involvement in the expanding capitalistic economy and the modernization of their way of life. Literary treatment of Jews was marked by its focus on the upwardly mobile assimilated strata of Jewish society and those Jews’ increasingly visible identification with the Polish world. This latter emphasis - which not accidentally coincided with the renewal of interest in Frankism - indicated that the Polish society's readiness to integrate the assimilating Jews might have natural limits.

These main trends could not easily be reversed by the short period of Polish-Jewish brotherhood which occurred in the early 1860s. However, the upheavals of the insurrectionary period considerably delayed their growth by shifting public attention to other dimensions of Polish-Jewish interaction. In 1862, Gazeta Warszawska, the same newspaper that three years earlier had launched the so-called ‘Jewish war’, a press-campaign against the Jewish bourgeoisie of Warsaw, exemplified the new, more positive inter-ethnic climate when it urged its readers to show more zeal in collecting money for gifts to the city's synagogues. The literature echoed resoundingly with this change in the prevailing mood due to Jewish participation in patriotic manifestations and continuing Jewish support for Poles during the uprising. One of its characteristic expressions was a flood of poetical manifestos and prayers exalting the idea of Polish-Jewish brotherhood, an alliance seen as an element of a broader vision of national reconciliation. The account that literature gives of the changing perceptions of Jews in the early 1860s is, of course, not free of internal contradictions, in regard to both the nature and intensity of this change in mood. Both ideological and geographical factors should be taken into consideration when interpreting such literary treatments. It is immediately apparent that this literature overemphasizes the depth and irreversibility of these changes in attitudes and also focuses attention on Warsaw, the centre of the real and mythical events and where the Jewish legend first took shape.

The Poles and Jews shared the same lands within the same country for hundreds of years. They lived together, or side by side - it varied. A string of historical contingencies, both medieval and modern, led to the growth of Jewish settlements, particularly in the (historically) central and eastern regions of the Polish state. This is indicated - in the 200-year period preceding World War II - by the proportion of Jews living in these territories: 8-10 per cent of the population (although towards the end of the 19th century the Jews constituted as much as 25 per cent of inhabitants in some Polish territories under Russian occupation). This proportion was more or less maintained consistently, a fact which testified, among other things, to the relatively stable situation of the Jewish national/religious group in this part of Europe. It also indicated that this group was the largest not only in proportional terms but in actual numbers as well, and this was reflected in the importance of Polish Jews within the world diaspora. A profoundly religious life and the considerable development of spiritual and intellectual activity in its various forms - artistic, scientific, social and political - assured the Polish Jews a unique position among European Jewry, although for Jews settled in the wealthier, more highly civilized and, above all more industrially developed countries of Western Europe (e.g. Germany, England and France) their economic position, and therefore their place in the modern state, opened up wider culturo economic possibilities. The uniqueness of their customs and the strong traditional roots shared by the greater part of Jews living in Poland undoubtedly was of positive value for the Jewish diaspora, retaining as it did an inexhaustible reservoir of unchanging religious and traditional values. But it must also be remembered that this uniqueness, together with the poorer material situation of the ‘Ostjuden’ meant that the Jews of Western Europe viewed them with some reserve.

The overwhelming majority of the Jews of Poland rejected assimilationist tendencies, steadfastly maintaining the primary value of their separate identity, and a significant number of Orthodox Jews preferred actual isolation from the non-Jewish environment. The Poles too, having numerous links with the Jews arising from the practicalities of everyday life, were not overly eager to break down barriers dividing them. Each side also displayed tendencies of superiority towards the other.

FOR CENTURIES mayufes was part of the Polish–Jewish experience. In Polish dictionaries and other sources, mayufes is usually defined as ‘a song sung by Jews at the Sabbath midday meal’, or ‘a song sung by Jews at certain religious ceremonies’; a ‘dance’; or even a ‘ritual Jewish dance’. According to Polish dictionaries mayufes derives from the opening words of the well-known Hebrew Sabbath zemer (song sung at the Sabbath table) Mah yofis (‘How fair you are’) (in modern Hebrew pronunciation, Mah yafit).

None of these definitions takes note of a crucial feature of the concept of mayufes in Polish–Jewish culture, however. When a mayufes was sung or danced by a Jew (or someone imitating a Jew), it was not at the family Sabbath table. Rather, it was performed before a Polish audience, without any relation to the context or significance of the original Jewish zemer.

The Polish historian Janusz Tazbir paints a vivid picture of the mayufes show in his discussion of the ‘entertaining character who dances the … mayufes’, describing the Jew who is performing as a ‘quasi-jester, a crude type who abuses the Polish language in the most amusing away’. The characterization of the performer as a ‘quasi-jester’ also includes the persona adopted by the Jew while performing the mayufes. Although Tazbir does not cite his sources, the context indicates that he was writing about a phenomenon known as early as the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Although I have not yet discovered any references to mayufes before 1763, the later sources show that this dubious form of entertainment— Jews singing or dancing mayufes amid heckling by Poles—had been common for some time.

The sources quoted above, as well as Tazbir's comments, do not reveal that mayufes represented a traumatic experience for Polish Jewry. As far as Jews were concerned, mayufes lost its original meaning as the name of a Sabbath song and was redefined in response to its Polish usage. Within the Jewish world, mayufes became a term for toadying or coerced conformity to the expectations of Polish gentry. At times it referred specifically to the degrading abuse of a Jew.

It was in this way that Józef Kwiatek, a prominent activist of the Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (PPS: Polish Socialist Party), defined the concept of the Jewish problem in a brochure entitled Kwestia żydowska [The Jewish problem]; it was issued in October 1904 as the 28th edition of the monthly, Latarnia [Lantern], published by the Polska Partia Socjalno-Demokratyczna Galicji i Śląska (PPSD: Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and Silesia). This definition was commonly accepted by Polish Socialists and Social Democrats. They were in general agreement concerning the genesis and existence of the Jewish problem within Polish territory and how it differed from the question of the socio-economic and cultural status of Jews in other countries, although some of the publicists and ideologists of the Polish workers’ movement, not always sharing the social democratic orientation-such as Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy (SDKPiL: the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania)emphasized above all the economic circumstances of the Jewish problem. What divided Socialist thinkers, however, was the variety of approaches to the solution of the problem, although all foresaw its disappearance along with the liquidation of unjust social relations. Some postulated assimilation as the one means of resolving it, others spoke out for full equality of Jewish people in every area of social life, and others again saw the solution in the realization of the idea of national-cultural autonomy, or within the framework of some similar form of national self-government.

The climax of disagreement among Polish Socialists over the Jewish matter took place in the first and fourth decades of the twentieth century. In the first period various concepts and viewpoints were worked out in an attempt to address the many new issues which arose at the turn of the last century as a result of the sociopolitical processes taking place in Jewish society in Poland.