On a July day in 1941 in Jedwabne – a small town in northeastern Poland – Polish Christians massacred 1,600 of their Jewish neighbors, herding many of them in a barn doused in kerosene and burning the structure and all those inside.
This horrible and outrageous story was told in 2001 by Prof. Jan T. Gross in his landmark work Neighbors. Gross chronicles the atrocities that were carried out free of Nazi interference.Most shocking is that Jews and Poles in Jedwabne had always got along. The Poles murdered “their former schoolmates and those who sold them food, bought their milk, and chatted with them in the street.”
Similar slaughters took place throughout Poland. Poles even murdered Jews after the war: On July 10, 1946, a Polish mob murdered 42 of their fellow Poles, who were Jews, in Kielce. All six Nazi death camps were operating throughout Poland from 1941-45.While they were not strictly “Polish” death camps, they were Nazi death camps situated in that country. Poland was most of European Jewry’s graveyard.
Yet, nuance is in order regarding Poland and its Jews. Poles can’t serve as an alibi for those Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Romanians, French, and all Jew-killers throughout Europe. Often, the victims of the Nazi conquest were not just victims: They were responsible for the murder of many Jews.
Even “Jewish Police” rounded up their fellow Jews for deportation to death. We must remember those realities before we target Poles as “absorbing hatred of Jews in their mother’s milk.” Hatred of Jews was a reality throughout Europe.
Polish-Jewish relations are not black and white
In her meticulously detailed Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction (2024), independent researcher Jennifer Stark-Blumenthal calls for a reevaluation of Jews’ attitude toward Poles, as well as Poles’ understanding of Jews.
The author writes: “It is my firm hope that this analysis will help readers shift away from a simple black-and-white perception of Polish-Jewish relations to one that is marked by nuance. Messy, difficult, and at times painful, the Polish-Jewish past is anything but simple. Neither side is easy to describe; neither has a simple agenda.”
Polish charters of protection were issued to Jews from the Rhineland – Ashkenaz – in the 13th and 14th centuries. Jewish life and scholarship in the Polish kingdom flourished. Despite some persecution, there was a Jewish population boom.
“The Council of the Four Lands” was a highly successful Jewish autonomous self-government in Poland. But reliance on the Polish nobility made Jews suspect to Ukrainian peasants who rebelled in their territory controlled by the Poles.
Under the leadership of Bogdan Chmielnicki, thousands of Jews were murdered by the rebels. Jews, the author of Poles and Jews writes, “occupied the important role of middleman minority within the Polish-Lithuanian economy.” It was not all hatred of Jews in the kingdom. For American Jews to single out Poland as the main hater of Jews is an exaggeration.
To Stark-Blumenthal’s credit, she is right in demanding a change in how Jews – especially American Jews – view Poland. Indeed, there was a Jewish “golden age” in Poland from 1500-1648 and a vibrant Jewish political and cultural life after Poland became a state in the post-WWI period.
But she undercuts her own argument by citing so many examples of Church, nationalist, and Communist antisemitism in Poland. Nothing was the same for the Jews – and the Poles – following Partition in 1772, 1793, and 1795 that divided Poland among Russia, Prussia, and Austria.
Even some Jewish support of the Polish rebellion against the Czar did not lead to real acceptance of the Jews or calm accusations that the Jews were a fifth column in Poland. While it would be easy to blame the Church in Poland for all this hate, it seems to have permeated a wounded society that never recovered from its humiliation hundreds of years ago.
True, American Jews singled out Poland as an arch-enemy when modern Poland arose and were partially wrong for doing so. The author of Poles and Jews points out the hypocrisy of American Jewry for condemning Polish pogroms of Jews while ignoring the mass lynching of black people in the US’s south at the same time.
Perhaps the Poles had a right to be resentful. But hatred of Jews has permeated Poland for hundreds of years. Was it worse than Ukrainian or Lithuanian hatred of Jews? No. But even today, Poland has a Jewish problem.
Poles are resentful that the Nazi murder of thousands of Germans seems to be ignored in WWII. They believe the genocide of the three million Jews in Poland has been the sole focus of the world – as well as condemnation of Polish hatred of Jews.
While it is true that Auschwitz’s first camp claimed many Polish Christian lives, it in no way equaled the murder of one million Jews in Birkenau, the death camp of Auschwitz reserved for Jews.
But it is time that Poles stop using their persecution as an alibi for their murdering Jews during the war. We should acknowledge Polish Christian suffering while being able to condemn them for their Jew-hatred.
Stark-Blumenthal is right in worrying about the hatred of Jews, which has become a staple of Polish nationalism and populism. At the same time, she calls for Jews to recognize that the sole focus on the six Nazi death camps in Poland is a distortion. It should not be American Jewry’s sole focus for understanding Jewish life in Poland.
But the Polish massacres of Jews in Jedwabne and Kielce cannot be denied. And the harsh rule of Communism – in which some Jews participated – does not give the Poles an excuse to hate Jews. In fact, even the Jewish Communists were accused of being Zionists and subjected to antisemitic purges from 1968 to 1969.
The author of Poles and Jews makes a difficult argument. She condemns Poland today for antisemitic populist politics inspired by US President Donald Trump. I disagree with her. Despite the many great achievements of Jews in Poland, her study chronicles a consistent hatred of Jews by many Polish Christians.
It did not begin with WWII or Solidarity. The importance of the book is a reminder that Poles should not be the alibi for a Jew-hatred that permeated all of Europe. The history of Jewish exile in Poland is not just a vale of tears but a story of successful self-government, financial activity, cultural creation, and religious life.
The writer is a rabbi, essayist, and lecturer in West Palm Beach, Florida.