Pre war Poland was a very nationalistic anti-semitic state. They also had far more Jews than Germany did, and the Polish Jews were not assimilated; they wore specific clothing and openly practiced. Some cities in Poland were 1/3 Jewish, the Jewish population of Germany was always less than half of a percent. Hence the real murders beginning after the conquest of Poland. ETA collaboraters existed in every nation. Hell, we still have Nazis right now.
I’m not sure what you mean by this.
It’s my understanding that despite anti-Semitism, there was considerable Jewish assimilation into Polish society prior to WWII, and that separation from other Poles was forced on Jews after Nazi Germany conquered Poland.
I meant, there were very large Jewish communities in Poland that spoke Yiddish and were distinct from Gentiles. And the pre-war Polish government was not friendly towards them.
Yes, my impression is that almost all Jews in Poland at that time would have spoken Yiddish as their first language and socialized almost exclusively with other Jews. This was true regardless of religious observance; if a Jew decided to stop being religious, they would become part of the secular Jewish subculture, not part of the mainstream Polish culture.
Yiddish is the dialecitical word for “Jewish”. They were speaking a dialect of German that is spoken by Jews in Europe and they were right in the middle of Poland, which had just become a nation again after 200? years. They were not welcome to the new Polish government, but Polish anti-semitism did not extend as far as Naziism. It was very much there, though. They were also openly practicing their beliefs which had been tolerated (here, kind of) under the Russian Empire, the Polish state was an entirely new thing after WW1
It was pretty common even in America at that time. Even FDR to an extent.
The Germans were able to recruit SS divisions from every nation they occupied. I assume they were all dedicated anti-Semites. It is everywhere, in the US too. Although I think the Germans called FDR Franklin Rosenfeld, to show his true Jewish nature.
Not true, especially outside of shtetls in rural areas.
“In cities and large towns in Eastern Europe, such as Warsaw in Poland, younger Jews fully embraced the country’s culture whilst simultaneously observing some Jewish traditions with their families.”
“Before the Holocaust, Jews were the largest minority in Poland. In Poland’s major cities, Jews and Poles spoke each other’s languages and interacted in markets and on the streets. Even the market towns, or shtetls, that have come to represent the lives of Jews in Eastern Europe were, to some extent, mixed communities. That did not mean that antisemitism did not impact the lives of Polish Jews, but Jews were part of Poland, and Polish culture was, in part, Jewish.”
A lesson of the Holocaust (and one which lent major support to the founding of Israel) was that no matter how deeply Jews were wound into the national fabric, it could unravel under pressures of war and the bubbling up of old hatreds never completely suppressed.
Nothing in your cite actually contradicts what I said. I didn’t say that most Polish Jews couldn’t speak Polish, I said that it wasn’t their first language. And I said Jews and Gentiles didn’t typically socialize together, not that they didn’t interact in markets or on the streets. Intermarriage was rare and scandalous. The two communities interacted more or less peacefully, but Jews were not “assimilated” in the sense that anyone viewed the distinction between Jew and Gentile as insignificant. (Except, I guess, the Communists, and even then more in theory than practice).
And your cite(s) for this, as well as the claim that it wasn’t possible for religious Jews to be part of the mainstream Polish culture, is…?
I’m not sure of the details of the interwar Polish government’s attitude toward Jews, but it is grossly inaccurate to say that Judaism was “tolerated” under the Russian Empire.
Common knowledge. How much Jewish history have you studied?
OK, it takes some ignorance to ask for a cite that Jews in prewar Eastern Europe spoke Yiddish, but here you go.
Language was often, but not always, associated with ideological outlook. In the 1931 census, nearly 80 percent of the Jewish population cited Yiddish as their mother tongue. Ideologically, Yiddish was the language of Jewish socialists and others who believed in doikeyt (“hereness” in Yiddish). The Zionists promoted Hebrew, while Polish sometimes suggested assimilation.
Corresponding with this breakdown of language by ideology was a dynamic cultural life, centered in major cities like Warsaw, Vilna, and Lvov. The Yiddish press had a large circulation in interwar Poland, with hundreds of publications, including two mass-circulation daily newspapers in Warsaw, Haynt and Moment. A Hebrew press also developed in interwar Poland, but struggled for readers, since Hebrew was not the daily language of most Polish Jews. The Yiddish theater flourished, and the founding of the Jewish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in Vilna in 1925 laid the foundations for research on East European Jewish life.
From here:
My father’s family fled from pogroms there. Their lives were most certainly impacted by antisemitism. (Yes, here also, but not nearly as badly.)
And while they had, while there, spoken Polish and Russian, they definitely considered Yiddish to be their native tongue; and it was the only one they kept speaking in the USA, and the only one my father (who came over at age 10) continued to know any significant amount of as an adult.
Yeah tolerated was not accurate. How about “forcibly settled in certain areas, particularly in Poland.” I appreciate the correction.
I was not contesting that. Even where Yiddish was their “mother tongue”, it didn’t preclude their speaking their country’s main language(s); it would have been impossible in many cases to conduct professional and other activities without that facility. My objection has been to:
and your allegation that Jews in Poland:
“socialized almost exclusively with other Jews.”
Still waiting for evidence of such.
And while I highly doubt it was your intent, these types of unsupported claims provide fuel for bigots who like to claim that Jews have invited prejudice by isolating themselves from others and refusing to assimilate*, and aren’t really part of the national fabric.
*a simultaneous claim from anti-Semites has historically been that Jews are pushy, horning in where they aren’t wanted. I always wondered how bigots manage to reconcile these mutually exclusive propositions in what remains of their minds.
Poland was an anti-semitic society. The mostly Catholic Poles did not want to associate with the Jews, and the Jews kept to themselves as well. Jews being unwelcome in Europe was a fact for centuries.The Jewish ghettoes in Polish cities were not created by the Nazi occupation; they were already there. In fact, when the first German troops came through the Eastern European Jewish settlements, they found it solidified their beliefs about Jews as an alien race. Jews were treated as aliens for a long time. There were very few Jews in Germany in 1936.
Jews in Germany had been trying to get out for some years by then; significant exodus starting by 1933, and some sooner.
And part of the question is what “very many” means. Jews weren’t a large percentage of the German population, no – but we were (and are) a tiny percentage of the world population. There were more Jews in Germany than in any but a few other places in the world.
I can’t find good equivalent figures for, say, 1925 – that is, I can find Germany’s, but not most other countries; but this chart, if I’m counting right, shows for 1900 Germany in 6th place in the world, and one of the five countries with more Jews is Austria (the others: Russia, the USA, Poland, and Hungary.) By 1925 the population in Germany was down a bit, but not much (or maybe some weren’t “registered” Jews).
I am not Jewish, and I am trying to be careful and respectful here about such an awful subject. I hope I am not coming across as a jerk. Germany in 1900 contained many areas that would become Polish after WW1. I chose 1936 as the year due to that being the year of the first German annexations of other territory. Poland, as a recently created nation, held a much larger number of Jewish people, although many may have been born in pre-war Germany and spoke a German dialect.
There were still more Jews in Germany in, say, 1932, and probably still in 1936, than in all but a very few countries in the world; so it still comes across very oddly to me to say that “there were very few Jews in Germany”. As a percentage of Germany’s population there were indeed very few; but as a percentage of national population there were (and are except for Israel) very few Jews anywhere in the world. The implication which I took from the post in which you said that (did I read it wrong?) was that Jews had been avoiding Germany all along; but Germany had actually been one of the favored countries. Germany had antisemitism all along, of course, but so did everyplace else; many places (until the 1930’s) had it worse.
No, I don’t think you’re trying to be a jerk.