Thinking with restriction: immigration restriction and Polish Jewish accounts of the post-liberal state, empire, race, and political reason 1926–39

Abstract

This paper investigates how educated Jewish observers struggled to understand the causes of the global immigration restriction that so impacted East European Jewry in the 1920s and 1930s, and uses their competing explanations, convictions, and uncertainties to reveal underlying structures of Jewish political understanding in the interwar period more broadly. Efforts to explain restriction, the ways in which it seemed both to target Jews and to be part of a general closure of the developed world, and questions of timing demanded reflection on the most fundamental questions of the interwar political order. Did state policies flow from economic reason, and did nationalisation, democratisation, and socialisation of domestic politics alter this causal pattern? In a world where closed borders were the default, what difference did statehood or statelessness make? What was the meaning and implication of the deployment of “race” in others' debates about restriction, and what role did global race-thinking play in determining population policies? What was the causal significance of specifically anti-Jewish animus, its nature, and the role of Jews' own choices in determining their situation? Analyzing a number of loci of Jewish social policy debate, the essay focuses particularly on the diasporist emigration activist Il'ya Dizhur, the Zionist sociologist Aryeh Tartakover, and the cooperative-movement activist Majer Pollner.

Keywords:

• political thought
• Poland
• migration
• racism
• antisemitism
• Zionism
• diasporism
• empire
• state

Acknowledgements

The research for this paper was conducted with the aid of a 2009-2010 Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies and with the support of the 2010-2012 International Research Project on Jewish Migration from Russia and Eastern Europe at the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My thanks to Dan Moss, Stephan Stach, and the readers for EEJA.

Notes on contributor

Kenneth B. Moss is Felix Posen Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Johns Hopkins University. His book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard, 2009) received the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for best work of Jewish non-fiction from the National Jewish Book Council. He current project is entitled The Unchosen People: Nation, State, Diaspora and the Polish Jewish Condition in Jewish Political Thought 1928–1939. His work has appeared in the Journal of Modern History, Jewish Social Studies, Jewish History, the Journal of Social History among others.

Notes

1. I treat these questions extensively in my forthcoming book The Unchosen People: Nation, State, Diaspora, and the Polish Jewish Condition in Jewish Political Thought 1928–1939.

2. Tartakower, Migrations of Polish Jews in Recent Times, 18–19.

3. Hagen, “Before the ‘Final Solution’,” 376.

4. Pollner, “Mit eygene koykhes.”

5. Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 518 n. 43; Cherniavsky, “‘Aliyat yehudei Polin be-shnot ha-shloshim shel ha-meah ha-’esrim,” 127–33.

6. “Di yidishe emigratsye fun Poyln,” 85–6, 90.

7. Weil, “Races at the Gate,” 276.

8. Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 265, 264, 244.

9. Shimoni, Jews and Zionism, 97.

10. Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”, 166.

11. Tartakover, Yidishe emigratsye un Yidishe emigratsye-politik, 18.

12. Tartakover, Migrations of Polish Jews in Recent Times, 20–1.

13. Tartakover, Yidishe vanderungen, 133–4.

14. See the polemical but bibliographically helpful Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 387–410.

15. My forthcoming study The Unchosen People will devote attention to these aspects of the emigration debate.

16. Given this focus, I do not address the rich literature on the sociocultural realities of emigration and its impacts in East European communal life, as in the work of Gur Alroey or in Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora.

17. Vaserman, “Ikveta d'meshikha,” 28.

18. Blatman, “Ha-vikuah be-folin bi-1936 al tokhnit ha-evakuatsiah shel Jabotinsky,” 375. In fact, encouragement of Jewish emigration had been a policy desideratum of Polish government circles since the creation of the state; see Zahra, Exodus from the East, chapter 3.

19. Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 91–2.

20. Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 264ff.

21. Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 122.

22. Dizhur, Di moderne felker-vanderung, 15.

23. Ibid., 69–70.

24. Ibid., 13–14. Cf. Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 247–8.

25. On Western Jewish leaders’ relationship to the League, see Fink, Defending the Rights of Others.

26. Dizhur, Di moderne felker-vanderung, 78–9.

27. Ibid., 15, 13.

28. Tsen yor “YEAS”, 12–13.

29. Manor, “Prof. Aryeh Tartakover u-mifalo ha-iyuni-ha-meda'i.”

30. Tartakover, Dos yidishe emigratsye-problem un der yidisher velt-kongres, 4–5, 23, 26, 28; Dizhur's unpublished memoirs also accord importance to this “agreement between a private Jewish organization and a full three governments,” which seemed to promise “a fully legal and well-organized emigration wherein Jews would be treated as full-fledged human beings and citizens and would not have go through the hell of stealing the border, of being uninvited guests, of reactionary and antisemitic Polish governments.” Dizhur, incomplete typescript for Yidn loyfn fun Poyln, 123–4, Dizhur Collection, YIVO Institute, Record Group 589, microfilm 1.

31. Tartakover, Yidishe vanderungen, 137.

32. Dizhur, Di moderne felker-vanderung, 13.

33. Ibid., 100

34. Ibid., 102–3.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. Jackowski, Do konca wierny Polsce i Geografii, 7, 22, 32ff, 48. Thanks to Stephan Stach for bringing this book to my attention. See also Ormicki, Zycie gospodarcze kresow wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, 5–8.

38. For the Institute's views, see Paprocki, Minority Affairs in Poland; Boruta, “Instytut Badan Spraw Narodowosciowych,” esp. 64–5.

39. Ormicki, Skup zawodowy i handel obnosny w woj. Wilenskim, Nowogrodzkim, Poleskim i Wolynskim, 35.

40. Ormicki, Warunki i Mozliwosci Emigracji Zydowskiej, 5–6.

41. Ibid., 7–8.

42. Tara Zahra's forthcoming Exodus from the East, chapter 4, shows, in turn, just how fully this Polish vision of the mass emigration of its Jews was embedded in a larger transatlantic consensus among policy-makers and experts that mass Jewish resettlement was a key to solving both the Jewish question and East European problems more generally.

43. Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 387–410.

44. “A delegatn-konferents in der gezelshaft ‘YEAS’,” Moment, 2 February 1937.

45. Valk, “Vilner opteylung fun der yidisher tsentraler emigratsye-gez. ‘YEAS’,” 275.

46. Tartakover, Yidishe vanderungen, 141–3.

47. Ibid., 138–40.

48. Ibid., 122–9, 145.

49. Dizhur, Di moderne felker-vanderung, 10.

50. Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 390.

51. Pollner, Emigracja i przewarstwowienie żydów polskich, 5.

52. Pollner, “Mit eygene koykhes.”

53. Pollner, Emigracja i przewarstwowienie żydów polskich, 17–22.

54. Ibid., 42–5.

55. Talk of “the Yellow Peril” was a recognisable topic in Polish Jewish educated discourse by the 1930s; see Shandler, 167. More broadly, “race” as a concept imputing some possible social effect to inherited biological difference was already a naturalised category in the East European Jewish lexicon. A 1908 Russian Yiddish “political lexicon” published in a cheap pocket edition to help Jews make sense of “the foreign words that appear in Yiddish newspapers, journals, political and economic pamphlets” defined “race” thus: “Peoples, nations that stem from the same ancient family and have therefore many identical bodily and spiritual marks (skin color, bodily structure, the form of their languages, etc.). The Jews [and] the Arabs belong to the Semitic race, for instance. Most peoples of Europe constitute the Indo-Germanic race.” Politishes verterbukh, 1, 90.

Yet, conversely, there is little evidence of far-reaching commitments to race thinking as a primary mode of social perception in Polish Jewish life comparable to the ramified analytical racism so widespread in American, Australian, South African, or German thought, wherein some notion of biological difference served as the key to explaining social, cultural, and political phenomena. Rather, “race” seems to have functioned largely as a supplementary category in a political environment structured by older concepts of difference structured around culture, history, and religion. Thus, Dr Tsemach Shabad, a leader in Polish Jewish “social medicine,” treated “race” as a concept that could not be dismissed out of hand but strongly inclined towards minimising its explanatory relevance for “culture” and the “formation of peoples” in favour of factors like “historical development and environment.” “Rase un kultur” [Race and culture] [review essay of figures including Franz Boas and W. Goetz], YIVO-Bleter 5:3–5 (1933): 375–83, esp. 380. It may also be that the galloping racialisation of antisemitic discourse in the West and especially Germany (though less so in Eastern Europe itself; cf. Hagen, “Before the ‘Final Solution’,” 370) had a sobering effect; this was indeed the case with none other than Tartakover. In 1935, in a second edition of a textbook on contemporary Jewry for Poland's Hebraist high schools, Tartakover “completely omitted” “the chapter on the theory of Jewish race [torat ha-geza ha-yehudi] … because this theory is not sufficiently grounded and is also too difficult for young people to understand. I also thought it right to omit this chapter in light of the alarming moral decline of race theory following the recent occurrences in Germany.” Tartakover, Ha-am ha-yehudi be-zmanenu, 3.

56. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 312–31.

57. Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 161–2.

58. Ibid.

59. Shimoni, Jews and Zionism, 97–108; Peberdy, Selecting Immigrants, 63–5.

60. Peberdy, Selecting Immigrants, 66–7.

61. Weil, “Races at the Gate,” 279–80.

62. Shimoni, Jews and Zionism, 97–108.

63. Ibid., 109–44.

64. Tsen yor “YEAS”, 3–4.

65. Penslar, Shylock's Children, chapters 3, 5, 6; Dekel-Chen, “JCA–ORT–JAS–JDC.”

66. See Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, introduction.

67. Anonymous reviewer for East European Jewish Affairs, 19 March 2014.

68. This is Marcus's core accusation in Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 387–410.

69. Cf. Penslar's careful analysis of this question for German Jewish productivisationists in Shylock's Children, 205–16. I don't wish to suggest that the aforementioned reviewer would suggest any such simplistic reading; it is worth noting in this context her stimulating comments on the ambivalences of race thinking: “In view of the anxiety engendered by ‘assimilation’ – despite the constant escalation of anti-semitism and the prospect of immiseration as a result of economic discrimination – no one, not Jews and not Poles, could afford to dismiss the essentialism of racial doctrine entirely. The reluctance to do so – and thereby to look like a proponent of assimilation and of Jewish collective demise – would certainly explain the ambivalence toward the ‘torah’ of race in the pronouncements of Tartakover and Pollner.” Anonymous reviewer for East European Jewish Affairs, 19 March 2014.

70. Dizhur, typescript for Yidn loyfn, 72–3, Dizhur Collection, YIVO, RG 589, mf. 1

71. Dray yor idishe emigratsye, 14–17; Leshtshinsky, “Emigratsye tragedyes,” 235–7, 241.

72. Tartakover to Natan Meltser, 12 October 1933, Ha-makhon le-heker tenuat ha-avoda a.'sh. Pinhas Lavon, Tel Aviv: Personal Archives Collection: Tartakover (IV-104-565).

73. Tsen yor “YEAS”, 6.

74. Tartakover, Yidishe emigratsye un Yidishe emigratsye-politik, 134. On Polish nation-state outreach to migrants, see Gabaccia et al., “Emigration and Nation Building during the Mass Migrations from Europe.”

75. Tartakover, Yidishe emigratsye un Yidishe emigratsye-politik, 128.

76. ‘Al darke mediniutenu, 130.

77. Ibid., 132

78. Tartakover, Yidishe vanderungen, 147.