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ABSTRACT
Jews, unlike Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Germans, did not pose a direct, irredentist threat to interwar Polish territorial integrity. They were not a territorially concentrated group with border revision claims against the Polish state, nor was a neighboring government prepared to intervene on their behalf. In this sense, Jews presented the least tangible threat to Polish national security. Yet this article will illustrate that, despite the fundamental difference between Jews and other minorities, the Polish Ministry of Interior still pursued a divide and rule scenario with respect to Jewish political organizations – an insight overlooked in existing literature. By combining the theoretical insights and systematic research design of social scientific work with the empirical reality of historical research, this article examines a new facet of interwar minority politics, and contributes to the political science literature on state management of minority opposition.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Daniel Fedorowycz is a postdoctoral fellow in public humanities at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Previously, Daniel held fellowships at Yale University’s MacMillan Center, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He holds a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford, and an MA and BA (Hons) from the University of Toronto.
Notes
1 Existing social scientific literature that focuses on state management of minorities does not consider variation at the level of organization and instead focuses on the level of the ethnic group. Though helpful in understanding policies that states may choose to pursue vis-à-vis their ethnic minorities, existing literature overwhelmingly treats entire groups as homogeneous political actors, therefore overlooking the significant subgroup variation of why organizations representing the same group are treated differently by the state. See for example Brubaker, “Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples”; Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence; Gurr, “Why Minorities Rebel”; Mylonas, The Politics of Nation-building; Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence; Cederman, Weidmann, and Bormann, “Triangulating Horizontal Inequality”; Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug, Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War. For a comprehensive literature review on the use of legal restrictions on political expression and participation to curb extremist actors in democratic regimes see Capoccia, “Militant Democracy”; Rosenblum, On the Side of the Angels, 426–8, 448. See also Issacharoff, Fragile Democracies.
2 I use the Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych (MSW) archives located in the Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN) in Warsaw because I am specifically interested in state action towards minority organizations, and not necessarily the reaction of political organizations to state policies. De-classified MSW archives are thus most appropriate for this research because they best reveal the inner workings of the state and shed light on how authorities perceived the various minority organizations. I also consult the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MSZ) archives post-1935, when Jewish affairs were transferred from the MSW to the MSZ.
3 Weinbaum, A Marriage of Convenience, 5.
4 For more on Polish state capacity to repress, see Cramsey and Wittenberg, “Timing is Everything.”
5 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, chapter four.
6 Heller, Jabotinsky’s Children, 14–5.
7 Stach, “The Institute for Nationality Research,” 173.
8 For comprehensive review of the historiography see Mendelsohn, “Interwar Poland” 130–9; Mendelsohn, “Jewish Historiography on Polish Jewry in the Interwar Period,” 3–13.
9 Ibid., 4–5.
10 Ibid., 130–1.
11 Ibid., 5–6.
12 Chu, The German Minority, 7.
13 Davies, God’s Playground, 190.
14 Mendelsohn, “Jewish Historiography (1986),” 131–2.
15 See, for example, Paul Brykczynski and Szymon Rudnicki.
16 See, for example, works by: Daniel K. Heller, Jack Jacobs, Kamil Kijek, Magdalena Kozłowska, Anna Landau-Czajka, Gertrud Pickhan, Michał Trębacz, and Joshua Zimmerman.
17 Mendelsohn, “Introduction,” 19; Bacon, “Agudat Israel in Interwar Poland,” 34; Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919–1939, chapter seventeen. Certainly, not all historians view all Jewish political projects of interwar Poland as a failure. See, for example, Jack Jacobs.
18 Heller, Jabotinsky’s Children, 18.
19 Archiwum Akt Nowych, Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych, Wydział Narodowościowy, syg. 1002, s. 52.
20 Ibid.
21 Kozyra, Polityka Administracyjna, 260, 280; Dopływ, syg. 1017, s. 20, Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych (MSW), Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw, Poland. Henceforth AAN.
22 Kopstein and Wittenberg, “Deadly Communities,” 263.
23 Kozyra, Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych, 280.
24 Holzer, Mozaika Polityczna.
25 Kozyra, Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych, 359.
26 syg. 1062, s. 2, Wydzial Narodowosciowy (WN), MSW, AAN.
27 Bacon, “Agudat Israel in Interwar Poland,” 22–3.
28 Ibid., 20; Bacon, The Politics of Tradition, 198.
29 Bacon, “Agudat Israel in Interwar Poland,” 21.
30 Holzer, Mozaika Polityczna, 563.
31 Kozyra, Minsterstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych, 280, fn. 160.
32 Mendelsohm, Zionism in Poland.
33 Kozyra, Minsterstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych, 280, fn. 160.
34 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 86.
35 Holzer, Mozaika Polityczna, 567.
36 Ibid., 272.
37 Ibid., 565.
38 Ibid., 263; syg. 961, s. 25, WN, MSW, AAN; Dop., syg. 1021, s. 28., MSW, AAN.
39 Dop., syg. 1021, s. 87, MSW, AAN.
40 Ibid., 89.
41 Holzer, Mozaika Polityczna, 264.
42 Syg. 963, s. 113–4, WN, MSW, AAN.
43 Snyder, Sketches of a Secret War, 67.
44 Dop., syg. 1062, s. 14, MSW, AAN; Brumberg, “The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in the Late 1930s,” 77.
45 Kozyra, Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych, 260 fn 95.
46 Ibid.
47 Dop., syg. 1021, s. 27, 76, MSW, AAN.
48 Dop., sygn 980, MSW, AAN; Dop., syg.1017, s.4, MSW, AAN.
49 Brumberg, “The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in the Late 1930s,” 75.
50 Dop., sygn 980, MSW, AAN; Dop., syg.1017, s.4, MSW, AAN.
51 Ibid.; Kozyra, Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych, 280.
52 Brumberg, “The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in the Late 1930s,” 78.
53 Mendelsohn, “The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars,” 13.
54 Syg. 961, s. 24, WN, MSW, AAN.
55 Ibid.
56 Bacon, The Politics of Tradition, 199.
57 Ibid., 191, 198–9; for more see Bacon, The Politics of Tradition, chapter eight.
58 Ibid., 198.
59 Mendelsohn, “The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars,” 14.
60 Dop., syg. 1021, s. 462, MSW, AAN.
61 Syg. 1062, s. 7, WN, MSW, AAN.
62 Ibid., s. 3; Bacon, “Agudat Israel in Interwar Poland,” 21.
63 Mendelsohn, “The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars,” 15.
64 Ibid., 11, fn 5.
65 Mendelsohn, “The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars,” 13.
66 Mendelsohn, Zionism, 332.
67 Mendelsohn, “The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars,” 14.
68 Mendhelson, Zionism, 187.
69 Kijek, “Between a Love of Poland, Symbolic Violence, and Antisemitism,” 243.
70 Mendelsohn, Zionism, 209.
71 Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 222.
72 Ibid.
73 Heller, Jabotinsky’s Children, 22.
74 Kozłowska “Wandering Jews,” 246.
75 Ibid., 17.
76 Ibid., 12, 17; Kozyra, Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych, 377.
77 Mendelsohn, “The Jews of Poland Between Two World War,” 14.
78 Kozyra, Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych, 357.
79 Snyder, Black Earth, 47.
80 Mendelsohn, Zionism, 309–10.
81 Dop., syg. 1021, Spraw. za XII 1926–1927, MSW, AAN.
82 Bacon, “Agudat Israel in Interwar Poland,” 27.
83 For more on relationship between Polish government and Agudas see Bacon, Politics of Tradition.
84 Snyder, Black Earth, 48.
85 The Minorities bloc was a loose coalition of minority organizations (Ukrainian, Jewish, German, and Belarusian) that ran for parliamentary elections in 1922 (winning sixty-six mandates) and 1928 (forty-four mandates).
86 Bacon, The Politics of Tradition, 266.
87 Ibid., 266–8.
88 Bacon, The Politics of Tradition, 271.
89 Weinbaum, A Marriage of Convenience, 42.
90 Snyder, Black Earth, 63.
91 Ibid., 7.
92 Korzec, “Anti-Semitism in Poland as an intellectual, Social, and Political Movement,” 92.
93 Syg. 1004, s.17, Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych, AAN.
94 Weinbaum, A Marriage of Convenience, 12–3.
95 Holzer, Mozaika Polityczna, 567.
96 Auerbach,“Ogólno-Żydowska Partia Pracy,” 47. MSW document cited, in Polish: “the Communist Party has an undeniable influence on the OZPP.”
97 Ibid.
98 Kopstein and Wittenberg, “Who Voted Communist?” 89–90.
99 Kijek, “State Education,” 250.
100 Kopstein and Wittenberg, “Deadly Communities,” 262.
101 Auerbach,“Ogólno-Żydowska Partia Pracy,” 46–7.
102 Ibid., 40.
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid., 39–40.
105 Ibid., 38.
106 Mendelsohn, Zionism, 19.
107 Ibid., 45.
108 Ibid., 46.
109 Ibid.
110 Power struggles between Jewish political organizations over trade unions were “fierce.” See syg. 961, s. 25, WN, MSW, AAN.
111 Auerbach,“Ogólno-Żydowska Partia Pracy,” 50–1.
112 Ibid., 57.
113 Marcus, Jews in Poland, 284.
114 Ibid.
115 Heller, Jabotinsky’s Children, 19.
116 Similarly, recent scholarship also problematizes the classic pre-1926 “ethnic” versus the post-1926 “civic” typology used by historians and questions the extent to which 1926 was a beneficial turning point for Poland’s minorities. Brykczynski, “Reconsidering Pilsudski’s Nationalism.”