VI
THE POLISH JEWS
One goes to Poland with a firm conviction that its civilization is of the West. Latin was the language of its ancient culture. Did not Copernicus lay the basis of our modern outlook at Cracow? One feels, as one cannot feel in Russia or Turkey, that the ancestors of its people passed through the same formative influences, Renaissance, Reformation and "Enlightenment," as our own. One sight seemed to contradict these impressions even in the first walk through Warsaw streets. The snow was on the ground. The sledges, the crows, and the gilded Byzantine church suggested Russia. But the Jews in the streets reminded me of Salonica. Here was a race living, by its own choice, that life of separation which is normal in the East. In Turkey one expects it. Every race has there its own language, its own costume, its own religion. The Jews there are not more separate than Greeks or Armenians. In Poland this Eastern phenomenon surprises. Even in the larger towns the majority of the men, including some who are wealthy, continue to wear their traditional costume—the black gown, the little black cap, and the inevitable beard and the peculiar curl prescribed by ritual. These men in the strange garb talk no Polish among themselves: their speech is still the German jargon which they brought with them long centuries back from the Rhine. Thus it happens that from his first years of childhood the young Pole grows up with the sense that these strangely dressed men with the incomprehensible speech are foreigners in his land. Why it is so, I do not know. You will see no black gowns in Hungary, nor hear Yiddish in the streets, and the Hungarian Jew speaks Magyar at home, and feels himself a Hungarian citizen.
The outer garb covers a personality which is as little Polish as the dress is European. The average Orthodox Jew, even in the middle class, has grown up in a mental world which nowhere touches that of his Polish neighbor. His education has been almost exclusively religious. He knows Hebrew as few of us ever knew our Latin. I have heard poor Jewish children talking Hebrew as they played on the streets. His wits have been exercised in the gymnastic of Talmudic casuistry. Of European history or modern science he knows (or used to know) nothing. If he is an idealist (and this persecuted race is rich in idealists), it is not the Polish nationalist dream or the Socialist Utopia, or the scientists passion to know the causes of things, that allure him, but rather his secret, disdainful, theocratic vision of a chosen race true to its destiny and bound by its law. It is not easy to admire the wisdom which takes as
84. ACROSS THE BLOCKADE
its chosen field for idealism the obstinate resolve to observe the Sabbath rather than Sunday as the weekly day of rest. But one must bow with a sort of veneration before the self-sacrifice of this race which in Poland, has handicapped itself in the daily competition of industry because it will not compromise with the law. The mental gulf between this old world and any modern culture is deep. It is so deep that Jewish girls of the middle class, who have had a more conventional modern education, feel themselves aliens at their marriage with young men of their own race who were bred in the Orthodox lore.
If the reader asks why the Poles, alone of all races professedly Western in their culture, live with this impassable gulf between themselves and their Jews, I am somewhat puzzled to find the answer. Firstly, they were not, until to-day, a ruling people: they could not attract others to themselves. Secondly, there are historical reasons. It may be partly a consequence of the wide autonomy, legal and fiscal, conceded by the old Polish Kingdom to the Jews. It is probable also that the Russians deliberately widened the gulf. Thirdly, the cultural level of the Poles themselves was too low for a bridge to be built on an intellectual basis. The Jew had his own ancient culture. The poorer Pole, unlettered and untaught, possessed no culture at all. His one spiritual possession was his Catholic faith. It is, I think, the traditional association of Polish nationality with the Catholic religion, which makes the barrier against the Jews so difficult to lower. The Pole emphasized his Catholicism against his Prussian Protestant conquerors in the West, and his Russian Orthodox conquerors in the East. The few Protestant Poles in East Prussia and Silesia lost all sense of their Polish nationality. Ask a peasant or a woman in any mixed area if he or she is a Pole, and the affirmative answer will usually be, "I am a Catholic." I have often heard that answer myself, and for me it gave the clue. In Hungary the Calvinist minority was always as much Magyar as the Catholic majority, and religion was never reckoned a part of nationality. In Poland as in Turkey, nationality and religion are one idea. The Jews are in sentiment excluded from the Polish nation because they are not Catholics. A Jew is really adopted as a Pole, only when he compounds with the world by accepting baptism. So far as I could gather, the open preaching of anti-Semitism and the organized persecution of the Jews in Poland are comparatively recent phenomena. A Pole will always begin any conversation about the Jews by recalling the traditional tolerance of the Polish State. That is, I fear, a myth: it was on the persecution of both of the Protestants and the Orthodox that Prussia and Russia fastened as a pretext for the first Partition. The fact is that modern anti-Semitism in Poland has an obvious economic root. Until the middle of last century the Jews were the only middle class in Poland, and the only trading class. Poles were either landowners, peasant owners, or laborers. In the last fifty years Poles have increasingly taken to trade and even to industry, though the names of most of the larger firms are still preponderantly German or Jewish. Usually these magnates are baptized Jews. This belated industrial development in Poland, delayed by the heavy hand of Stardom, brought Jewish and Christian traders and shopkeepers, when it came at length, into sharp competition. As in Austria, so in Poland, this economic competition was obvious material for the political agitator. M. Roman Dmowski, the founder of the old National Democratic ("N.D.") Party, did what Lueger and the "Christian Socialists" did in Vienna: he roped the small middle-class man, who felt the pressure of Jewish competition, into an essentially Conservative Nationalist Party. Before the war his was a russophil policy; he was a favorite at the Tsar's Court, and represented in the Duma a tendency that was relatively reactionary even in that backward assembly. In Poland, though his party relied for funds on the big landowners, it won popular support by a violent and entirely reckless campaign against the Jews. To this party belong not merely M. Dmowski, by far the cleverest of Polish politicians, but also M. Paderewski, and most of the present ministry. From specimens of their election literature which I saw, one might suppose that they fought the first election in free Poland mainly on the Jewish issue, combined with the subtle suggestion that most Socialists are Jews, and all Socialists Bolsheviks. Ugly illustrated posters and leaflets, issued officially by this party, depicting the Jew as a serpent or a vampire, appealed to the numerous illiterate electors, and the newspaper press kept the agitation going from day to day by incessant anti-Jewish articles. I procured copies of some of these sinister popular appeals to race-hatred, and in the municipal elections a little later actually myself saw a"N.D." car, decorated with all the Allied flags, scattering an anti-Jewish leaflet in the main street of Warsaw. For the present state of mind of brutal fanaticism which breaks out in massacre, this ruling party is directly responsible. Itself at bottom the party of the big landed interest, it has used anti-Jewish prejudice as a demagogic appeal, in order to win the masses from the Socialist and Peasant parties.
I must in fairness mention the charges usually advanced against the Jews. There is, of course, as everywhere, the charge of usury. Because many or most of the town dealers and retailers are Jews, they are said to be the causes of high prices and the food shortage. In point of fact the real reason for the anger of the Polish trading class against the Jews, is that their margin of profit is so small that even the co-operative societies can hardly compete with them. Poland is suffering from an acute currency crisis, but the people are too ignorant to understand the real causes of the decline of the value of the mark. The economic plight of the Polish workers is desperate, mainly because the rise of wages has not followed the rise of prices. Prices rose ten times: wages only three to five times. No doubt dealers, including Jews, did hoard and speculate, but the more guilty "profiteer" was probably the Polish landlord and farmer. It is the obvious cue of the profiteer, and the employer who will not raise wages, to blame the Jews for the high cost of living. Again, they are accused of being pro-German, partly because they rejoiced at the defeat of Stardom, and partly because the Germans, during the occupation, found it convenient to employ them, since they all speak German. That fact attracted notice, only because the Russians had, on principle, refused to employ any Jews at all. Half Polish society, one is apt to forget, was pro-German, or, as it was called, Activist, until the crash, and the President himself, General Pilsudski, fought most gallantly on the Austro-German side against Russia. Elsewhere it is counted a crime that they are neutral in the racial feuds of the Poles against the Ukrainians. The most recent charge is that all Jews are Bolsheviki. Some young Jews are certainly Communists, but the mass of the race detests the thought of social revolution as it detests every new thing.
I will not attempt to describe the successive waves of pogroms which have swept over the Polish Jews since November last. I happened to be in Poland during a relatively quiet interval. I saw no pogroms, but I heard enough in my talks with Polish officials, officers, and politicians to understand the atmosphere of the pogrom. I myself heard the Gendarmerie Commandant of the town of Pinsk declare in cold blood that he would have to shoot one in ten of the population. About ten days later thirty-five Jews were shot in Pinsk by the troops without charge or trial. Sometimes the number of killed may rise (as at Vilna and Lemberg) as high as sixty and seventy, sometimes whole streets of Jewish houses are burned down, more often there is pillage, beating and insult, but little or no killing. I refrain from dwelling on this painful subject of pogroms, because, though one cannot insist too sharply on their cessation, it would be a grave mistake to suppose that they are the real evil. Let me say, once, in plain language, that these Catholic Polish Christians do on occasion, with their troops at their head, massacre as brutally as ever Turks massacred Christians, and the authorities show a Turkish tolerance to these outrages. But pogroms, after all, are only the occasional aggravation of a daily martyrdom. The same fanaticism shows itself in every relation of life.
Jews have said to me repeatedly that no Christian employer will employ a Jew: certainly there are many big employers who on principle exclude Jews. A large number of Jews (they are one-third of the population), barred out under Russian rule, were taken into the service of the Warsaw tramways during the German occupation. They were all instantly dismissed at the Polish Revolution. In a typical country town (I speak of what I saw at Vloclawek) the big modern factories will employ no Jews. They can work only in a few small home-industries of their own. That is true also of Lodz. Some of the factories belong to Jews, but even in them no Jewish operatives can be employed. The fact is that anti-Semitism has now filtered down into the working-class. Polish workmen will not work with Jews. Jewish workmen must create their own separate Trade Unions. When, at the Revolution, a Workers 9 Council (Rada), on the Soviet model, was created in all the towns, the Socialist leaders had the greatest difficulty in persuading the Polish workmen to admit the Jewish organizations, and when I left Poland, at the end of March, they had not everywhere succeeded. West of Poland Socialism knows no barriers of race. In Poland the Jewish Socialists must keep apart, in their own separate organization, the Bund. Though the Polish Constitution imposes no legal disability on the Jew, I believe it is the fact that no unbaptized Jews (or I shall say, virtually none) have been admitted to official posts or to any rank in the civil service. My note-books are full of little details of acts of oppression against Jews—interferences with their clubs, with their newspaper, and open brutality in the street. One heard of these things everywhere. The broad facts are enough. No Jew was safe from daily insult, while a Chinese wall excluded the Jews from every region of Polish social life, save in the most advanced circles. The whole condition of this society rather resembled that of a mixed white and colored community than a European land.
The Poles, politically and culturally an immature and backward people, have won the power to make their land a hell for its three million Jews, by no merit of their own, but simply by the victory first of Germans over Russians, and then of the Allies over the Germans. What they do to other races is some concern of ours. If the diagnosis of this essay be correct then undoubtedly the root of the evil, whether Poles or Jews be to blame for it, is the excessive isolation of this essentially foreign racial element. To conclude, however, as the Poles do, that the cure for this evil is to bring the Jews into the framework of Polish nationality, is surely to betray a complete ignorance of the meaning of the idea of nationality. Race and language are trifles compared with the historic gulf between these two peoples. Each has suffered, each has struggled, but never in the same cause and with the same sentiments. Mazzini wrote in vain, if we are going to say that aliens who share none of the traditions, none of the memories, none of the hopes, none of the religious faith of the Poles, can partake of Polish nationality. Good citizens of the Polish State they may be, if they are permitted to wish it well, but even this they will not be, until the Poles cease the effort to beat them into patriotism. None the less, this Polish reasoning is sound, in so far as it betrays a perception that some social bond, some idea of union, some human tie must be discovered, if their State, with its three million Jews, is to cohere. The bond cannot be nationality. Let them seek it in common work. In this modern world, it is much more important that men produce, shoulder to shoulder, and share common interests as workers and creators, than it is that they profess the same historic nationality. When Jewish workers are admitted to every factory and to the civil service, when the separate Trade Unions, and the separate Socialist workers' parties fuse, the Jewish problem will be solved in Poland. Liberalism, one may say in passing, exists in Poland neither as an idea nor as a party. The idea of Socialism and its work for common human ends, free from this curse of racial fanaticism, is the one force in Poland which gives any hope for the future, and it is only in so far as the weak and backward Polish Socialism movement grows in courage and numbers and fidelity to its ideas, that any radical solution can be found for the Jewish problem.
Failing this radical social solution none of the obvious remedies seems to me particularly hopeful. The political vote is useless to the Jews. Jewish parties were and are sharply divided into many groups with divergent policies. The Orthodox stand by themselves. Their Socialists are at war with their middle-class. They were often robbed of their voting chances by skillfully arranged electoral areas. But if they had won a proportionate number of seats in the Diet, their case would have been rather worse than better. If they had become a balancing party, with a big vote to sell, the answer to this use of power would have been only a sharper application of the rod of persecution. In some of the Badas (Workmen's Councils) they had this balancing power between the Left (Communists) and Right (Polish Socialist Party), and they hardly dared to use it, because they knew that any act or decision which would cause it to be said that Jews are exerting a political influence, would only expose them to further persecution. It is dangerous to be a Jew, but most dangerous of all to be a Jew who can be accused of wielding power.
If it is of their rights as a minority that one thinks, then obviously it is important that they should have their own schools, which must receive their fair share of public money. The control of these schools ought to be in the hands of the Jewish community, on a democratic basis. While they clearly ought to teach the Polish language and history, the instruction must begin in the mother-tongue, which is Yiddish. Cultural autonomy on these lines is a right which must be secured to every minority in Europe.
It is on this matter of schools that controversy mainly turns in Poland. To me it seems curiously unreal. Here is a race liable to be massacred on occasion, habitually insulted in its daily life, excluded in fact from the State's service, and barely able to live by minor crafts and petty trade, because it is excluded by sheer fanaticism from the chief industries, and we offer it as a solution—Jewish schools. The League of Nations, we are told, will impose certain obligations on the Polish State in regard to its Jews. The League as it exists to-day is primarily a Grand Alliance. Poland feels herself an ally, and is regarded in Paris as the indispensable barrier against Germany and Russia. French officers are training and even commanding its army. French diplomacy, strongly clerical in its tendencies, is the only effective representative of Europe or the League in Warsaw to-day. The Allies failed to stop the little war of the Poles against the Ukrainians. They will fail, even if they try, to stop the persecution of the Jews. No Alliance ever yet contrived to control an ally. From an ally one wants an army, not virtue. While the League remains a militant alliance against the Germans and Bolsheviks, it will achieve nothing for the Polish Jews, or for any other minority. It will no more succeed in controlling the Poles in this matter than Mid-Victorian England in the Crimean days could control the Turks, while it regarded them as allies. Its diplomatic agents will move in Polish society, where no one meets a Jew, and only a very strong and exceptional man will risk his local popularity for the sake of the Jews. To place minorities (be they German or Jewish) under Poles and Tchechs, and then to imagine that all will be well because some magic League of Nations will watch over them, is a pitiable self-deception. The Poles understand very well what their róle in Europe is. Their róle is to fill a rather onerous part in the French strategy of encirclement, and to keep a strong conscript army on the Vistula, while the French keep watch on the Rhine. They know very well that if they fill this róle, they may treat Jews, Germans, and other minorities as they please. That is a corollary of the new militarism. The way of escape? I see none from this false start. But more and more, day by day, the Polish Jew, like every wronged race and class in Europe, will seek his salvation in Socialism.
On one fact, however, it is not too late to insist. The boundaries of Poland have not yet been drawn on its Eastern side. Its armies are occupying the country beyond the Bug, but as yet they have no formal "mandate." Here the Jewish population is even denser than in Poland proper. Brest, Vilna, Pinsk, and the rest, are overwhelmingly Jewish towns. This is the old Russian "Pale," in which even the villages are often Jewish, and since the devastation of 1915, when the Cossacks drove out the Orthodox peasants, the Jews have even taken to tilling the soil. One might press this case as strongly from the Lithuanian, the White Russian or the Ukrainian standpoint, for the Polish population here is a negligible minority. All these races will be wronged, but more especially the Jews, if the Polish frontier is drawn beyond the true Polish racial limits. I know a town in the Pale which had lived under Tsarist Russian, German, Ukrainian, Bolshevist, and Polish rule. I asked the local Jews which, from their standpoint, was the best and the worse. They had nothing, as Jews, against Germans or Bolsheviki. Neither persecuted. They all agreed that Polish rule was decidedly worse than that of Stardom. The leaders of the Ukrainians, I imagine, would have said the same thing if I could have questioned them, but they were all in prison.