7.
A CLOSER LOOK AT POLAND AND EASTERN EUROPE

               "Probably 90% of medieval people [in Europe] were peasants. But
               astonishingly little is known about them. Universally illiterate, like
               prehistoric people, they left no documents of their own. Literate members
               of medieval society, mainly churchmen, either ignored the peasants or, in
               most cases, mentioned them with contempt. To reconstruct the life of
               peasants, not only their economic condition but also their customs, attitudes,
               and inner experiences presents an impossible challenge." [JUDD]

         "[Medieval] satire [about peasants]," says Jacques Le Goff, "often emphasizes the peasant's filth, poor clothing, and minimal diet, but also a sort of bestiality that placed him ... between beasts and humans ... [This reflects] the undeniable and widespread conditioning brought on by harsh living conditions, alimentary shortages, monotonous work, a daily struggle for existence, the great scourge of famines, recurrent epidemics, and the dangers of war ... " [LE GOFF] (As recently as pre-World War II Poland, Jewish author Norman Salsitz, who was raised in that country, notes that "all across Poland the peasant was held in almost universal contempt.") [SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 88]

     These peasants are that stock from whom most Euro-Americans have descended.  And these impoverished and often desperate people who harbored the greatest day to day grievances against the Jews, and who perpetrated most of the violence against them -- are rendered entirely mute in the twentieth century. We know well the Jewish martryology myths of the Middle Ages story, told and retold by their Hebrew and Yiddish chroniclers that are popular Jewish canon today. But we don't know the peasants' version of things; there is only scant reference to them by the Christian clergy or local aristocracy, neither of whom were even remotely sympathetic to their plight.

      A Jewish author, Max Dimont, lays the barest outline of  the peasant torment:

 

                 "[Christian feudal life  was like] a vast prison. The bars were the

              all-encompassing restrictions placed upon the daily life of the

              people. Inside the bars were the peasants, the so-called Third

              Estate, who comprised about 95 per cent of the total population.

              Outside the bars but tied to them by invisible chains were the other

              two estates, the priests and the nobles. Neither inside the prison nor

              tied to the bars outside it were the Jews, the unofficial "Fourth

              Estate."

                 The restrictions placed on the feudal serfs, as the peasants were

              called, pursued them from "womb to tomb." There could be no

              movement from one estate to another except through the ranks of

              the clergy, and then only for the exceptionally gifted child.

              Restrictions on travel kept  the serf tied to the soil. He usually saw

              nothing of the world except that within walking distance. Though he

              was technically a free man,  he could own no property. He could be

              sold with the land by his lord ... The peasant had to grind his flour

              in the lord's granary, bake his bread in the lord's bakery -- all for a

              fee, paid either in goods or in labor. He could only own wooden

              dishes, and one spoon was all he was allowed for his entire family,

              no matter what its size. The kind of cloth he could buy, sell, or

              wear, was regulated. The lord was allowed to sample everything his

              serfs had, including their brides ... " [DIMONT, p. 247]

 

     "In this [feudal] system," notes Eva Hoffman, "the Jews who were growing more numerous and visible could be thought of as another estate, with its own place in the ordained social order." [HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 47] "All Eastern European Jewry," notes a Yiddish folk saying, "is one town." [KUMOVE, S., 1985, p. 47]

 

     "No travelers' account of Poland," says Jerzy Lukowski, "was complete without almost ritual reference to the degradation of the serfs ... In Poland, peasants were forbidden to leave their villages without seigneurial  [manor lord] permission in 1496 ... Until 1768, the noble seigneur enjoyed the power of life and death over his serfs. He could buy and sell them like chattel, independently of landed transactions." [LUKOWSKI, p. 38] As late as the 1800s, says Jewish scholar Howard Sachar, "the typical Russian peasant was bound in serfdom to his soil. Diseased, ignorant, hopelessly superstitious, he lived in a rude hut, slept in his clothes, and fed his fire with animal dung." [SACHAR, p. 80] And as Sula Benet notes about Poland:

 

     "For three hundred years, until 1784, the peasants were serfs, bound

     to their land and to their lords. After that, although the Constitution

     of 1791 nominally changed their status, there was little real change

     in their position or condition until Poland was reconstituted in 1919,

     after the first World War." [BENET, S., p. 31]

 

     And what of the Jewish merchants and money lenders, and the Jews at-large, the people that kept to themselves and refused to interact with others except towards commercial profit, these people from whom many impoverished Gentiles sought out to borrow money, not to expand their fortunes, but merely to survive the current season?

 

           Dimont continues:

 

                "None of these restrictions applied to the Jews. They were free to

                come and go, marry and divorce, sell and buy as they pleased....

                The priests were excluded from work, the nobles did not want to

                work, and the serfs were not allowed to enter the bourgeoisie or

                middle-class professions. There was no one left to do this work

                except the Jews, who therefore became indispensable. The Jews

                were the oil that lubricated the creaky machinery of the feudal

                state."  [DIMONT, p. 247]  

 

     Jews were visibly distinct from the rest of the population, especially by dress. They usually wore black and the men were distinguished by side locks over their ears. They also '"stood out by specific mannerisms," says Janusz Tazbir, "their nervous gestures, continually emphasizing the spoken word, and their characteristic feverish haste." The Jew was to a Christian "an economic rival, an onerous creditor, accused of arrogance and impudence ... and willing to suffer any humiliation for even a small gain. " They were widely perceived as cowards and swindlers who held "occupations that did not deserve to be called 'work.'" [TAZBIR, p. 27-31]

 

       Bernard Weinryb suggests as typical the area of Breslau in the mid-14th century: perhaps 10% of the Jewish community was "poor and about 7% 'very rich,' thus placing about four-fifths of the Jewish population in the middle-income range, whatever this may have meant to them." [WEINRYB, p. 70] Even as late as the twentieth century, there can be no comparison between the strata of "poor" in the Jewish community and the impoverished Gentile peasant society at-large around them. Ewa Morawska notes that

 

     "At the end of the last century in Galicia [a province that is today divided

       between Poland and the Ukraine, including the city of Krakow], a region

       generally poorer than other provinces of Eastern Europe, about 50,000

       peasants annually died of starvation; such catastrophes did not occur

       in Jewish society, even among the most deprived, partly because of the

       well-organized in-group assistance, but also because of a somewhat

       higher general standard of living."  [MORAWSKA, p. 12]

 

      A good example of chronic Jewish myopia concerning their own history, completely devoid of the wider context of European history around it, is Poland.  This country -- until Hitler's campaign to exterminate Jews, and Poles, and others -- was the home for more Jews than any other place in the world. After being expelled from other areas of Europe in the mid-1300's, Jews were allowed by the ruling nobles to immigrate to feudal Poland. There, despite modern Jewish itemization of alleged Polish persecutions over the centuries, the Jewish community flourished. (Just before World War II, "84% of all the Jews in the world either lived in historically Polish territory, or came from families that had lived there." [SHERWIN, p. 157] To this day Jewish popular opinion still condemns Poles and their culture, with accusations of all sorts leading up to alleged Polish indifference to -- and betrayal of -- the Jews under the Nazis. More about that later.

 

      Let's go back a few centuries. What kind of country, we might wonder, had the Jews moved to? Beyond the sacred island of Jewry, what was the indigenous populations' miserable situation? What were the social and political forces that were boiling all around them? In war after war after war, Poland has been a country continuously ripped apart, partitioned, divided, and subdivided by invaders for centuries. If anyone has a legitimate claim to historic victimization, Poles can stake a claim as deeply valid as anybody. Here is a rudimentary chronological overview of the social upheaval, religious tension, and terrors that ripped through all or part of Polish society (which has changed and reformed in expanse) for hundreds of years, beginning with the century before the Jews' arrival:

 

               1241-1242. Mongols invade Poland.

               1246-1307. Lithuanians raid parts of Poland.

               1248-1287. Jatvingians raid parts of Poland.              

               1328-1322. Teutonic (Germanic) knights and Bohemians crush

                                 Poland in a series of wars.

               1350's. Jews began immigrating en masse to Poland.

               1399. Mongols defeat Poland in war.

               1410. Poland defeat Teutonic knights in war.

               1419. Protestant Hussite rebellion.

               1454-1467. Polish uprising against the Teutonic knights.

               1475, 1484. Ottoman Empire attacks parts of Poland.

               1486-94. Russian Tsar Ivan II the Great attacks Lithuania.               

               1492. Tatars raid parts of Poland.

               1497. Moldavians militarily defeat Poles.

               1498-99. Tatar invasion reaches Krakov, one of Poland's

                              greatest cities.

               1500-1503. Tsar Ivan II attacks Lithuania again.

               1507-1508. Polish war with Russia over Lithuania.

               1512-22. Polish war with Russia over Lithuania.

               1524. Ottoman troops cut through parts of Poland

                         and conquer sections of Hungary.

               1558-82. Russian Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible fights 24 year long

                              war against Teutonic kingdom.

               1563-70. Russia invades Poland in First Nordic War.

               1578-81. Poland defeats Russia in three campaigns.

               1600-1635. Swedish-Poland war.

               1618-1648. Thirty Years War, of which Poland has peripheral

                                 involvement.               

               1620. Poles defeat Prince of Transylvania.

               1621-1631. Poles defeat Turks in battle, but Turkish attacks

                                 continue for ten more years.

               1633-34. Poles attack Turks, Russians, and Swedes.

               1635. Poland seizes Swedish ports on Baltic Sea.

               1648, 1651. Rebellion of Cossacks against Polish nobles. With

                                  armed aid from Tatars and Turks, hundreds of

                                  thousands of people are massacred.

               1654-1655. Russia attacks Poland and conquers eastern part.

               1655, 1657. Poles defeat Swedish and Brandenburg armies.

               1660-62. Polish union with Ukraine and defeat of Russia.

                             Polish rebellion against King of Poland.

               1672-1673. Turks attack Poland; Poland loses two-thirds of

                                 Ukraine.

               1673. Turks defeated.

               1683. Turks driven from Vienna, a crucial event for Europe.

               1700-21. The Northern War. Polish alliances attack Sweden.

               1704-1710. Swedish troops destroy one-third of all Polish cities.

               1756-63. Seven Years War. Russian armies used Polish bases in

                              their war against Prussia.

               1768-72. Polish Catholic uprisings, known as the Confederation of

                             Bar.

               1794. Polish popular insurrection against Russia and Prussia.

               1797-1801. Polish legions, formed from former Austrian prisoners

                                 of war, fight Austria.

               1806. France attacks Prussia, Russia aids France, and Poles rebel

                        against Prussia.

               1809. Napoleonic Wars of 1809.

               1830-31. Polish insurrection and war against Russia.

               1833-1846. Rebellious Polish revolutionary cells captured and

                          imprisoned.

               1846. Polish rebellion put down by Austrian troops.

               1853-56. Russia's Crimean War leads to reforms in Poland.

               1863. Polish insurrection, put down. Executions and exile.

                        Russian governor makes "every effort to stamp out Polish

                        culture altogether."

              1905. Polish patriots take part in abortive revolution against Russian

                       government.

              1914. World War I. 800,000 Poles killed and destruction of the

                        country.

              1917. Russian Revolution.

              1918. Polish uprising against Germans in city of Poznan.

              1920. Polish-Soviet war.

              1929. Polish unemployment hits 33%, not including those employed

                       in agriculture.

              1936, 1938. Violent uprisings, strikes.

              1939. Fall of Poland to the Nazis in World War II.

                        [ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITTANICA, 1993]

 

    This is the kind of country Poland's Jews lived in since the fourteenth century. "The established order (of the Polish state) has been overturned on at least five occasions -- in 1138, in 1795, in 1813, in 1864, and in 1939, on each occasion all concrete manifestations of a unified political community were lost." [DAVIES, p. x]  In just the 1600's, for instance, "war, the bubonic plague, slave raids, and mass murders had reduced the total [Polish population]  ... [to] 45% of the former total population." [E. Britt., 25, p. 946] Jews were, as elsewhere in Europe, for centuries not obliged to serve in the military and distanced themselves from warring factions as much as possible, unless, of course, it was clearly opportune to make an allegiance. Jews principally functioned -- at least till the Enlightenment -- with the intertwined aims of insular self-survival, weathering others' socio-political catastrophes, and advancing wherever and whenever possible towards the objectives of Jewish individual and communal opportunism.

 

     The failed Polish insurrection against Russian rule in 1863, notes Theodore Weeks, had the following effect on the populace in Poland:

 

     "The Jews of Russian Poland were also affected by the post-1863

     repressions. On the whole, however, the Russian administration did

     not single them out -- unlike the Poles -- for specific restrictive

     measures ... Thus as Polish rights were further restricted, on the

     whole, the Jewish legal situation in Russian Poland remained

     relatively untouched." [WEEKS, T., p. 64]

 

      "Only a very small percentage of the population in Poland," notes Bernard Weinryb, "in about 1600 estimated at less than 10 per cent of the country's total population, had any aspiration to "rights." Less than half of this small group (the magnates and the wealthy landed gentry) had standing and influence in the country." [WEINBRYB, p. 160]

 

     Discriminated against on one hand (as everyone, short of nobility and clergy, was throughout medieval Europe in some form), the Jewish community in Poland was also afforded special privileges by the ruling aristocracy. While Jews were sometimes prohibited from owning land (as were most other people), they could pay the owning nobles a flat fee to lease it; profits beyond this fee were theirs to keep. "The belief that Jews could not own land," notes Albert Lindemann, "ranks as one of the most often overheard simplifications about their status, both in Russia and elsewhere in Europe ... The real issue was not whether Jews could own land, if they would work it with their own hands, but whether they could own land that allowed them to exploit the labor of the peasants." [LANDEMANN, Esau's, p. 63]

 

     Jewish author Norman Salsitz notes another version of the land issue, in his book about growing up in pre-World War II Poland:

 

     "My father's father was born and spent his life on an estate not far

     from Kolbuszowa. The estate belonged to Jacob Eckstein, certainly

     the most estimable Jew in our town. Naftali Saleschutz, my grandfather,

     served as manager, which brought him into close relations with many

     peasants who worked in the fields belonging to Eckstein and gave him

     a sense of connection with the soil. (The Jews had lived in the area since

     the sixteenth century; they were originally farmers but had in time moved

     off to the towns and villages and lost direct contact with the land)."

     [SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 28]

 

     For the non-Jewish part, notes Michael Aronson, "Russian peasants endured a hunger not only for food. They suffered from land hunger as well." [ARONSON, p. 25]

 

     Jews in Poland were formally protected and served as tax-collectors, bankers, and administrators of the money mints, breweries and salt mines. (In later centuries Jews eventually owned many of such important industries). Even the Polish King Casimir the Great fell into debt to Jewish lenders, as did King Lewis of Hungary. [LEON, p. 156] "In the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries," says Abram Leon, "Jewish usurers succeeded in taking possession of the lands belonging to the nobles." [LEON, p. 185] Until the union of Poland and Lithuania, Jews perhaps had it even better in Lithuania. "Lithuanian Jews," says Leon, "enjoyed the same rights of the free population. In their hands lay big business, banking, the customhouses, etc. The farming of taxes and customs brought them great wealth. Their clothes glittered with gold and they wore swords just like the gentry." [LEON, p. 189]

 

     "Jews in southeastern Poland ...," notes Jewish scholar Bernard Weinryb,

 

      "were legally on par with the nobles with regard to the amounts paid as

       indemnification for being wounded or killed. If we go beyond formality

       and consider the prevailing practice the position of the Jew appears in

       a more favorable light. If he could not be nobleman, he could be like

       one -- or in the place of one. Jewish lessees of the king's or nobles'

       villages and towns, or of various taxes and other sources of revenue,

       were accorded broad powers and status-bearing functions, often over

       large expanses populated by many people, not all of them peasants.

       To these Jews were transformed almost Lord's power, mostly including

       the perquisites of local justice. A number of Jews actually did behave

       like nobles -- conducting themselves haughtily, arrogantly, arbitrarily,

       dictatorially, and sometimes even recklessly ... A number of cases are

       known in which a non-Jewish tax collector, or nobleman, or a court

       usher, was simply afraid to enter the houses of prominent Jews on

       business, not wanting to risk being thrown out or beaten up ... Many

       ... instances are known in which Polish Jewish communities or other

       groups refused to follow Polish court summonses or orders from

       other offices." [WEINRYB, p. 162-163]

 

      In later centuries, however, "increasingly," says Leon, "the Jews came in contact only with the poor, the artisans, and the peasants. And often the anger of the people, despoiled by the Kings and Lords and compelled to pledge their last belongings to the Jews, turning against the walls of the [Jewish] ghetto." [LEON, p. 155]

 

     The Jewish role of hated tax collector was common not only in Poland, but throughout Europe. Salo Baron writes that:

 

          "Most widespread was the Jewish contribution to tax farming. The

           medieval regimes, as a rule, aided by only small, inefficient, and

           unreliable bureaucracies, often preferred to delegate tax collection

           to private entrepreneurs who, for a specific lump sum they paid

           the treasury, were prepared to exact the payments due from the

           taxpayers. Of course, the risks of under collection were, as a rule,

           more than made up by considerable surpluses obtained, if need

           be, by ruthless methods. [BARON, EH of J, p. 46]

 

      "Wealthy Jews," notes Bernard Weinryb, "with good connections among those in power, and on one hand, underworld elements, believed in their own ability to take care of themselves, or to invoke the protection of the powerful. They frequently resorted to hard and brutal measures to achieve their ends ... " [WEINRYB, p. 164] Typically, Jewish apologists like Leon Poliakov -- following traditional martyrological models -- blame Jewish economic "aggression" against non-Jews as a response to Gentile hostility to them:

 

     "The Jews replied to Christian animosity by a hatred just as intense but