Poland’s relationship to Jewishness remains a fraught issue that stimulates much debate. (I know, having witnessed some of those heated arguments.)
In “Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival,” Geneviève Zubrzycki, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and a faculty member at the school’s Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, provides deep insights into the contemporary picture, drawing from a decade of fieldwork and close study.
The backdrop is a stark and horrific reality. Prior to World War II, Poland was home to 3.5 million Jews, constituting the largest Jewish population of any European country. By the time of the 2011 census, only 7,000 Polish residents identified themselves as Jewish.
In spite of that small number, Jewishness has been a hot topic throughout Poland in its post-Communist era.
There have been great efforts to center the historical presence of Jews in the country’s consciousness, most prominently through Warsaw’s Polin Museum and Krakow’s Jewish Music Festival.
But it is also seen in dozens of local Jewish-themed museums and festivals, and in the attempts by artists and activists to memorialize the erased Jewish presence in Poland’s landscape in creative ways. And while there is no shortage of misguided appropriation of the Jewish past, there is a startling number of serious efforts to present and understand Jewish culture, practices, and language (including the development of Jewish studies departments in Polish universities, with classes taught and attended primarily by non-Jews).
Zubrzycki attaches some of this “Jewish turn” to what she terms “magical philosemitism,” and helps situate it within the country’s internal tensions and struggle for identity. Central is the reality that today’s Poland is a remarkably homogeneous society. In the 1930s, ethnic Poles composed around 65% of the nation’s population, with Jews representing 10%, and Germans, Ukrainians and other European groups forming the remaining 25%. Following World War II, ethnic Poles were 96% of the populace, with the country also transforming from 65% Catholic to 95% Catholic — a uniformity that continues through the present day.
Because this homogeneity is perceived as an obstacle for those wishing to see the nation develop into a secular and multicultural society, many Poles have turned to the Jewish past as an emblem of Poland’s former diversity.
Zubrzycki notes that, through activities like learning Yiddish, preparing Jewish foods and performing Jewish dances, “ordinary citizens participate in a broadly understood Jewish revival that undermines the dominant view of Poland as essentially, primordially ethno-Catholic. Jewish presence — whether in its historical or contemporary incarnation — is invoked to trump Poland‘s ethnoreligious homogeneity.”
Zubrzycki notes that this magical philosemitism has its counterpart in a magical antisemitism adopted by some reactionary Poles.
“As Jewishness has become a symbol of a liberal, plural, and secular Poland,” she writes, “Poland is claimed by the Catholic Right to be ruled by ‘Jews ’ — symbolic Jews — who must be stopped.”
Whereas liberals imagine a reintroduction of Jewishness as an opportunity to build a healthier society, rightists equate Jews with a dangerous cosmopolitanism that threatens Polish Catholic hegemony.
One of the achievements of the rightist Law and Justice party that currently holds power was the 2018 law making it a criminal offense to lay blame on Poland for crimes during the Holocaust. This legislation had its roots in the controversy following the publication of Polish-born Princeton historian Jan Gross’ 2000 book “Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland,” which documented the killing of Jews by ethnic Poles during World War II.
Because the national narrative had portrayed Poles solely as victims and heroes, casting them also as perpetrators provoked a firestorm. And many Poles responded by doubling down on the exculpatory narrative and sometimes resorting to raw antisemitic rhetoric.
And meanwhile, what of Poland’s actual Jews? While Jewish numbers are in decline in most diaspora countries, in Poland they have been increasing. And that is due to the significant number of people who have begun to identify openly as Jewish, often upon the revelation of Jewish heritage on at least one side of their family.
There have been many incentives for Poles of Jewish descent to conceal their heritage. Jews who managed to survive the Holocaust often found an uneasy, and sometimes violent, homecoming. And the late 1960s saw the expression of official antisemitism, with at least 13,000 Jews — around half of the country’s Jewish population — being expelled in 1968. Particularly since the Communist regime suppressed religious expression, there was little to be gained, and plenty to be lost, by being Jewish.
Jews who are embracing their identity in Poland today have to contend with many challenges. Issues that Zubrzycki observed, both within Polish institutions and in accompanying young Polish Jews on a Birthright trip to Israel, include a lack of Jewish education and lived religious observance; a sense of disrespect from the rest of the Jewish world, which tends to regard Poland as a Jewish graveyard; and a dearth of native Polish rabbis and educators, leading Polish Jews to feel as if they are being molded by Americans and Israelis.
Extensively researched and clearly presented, Zubrzyzcki’s book is unique in awarding attention to issues of Jewishness in today’s Poland through the perspectives of both non-Jews and Jews, and as filtered through the agendas both of Catholic nationalists and of those who seek to build a more diverse and inclusive society. Particularly for those who have visited Poland and wish to make sense of the complicated landscape, this is a valuable resource.