The collapse of law and order in November 1918 had produced a rash of anti-Jewish outrages in country areas and in towns such as Lwów and Pińsk. Further violence and reprisals took place in the wake of military operations between the Poles and the Bolshev iks, since numerous socialist Jews had welcomed or even joined the Red Army. Like much of European society at the time, many of the clergy did not distinguish between Jews and Bolsheviks, and parish priests encouraged anti-Semitic feelings. Hostility towards the Jews was inadvertently heightened by American and British Jewish pressure groups at the Paris peace talks of 1919. It was at their insistence that states such as Poland were made to sign ‘Minority Treaties’, which subjected their treatment of their Jewish citizens to international scrutiny. In Poland, with its long tradition of toleration, this was seen as an insult.
The census of 1931 revealed that there were 3,113,900 Jews in Poland, representing 9.8 per cent of the entire population. They made up over 30 per cent of the population of Warsaw, a fairly standard figure for most of the larger cities, with exceptions such as Białystok’s 43. In smaller towns the proportion was often much higher, reaching 60, 70 and in a handful of cases over 90 per cent of the population. As the majority wore black gabardines, sidelocks and beards, and spoke Yiddish rather than Polish, they were conspicuous. They also stood out by their economic relationship to the rest of the population.
The occupational breakdown of the 1931 census reveals that only 0.6 per cent of those engaged in agriculture were Jews. They made up 62 per cent of all those making a living from trade, and the figure for the town of Pińsk was 95. Their fortunes fluctuated dramatically during the economically unstable twenties and thirties. Every time a new peasant cooperative was founded or a village combined to sell its produce direct to the buyer, the livelihood of several Jewish families vanished. By 1936 at least a million Jews in Poland were losing their source of subsistence, and by 1939 just over that number were entirely dependent for their survival on relief from Jewish agencies in the United States.
Polish representatives to the League of Nations urgently pressed for the lifting of restrictions on immigration into Palestine and the United States. The desire to be rid of the Jews may have gone hand in hand with concern for their plight, but it was not entirely racially motivated: the same representatives also appealed to the League to facilitate large-scale emigration of poor Polish peasants.
While the majority of Jews in Poland were caught in a poverty trap, they never managed to dispel the envy surrounding the community as a whole. In 1931, 46 per cent of lawyers and nearly 50 of doctors were Jews, who were also disproportionately successful at getting into universities. An anti-Semitic campaign began in the mid-1930s at the University of Lwów, spreading to other universities and technical colleges, which resulted in some cases in the introduction of admission quotas based on percentages of the population.
The National Democrats, denied power for so long, had largely lost their sense of identity as well as much of their membership. In an attempt at gaining the support of disgruntled elements, they began to play the card of anti-Semitism, but they were outdone in this by small openly fascist parties, the most notorious of which, Falanga, carried out assaults on Jewish shops and synagogues. Violence of this kind was not uncommon, but the overwhelming majority of popular disturbances were the result not so much of racial hatred as of economic factors. Law and order were precarious, and the police force (whose inspector-general was a Jew) was about half the size of that in Britain and France in relation to the respective populations.
Relations between Poles and Jews varied enormously; they were far more complex than, and rarely as bad as, is usually made out. There was certainly a great deal of low-level but deeply ingrained anti-Semitism in some areas of Polish society. Yet at no point did the sort of biological anti-Semitism of the Nazi or anti-Dreyfusard variety catch on in Poland. The points at issue were political, cultural and economic, and they have to be viewed in the context of the situation confronting the population as a whole.