The Polish—Jewish Symbiosis in the Second Republic, 1918–39

Abstract

Polish-Jewish relations during the first half of the twentieth century are invariably characterized in the most negative of terms. Many historians, and not only those who are Jewish or of Jewish origin, have excoriated the Second Polish Republic in particular for being vehemently or even uniquely anti-Semitic. They have also often argued that Poles bear a considerable measure of responsibility for the appalling tragedy of the Holocaust, the organized and systematic extermination of some six million Jews by the Third Reich during the Second World War.¹ The anti-Semitism attributed to inter-war Poland is interpreted as an essential preparation or dress rehearsal for the mass atrocities of wartime. In short, the Holocaust is depicted as the inevitable culmination of pre-war anti-Semitism, not simply in National Socialist Germany, which pursued an official policy of racist anti-Semitism, but also in Poland, which did not.²