1. The Jews in early-nineteenth-century Poland
The twentieth century saw numerous and deep antagonisms between the Jews of Poland and the Poles, so much so that it is difficult to imagine any solidarity whatever between the two peoples. Yet such solidarity was real some hundred years earlier. History is rich in testimonies, generally little known, of an active Jewish patriotism in favor of a Poland to be reborn — a patriotism illustrated in particular by the number of Jewish combatants who fell for this cause, or the number of those deported to Siberia. Already, during the national insurrection of Tadeusz Kościuszko at the time of the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century, a Jewish regiment had been commanded by Berek Joselewicz1, an emblematic figure of Polish patriotism among the Jews. The same spirit is found in classical Polish literature; thus every Polish schoolchild knows, in the masterwork of Adam Mickiewicz, Messire Thadée (Pan Tadeusz), the figure of Yankel, “a brave Jew who loved Poland just as a Pole would.”
This patriotism was not self-evident. The Jews of Poland, though they had been favorably received by the kings of Poland at the beginning of their settlement in that country, begun some eight centuries earlier, had since then undergone discriminations and indignities similar to those they faced elsewhere in Europe — without there having been in Poland, in the Middle Ages, mass massacres, as was the case in the West. As for the dreadful Khmelnytsky pogroms, they were rather the work of the revolted Ukrainians, who likewise killed their Polish masters. Nonetheless, religious antisemitism was active, and discrimination strong. The Jews in the Poland of the partitions had reasons not to feel themselves the brothers and equals of the Poles, for they were exposed to the hostility of the peasants, for whom the Jew was the intermediary between himself and the nobleman, his exploiter. To this were added the contempt of the nobility and the enmity of the clergy. If, throughout the nineteenth century, the Jews of the various countries of Europe fought for their emancipation, inspired by the example of the French Revolution, in the empire of the tsar — to which belonged the Poland that concerns us here (for it was in that part that the Polish national uprisings principally occurred) — this emancipation was singularly slow in coming.
At the start of the nineteenth century, the Jews in the territories of the former kingdom of Poland represented a force. Their number was considerable; if they did not yet constitute, as in 1939, ten percent of the total population, they were not far from it2. Moreover, their role in economic life was constantly growing: traditionally merchants, intermediaries, and bankers, they were becoming entrepreneurs and capitalists with the country’s industrialization. To have them on one’s side was no negligible asset in the struggle waged between the tsarist central power and the Polish patriots.
Until the end of the eighteenth century, so long as their independence lasted, the Poles had hardly hastened to emancipate the Jews. But at the moment of the partitions of the country and of national peril, spurred also by the example of the French Revolution3, they had indeed proclaimed equality of rights for all. This proclamation, however, remained a dead letter with the defeat of Tadeusz Kościuszko and the disappearance of independent Poland in 1795. A few years later, in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, created by Napoleon at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a reversal of Jewish emancipation: the Jews fell victim to a series of decrees that suspended their civil rights, taxed them in discriminatory fashion, expelled them from the city center in Warsaw and other towns, and so on. These measures persisted for half a century and notably delayed the integration of the Jews into the Polish society of that part of the territory ceded to Russia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The Jews of the Prussian and Austrian parts of the former Kingdom shared the fate of the Jews of those countries. The Jews of the Russian part, by far the most numerous, endured discrimination, maintained and aggravated by tsarist policy.
In appearance, then, the Polish Jews had some merit in being patriots. And yet there was a certain logic in their attachment to the cause of the Polish rebellion. Tsarism was seen as the oppressor of the one people as of the other, whereas the Polish conspirators, often sincerely democratic and in any case anxious to secure such important allies, promised complete equality to their Jewish compatriots. If tsarism symbolized oppressive immobility, clandestinity was the bearer of social progress. Later, from the 1880s, the Jews of “all the Russias” would throw themselves into the revolutionary struggle, since the revolution was to liberate the Jewish people; but a few decades earlier they had often leaned in favor of Polish nationalism.
To be sure, this patriotic fever had not seized the entire Jewish masses. Harassed now by the Russian occupiers, now by his Polish neighbors, the ordinary Jew preferred to keep clear of quarrels in which he did not feel directly implicated, and where there were, for him, mostly blows to be taken. And some sided with the Russian party, often for economic reasons. It is not fitting to blame them: the game was so complex that the Poles themselves had never managed to rise up unanimously. Sometimes the nobility rose to liberate the country, while the peasants, whom that nobility exploited, kept clear of it, when they did not help the Cossacks hunt down the “gentlemen”; sometimes the Polish magnates supported the tsar, whose army was the guarantee of tranquillity in their immense domains in Ukraine; sometimes, finally, the nascent industry feared cutting itself off from the immense Muscovite market. Onto the patriotic tensions were thus superimposed economic struggles; the feudal residues of the Polish countryside, where serfdom was still in force, confronted the industrial revolution of the cities.
The Russians were aware of the importance of having the Jewish minority on their side, and voices were raised in the ruling spheres of the Empire to propose the emancipation of the Jews in Poland, in order to detach them from the Polish cause. “Divide and rule” found there a new application. But such a course seemed difficult, given the whole of imperial policy. How could equality be granted to the Jews of Poland without also granting it to those of the rest of the Empire? That risked singling out this Poland which the tsars wished, on the contrary, to dissolve into anonymity. Grant it to all the Jews? That meant running up against the hostility of Russian opinion. So that the occupiers resolved only on measures of little real effect4, thereby propelling the Jews into the search for other paths to emancipation.
2. The insurrection of January 1863
It is impossible to encompass, in an article of reasonable length, the whole of the Jewish contribution to the various stages of the Polish struggle for independence. One exemplary case is that of the insurrection of 1863, known as the “January Insurrection,” probably the most important. Numerous documents illustrate the part taken by the Jews in these events.
2.1. The pre-insurrectionary period
If the insurrection did indeed break out in Warsaw and in the provinces on January 22, 1863, a long period of bloody disturbances preceded the uprising properly so called. In February 1861, street demonstrations in favor of independence led to the death of five demonstrators under the troops’ bullets; their burial gave rise to patriotic demonstrations with a considerable Jewish participation. In particular, several rabbis of Warsaw, including the chief rabbi Ber Meisels5, took part in the processions and ceremonies.
The “events” of April 1861 constituted a great moment of Judeo-Polish solidarity. On the 8th, a dense crowd of Warsaw inhabitants made its way toward the Royal Palace in a peaceful demonstration demanding independence. The troops guarding the forecourt before that building opened fire, but the procession did not recoil, and further volleys followed, killing a hundred demonstrators in all. At the head of the procession, a Polish priest brandished, as a rallying sign, a great cross6. The first volley cut him down; but the cross did not fall — it was taken up and brandished by a young Jew, Michał Lande, who was immediately killed by the next volley. The crowd, unleashed, refused to disperse, and it took numerous charges of Cossacks to restore order. This dramatic incident did much to bring the two communities closer; the brother of the slain man, Shoèl Lande, traveled across the Polish and Lithuanian provinces in demonstrations of anti-Russian solidarity. And indeed, in several Polish regions the Jewish population was responsive to such appeals. Here, for example, is a clandestine leaflet translated from Hebrew:
(Kamieniec Podolski, January 1862)
Hear, O Sons of Israel! Hear, and it shall be well with you!
Be strong, unite your hearts with the inhabitants of Poland — you shall do good! And know, O Sons of Israel — may the Eternal bless you! — that each of us must labor with all his strength for the good of the country to which his wandering has brought him. That is why each of us must, to the measure of his strength, take care to keep the covenant with our Christian brothers, inhabitants of Poland, and to help them by all our efforts. Have no worry over the great labor that awaits us, for it will not be ours to complete it, as our sages say. Every Jew must rigorously and seriously follow a path of justice and good, must not run about the squares and the streets, must not cause there alarms and tumults, but must do all he can and spare nothing in his assistance to our fellow citizens. The hope of a good for all Israel resides only in love and in friendship.
First day of the month of Shevat in the year 5622.
In the wake of the bloody events of early 1861, the churches — the only places where one could gather without prior authorization — rang with patriotic songs; many young Jews began on this occasion to frequent these churches, to dress in the traditional Polish fashion (for opposition to the occupier expressed itself even in clothing), to sing in Polish in the synagogues. The police ended by bursting into several churches to seize the “ringleaders”; the priests then cried profanation and, as a sign of protest, closed their churches. And certain synagogues of the city were likewise closed in solidarity, to the great displeasure of the authorities. Here is an extract from a police report on the subject:
Warsaw, 31.1/7.2. 1862.
The closing of the synagogues simultaneously with the churches was a demonstration of the Jews in favor of the Polish agitation. The Poles, needing the Jews, extended to them a fraternal hand, and these, until then rejected and despised, seized it in order to benefit from the rights of fraternity and to emerge from their exclusion […] After the proclamation of the state of emergency, nothing but their desire to show their solidarity with the Poles obliged them to close the two principal synagogues of the city, for their justification — that, in case of opening, seditious hymns would be sung there — has no foundation.7 However, while the main entrances of the synagogues were closed, the side doors remained open, so that the synagogues were at once closed and open…
One would like to smile at the evocation of the little ruses of the Jewish leaders of Warsaw, but the Russian authorities, for their part, were not joking. The rabbis and preachers Meisels, Kramsztyk, and Jastrow were imprisoned in the citadel of Bobruisk, then the first, who had come in his time from Cracow (Austrian zone) at the invitation of the faithful of Warsaw, was expelled toward Austria8, and the second, who had come from the western part of Poland — toward Prussia. It is true that the episode of the closed synagogues was only the fatal drop of water — throughout the year 1861 these patriot-rabbis showed an active attachment to the Polish cause, delivering patriotic speeches and writing messages of encouragement to the provincial communities. Here, to illustrate this effort of propaganda, is an extract from a sermon delivered by Rabbi Kramsztyk in the synagogue of Nalewki Street:
Poland has erected to the Eternal a worthy temple, bearing the device: all the sons of one same land are brothers, and as such must enjoy the same rights and taste the same happiness… Now our Mother-fatherland recognizes us as her legitimate children, now our Polish brothers clasp us to their fraternal heart and share with us all the heritage they possess, bestow upon us their tenderness and their love […] Behold the temple erected by Poland in honor of the Lord Sabaoth9, and in this temple we must henceforth, in concert with our newly acquired brothers, raise prayers for our beloved mother, for our Fatherland…
All this earned the rabbi a year in a dungeon.
The patriotic acts of these Warsaw rabbis were widely known, and the clandestine Polish propaganda used them to good purpose. Here is a letter addressed to the rabbis Meisels and Jastrow, after their expulsion from the Russian zone, by the Polish officer-cadets of the military school of Cuneo, in Italy. One admires at once the style, so characteristic of Polish patriotic romanticism, and the concern to hold the representatives of the Jewish community back from the temptation possibly to come to terms with the Russians, who precisely at this period were deploying efforts of seduction toward the Polish Jews:
Paris, 1.4.1862
Honorable Compatriots,
Your noble sacrifice for the great work of the fraternity of the two peoples, which the Muscovite yoke in Poland seeks to sunder, has already borne fruits that constitute one of the foundations of our society and of our national life. Your merits, well known in the country, have not yet been able to be appreciated at their true value; only the future will give them the sanction of the centuries and will illuminate them with a fitting light.
The government imprisoned you, sought through suffering and exile to annihilate your efforts as priests and as patriots, but the crown of thorns by which the enemy wished to debase your exploits is on the contrary the glorious ornament of your civic virtues; it sanctifies your great projects and hastens their realization.
The Polish youth who in our country had been the witness of your actions, driven by recent events toward a foreign land, sends you from Paris, from Cuneo, and from other places a proclamation of real compassion and homage.
Deign to receive these words from a sincere heart!
Fighting under the same flag for liberty, rising up with you, hand in hand, in the front rank, we shall always second by deed and by word your effort, for we know that you attach no value to dealings with the perfidious enemy, because you believe in the inner force of a people that needs only to unite and to become conscious of itself in order to liberate itself.
Bless, men of good, our labors already undertaken for the sacred cause of our Fatherland, beseech God that He send us His favor and His breath!
Honor and fraternity!
“The Voice of Paris and of Genoa,” no. 4, p. 15
Meanwhile, the preparation of an armed insurrection was in full swing. This preparation involved the purchase of arms, of powder, of lead… The greater part of these supplies arrived as contraband from abroad, either from the Austrian and Prussian zones, or above all from Western Europe, where the Polish patriots expatriated in the wake of the previous insurrection, in 183010, constituted a very active group. The arms arrived in the boats that docked at the Baltic ports, such as Danzig and Riga, generally to load Polish wheat there or to bring cotton to the rapidly developing textile industry. Then, contraband passed them from Prussia into Russian Poland; this contraband was for a large part in the hands of Jews. A picturesque episode, which exposes both the Jewish participation in the arms traffic and the venality of the tsar’s officials, is recounted in this report from the head of an internal-security detachment to his battalion commander:
Shavli, 2.11.1862.
An important affair broke out in Riga last week. A Jew from the village of Jagorie carried several bales to the railways, to be transported toward the city of Dünaburg. The Customs administration, seized with a doubt, had the bales opened, in which 350 and even up to 700 kilograms of powder were discovered. The Jews fled, but on the order of the Governor General of Riga they were found and arrested. They confessed that at Jagorie there was still more powder, and the Governor General then sent his adjutant to the local police inspector, at Shavli. The latter dragged things out a little while warning Jagorie, so that the Jews were able to evacuate the powder on a cart. How much and toward where, no one knows. Which I have the honor of reporting respectfully to Your Excellency.
One could cite dozens of affairs of this kind. The Jews furnished the insurgents with arms, uniforms, horses… In most cases (but not always), these were commercial transactions, yet the risk incurred — which, as we shall see, was graver for the Jews than for the Poles accused of the same acts — allows us to affirm that a patriotic element also entered into it. The Jewish commercial circuits, official and above all clandestine (the multiplication of frontiers in the region, the high customs duties, and the disparity of prices from one region to another had long contributed to creating hidden routes for goods), served the insurgent cause greatly.
2.2. The insurrection in Russian Poland
The insurrection properly so called broke out on January 22, 1863, in the first place to avoid the forced conscription into the tsar’s army of the Polish youth. Indeed, the Russian government, conscious of the gravity of the clandestine machinations in Poland, had decided to defuse these designs by incorporating into its troops, which were fighting in the Caucasus against the mountain peoples, some 10,000 young Polish recruits, chosen from among the suspects.
From that date, Poland attempted to escape Russian control by arms; if in the capital the tsar’s garrison had remained shut up in the Citadel that dominated Warsaw, the provinces were crisscrossed by rebel detachments that clashed first with the Russian garrisons, then with the armies sent to subdue them. A provisional National Government had been proclaimed, but, unable to maintain itself in a practically occupied Warsaw, it wandered through the provinces, which hampered its effectiveness. The struggle, waged essentially as a guerrilla war, lasted some eighteen months. Western Europe, on which the insurgents counted, did not stir; Prussia and Austria made common cause with the tsarist empire. Arms were lacking; the sabers of the nobles and the scythes of the peasants clashed with the cannon of an ever more numerous troop. The leadership of the Insurrection tore itself apart. The last clandestine “dictator” of the Insurrection, Romuald Traugutt, was arrested and hanged in August 1864 in Warsaw. This was practically the end of armed resistance in Poland.
— The relations between the Jews and the Poles during the Insurrection are illustrated by a few significant documents.
Appeal of the mayor of Warsaw, J. Szacki, to the Jews, in July 1863:
Polish citizens of the Mosaic faith!
I, the mayor of the city (rosh ha-ir), address you. I know your love for Poland, for your fatherland. I have numerous proofs that you spare neither privations nor pains, that you make little of your life and your goods when they must be sacrificed for the fatherland. Your sons shed their blood with ours on the common field of battle, for, as you know, the Muscovite makes no distinction of religion in his will to destroy all rights and to kill liberty. You have handed over the gold and silver vessels of your temples to buy arms. You have great merits in the Polish cause. I thank you for it in the name of the fatherland, of which you will be free citizens, equal to all others as to dignities and as to offices, in the army and in the State. Your priests will be respected like ours; there will be no difference between the Christian and the Jew.
There are, however, among you unworthy men, who betray our sacred cause and serve as spies for the enemy. I do not hold you responsible for the crimes of certain ones among you, but I impose upon you the duty of watching over these unworthy ones and of denouncing them to the National Government. Five persons of your community received today from our tribunal a sentence of death. This sentence will shortly be executed. The National Government orders that, at this execution, the ritual prayers for the dead not be said for the condemned, that the kaddish not be said — that prayer which, according to legend, angels had brought from heaven, and which children say for the salvation of their parents. Likewise, the National Government forbids the families of the condemned to rend their garments in sign of mourning, as your rules ordain. May the traitors to the fatherland be cursed beyond the grave! It will be forbidden to light candles for their souls, or to place stones on their graves. Whoever contravenes this order will be severely punished. The heads of the communities will have the responsibility of seeing to the strict execution of this order.
This document shows the great complexity of the relations between the two communities, and the desire of the Poles not to alienate the Jews of Warsaw, despite the “blunders.” The proclamation of mutual friendship is still more visible in this other extract from the clandestine press:
Warsaw, November 10, 1863
The National Government wishes to smooth away all obstacles in the nation’s march along the road of progress, and it is not for form’s sake that it has affixed upon the flag of the insurrection these terms that are dear to us: Independence, Liberty, Equality.
Jews. It is an authentically progressive, political, and above all patriotic step that the Central Committee accomplishes in giving to the faithful of the Old Testament equality of citizen rights with all others.
Rejected by the men among whom they have lived for so many years, the Jews, desirous of acquiring a social position, found only a single means, a single lever, by which to rise above moral humiliation.
This lever was money, for which they struggled, and our contempt they paid with their hatred. Sad were our relations, sadder still for the two parties their consequences.
But from the moment when the unarmed Jewish breast rose up beside the Polish breast to serve as a target for Muscovite bullets and bayonets, when Jewish blood marked the pavement of the Polish cities with our blood, the hostile feelings of the past vanished, and the shadow of the old mutual enmity no longer subsists in our memories. Let us follow the noble idea, let us follow the order of the National Government, let us extend a fraternal hand to the Jews who have given this day truthful proofs of their patriotism, let us give them proofs of true benevolence. Then the peasant and the Jew will become worthy of the name of Pole, and God will give us a fine future.
Wolność (Liberty), no. 3 of Nov. 10, 1863.
Despite these assurances of mutual love, distrust often persisted between the two communities. The Jews were regularly accused of spying for the benefit of the occupier — as in the text of J. Szacki cited above — and numerous reports, both from the commanders of the partisan detachments and from the Russian authorities, signal hangings of “Jewish spies” by the insurgents. These ambiguities (inevitable in the situation of extreme complexity in which the country found itself, as attested by the examples of collaboration with the occupier on the part of other categories of the population) doubtless restrained Jewish patriotism, and it happened that the population of a shtetl, learning of the formation in the vicinity of a detachment of insurgents, would shut itself in, fearing that the young patriots might begin their war by turning on the Jews…
The insurgents, who never managed to constitute a true army, but rather isolated detachments, numbered in all a few tens of thousands of men. Among them, a few hundred were Jews; some, like Rachmal Borensztejn, even commanded detachments. Several of these fell in combat, or were executed or sent to Siberia. It must be noted that the Russians often treated them with greater severity than their Polish compatriots. Here, for example, is a report from the Russian authorities concerning the repression of the insurrection in the region of Prużany, in Lithuania:
Vilna, December 1864.
On the night of August 12 to 13, 1863, a band of insurgents attacked the village of Shereshevo, in the region of Prużany, and, after committing murders and lighting a fire, disappeared. The inquiry proved that this band had received provisioning for two weeks from the inhabitants of the hamlet of Peniajki; then, in order to make an example for the other hamlets, the authorities gave the order to burn Peniajki and to deport its population, which consists of six families: three noble11 and three Jewish. The first are to be sent to the distant governorates of the country; the second — to Siberia.
2.3. The Insurrection in the other parts of Poland
The Prussian zone of occupation could hardly act in favor of the Insurrection, apart from an intense contraband of arms. The Poznań insurrection, which had broken out but had been vigorously repressed in the spring of 1846, had broken many an impulse in that region.
In the regions of Poland that had fallen to the Austrians, the Insurrection practically aborted, especially in the zones of Ukrainian predominance. However, at the heart of “Little Poland,” and above all in Cracow, the former capital, the agitation of minds was strong — among the Poles. As for the Jews, they were apparently more hesitant, as one can imagine in reading the following appeal:
Appeal of the mayor of Cracow to the Jewish population for the needs of the Insurrection
Cracow, February 14, 1864.
The National Government clearly proclaimed, from the beginning of the insurrection, the equality of rights of the Israelites with regard to all laws and liberties, imposing upon them at the same time the fulfillment, equal to that of others, of their obligations toward our common fatherland.
Our brothers of the Mosaic religion who live under Muscovite oppression have responded gloriously to this appeal of the National Government, and have conducted themselves as worthy sons of our Mother Poland. We have counted upon the fields of glory several of your valiant coreligionists. And those who are not in a state to shed their blood for liberty contribute by their goods to the liberation of the country from the yoke that oppresses it.
In the face of these glorious and gladdening facts, all the greater is my sorrow when I learn from the reports reaching me from every quarter that at the very heart of Poland, in Cracow, its ancient capital, the citizens of the Mosaic faith, who were born and grew up on this soil, who feed on its bread, nonetheless refuse, with rare exceptions, all sacrifice on the altar of national needs, moved as they are by a shameful indifference or by malevolence.
I appeal therefore to your hearts and to your consciences, Israelite brothers, and I warn you not to oblige me, by such conduct, to harsher measures, applicable to citizens of ill will. This is my last warning. The continuation of your indifference, the refusal to pay the National Sacrifice, will unfailingly bring the order to citizens of the Christian religion to break off all commercial relations with you, and the prohibition of all purchase in the quarters of Kazimierz and Stradom12.
2.4. Outside Poland
Particularly little-known, and most instructive, pages were written outside Poland, in emigration. As we have seen, the Poles were numerous there, and since their departure from the country at that time was due essentially to political reasons, their national consciousness was heightened. In emigration, the Jews originating from Poland who had left to seek better fortune elsewhere in the world were then less numerous than they would be toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the pressure of growing antisemitism and the deterioration of the economic situation in the tsarist empire would incite them to emigrate massively. But they already formed important nuclei, not only in the United States but also in France, in England, and even in Australia. Everywhere, they were solicited by their Polish compatriots, as the following letter testifies:
Appeal of Polish soldier-refugees in Melbourne to the Polish Jews in Australia
Melbourne, February 1864.
We make our appeal to you, children of Israel, in this decisive moment. The cause of your native country is in danger; sons of Israel, you are also sons of Poland. When, centuries ago, you had been driven from your fatherland and scattered, wandering, over all the earth, your ancestors found a refuge in Poland. Today, on this soil where the bones of your fathers rest, in these towns and along these streams where each of you saw for the first time the light of day, unfolds the struggle for liberty — one more heroic effort to throw off the cruel foreign yoke, to raise the Poles, without distinction of race or confession, toward the state of independence, toward a national government, toward a free, undisputed, and honorable place among the nations. It is known that there is no distinction of race or religion in the aims and aspirations of the patriots, whose ranks count people of various origins and religions: Slavs, Lithuanians, Israelites, descendants of the Turkish colonists — all go, shoulder against shoulder, toward death or toward victory against the Muscovite bayonets and the Cossack lances. The country which, in the times of its liberty, had been liberal in the era of religious persecutions, will know, in the era of civilization and of the Enlightenment, how to appreciate and reward with gratitude the merits of all its children.
The Poles of various races and confessions are brothers. They are brothers by the community of their sufferings, by their common struggle for liberty. Did not the tyrant brandish the knout to force the Israelites to renounce the faith of their ancestors? Is it not a historical truth that those thousands of Hebrew children were torn, together with thousands of Christian children, from their families in Lithuania, in Russia, in the Kingdom, in Volhynia, or in Podolia13?
There is no doubt that [this tyrant] desires today to divide the Poles, to set the Jews against the Christians, as he had already done in certain provinces, raising the faithful of the Greek Church against their neighbors of the Roman confession.
“Divide et impera!” is his principle for crushing the patriotic forces. The Muscovite tsars have always attempted to divide the Poles when these took up arms against them.
Behold, our brothers of all races and all religions fight once more! We would not be worthy of being human beings if we looked upon their struggle passively. Even strangers show their sympathy and bring their aid. It is all the more the duty of those who were born on Polish soil, who have not forgotten their childhood, who in Poland, in the bosom of their mothers, raised toward God their first prayers!
In Hungary, Kossuth, calling the people to arms, said: “He who in the present hour forgets his country is not a human being, but a dog — let the women spit upon him!” We, here in Australia, are not in a position to fight at the side of our brothers, we cannot expose our breasts to the Muscovite cannon nor throw ourselves into hand-to-hand combat, but we must aid those who do. The cause for which they fight is our cause, we the exiles of distant lands! In our beloved country have remained our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, and our sisters.
We can aid them in many ways; it is for each to choose his own. The combatants need arms, the wounded need care. We can aid the sick in the hospitals and the able-bodied on the field of battle. Let the Poles of all confessions do their duty.
Israelite brothers! You form the majority of the Polish stock in Australia, you are numerous and powerful. In this decisive moment, inscribe the name of Israel in the struggle for the resurrection of your native country. This will be no inscription upon sand; the memory of the people will serve as a tablet, for the people does not forget as individuals can forget. Step forward, let us be friends among the peoples! Do not forget Epstein, Meisels14 and so many other illustrious men. Do not forget your kin in the patriotic councils and in the ranks of the combatants, who are as good Poles as they are good Hebrews. It is a privilege to be able to aid our fatherland, which suffers from the cruelty of the tyrant; and it is a duty that no one must shirk.
In the name of former Polish soldiers S. Rakowski
The Poles’ effort to win over the Jews and their organizations outside Poland, in the hope of gaining their support both for the struggle in the country itself and for obtaining the intervention of the Western countries in favor of Polish independence, can be read in this letter, written in French and dated March 15, 1862 (thus, before the outbreak of the Insurrection properly so called, but after the bloody events of 1862 and the demonstrations of Judeo-Polish solidarity that followed them). It was addressed by the Polish Committee in Paris to the Archives Israélites of Paris, an organ attached to the recently created Alliance Israélite Universelle:
For twenty years, the Archives Israélites have demanded justice for our compatriots of the religion of Moses. These efforts have not been sterile; they have contributed to the reconciliation of all beliefs, a reconciliation of which we are proud and happy. Proud, because this fraternity recalls a glorious memory of our history. It is Poland that offered hospitality to the Israelite race when all of Europe persecuted and expelled it. We are happy about it, because this reconciliation puts an end to our divisions, which made the strength of our enemies. Thus it is with sorrow that we have learned of the death of the illustrious founder of the journal15 which rendered a signal service to our country. In the name of our compatriots, we address to you the expression of our condolence and we beg you to accept a modest offering destined for the erection of a monument that esteem and gratitude wish to raise to the memory of your venerable father.
Accept, Sir, etc.
The members of the Polish Committee in Paris Count Lechodowski, J. Janowski, J. Czyński, L. Zienkowicz, E. Korabiewicz, A. Chrystowski.
Naturally, there were numerous exchanges and joint demonstrations in places where the concentration of Poles and of Jews originating from Poland was greatest; the Polish Jews took part in public meetings and collections. One may cite the appeal launched in July 1863 in New York by the “Committee of Polish Jews living in the United States of North America” (… Consider, and do not forget, that the greater part of the Poles of this country is of our confession and that the advantages that Poland would draw from its independence would serve in several respects the glory and the rights, long neglected, of the Israelites. It is to be deplored that our expatriated coreligionists so quickly forget the tyranny that touches not only all the Poles, but the Israelites particularly…) and the meeting held on July 19, 1863, in the hall of the Cooper Institute, at which a committee to aid insurgent Poland was created. In analogous fashion, a great public meeting was held in London, at St. Martin’s Hall, in March 1865, with notably a moving speech by a Jewish lieutenant of the now-defeated insurgent army. It was no longer a matter then of bringing assistance to the combatants, but rather of helping the new wave of fugitives escaping from the country reconquered by the tsar’s armies, in the hope of resuming the struggle later. In reality, the insurrection of 1863 was the last great Polish attempt to reconquer independence by arms. Thereafter, the tsarist grip was too heavy to permit such initiatives. The country would have to await the upheavals of the First World War and the new map of Europe, redrawn at the Congress of Versailles.
By way of conclusion
In all the Polish patriotic struggles, from the partitions of Poland down to the last third of the nineteenth century, the Jews were present, and present actively, on a scale of which one is generally unaware today. Why this ignorance? Probably because this information, in truth, troubles both parties, for in both the vision of “the other” has dramatically simplified and hardened over the past few decades. These pages have no ambition of modifying acquired and entrenched opinions, but simply of informing the reader about what once was; and if he is surprised by it, his reading will not have been useless.
Yes, Jews took part, alongside the Poles, in the struggles for national rebirth. It is true that these combatants represented only a small fraction of the Jewish population of Poland. It is true that the majority kept aloof, judging that this was not their affair — generally the traditional and religious population, which led a separate life. But the Jews of Emancipation, those who sought their future in a greater openness to the outside world, were numerous in considering that this future was inseparable from that of the Polish people, and that solidarity between the two groups was a necessary condition of a Jewish flourishing in Poland, all the more so as the proportion of Jews in the total population was steadily increasing.
This path was not easy, and did not bear the hoped-for fruits. The profound transformation of Polish society during the nineteenth century — with the passage from a quasi-feudal structure to a more modern one through the country’s industrialization, the aggravation of the social conflicts that ensued, and also the general impoverishment due to the successive crises — then the policy of the Polish government between the two wars, which set about diverting popular discontent toward the Jews — all this led, on the contrary, to a profound rift between the two peoples, with an intensification of mutual resentments and hatreds, and with the growing violence whose paroxysm, as we know, was reached from the 1930s onward. Thus, how not to recall that, when at the end of the First World War Poland was being reborn, a Polish army of some 50,000 men was formed in France under the direction of General Haller and transferred to Poland to fight against the Bolsheviks. It began this campaign with a few resounding pogroms in the Jewish towns of Galicia, and pursued this kind of exploit all along its march to Kiev in 1920. How far one was from that fraternity glimpsed a century earlier, and from its hopes.
This probably explains the fact that during the last third of the nineteenth century and down to the middle of the twentieth, a great part of the Jews who committed themselves to the struggle for a better future did so in the ranks of the revolutionary organizations (communist parties, the Bund…) for those who believed that the Jews could hope to be happy in the Diaspora, or else in the Zionist parties of various tendencies for those who envisioned the future otherwise.
Even during the Second World War, when the two peoples had to confront in Poland one same and terrible enemy, the union of efforts came about only sporadically (for example, during the weeks that the siege of Warsaw by the German army lasted in September 1939), or fragmentarily. There was scarcely anyone but the combatants of the Warsaw ghetto who, during their desperate fight in the spring of 1943, unfurled the device “For your liberty and for ours” — that very one which the Poles had gloriously borne to the four corners of the world throughout the period of their country’s captivity…
Notes
Later, during the Napoleonic wars, he commanded a detachment of Polish cavalry and was killed in combat in 1809. During the same Insurrection of 1794, a Jewish detachment of 400 soldiers defended fiercely the suburb of Praga against the Russian army of Suvorov, and was practically wholly exterminated, colonel at its head.↩︎
In 1809, in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw created by Napoleon, they represented 7% of the total population, and 28% of city-dwellers. According to the calculations of the time, the Jews of Poland then represented 20% of the world’s Jewish population.↩︎
After a first partition of Poland, in 1772, a patriotic resurgence took place in 1791: the Poles proclaimed a constitution which, in particular, made the monarchy hereditary and gave the citizens an equality of rights. However, as early as the following year, the opponents of this reform appealed to Russia, which brought about the second partition of the country (in 1793), which in turn provoked the national insurrection of T. Kościuszko, and a new affirmation of democratic aspirations. But this revolt was crushed by the Russians, and what remained of the “Kingdom of Poland” was annexed by the tsar.↩︎
This “competition” between Russians and Poles to win over the Jewish minority is illustrated by the measures taken during the period preceding the insurrection of 1863. In June 1862, at the moment when the disturbances and anti-Russian agitation were swelling in Warsaw, with an active Jewish participation, the tsar’s representative, Aleksander Wielopolski, posted a ukase granting the Jews of Poland equality of rights. He made explicit the objective of this measure in saying to Rabbi Meisels: “Henceforth the Jews have no more reason to meddle in certain affairs…”. For their part, the Poles took counter-measures, and opened to the Jews access to the professional corporations, the Polish schools, the chambers of commerce, and so on. A year later, the insurrection having broken out, the National Government proclaimed by the insurgents published a manifesto addressed to the Jews, formally promising them equality as soon as national independence was obtained.↩︎
Ber Meisels was later regarded as a model of the Polish patriot among the Jews. His portrait hung notably in the office of Adam Czerniaków, president of the Warsaw “Judenrat” between 1939 and 1942, who regarded himself as a patriot.↩︎
A Catholic cross, of course, symbol of the opposition to Russian Orthodoxy…↩︎
The rabbis had prudently warned the Russian authorities of this closing, under the pretext cited.↩︎
He was later appointed rabbi in Amsterdam.↩︎
In other words: of God (Translator’s note).↩︎
Later called “the Great Emigration,” because it counted the most exiles (some 10,000 in France), among them celebrated figures such as Mickiewicz, who for a long time held a chair at the Collège de France. It was preceded and followed by many other waves of emigrants, who took part in struggles throughout the world and for causes other than that of Poland. In particular, the exiles of the end of the eighteenth century took an active part in the War of Independence of the United States; the Hungarians who rose against the Habsburgs in 1848 were actively aided by Poles and even led by Józef Bem, a Polish general who came out of the Polish insurrection that had broken out without success in the Prussian zone two years earlier. Likewise, the troops of the Commune who defended Paris against the Versaillais were commanded notably by Polish generals expatriated after the insurrection of 1863 (Dąbrowski, Wróblewski, Okołowicz), etc.↩︎
These were small impoverished nobles returned to the state of peasants, who worked their land themselves; a fairly frequent phenomenon of the eastern marches of Poland. Moreover, among the workers of the rapidly developing Polish industry were proletarians issued from an impoverished nobility, a phenomenon practically unknown in Western Europe.↩︎
Kazimierz and Stradom were the quarters of Cracow inhabited by the Jews (translator’s note).↩︎
These are the “Cantonists,” those boys of 12 who were forcibly seized from families in the various national minorities of the tsarist empire to make of them soldiers’ children and, by that means, to Russify them.↩︎
Epstein and Meisels: rabbis of the Jewish community who had actively fought for Polish independence.↩︎
This is Samuel Cahen.↩︎