The Maccabaean

The Situation and Prospects of the Jews in Poland

H. N. BRAILSFORD, in The New Republic of August 20, analyzes the position and prospects of the Jews in Poland under the title "Poland and the Jews." Mr. Brailsford, who is one of England's foremost publicists and a trained observer of social and political conditions makes his analysis profound and thorough-going and one is tempted to quote the article almost in its entirety. He begins by pointing out the wide gulf which visibly exists between the Jew and the Pole, a gulf which has its origin in the superior cultural life of the Jew and is accentuated by the fact that Polish Nationalism and Catholicism are one and inseparable. "The Jews are in sentiment excluded from the Polish nation because they are not Catholics. A Jew is really adopted as a Pole, only when he compounds with the world by accepting baptism."

Mr. Brailsford then traces the root of anti-Semitism to its economic causes; and, with regard to its political manifestations, he writes as follows:

As in Austria, so in Poland, this economic competition was obvious material for political agitators. M. Roman Dmowski, the founder of the National Democratic ("N. D.") party, did what Lueger and the "Christian Socialists" did in Vienna, he roped the small middle-class man, who felt the pressure of Jewish competition, into an essentially Conservative Nationalist party. Before the war, his was a Russophil policy: he was a favorite at the Tsar's court, and represented in the Duma a tendency that was relatively reactionary even in that backward assembly. In Poland, though his party relied for funds on the big landowners, it won popular support by a violent and entirely reckless campaign against the Jews. To this party belong not merely M. Dmowski, by far the cleverest of Polish politicians, but also M. Paderewski, and most of the present ministry. From specimens of their election literature which I saw, one might suppose that they fought the first election in free Poland mainly on the Jewish issue, combined with the subtle suggestion that most Socialists are Jews, and all Socialists, Bolsheviks. Ugly illustrated posters and leaflets, issued officially by this party, depicting the Jew as a serpent or a vampire, appealed to the numerous illiterate electors, and its newspaper press kept the agitation

going from day to day by incessant anti-Jewish articles. I procured copies of some of these sinister popular appeals to race hatred, and in the municipal elections a little later, actually myself saw an "N. D." car, decorated with all the Allied flags, scattering an anti-Jewish leaflet in the main street of Warsaw. For the present state of mind of brutal fanaticism which breaks out in massacre, this ruling party is directly responsible. Itself at bottom the party of the big landed interest, it has used anti-Jewish prejudice as a demagogic appeal, in order to win the masses from the Socialist and peasant parties.

The charge against the Jews, by which this persecution attempts to justify itself are analyzed by Mr. Brailsford as follows:

I must in fairness mention the charges usually advanced against the Jews. Because many or most of the town dealers and retailers are Jews, they are said to be the causes of high prices and the food shortage. In point of fact the real reason for the anger of the Polish dealer and shopkeeper against the Jew is that his margin of profit is so small, that even the cooperative societies can hardly compete with him. No doubt, dealers, including the Jews, did hoard and speculate, but the more guilty "profiteer" was usually the Polish landlord and farmer. It is the obvious cue of the profiteering landowner and the

employer who will not raise wages, to blame the Jews for the high cost of living.

Mr. Brailsford speaks of the pogroms, of the one in Pinsk which followed a statement made by the military commandant at Pinsk in which he declared "in cold blood that he would have to shoot one in ten of the population." He speaks also of the pogrom in Lemberg, but he does not believe that pogroms are the real evil. The real evil is the daily martyrdom to which the Jews are subjected in every relation of life, in the factories, in the trade unions, in the workers' councils, in the Civil Service,—in the daily insults and open brutality on the streets. "The Poles, culturally an immature and backward people, have won the power to make their land a hell for its three million Jews, by no merit of their own, but simply by the victory first of Germans over Russians, and then of the Allies over the Germans." Mr. Brailsford thinks it impossible to solve the problem by attempting "to bring the Jews into the framework of Polish nationality."