The Catholic Church and Antisemitism

Ronald Modras

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135286170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Interwar Poland was home to more Jews than any other country in Europe. Its commonplace but simplistic identification with antisemitism was due largely to nationalist efforts to boycott Jewish business. That they failed was not for want of support by the Catholic clergy, for whom the ''Jewish question'' was more than economic. The myth of a Masonic-Jewish alliance to subvert Christian culture first flourished in France but held considerable sway over Catholics in 1930s Poland as elsewhere. This book examines how, following Vatican policy, Polish church leaders resisted separation of church and state in the name of Catholic culture. In that struggle, every assimilated Jew served as both a symbol and a potential agent of security. Antisemitism is no longer regarded as a legitimate political stance. But in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, the issues of religious culture, national identity, and minorities are with us still. This study of interwar Poland will shed light on dilemmas that still effect us today.

Chapter 1

Poland, Jews, and the Catholic Church: History and Context

Poland was already a state in 965/966, when Ibrahim Ibn-Jakub, a Moorish Jew, accompanied a Spanish embassy from Cordoba to Central Europe and described the dominions of Prince Mieszko, the warlord of the Polanie. It was the same year that Mieszko, with a wary eye on German ambitions, married the Czech princess Dubravka and embraced the Christian faith in its Roman rather than Byzantine expression. With that one, politically astute action, Mieszko aligned Poland’s future with that of Western Europe, making it (with Hungary) the most eastern outpost of Western Christendom.

Prehistoric migrations had brought a series of tribal peoples to transverse and sometimes settle the fields between the Odra and Nysa rivers on the west and the Bug and later Dnieper rivers on the east: Scythians, Celts, Goths, and Slays. One of those Slavic tribes, the Polanie (“field-dwellers” from the Slavic word for field, pole), settled the lands between the Odra and Vistula rivers by the seventh and eighth centuries C.E. From a union of tribes there evolved a national identity and culture that in 1634 made Poland the largest kingdom in all Europe. Written history tells of both immigrants and invaders coming to reside among the Poles and eventually making the Polish language and culture their own: not only other Slavic peoples but Armenians, Germans, Italians, Scots, Tartars, and Turks. It is not without irony that the writing of that history begins with the travel record of a Jew and the advent in Poland of the Catholic church.¹

From its very beginning, Poland’s written history has been intertwined with that of the Catholic church in Poland. No less integral to that history, however, is the story of Poland’s Jews, brought to a horrific end in this century by Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. While scholars have addressed these histories individually, more serious research is required into the relationship of the Catholic church and the Jewish community in Poland. This present study examines the last years of that relationship before the invasion of Poland and Hitler’s war of extermination against the Jews. It demonstrates that Poland’s Catholic leaders, in the 1930s as. in previous centuries, shared the traditional thinking and attitudes of the church elsewhere in Europe and in the Catholic world. Loyalty to tradition and a habit of looking to the West were traits that had long characterized Poles. For the leaders of the Catholic church in Poland, that meant looking to Rome.

A History of Ambivalence

1. Jewish origins and autonomy

Judaism, like Christianity, came to Poland from the west.² Jewish merchants may well have traveled across what would become Poland as early as the ninth century, thus antedating the advent of Christianity. Portentous of the future, the first written record we have of Jewish immigration relates to the first crusade, when anti-Jewish violence erupted across Western Europe. A Bohemian chronicle tells of Jews fleeing Prague for Poland in 1097/98. In an effort to escape persecution in the regions of the Rhine and Danube, Jews settled in Silesia, then as now in western Poland. According to a Polish chronicler of that period, Wincenty Kadłubek, bishop of Kraków, Prince Mieszko III (1173–1209) imposed heavy fines on Christians molesting Jews.³

The cities of Poland attracted not only Jews but large numbers of other foreigners, especially Germans who brought with them the so-called Magdeburg Laws. Adopted first in Silesia in 1211 and then elsewhere in Poland, they granted cities a large measure of autonomy, so that the burghers or city-dwellers evolved into a special class. The same became true for Poland’s Jewish immigrants. By 1264 enough Jews had migrated to Poland to warrant legal provisions guaranteeing their rights and responsibilities to the Polish crown. Prince BolesJaw V (the Pious) promulgated the celebrated Statute of Kalisz. Although modeled after similar charters issued a few years earlier in Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, the Statute of Kalisz was far more comprehensive. It freed Jews from the jurisdiction of local magistrates or overlords. By conferring upon Jews the status of servi camerae (literally servants of the treasury or more simply tax-payers to the crown), it made them answerable only to the king or his deputy, with full protection of life and property.⁴

The Statute of Kalisz set no restriction on the amount of property Jews could acquire and no limits on their choice of occupation. It guaranteed them the right to travel, to keep what they had inherited, and to conduct business activities, specifically money-lending. In both civil and criminal proceedings, Jews were exempted from municipal jurisdiction, subject rather to the crown and its representatives, to whom any Christian accused of physically injuring a Jew was also answerable. Jewish oaths were recognized as evidence in these legal proceedings, and any testimony of a Christian against a Jew was recognized as evidence only if corroborated by a Jewish witness. The Statute furthermore forbade anyone to attack synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, or schools. Similarly outlawed was the harassment of Jewish merchants on the road or exaction of higher duties from Jews than from other merchants. Jewish children could not be forcibly baptized, and Jews who deserted their religion were bound to relinquish their inheritances. In addition to privileges guaranteed by earlier charters, the Statute made additional provisions, two of them particularly striking. Consistent with papal decrees, no Jew was to be accused of using Christian blood (the “blood libel”) because, in the words of the Statute, “their law prohibits the use of any blood.” And just as Christian townspeople were bound to help each other, if attacked at night, a Christian neighbor was required to help a Jew or else pay a fine.⁵

Originally promulgated in 1264 for the province of Great Poland (Wielkopolska), the Statute of Kalisz was confirmed four times for all the Polish kingdom by King Casimir the Great and expanded in 1453 by King Casimir IV. Jewish elders were invested with the authority to judge cases between Jews, and permission was granted for Jews to slaughter cattle according to ritual prescriptions (shehita). Polish Jews, in short, enjoyed the status of freemen. According to a 1457 document in Mazovia, they enjoyed the rights of the nobility (jus nobilium).⁶ It was a condition obviously far superior to the masses of Poles who were enthralled to serfdom, and arguably the most humanitarian regulation of their status anywhere in late medieval Europe.

While exceptional for its liberality, the Statute of Kalisz was not singular to Poland. Utterly original and unique to Poland, however, was the Council of the Four Lands (Vaad Arba Artzot) which afforded Poland’s Jews more autonomy than anywhere else in the entire history of its diaspora. After a number of conflicts between the Jewish community and the Jewish tax-collectors appointed by the crown, King Zygmunt August II in 1551 granted Jews first in one province and then in others the right to elect their own leaders. Each Jewish community was entitled to elect their own rabbis and “lawful judges” to take charge of their spiritual and social affairs. This led to the creation in each Jewish community of a kahal, a body of elders (forty in large centers, ten in smaller towns) who governed the affairs of the local community. Entrusted to the kahal were such duties as administration of the synagogue, schools, and cemeteries, provision of kosher meat, and the settling of disputes within the community.

Out of these local bodies there grew conferences or assemblies of rabbis and kahal leaders, generally one a year in Lublin. Institutionalized by King Stefan Batory in 1581, the name of the annual assembly came to be fixed as the Council of the Four Lands, drawing as it did the Jewish leadership from all over Poland. Its primary task, from the crown’s point of view, was to collect and deliver taxes from the Jewish communities to the royal treasury. But once the right to be governed by elected leaders was established, the cornerstone was laid for autonomy in other spheres of life as well. Functioning as a parliament, it not only allocated taxes for the king but regulated the entire economic life of the Jewish community, issuing regulations on matters ranging from bankruptcy to the allocation of rabbinical positions. It served as the official representative of all Jews in Poland through the stadlan, a special delegate who alone was authorized to intervene for Jews before the parliament or other offices. The authority of the Council was enforced by the crown. A Jew who ignored its commands faced not only excommunication by the Council (herem) but confiscation of property by the state. The autonomy afforded by the Council was enjoyed by Polish Jews for nearly two hundred years, until 1764 when, on the eve of its partitions, Poland became no more than a Russian protectorate.⁷

Throughout the medieval period Jews proved to be a valuable resource to the Polish kings and nobility, developing both crafts (fur-making, tailoring, tanning) and trade, local and long-distance (with Hungary, Turkey, the Baltic and Black Seas). The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw Jews prosper as merchants and middlemen. Wealthy Jews leased the royal mint, salt mines, and the collection of customs and tolls. Jews from Grodno, for example, owned villages, manors, fish ponds and mills.⁸ The most conspicuous success story was undoubtedly that of Abraham Esofowicz, who was elected to the nobility (szlachta) and made treasurer of Lithuania by King Zygmunt I. Before his elevation, he converted to Christianity, but his brother Michał remained a practicing Jew when he was elevated to the nobility (1525), a case without parallel anywhere in Christian Europe.⁹

2. Opposition: the church and the guilds

In stark contrast to Poland’s secular princes in their treatment of Jews, were the princes of the church. Three years after the Statute of Kalisz, Guido, the papal legate to Poland, convened the Council of Wroclaw (1267) to deal, among other things, with the issue of Jews. The resolutions of the Council simply affirmed and applied the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, legislated earlier (1215) in Rome. Jews were ordered to live apart from Christians in separate sections of the city or village. The reason given for the segregation was that “Poland is a new plantation on the soil of Christianity,” and there was reason to fear that its Christian population would “fall an easy prey to the influence of the superstitions and evil habits of the Jews living among them.”¹⁰ Other resolutions by the Council of Wroclaw stipulated that Jews were to wear the peculiarly shaped hat (cornutum pileum) that distinguished them from Christians. Each town was to possess no more than one synagogue, and Jews were barred from collecting customs or duties or holding offices where Christians would be subordinate to them. Christians were forbidden to invite Jews to a meal, to eat or drink with them, or to serve Jewish households as servants, wet-nurses, or nursery-maids.^11...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Studies in Antisemitism
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Poland, Jews, and the Catholic Church: History and Context
• 2. Liberalism: The Masonic-Jewish "Alliance"
• 3. The Protocols: The Myth of World Domination
• 4. The Soviet Union and "Judeo-Communism"
• 5. Nazi Germany and Racist Antisemitism
• 6. Jews and the Spanish Civil War
• 7. Everywhere Else: Why not Poland?
• 8. Accusations against the Talmud
• 9. The Interwar Economy: Poverty and the Boycott
• 10. A Culture Catholic or else not Polish
• 11. Catholic Solutions to the "Jewish Question"
• 12. Violence at the Universities and in the Streets
• 13. The Vatican and the Polish Bishops
• 14. By Way of Contrast: The Polish Opponents of Antisemitism
• Epilogue
• Index