From the material on Jewish political "clout" you cite:
In the early 1920s the Polish Jewish community amounted to 2,846,000 --10.5 per cent of the population. It was far from politically homogeneous. On the far left were the Communists (KPP). Although the proportion of Jews in the KPP was always greater than 10.5 per cent, the Communists were never a significant proportion of the Jewish population. Although the PPS had always welcomed Jews into its ranks, it was imbued with Polish nationalism and was hostile to Yiddish; as a result the post-war PPS had little Jewish following. Instead the largest left-wing force among the Jews were the Yiddishists of the Bund, whose Polish section had survived its defeat in the Soviet Union, but they were still a distinct minority in the larger community. In the 1922 elections for the Polish Parliament (Sejm) they received only a fraction over 87,000 votes and were unable to win a single seat. On the right stood Agudas Yisrael, the party of traditional orthodoxy, with approximately one-third of the community loosely behind it. Its members took the position that the Talmud required loyalty to any Gentile regime that did not interfere with the Jewish religion. With their passive conservatism they could have no influence on any of the more educated elements who sought an activist solution to anti-Semitism. A small following, primarily intellectuals, followed the Folkists, a group of Diaspora Yiddish nationalists. All of these elements, though each for different reasons, were anti-Zionist.
The dominant political force within the Jewish community were the Zionists. They had taken six of the thirteen Jewish seats in the 1919 Sejm, and the 1922 elections gave them an opportunity to demonstrate that they could counter the still virulent anti-Semitism. The largest faction within the movement, led by Yitzhak Gruenbaum of the Radical Zionists, organised a 'Minorities Bloc'. The non-Polish nationalities constituted almost one-third of the population and Gruenbaum argued that if they united they could be the balance of power within the Sejm. The Bloc, comprising Gruenbaum's Zionist faction, together with elements from the German, Byelorussian and Ukrainian nationalities, had 66 of its candidates elected, including 17 Zionists. Superficially the pact seemed to have succeeded, but in fact it quickly demonstrated the divisions both within the Zionist movement and the minorities in general. The Ukrainian majority in Galicia refused to recognise the Polish state and boycotted the elections. None of the other nationalist politicians would support the Ukrainians' fight and the Galician Zionists, anxious not to antagonise the Poles, stood in the election as rivals to the Minorities Bloc. The Galician Zionists won 15 seats, but as their success was due to the Ukrainian abstention they could not pretend to represent the region. Even within the Minorities Bloc there was no commitment to long-term unity, and after the election it fell apart. There were now 47 Jews in both houses of the Sejm, 32 of them Zionists, but their electoral opportunism had discredited them.
This text is a chapter of <Zionism in the Age of the Dictators a Reappraisal>, by Lenni Brenner.
The copyright (©) belongs to the author. It was published by Croom Helm, Kent (GreatBritain) and Laurence Hill, Westport, Conn. in the USA, 277 p. ISBN (GB) 0709906285; USA (paperback) 0882081640 in 1983. This book has been out of print for years.
There was Jewish politics, but it was hardly a dominant feature of the Polish Republic, nor was it homogeneous. And it may be that there were a number of Jews who owned shops and taverns, it is still true that most Jews were unassimilated, and lived in fairly segregated shtetls. Just as most Jews were not Communists, and most Communists were not Jews, most Jews were not Capitalists, and most Capitalists were not Jews. Without a predisposition to do so, no one would identify Jews with either Communism or Capital..... |
