I. Introduction
When my great-grandfather, Moshe, came to America, he was fleeing the pogroms in Poland. He was from Łomża, Poland and left the country before World War I because life was getting too dangerous. Years later, his grandson, my cousin, met a Pole at school. He told Moshe when he got home—he was so excited to have met another Pole. But Moshe got angry and declared “We are not Polish; we are Jewish.” The hatred of Poland was strong, but no one in the family understood why. Moshe never discussed it, and the old country was never really spoken of again.
Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe had been forming and evolving since the introduction of Western Europe to Eastern Europe. It finds its basis in religious differences but also acts as a scapegoat for the East’s mistrust of communism. Unlike in the West, where it often seemed like anti-Semitism was enabled from the lower social stratums, anti-Semitism in the East was enabled at all levels of the social hierarchy. Anti-Semitism became highly visible in the East following World War I when many Eastern European countries gained independence, as Wistrich notes that
“In all these countries there were substantial Jewish communities whose occupational structure, levels of acculturation and political orientation posed serious problems for mixed-nationality states which had not yet industrialized, which often lacked a fully crystalized ‘native’ bourgeoisie and whose sometimes fragile national identity was threatened by powerful neighbors to the East and West” (145).
Whereas anti-Semitism in Western Europe had become more latent over the years, stemming from Enlightenment ideals and strong national identity, anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe had remained very visible. This visibility was due to the lack of self-determination given to Eastern European nationalities, which had seemingly only developed out of roots in Christianity, continuous domination by stronger states, and the sheer number of Jews living in the East prior to World War II. Ultra-nationalism and anti-Semitism developed in response to an identity crisis within the East.
II. Hubristic Pride and Ultra-Nationalism Affecting Anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe is a combination of many different attitudes, which makes it differ from Western Europe’s brand of anti-Semitism. In Western Europe, anti-Semitism morphed out of anti-Judaism, which dropped out of popular discourse with the rise of nationalism during the nineteenth century. Since Western Europe stressed nationality over religion, it became a necessity to use the pseudo-science associated with anti-Semitism to justify hatred of Jews. However, in Eastern Europe, in places such as Poland, the land and the people were always under the yoke of stronger powers. While people may have felt nationalistic pride, there was no huge movement fixated on nationalism during the nineteenth century.
To understand the extent to which national psyche would have been wounded, it is necessary to understand the concepts of authentic pride and hubristic pride. Authentic pride is “pro-social aspect, associated with feelings of accomplishment, confidence, [and] success” (Kavetsos). Hubristic pride is the “anti-social aspect [of pride], linked to disagreeableness, neuroticism, [and] narcissism” (Kavetsos). The former is used to create positive self-identification within a group. The latter is used to differentiate from the in-group and the out-group. Since Eastern European nations did not have their own sovereignty and they were often considered the peripheral territories to be traded between larger sovereign states, they could not have had authentic pride. The only pride they could have had would have stemmed from trying to differentiate themselves from other nations they considered lesser.
This use of hubristic pride to create a sense of nationalism often leads to extreme, racist movements that work to fully exclude the specified out-group. This phenomenon is known as ultra-nationalism, which is the idea of being extremely nationalist (Davison). In Eastern Europe, hubristic pride formed as a way for gentiles to differentiate themselves from Jews, thus leading to ultra-nationalist behavior. Scholars note that anti-Semitism was so prevalent in Eastern Europe because of the distinct cultural differences in tradition, language, religious practice between Jews and gentiles (Richarz 81; Wistrich 158). These factors could be easily manipulated through hubristic pride to create a particularly hostile environment towards Jews in Eastern Europe, sparking an ultra-nationalist tendency rooted in traditionally Eastern European culture—a culture based in Catholicism, superstition, and tradition.
Eastern Europe existed for a long time under a feudal system with the Catholic Church as a prominent background power. Within these societies, Jews were often in positions of financial power as moneylenders and middlemen. Because of the powerful ant-Judaic rhetoric coming out of the Church, there many destructive attacks on Jews throughout time. One of the most famous examples is the Bohdan Khmelnytsky attacks in Poland during the middle of the seventeenth century. The uprising was a Cossack rebellion against the Polish and Lithuanian commonwealth that attacked rich Jews and Christians for their high social standing. Kohut makes special note that “The Ukrainian glorification of an event that in the Jewish tradition is perceived as the greatest horror of early modern times is indicative of the deep chasm between the historical memories of the two peoples” (141). Ukrainians look at the attacks as a national victory that developed out of their own hubristic pride. To Ukrainians, this rebellion was essential to forming an independent and sovereign Ukrainian culture. It was a victory of the oppressed over the oppressors, and this imagery helped solidify the image of the Jew as the enemy within the Eastern European psyche.
Because of this deep divide, Jews have generally been labeled by Ukrainians as “economic exploiters and willing tools in the social, religious, and national oppression of the Ukrainian people” (Kohut 142). This classification is not specific to Ukraine; across Eastern Europe Jews have been viewed as a nation out to usurp other nations of their sovereignty. This hatred of Jews led to the creation of the Pale of Settlement by Catherine the Great. This area, also known as Yiddishland, constituted of “15 provinces of Western Russia demarcated for Jewish habitation…[spanning] a land mass from the Baltic to the Black Sea, West to the Hungarian border and South to Turkey. This was the area of the former Congress Poland with some territory more recently conquered by the Russian state around the Black Sea and the Crimea” (Horowitz 567). The designation of this land as the only space Jews could live was intended to be a slap in the face to Eastern European Jewry.
Yet, while it was intended to insult the Jews, it seems quite possible that this designation was also an insult to the Christian communities in the area; it relegated gentiles to a lower status because it inherently stated that the gentiles living there were unworthy to live with anyone other than Jews—people they had been indoctrinated to believe killed Christ. This damaged their national psyche and allowed hubristic pride to ensue. They were already struggling to conceptualize their identities; were they independent and unique nationalities or simply underlings of the greater Russian empire? By designating the Pale of Settlement as the only place Jews could live within Eastern Europe, Catherine the Great put the gentiles of the region on the peripheries as well, causing their identities to be further put in flux.
This interethnic divide was not getting better; old superstitions still had sway over the Eastern European populations. In 1913, a young boy was found mutilated and murdered just outside of Kiev. The New York Times writes that “the nature of the allegation…has been shown over and over again…that there is nothing in the religious belief or practice of the Jews that remotely requires or sanctions or suggests the thing charged” yet “peasants [sic] are the helpless victims of this superstition” (New York Times). The author of the article frames the peasants as being victims of simply a lack of development within Eastern Europe that would stop them from seeing the absurdity of ritual murder accusations. It does seem likely that a lack of development in Eastern Europe, as opposed to all the industrialization and modernization in Western Europe, allowed old beliefs to still have traction. However, because gentile peasants within the region were living within the Pale of Settlement and trying to keep a solid hold on their national identities, it seems likely that the superstition of ritual murder was used as another way to demarcate Jews from gentiles. This demarcation would have come from and led to hubristic pride, which would have been used to garner ultra-nationalism within the psyche of the people.
Because the Enlightenment and industrialization did not originate in Eastern Europe, it took many years for these developments to reach the region. As such, the Church could propagate the same anti-Semitic rhetoric it used in Western Europe. The difference was, however, that in Eastern Europe, there were many Jews, and they could be easily identified as different because of their culture. Jews were not well integrated into Eastern European culture, making it easy for people to identify them as different from the culture they wished to express.
This all changed with the dissolution of the Russian Tsarist regime. When the Soviet Union was founded, Jews in Russia were emancipated, but “the politics of the Soviet government forced the Jewish population to completely change its social structure and to drop its religious identity” (Richarz 85). With emancipation and strict anti-religious policies, Jews were integrated into Russian society; Richarz says that “it was only anti-Semitism that, in the long run, kept alive the idea of being Jewish in the Soviet State” (86). Grüner adds onto this idea by writing that “anti-Semitic attitudes and anti-Jewish violence on the part of the majority population had by no means disappeared” but that “During this period the regime increasingly focused on the problem of ‘nationalistic deviance’” (358). Even though the officials of the Soviet Union were creating a system of relative but forced equality amongst its citizens, its own population and other Eastern European countries were still struggling with their Jewish Questions. They wanted to consolidate their states under one national banner and drew on anti-Semitic ultra-nationalism to do so. To many people and most Eastern European governments besides the Soviet Union’s, Judaism and an Eastern European identity was an oxymoron that could not exist.
During WWII, anti-Semitism became the most blatant it had ever been, particularly in Eastern Europe. Grüner writes that “It is difficult to imagine how the German administration in the occupied areas would have been able to function so efficiently if it had not been for a substantial amount of support on the part of the local population” (360). By engaging with the Nazis, Eastern Europeans could actively help rid themselves of their Jewish populations that they had been struggling to conceptualize and deal with for years. For Eastern Europeans, engaging with the Nazis and helping them find Jews meant a way to rid themselves of all the problems they had—from economic problems to nationalistic problems.
However, it is clear that because of the downfall of the Nazi regime, the Jewish Question was not “solved”. Following WWII, many Jews tried returning to the places they were originally from, only to find that the anti-Semitism and ultra-nationalism that had sent them into the hands of the Nazis was still alive. Grüner explains that “Overall the virulent anti-Semitism of those years was without doubt…a phenomenon affecting the whole of society, which citizens of all classes and regions of the country took part in. Anti-Jewish thoughts and actions were present everywhere” (361). The Nazis had provided a way for the hubristic pride and ultra-nationalism within Eastern Europe to reach a head, allowing nations that felt out-of-control to exercise self-determination in what happened to the Jews. When this self-determination was thwarted, populations reacted by continuing in their ultra-nationalist tendencies.
III. Case Study: Poland
The anti-Semitism of Poland is one of the quintessential examples of how anti-Semitism functioned in Eastern Europe. In seeking to understand anti-Semitism in Poland, it is necessary to understand that, like many other modern-day Eastern European states, “Up to 1918, Poland had not existed as a separate state” (Richarz 81). Until that point, its territory and people were being passed between the greater Russian and Prussian empires. Once it gained its independence in 1918, Poland had the largest population of Jews in Europe prior to World War II.
There was a very present sense that Jews were unwelcome in Poland—Wistrich writes that the rallying national cry was “Poland for Poles” (157). “Poland for Poles” constituted strict adherence to the Polish national identity, part of which was centered around being Catholic. Before the war, the automatic identification was “Polak-katolik” meaning “the Pole is a Catholic,” and Wistrich describes this as being “a particularly fertile breeding-ground for anti-Semitism” (166). As such, Jews were considered “fundamentally unassimilable and intransigent enemies of the Polish national cause” (Wistrich 157). At the same time, Jews in Poland were fighting for minority rights against anti-Semitic political groups and movements that led to the “the deaths of hundreds of Jews in the 1930s, to economic boycotts, government discrimination and open calls from most Polish political parties for the mass emigration of Jews” (Wistrich 157). This was Polish ultra-nationalism. Anti-Semitism for Poland was rooted in its ultra-nationalist ideology that to be Polish was to be Catholic—a person could not be Polish and follow any other religion. Jews automatically could not be Polish. This exclusivity is exemplary of hubristic pride and caused the atmosphere within Poland to be violent towards Jews for years before World War II and the Holocaust, making it easy for the Nazis to implement their plans within the country.
By the end of 1939, Poland was under Nazi control. Under Nazi control, Poland was once again under the yoke of a stronger power, and its independence and national pride were at risk once again. Wistrich notes that while Poles in the Catholic hierarchy did not like Nazi rule, they still believed that Jews were “‘atheists,’ revolutionaries, and subverters of Catholic morality” and were seen as “a threat to the Polish tradition and national spirit” (158). Thus, while Poles were greatly affected by the Holocaust and Nazis—they lost about three million people—they blamed the Jews for the problems that befell them. They felt that if the Jews had not subverted Polish sovereignty and independence, then they would not be in the dire situation with which they were faced. Wistrich writes that there was “considerable approval among Polish nationalists and fascists for Hitler’s Jewish policies” (159). Poles had hated Jews for a long time, and while they disapproved of their sovereignty being sabotaged by German authority, they were comfortable with the steps Hitler took to solve the Jewish Question for them.Yet, following the defeat of the Nazis, Poland was faced with another occupying force—the Soviet Union. It is during this time that the accusation of Jews as communists really began to take root. People thought that “Jews in Eastern Poland had welcomed the Soviet invaders in 1939 with open arms…and that Jewish ‘Muscovites’ (Polish Communists who had spent the war years in the USSR) had returned to Polish soil with the Red Army in 1944-5 in order to dance on Poland’s grave” (Wistrich 159). Since Polish national identity and independence was taken over by communist aggressors, animosity towards Jews became attached to the image of communists.
This image of the Jews as communists stayed within the Polish anti-Semitic psyche since the introduction of communism into the region. During the forty-five years that communism was in Poland, anti-Semitism continued to thrive as many people continued to blame Poland’s lack of sovereignty on the Jews. In 1990, Poland regained its independence with the fall of the Soviet Union and held elections. However, with these elections, anti-Semitism became politicized as politicians began mudslinging each other with anti-Semitic rhetoric. Wistrich describes that the Prime Minister “found himself smeared by [an incumbent’s] supporters as a crypto-Jew who was soft on Communism” (165). Gebert offers that this happened because anti-Semitism was always a part of the “subculture of violence” and that “verbal aggression was directed not only against Jews but against persons and institutions that had nothing in common with anything Jewish but were labeled ‘Jewish’ to express disapproval” (729). The only difference between the Poland of 1990 and the Poland of the communist era was that in 1990, Poles had freedom of speech. Anti-Semitism existed as an undercurrent throughout Soviet times, but once the Soviet Union collapsed, people could say whatever they wanted.
Since the end of the Soviet era in Poland, the country has seen a more visible anti-Semitism. Grudzińska-Gross explains that when the Soviet era ended in Poland there “was a change that, while rejecting the immediate past, wanted to reach into a deeper past, more distant than the last fifty years” (664). This reaching back meant trying to rediscover what it meant to be Polish, and when the Poles did this, they fully revived the idea that to be Polish was to be Catholic. To Grudzińska-Gross, they wanted to forget the traumatizing events of the communist era, and thus they returned to old prejudices born out of hubristic pride (665). However, it should be remembered that Poles also blamed the Jews for the introduction of communism into their land. So, while Poles wanted to start over from a time that communism was not a part of their lives, they also could not forget who they thought originally forced communism onto them—the Jews. They continued living with an ultra-nationalism based on hubristic pride. But since most of the pre-War Jewish population living in Poland no longer exists, there is no physical people to hate. Thus, anti-Semitism has remained in the ethos of the Poles and is used indiscriminately to damage the reputations of people that the Poles dislike.
IV. Conclusions
Eastern European nations were under the yoke of larger, more powerful states for many years, and as such, they were constantly forced into living situations with other nations that they felt they could not—and did not want to—identify with. Specifically, they did not want to interact with the Jews because they had been taught by the Catholic Church that Jews were Christ-killers and could not be trusted. Thus, when Eastern Europeans could not practice self-determination that would have allowed them to engage in authentic pride, they turned to hubristic pride that allowed them to distance themselves from the Jews.
This differed from Western Europe where states were powerful and authentic pride was used to engage with nationalism., The idea and realization of a nation-state was born out of revolution that stressed nationality before religion in Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, nation-states did not come into being until the dissolution of the Russian and Prussian empires. Yet, even though nation-states in the East were not born until the late eighteen-hundreds and early nineteen-hundreds, the concept of nationhood was not unknown to the people living in Eastern Europe. There were always feelings of nationalism, and when these nations felt like they were disrespected or were fearful of other nations living near them, they turned to ultra-nationalism to try to keep some of the pride integral to their identities. Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe was born from a combination of superstition, Church teachings, and hubris.
This need to create a strong Eastern European identity helped to fan the flames of the mass exodus of Jews from the region during the late eighteen-hundreds and throughout the nineteen-hundreds, as well as the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. As such, there are not many Jews still living in Eastern Europe, causing anti-Semitism to be based on a more theoretical idea of what Jews are. Anti-Semitism is embedded within Eastern European cultures; it is commonplace to use the term “Jew” as an insult and to hear conspiracy theories surrounding Jews and the Jewish state. Perhaps this is happening because the national identities of these states are still weak; they cannot exist so absolutely without a national enemy. Wistrich noted that to be Polish is to be Catholic. If Catholicism were removed from that categorization, the Polish identity would cease to exist in the way people need it to. This dilemma is applicable to the other Eastern European states that never existed without anti-Semitism as the dichotomous entity to their identities. Without an enemy that is completely vilified and ultimately foreign, the Eastern European identity could not exist.
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