The Jews in Poland and Russia: Interview with Antony Polonsky

Oct 16, 2013
Polonsky Vol. 3

On Tuesday, October 22, Antony Polonsky, the Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University will appear at YIVO to discuss his monumental three-volume The Jews in Poland and Russia (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization).

He is interviewed here by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman.

RN: Why did you see a need for a new three-volume work on the history of Jews in Poland and Russia? Hasn't this already all been written about at great length?

AP: In the last 25-30 years, a great deal of research has been done on the history of Jews both in Poland and in the areas east of Poland which were formerly part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This has been mostly detailed investigation of different aspects of this history. I think that there is now a need for a new synthesis. Historical study seems to oscillate between detailed investigation of problems and syntheses. One example of a synthesis is The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, which is a major achievement. But what I wanted to do was not to provide an encyclopedia, but, instead, a synthesis through the eyes of one person, and perhaps irrationally, I thought I could do it myself!

RN: Looks like you pulled it off! What were your primary sources of new scholarship?

Antony Polonsky
Antony Polonsky

AP: For the last 25 years, I've been the principal editor of Polin: Studies in Polish JewryThis was a yearbook that was established at Oxford in 1984, and its goal was to unite all scholars working in this field and to give them a forum in which they could discuss their views. I generally tried to devote each volume to a specific theme and I looked at the themes about which I myself felt that the state of knowledge was defective. So over this quarter of a century I was able to commission articles from all of the people that I regarded as the key scholars in the field. That was my primary basis for the book. But, of course, there is also a huge mass of secondary literature which has developed. And since 1991, the archives in Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania have been opened, and even before that, the Polish archives were opened, and there are also important sources there. But this a synthetic work and it is primarily based on newspapers, journals, and secondary material.

RN: What would you say are the most important revisions that have been made to our understanding of this history?

AP: Well, I think that the general character of this history is well-established within the Jewish world and it contains an inherent contradiction. On the one hand, when we think of the history of the Jews in Poland-Lithuania and its successor states, we think of a succession of disasters starting with the Khmel’nyts’kyi Uprising and ending with the Holocaust. So that this history is seen from the start to the end as one of persecution, violence, and anti-Jewish activities. On the other hand, we have a very romanticized view of this past, the idea that when Jews were living in the shtetl, they lived harmoniously with one another: they all believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and everyone lived happily in a religious/cultural community. Now, obviously, these two points of view—the overly optimistic and the overly pessimistic—are incompatible. But they both seem to be held simultaneously in the eyes of many in the Jewish world. And what I wanted to do was to provide a corrective which was neither excessively pessimistic or excessively optimistic.

Poland-Lithuania was the heartland of East European Jewry. This was, from the middle of the 17th century, the largest Jewish community in the world. This was the community which produced Hasidism, its misnagdic opponents, Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and the various political movements which developed in the late nineteenth century: Zionism, Bundism, and the various combinations of Zionism and socialism. But at the same time, the transformation of the position of the Jews which occurred in Western and Central Europe, from a religious and cultural community transcending national boundaries into citizens, occurred only partially in the Polish lands. There was a minority of Jews who considered themselves Poles of the Jewish faith and a similar minority in the areas directly incorporated into the tsarist empire who considered themselves Russian-speaking Jews, but the majority of Jews in this area were not integrated, and from the 1880s, when the tsarist government began to pursue a more hostile policy toward the Jews, they began to see the Jews as an ethnic rather than as a religious group. And this was when the earlier mentioned new political movements emerged. So this is the general picture which I've tried to draw.

I'm not sure that it is a fundamental revision. People have drawn different lessons from what I've written. A well-known Israeli historian said that this is a book that shows that Zionism was the only solution. It is certainly true that all the other attempted ways of dealing with "the Jewish question" did not succeed in Polish lands. But at the same time, other scholars have seen this as a vindication of those Jews who sought integration, who sought to transform themselves into Poles or Russians of the Jewish faith as had occurred in Germany and as had occurred in the United States—to have a loyalty that is both national and Jewish. I've tried to give every different element within the Jewish world its voice. Although I do have my own opinions, I've tried to keep them out as far as possible.

RN: You have a separate chapter on women in the second volume, which covers the years 1881-1914. Has the experience of Jewish women been a neglected topic in the historiography to date?

AP: Yes, I think it has. Obviously, in pre-modern Jewish life women had a separate, but in fact, inferior status. And the attempt to transform the status of women and the various crises resulting from the inferior status of women have been a matter for considerable investigation. Indeed, I also commissioned a volume of Polin on this subject, and I was heavily dependent on my two co-editors there, the late Paula Hyman, a great scholar of Jewish women's history, and my student and now colleague at Brandeis, Professor Chae-Ran Freeze. People ask me why I had a separate chapter. Shouldn't one integrate the history of Jewish women into the different chapters? And I didn't have another separate chapter in the third volume because by that time there was no space. But I felt that one needed a separate chapter in order to highlight what was specific to the experience of Jewish women. And also there, as throughout the book, I tried to use literature because the Jews were a stateless people and expressed their opinions of how they felt about their situation and where they were through literature. I tried to use literature not only by men, but also literature written by women. And I think that does give one a feeling for how women themselves saw their position.  I was hoping to give a voice to people who previously had been relatively voiceless.

RN: In fact, it's pretty notable for this kind of survey that you've included many excerpts of writing contemporary to the time periods you were writing about. Can you say a few more words about why you felt it was important to include these voices?

AP: Let me say, that I have produced a one-volume abridgment and in the one-volume abridgment, which is about 450 pages long, I cut out most of those quotations. The end result is a much sharper picture but it lacks the nuances.

So I felt that those extracts were necessary to convey how people saw what was happening to them. Here, I have to add a word of thanks to my publisher. I don't think many publishers would allowed me to go on at the length that I did and to include these large numbers of extracts that I did in the way that the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization did. When this book started, it was intended as a one-volume work, 500 pages. I wrote the first volume which was to go to 1914 and it was clear that I couldn't condense it into one volume so my editor said, "OK, so do two volumes." Then, when I finished the first volume, it was actually so large that we decided that we would have to make two volumes out of the first volume. The third volume equally could have been made into two volumes. We decided that we wanted to keep it at one volume but it's a very large book. It's over a thousand pages.

So I felt that the excerpts from the literature were necessary to give the complete picture I was aiming at. I also tried to use not only the literature which Jews wrote in Jewish languages (Hebrew and Yiddish), but also what Jews wrote in German, Polish, and Russian, because Jews write differently when they write believing that there is a larger non-Jewish audience listening to them, than when they write largely for themselves.

The great problem in all historical writing is the need to avoid hindsight. We know what happened to the Jews of Eastern Europe. It's very difficult today, having seen the mass murder of the Jews during the Second World War and the attempt of Stalin to destroy Jewish culture, to understand how things looked at the time to Jews. And the picture which emerges if you use contemporary sources is one in which people didn't believe that their communities would be destroyed, that this was a history that was going to end in blood and disaster.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

Attend the lecture.

Read Adam Kirsch's review of The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume II: 1881 to 1914 in The New Republic.

Buy the three-volume The Jews in Poland and Russia:

Read an excerpt from Volume 2 (1881-1914).

Buy the one-volume The Jews in Poland and Russia: A Short History.