THE JEWISH COMMUNITY 187Commissar of Foreign Affairs, who was born at Bialystok, or Roza Luksemberg
(Luxemburg) (1870-1919), born at Zamosc, shared much of the Bund's outlook,
but tended to move directly into the all-Russian branches of the Social
Democratic Movement.
For the historian, the growth of Jewish political parties in the Polish
provinces offers striking parallels with contemporary developments in Polish
politics. Mutatis mutandis, the aims and demands of the Zionist movement for
an exclusive national homeland, not to mention their strident tone, closely
matched those of the Polish National Democrats; whilst the Zionists' ambiva-
lent relationship with Judaism ran parallel to that of the Polish nationalists with
the Roman Catholic Church. The attempts of Poale Zion to reconcile their
national and socialist interests reflected contemporary stresses within the PPS,
and led to exactly the same sorts of schisms and factions. Both the name and the
ideological stance of the Bund closely resembled those of the SDKPiL. None the
less, the measure of mutual sympathy and collaboration between the Jewish
parties and their local Polish counterparts varied enormously. The Zionists and
the National Democrats were competing for influence on the same middle-class
ground, and were offering diametrically opposed visions of the future - the one
purely Jewish, the other purely Polish. In consequence they regarded each other
with undisguised hatred, the former complaining about 'anti-Semitism' the lat-
ter about 'anti-Polonism'. The Jewish socialists enjoyed somewhat better rela-
tions with the PPS, especially when they chose to work for socialism at home in
Poland rather than abroad in Palestine. Polish-speaking Jews of the socialist
persuasion, of whom in Lodz, Warsaw, Grodno, and Bialystok there were
many, tended to join the PPS rather than the Paole Zion or the Bund. The
Bundists, whose only point of sympathy with the Zionists lay in their common
hostility to Polish nationalism, showed little concern for Polish affairs before the
First World War. After the October Revolution, the majority joined the
SDKPiL, and the PPS (Left) in the communist camp; but their violent suppres-
sion in Soviet Russia inspired a sudden change of heart. The Polish branch of the
Bund continued to function in Warsaw till 1939, and moved much closer to the
PPS. A small communist faction, the Kombund, existed in the political under-
world from 1921, in collaboration with the KPRP.^16 (See Chapter 22.)
The currents and eddies of Assimilation in the Polish provinces were
extremely complicated. They were determined not only by infinite gradations in
the extent to which Jews were willing to merge themselves into the population at
large, but also by the baffling variety of 'host communities' and by widely differ-
ing degrees of mutual antipathy. The problems arising from attempts to assim-
ilate the Jews into Polish culture offer but one example of problems which arose
in their varying relations with Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and
Byelorussians, with Catholics, Protestants, Uniates, Orthodox, and Muslims;
with the nobility, bureaucracy, intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, peasantry, and prole-
tariat; and with every conceivable combination of each and every one. Within
the Polish intelligentsia, Polonized Jews formed an important and prominent