THE JEWISH COMMUNITY 191diminished the opportunities for traditional Jewish businesses. Unassimilated
Jews were not welcome in state employment, and were effectively barred from
a wide range of occupations, from the Army and Civil Service, even from the
schools, the state liquor monopoly, and the railways. In all the professions,
efforts, either covert or open, were made to keep the entry of Jews to a level
commensurate with their numbers in the population as a whole. No state sub-
sidies were forthcoming for Jewish schools. In this way,economic pressures
aggravated psychological insecurity. It has to be remembered that most Jewish
families found themselves in the Polish Republic irrespective of their personal
inclinations. Like the Palestinian Arabs after the Second World War, the Polish
Jews in 1918-2.1 found that a new state had been created around them, and that
they were hostages to political fortunes entirely beyond their control. Some
were favourably inclined; others were not. The Polish authorities encouraged
Jewish religious bodies but frowned on those which possessed a separatist or
nationalist flavour. What is more, an unprecedented demographic explosion
countermanded all attempts to alleviate social conditions. The Jewish popula-
tion rose to 2.7 million in 1931, and to 3.35 million in 1939. As a result, no less
than 400,000 Jews emigrated from Poland for good in two decades. Still more
would have left if entry to Palestine and to the USA had not been restricted.
These facts are incontestable. The difficulty is to put them into some sort of
meaningful perspective. In a new, multi-national society, intercommunal
antipathies were commonplace, and the Jews were not exempt from the irrita-
tions and antagonisms which divided every ethnic group from the others. Yet it
must be stressed that the pressures and discriminations to which the Jews were
exposed were nothing exceptional. In terms of wealth, education, and social
position, the Jews occupied a middling position among the minorities, inferior
no doubt to that of the Germans in the western districts, but superior to that of
the Ukrainians and Byelorussians in the east. In a society where the Jews formed
10 per cent of the total population - in Warsaw and Wilno 40 per cent, and in
towns such as Pinsk 90 per cent - it was difficult to raise the hysterical Jew-
scares which flourished in neighbouring countries. Almost every Polish family
possessed Jewish friends or relatives, traded in Jewish shops, consulted Jewish
doctors or lawyers, or drank their beer in the local Jewish tavern. The smooth
functioning of Polish society as a whole could not be divorced from the success
of the Jewish concerns which were integrated into it. One might have deplored
that dependence; but it was in no one's interest that radical measures be taken
against it. Only one influential Polish party, the National Democrats and their
successors, were openly hostile to 'the native foreigners in our midst'; and they
were no more rabid in their views on Jewry than on Germans, Ukrainians,
socialists, or gipsies. If we are to believe a leader of the Jewish Bund in pre-war
Warsaw, even the virulence of the National Democrats had its limits:
... the nationalists... had great psychological and other difficulties in accepting the
ideas of Fascism and Nazism... They were not revolutionaries like the Nazis in