THE GROWTH OF THE MODERN NATION 51not possible to lead two tribes of Chosen People through the same desert. (See
Chapter 9.)
Seen through the Jewish filter, the spectrum of Polish political life assumes an
entirely different aspect.^51 As a result of rooted opposition to separate Jewish
aspirations, a man like Staszic, who in Polish terms was considered a 'moder-
ate', and a 'Conciliator', became an 'anti-semite' and therefore an 'extremist'.
His pamphlet Concerning the Reasons for the Obnoxiousness of the Jews (1816)
earned him the label of 'the old Jew-baiter'. Similarly, General Krasiriski, who
as a faithful servant of the Tsar and an unashamed Russifier was deemed by
Poles to be a 'traitor', showed equal indifference to nationalist feelings of all
sorts and became in Jewish terms a 'moderate'. It was only on the Far Left that
Polish and Jewish politics tended to coincide. In the early decades, Lelewel or
Walerian Lukasinski were classified both as Polish patriots and as 'pro-
Semites'. At the end of the period, a number of progressive Jews, like Bernard
Hausner joined Pilsudski's Legions, just as their forebears had joined
Kosciuszko or Poniatowski. Most typical, however, were those Polish and
Jewish revolutionaries who, having rejected the bourgeois aspirations of their
respective national communities came together in the internationalist Marxist
movement.
To the north-east - that is, in the North Western Land of the Russian Empire
- the Poles came into conflict with the national revivals of the Baltic
Lithuanians, and of the Slavonic Byelorussians. Until the mid-nineteenth
century, the separate identity of these two peoples had not been generally recog-
nized, not even by themselves. Peter Kropotkin, writing in the first
edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica informed the world quite inaccurately
that the peoples of the former Grand Duchy consisted of Baltic 'Zhmudi', i.e.
Samogitians, and Slavic Lithuanians. No one seriously imagined that they could
become a serious political factor. But they did.
For five hundred years, the Lithuanians had lived in political union with the
Poles in a situation closely analogous to that of the Scots and English. Until
1793, their Grand Duchy had formed part of the united Republic of
Poland-Lithuania. In the course of this long union, the Polish language, like
English in Scotland, had been almost universally adopted by the ruling and edu-
cated classes. The Lithuanian language, like the Gaelic language of the Scots in
Scotland, had only survived in the remoter rural areas, and in certain segments
of the peasantry. It was not normally spoken by any significant group in the
country's capital, Vilnius (Wilno), whose Lithuanian population at the last
Tsarist Census in 1897 reached only 2. per cent. It had no settled written form,
and no literature of note. Its only centres of study and publication lay across the
frontier in East Prussia, in so-called 'Little Lithuania', where the districts of
Klajpeda (Memel) and Tylza (Tilsit) were inhabited by a Protestant Lithuanian
minority. Lithuanian Nationalism developed in reaction on the one hand
against the Polish assumption that Lithuania belonged to Poland, and on the
other hand against the attempts of the Tsarist Government to impose Russian