thereafter, Dmowski’s ascendance to leadership marked a sharp decline for
Polish Jewry. In all, the experience of Jews in interwar Poland was the
inverse of that of Jews in the Soviet Union. The latter was good for Jews but
bad for Judaism. Interwar Poland was better for Judaism than for Jews.
Initially, the situation of Polish Jewry was defined by the National
Minorities Treaty, signed by Poland and the Allies in 1922. In accordance
with this treaty, the newly reconstituted Polish Republic promised to guar-
antee the political and cultural rights of national minorities, which during
the interwar period meant Ukrainians and Jews. In practice, this meant that
Jews were allowed to organize political parties and elect representatives from
each Jewish community to the Polish Sejm (parliament), and to establish a
network of state-funded Jewish schools. By 1922, there were thirty-five
Jewish delegates to the Sejm. By the mid-1920s, the three leading Jewish
political parties were Zionists, Bundists, and religious parties such as Agudat
Israel. The last won a plurality of Jewish communal elections; thus represen-
tatives of religious- dominated communities had the largest portion of the
Jewish bloc in the Sejm. The Gerer rebbe, the leader of the Gur Hasidim, was
the head of the Jewish bloc.
The three leading networks of Jewish schools paralleled the three parties.
Zionists set up Tarbut schools, secular Jewish schools conducted in Hebrew
whose curriculum derived from Asher Ginsberg’s notion of secular Jewish cul-
ture. Bundists set up Tsisho schools, a Yiddish acronym for Socialist Jewish
School Organization, which taught secular Yiddish culture. Religious parties
expanded the network of traditional Jewish schools in size and scope. To be sure,
state sponsorship of these schools did not last through the 1920s. Nonetheless,
the sanctioning of these schools by the state, seen together with the emergence of
Jewish political parties, realized the vision of Simon Dubnow’s Autonomism,
albeit in a more politically and religiously diverse form.
These political and cultural successes were mitigated by the growing economic
difficulties of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1926, Piłsudski instituted a series of statist
economic policies that, among other things, nationalized commerce and industry.
While not aimed at harming Jews economically, these policies forced many
Jewish merchants and industrialists out of this sector of the economy, precipitat-
ing a period of economic decline. Dmowski’s ascendance after 1935 brought a
sharp rightward shift in Polish politics, including the introduction of a massive
boycott of Jewish-owned businesses and industries. It is important to note that,
despite this decline, the situation of Polish Jews in 1939 was still qualitatively dif-
ferent from the situation in Nazi-occupied Poland. Nonetheless, by the end of the
1930s the situation of Polish Jewry had deteriorated. Thousands of young Polish
Zionists were preparing to emigrate to Palestine. That they remained in Poland
was due to the inaccessibility of Palestine by the late 1930s, which resulted from
the policies of the British Mandate and the growing conflict between the Yishuv
and the Arab population of Palestine and the Middle East.
214 From renewal to devastation, 1914–45