THE JEWISH COMMUNITY 189To these ingredients, let us add Yiddish, the long black coat, and early marriages. Let
us sugar it all over with poverty, which is responsible for swindling and usury, and we
shall have the whole cake ... It is unsavoury; but I cannot believe that it will not collapse
one day under the pressure of education and progressive ideas.^17
Prus's arguments contain their share of liberal fallacies; and most of his predic-
tions were not realized; but they reveal the main arguments and counter-
arguments of his day. In the decade before the First World War, when the
growth of Zionism invalidated all denials of a separate Jewish nationality, the
level of debate deteriorated. The 'Anti-Semites' and 'the Pro-Semites' battled
each other incessantly, in a barrage of recriminations and of mutually exclusive
claims.
In the circumstances, a measure of intercommunal animosity was perhaps
inevitable. It was encouraged by the age-old social and economic deformations
of Polish and Jewish society, by poverty and demographic pressures, and above
all, by the growing tendency in Eastern Europe for all national groups to seek
their own separate salvation in their own separate way. Polish hostility towards
the Jews was complemented by Jewish hostility towards the Poles. In an age of
rampant Nationalism, inter-communal solidarity was badly hampered. So long
as the Empires of the partitioning powers remained in place, the numerous
renascent nations of the region were trapped like rats in a cage, where it was eas-
ier to bite one's neighbour than to break down the bars of the common servi-
tude.
During the First World War and its aftermath the predicament of the Jewish
community entered a phase of acute danger. Having no vested interest in the vic-
tory of one side or the other, they were blamed for disloyalty by all sides at once.
Having no means of raising a force of their own, they were one of the few
national minorities of the area who could not see to their own defence. For seven
long years, from August 1914 to October 1920, Galicia and the Pale were the
scene of innumerable military actions. They were trampled incessantly by
the combatants of the Eastern Front, of the Russian Civil War, of the
Polish-Ukrainian War, and of the Polish-Soviet War. When the fighting finally
stopped, the Treaty of Riga left a million Jews on the Soviet side of the frontier,
and over 2 million in the Polish Republic.
The rebirth of Poland seemed to many Jews to herald the crossing of Jordan.
The destruction of the Russian Empire, the support of the western democracies,
and the founding of the League of Nations with its guarantee of Minority Rights
all pointed to an end of the chronic insecurity which had prevailed for almost
half a century. With this in view, Jews volunteered for service both in Pitsudski's
Legions and in the Polish Army during the Soviet War; and a substantial element
openly voiced their sympathies for the new Republic right from the beginning.
Notwithstanding the hostility of the Zionists, and of extreme Polish nationalists
(who succeeded at the height of the Battle of Warsaw in persuading the autho-
rities to intern all Jewish volunteers as potential Bolshevik sub-versionists),
the majority of established Jewish leaders decided to co-operate with the