Alien, Hostile, Dangerous:

The Image of the Jews in the Polish-Catholic Press in the 1930s

by Dr. David Silberklang

“Alien… hostile… dangerous… poison… depraved… hate-filled… enemies… pernicious… corrupting… foreign… tumor… pornographers… frauds… parasites… predators.”

Archbishop Adam Sapieha

These descriptions of Jews are not taken from a Nazi ideologue, but are the language of discourse in the intellectual Polish Catholic press in the 1930s. In a courageous but disturbing article appearing in the latest volume (32) of Yad Vashem Studies, Dr. Dariusz Libionka, senior lecturer at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, lets the words speak for themselves.

Libionka cites quotation after quotation, author after author, editor after editor, journal after journal, all with similar impact. The Jews were reviled with vehemence and conviction, and at times with language similar to that used by the Nazis. During the 1930s, the ‘Jewish Question’ became the main issue of Polish political life, explains Libionka. Regardless of the nature of the periodical, its target audience, or the political leanings of its editors, the urgency of finding a solution to the ‘problem’ exercised the Catholic intellectual press extensively.

This media feared assimilated Jews the most: “No cultural type is more dangerous than the ‘assimilated Jew,’” wrote the editor of Głos Narodu in 1937. This Jew was “an instrument of destruction,” whereas Judaism itself—and by definition its traditional adherents—was a “duplicitous… immoral… shallow, bland, formalized religion,” as well as “a form of materialism.” Jews were seen as conspiratorial communists and capitalists who had stolen Polish wealth—an alien race festering as an abscess on the body of the Polish nation, which had to be saved from the nefarious Jews. The threatened Polish people had “the right” to defend themselves against the Jews “by all decent means.”

A key influence on Polish Catholic intellectual attitudes towards Jews in this period was the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The widely respected scholar and priest Stanisław Trzeciak was the best-known advocate of “The Protocols” and in the second half of the 1930s, his writings reached a broad readership, especially in Przegląd Katolicki. The respect accorded him by the Catholic press leant his anti-Jewish articles an air of authority in the discourse. Judaism was charged with being “a system of contempt… without any trace of Christian forgiveness and love.” Certainly it was no surfeit of ‘forgiveness and love’ that led these Polish-Catholic authors and editors to attack the Jews so vehemently, viciously, and persistently, doing all in their power to inflame an already highly antisemitic atmosphere in Poland to fever pitch.

What could result from such an intense hostility? In an article written in 1936, Krakow Archbishop Adam Sapieha warned against Jewish employers “whose eyes are so clouded by greed that they cannot even see the looming danger, and practice ruthless exploitation in every area, preying on human misery.” The same Sapieha was largely unhelpful when approached by leaders of the remnant Jewish survivor community after the war, requesting he condemn antisemitism and the widespread physical attacks on Jewish survivors in Poland.

Publication of Yad Vashem Studies is assisted by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture

The virulent antisemitic atmosphere in prewar Poland—encouraged and aggravated by the intellectual Polish Catholic press—certainly did not turn all Poles into active accomplices of the Nazis. Yet two articles scheduled to be published in the next volume of Yad Vashem Studies, illustrate how Jews continued to be viewed as the “other,” the “foreign” and the “undesirable,” allowing their fate during the Holocaust and their needs afterward generally to receive minimal sympathy. In describing Polish wartime attitudes towards Jews, and Polish Church attitudes towards Jewish survivors in the immediate postwar years, researchers Joanna Michlic and Natalia Aleksiun respectively illustrate how little changed afterwards. With Libionka’s research as a foundation, perhaps their findings are not surprising. But the story told in these three articles is shocking and, in light of the current rise of anti-Jewish expression and the re-employment of age-old antisemitic stereotypes, the need for introspection deep.

The author is Editor of Yad Vashem Studies

Copyright ©2004 Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority