Jüdische Stadtdeputierte in der Zweiten Polnischen Republik: Projekte – Strategien – Dynamiken[The Jewish city councilors in the Second Polish Republic: Plans, strategies, dynamic]

The history of the Jews in interwar Poland (1918–1939) is relatively poorly researched. This is surprising because a proper analysis of this subject is crucial to understanding the Holocaust and the Polish past after 1939. Moreover, within this large field of interwar Polish-Jewish studies, there are minor but important issues that are wholly neglected. One of them is the participation of the Jews in the urban self-government and city councils. A few studies on this topic do exist, but they are devoted to individual urban centers. The book under review presents a broader picture of the activities of Jewish local government officials in Poznań, Kraków, and Warsaw. These three major cities are taken as being representatives of three different parts of Poland, previously controlled by Germany, Austria, and Russia, and, after 1918, reunited into one independent Polish state.Dr. Kozińska-Witt is an experienced scholar and prolific author educated in Kraków and Tübingen. During her academic career, she has worked at several prestigious institutions, such as the Simon Dubnow Institute and the Geisteswissenschaftlichen Zentrum für Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas in Leipzig, Martin Luther University in Halle, and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She researches micro, local, and everyday history, particularly Jewish politicians, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs in Polish towns and cities in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The book under review is a summation of extensive research and numerous articles.For political reasons, the topic of the city councils in the Second Polish Republic of 1918–1939 and the study of Jewish history were discouraged in Poland before the fall of communism in 1989. This situation started to change in the 1990s, but, initially, most scholars were interested in macro history, in general the activities of the Jewish parties, and their participation in the Polish Parliament, the Sejm. However, the municipal elections reflected the political divisions among the Jews better than the parliamentary elections. The Jewish politicians and activists were more active in local self-government. They could articulate the Jewish population's opinions, needs, and demands better than the Jewish MPs. It was also possible to achieve more on the local scale than on the main level. The study of city self-governments shows differences between the Jewish population of various regions of Poland, it demonstrates the democratization of political life and its influence on the Jews, and it also illustrates the growth of antisemitism, particularly in the 1930s.Kozińska-Witt shows how the city councils of Kraków, Poznań, and Warsaw were different, and how the pre-1918 traditions and administrative practices influenced the Jewish population and their representatives in different ways. She also demonstrates how persistent were these local differences. Before World War I, Kraków and Poznań were provincial and unattractive administrative centers, developing slowly. The Jewish population constituted approximately twenty percent of Kraków's inhabitants and below five percent in Poznań, where it was decreasing. Kraków's Jewish community was rather conservative but, simultaneously, a Polish-assimilated group was relatively large and influential. Almost all the Jews of Poznań considered themselves to be “Germans of Mosaic faith” and identified with the German state, culture, and politics.Warsaw, however, was the largest Polish city of a metropolitan character, attractive and growing quickly. The Jews constituted over one-third of its population, and their co-religionists from other parts of Russia were coming. The city was the third largest urban center of the Tsarist Empire and the second largest Jewish community of the world; from a Jewish point of view—an extremely attractive cultural place with a tiny group of “assimilationists.” This was the Jewish capital of Eastern Europe. Yet, there was no self-government in Russia, while the Jews of Kraków and Poznań participated in local municipal representations, could hold state offices, and had been well represented in various economic institutions.After World War I, the new Polish authorities introduced democratic elections to the local self-government, and the Jews found themselves in the councils of all three analyzed cities. However, in Poznań, a tiny Jewish community, diminished by the escape of the German Jews after 1918, lost its representation in 1925. In Kraków and especially in Warsaw, the Jews faced a growing challenge from the political right and, after 1926, from the authoritarian government of Józef Piłsudski, even though most Jews considered him to be a friendly figure and politically supported him. Yet, despite his socialist past, he was not a democrat. In 1933, a new law reorganized the local government and reduced its competencies and autonomy. The April Constitution of 1935, Piłsudski's life achievement, added further restrictions.Despite all, local self-government could preserve a democratic modus operandi more effectively than the central institutions. On the other hand, however, the omnipresent and growing antisemitism was more visible on the local level than in the Sejm. After the death of Piłsudski in May 1935, his successors, divided and weakened, turned to the right, to radical nationalism and antisemitism, to strengthened their position. The brutalization of public life and the growing irrationality of the anti-Jewish attacks led to the idea of “driving out” the Jews from the city councils. In response, an increasing number of Jews turned to the left. After years of Orthodox and Zionist political domination in Warsaw, the Jewish Bund became the most powerful party on the Jewish street.Kozińska-Witt examines the results of the municipal elections in Poznań, Kraków, and Warsaw, introduces the councilors, and presents their struggle for equal rights for the Jews. She has identified two periods in the history of the Polish interwar self-government: before and after the Great Depression. Before it, the Jewish councilors were relatively successful: they managed to acquire state and municipal subsidies for Jewish institutions, and, sometimes, they achieved working compromises with their enemies—the radical right. After the Great Depression, the Piłsudski regime, in an attempt to answer for the catastrophic economic situation of Poland, intensified centralist, etatist, and interventionist policies, drastically limiting the prerogatives of self-government. The regime also adopted “official nationalism,” which demoted Polish Jews from second-class citizens to powerless, barely tolerated subjects, put beyond the nation's solidarity. The Jews were considered a separate estate, and social support for it was transferred from the state organs and city self-government to religious communities.The book under review is an essential contribution to the scholarly debate on the situation of the Jews in twentieth-century Poland. No historian active in this field can ignore this important publication, which should be translated into Polish and English.

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