How Jewish Is the History of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth?

ENWhen a new statue of Roman Dmowski (1864–1939) was unveiled in Warsaw in 2006, around two hundred people gathered to honor the founder of the National Democracy movement (Narodowa Demokracja, ND) and leading proponent of ethnonationalist visions of a Polish state: “Poland for Poles.” The monument was later regularly defaced, but also became a locus of Polish nationalist circles. The commemoration of Dmowski became a catalyst for yearly marches across Warsaw on November 11, the anniversary of Poland’s regained independence in 1918. Since 2011, the nationalist “March of Independence” has gone mainstream, becoming an annual fixture of Polish public life and attracting thousands of participants claiming “Poland for Poles” and sometimes chanting far-right and antisemitic slogans. Every year a new theme is chosen for the march, each focusing on a nationalist message often framed in terms of “tradition” harking back to the imagined history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Some participants have even appeared as winged hussars riding their horses through the streets of contemporary Warsaw, evoking the memory of battles in which the hussars vanquished Poland’s enemies. The memory of the premodern past has been flattened and simplified in these nationalist circles. “From Sobieski to Dmowski,” some signs proclaimed, connecting Dmowski to seventeenth-century John III Sobieski (r. 1674–1696), the king of the multi-ethnic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth best known for his victories over the Ottoman Turks at Khotyn (1673; Pol. Chocim) and Vienna (1683). The “Poland” of yesteryear that today’s Polish nationalists conjure up in the figure of King John Sobieski did not exist. The slogan “Poland for Poles” articulates a monolithic ethnocentric vision that only became a reality after the Second World War.For the current Polish nationalists, Sobieski defended Christian Europe from Islam. But they conveniently forget that John Sobieski’s Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a multiethnic and multicultural republic of nobles. The king was indeed fighting the military forces of an Islamicate empire; but on his side were also Muslim Tatars, deeply rooted inhabitants of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whom the king rewarded with privileges and land - such as the village of Kruszyniany in the Podlachia region, where there is still an active mosque to this day. While this memory of “Polish” history and tradition is patently false and full of forgetting, its roots lie in nineteenth-century national historiographies. The modern study of history that emerged at this time was supposed to offer a new objective “scientific” method of studying the past. However, the writing of history was placed at the service of newly emerging national states, identities, and ideologies. This political purpose resulted in the sharpening of ethnic understandings of history. German, Polish, and other national histories thus tended to exclude groups that were not part of a given ethnonational conception of the nation. This was, as Sebastian Conrad has argued, a “birth defect” of “modern academic disciplines.” In Polish historiography, until recently, minority groups - such as Ukrainians, Muslim Tatars, Jews, Scots, and Armenians - often had little place. When they did appear, they were generally presented as outsiders, or, in the case of Ukrainians, even as enemies. But while Scots assimilated, Muslim Tatars remained a tiny minority, and Ukrainians eventually succeeded in creating their own state, the dominant historiographical framework effectively excluded Jews as foreign, “alien,” and peripheral to national narratives.As a result, the history of the Jews in Poland-Lithuania was long confined to Jewish scholars writing for Jewish readers. And when nineteenth- and twentieth-century Polish historians did write about Jews, their writing was often permeated with hostility and a sense of separation, as in Władysław Smoleński’s late nineteenth-century description of Jews as corpus in corpore, status in statu - an idea that persisted for many decades. But were Jews indeed so alien and insular as the popular opinion and some scholarly analyses have claimed? This chapter presents evidence to the contrary, arguing that Jews and Jewish communities - in spite of their differences and conflicts with Christian neighbors - formed an integral part of the composite social structures of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth [p. 27-29].