joanna michlicarticle2historicaldebate

8/3/2019 Joanna Michlicarticle2historicaldebate

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Joanna B. MichlicMarch, 17-19 2009, Jerusalem

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The Past That Will Not To Go Away: The Polish Historical Debate about Jan T.

Grosss Fear. Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz(2006, 2008) and the Study of

Early Postwar Anti-Semitism.

Introduction

In his study into the historical persistence of belief in ritual murder,Legenda

Krwi. Analiza Krytyczno-Historyczna Tzw. Mordu Rytualnego, published just one year

after the Kielce pogrom of 1946, the orientalist Tadeusz Zaderecki sets out his motives in

writing the forty-five-page monograph. Zaderecki, who had arrived in the early postwar

years in Poland from Lww, was shocked by his discovery that in the post-Holocaust

reality, belief in ritual murder exerted a strong hold on significant sections of Polish

society. His goals, in writingLegenda Krwi were to delineate in a scholarly fashion, the

history of ritual murder accusation, and to expose the false character of this belief.

Zadereckis other major aims were to facilitate further critical study of ritual murder

accusations, and to gain intellectual and moral support for his position amongst those

whom he describes as people of goodwill.

InFear,published first in English 60 years after the Kielce pogrom, Jan Tomasz

Grosss principal aims are much more expansive and far-reaching. They define what can

be called the Gross phenomenon with its impact on and interaction with postcommunist

Polish historiography and collective memory. As in his previous bookNeighbors. The

Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, published first in Polish in

2000 and next in English in 2001, Gross raises the problem of postwar Polish

historiography of the wartime and early postwar periods, and of the Poles self-image as

the only victims and heroes during the Second World War and during the communist

takeover of power between 1945 and 1949. ThusFearcontinues to set out a clear

counter-memory to the accepted canon of historical awareness and national self-image

and myths of these two periods.

LikeNeighbors, Fearis also directed at the community of professional historians

and constitutes a direct polemic with the dominant paradigms of postwar Polish

historiography of Polish-Jewish relations between 1939 and 1949.


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Yet unlikeNeighbors, inFear, Gross does not use an unknown event in the

history of Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War, the Jedwabne massacre

of July 10 1941, to question, challenge and reshape the existing historical perspectives.

Instead, with the same purpose in mind, he focuses on early postwar historical events thathave entered Polish historiography in the last two decades. He discusses the social

situation of the remnant of Polish Jews in the early postwar period and in particular, the

etiology of the anti-Jewish violence of that time. Regarding the latter, Gross concentrates

on the best-known, most-widely researched, and most-widely publicized event, namely

the Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946, whose gore, brutality, and scope of the death, shocked

the world.

Gross offers a new, passionate and provocative explanation and interpretation of

early postwar anti-Jewish violence based on his reading of published and well-known

archival data. His goal in writingFear, as he informs the reader in the introduction, is to

disentangle anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz from various phenomena with

which it has been conflated. The key phenomenon from which Gross sets out to

disentangle anti-Semitism is the anti-Jewish clich of Judeo-communism. His core

interpretation of the etiology of early postwar anti-Jewish violence is delivered in one

biting sentence: I believe, of a comprehensive documented story: it was widespread

collusion in the Nazi-driven plunder, spoliation, and eventual murder of the Jews that

generated Polish anti-Semitism after the war, not the alleged postwar Jewish collusion in

the imposition of Communism on the Poles. Thus he introduces a vision of Polish-

Jewish relations totally different from the prevailing ideological and social scientific

paradigms and master narratives in Polish historical writing, awareness, and collective

memory.

Fearreveals certain unattractive truths about Polish attitudes and actions towards

Jews during the Holocaust, and about the brutal violence the Jewish survivors faced,

upon returning to their homes, at the hands of their former Christian Polish neighbors and

other members of Polish society in the early postwar period.Fearalsotakes the reader

through a day in the life of a Holocaust survivor in early postwar Poland, documenting

the fear Jews continued to feel in their daily lives in the face of latent and violent anti-

Semitism. Gross treats the wartime and early postwar periods not as separate, but as


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interconnected historical times. This is a new approach as far as Polish historiography is

concerned, but not in English language scholarly discussion of Polish-Jewish relations

and the memory of these relations, see, for example, Joanna B. Michlic,Polands

Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present, and MichaelSteinlauf,Bondage to the Dead. In Grosss view the social environment or the context of

the wartime period provides evidence in which to study the causes of early postwar

violent anti-Semitism.

One might disagree with certain lines of Grosss arguments, or with key elements

of his explanatory framework of the etiology of early postwar anti-Jewish violence. Still

one has to agree withFears underlying assumption that the history of early postwar anti-

Semitism has to be retold anew in Poland.Fear, likeNeighbors, is written in the essayist

genre, a form that allows the reader to engage with new concepts, new observations,

eloquent new reflections and new interpretations, not necessarily fully developed.Fearis

not a comprehensive synthetic study providing an overview of the literature of the history

of Polish-Jewish relations, and one that refers in a systematic fashion to the theoretical

and psychological literature of ethnic violence. Thus, likeNeighbors,Feardoes not offer

a closure on the subject, but rather presents itself as an intellectually provoking invitation

to further scholarly discussion that might lead to a deeper understanding of early postwar

Polish anti-Semitism, of the social situation of surviving Polish Jews, and of the twentieth

century Polish social history. In other words,Fearinvites a fresh look at the history of

wartime and early postwar Polish-Jewish relations and wartime and early postwar Polish

society, and thus at Polish national mythology and identity.Fearitself also demonstrates

that there is no single proper method of historical investigation and interpretation. That

is the crux of its purpose and meaning.

Responses towardsFear

Has Grosss call been answered? Who has responded to his invitation by engaging

with Fearin meaningful and constructive ways? Who has responded by taking a fresh

look at twentieth century Polish history and collective identity? And who has manifestly

failed to engage with it in an intellectually constructive manner?


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The Polish debate aboutFearbegan in 2006 after the publication of the English

version ofFear, and intensified prior to and after the publication of the Polish edition of

Fearon January 11, 2008. A close look at this debate and its accompanying cultural

events suggests that it was primarily non-historically trained intellectuals such as thephilosopher Barbara Skarga, the ethnographer Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, the journalists

Halina Bortnowska and Teresa Bogucka, and young artists who responded to Grosss

invitation in the most intellectually meaningful and constructive ways. This outcome

should not be regarded entirely as a surprise, since in the earlier debate aboutNeighbors,

the non-historically trained intellectuals had also succeeded in producing the most

sophisticated observations and deep reflections about attitudes and actions towards Polish

Jews before, during and after the Holocaust, and about Polish national identity and

mythology. As in the debate aboutNeighbors, the key characteristic of their reactions to

Fearwas to open a conversation on the subject: to look at it in a fresh way, rather than

avoiding it or closing it altogether.

For example, in her essay O Strachu, the literary historian Alina Brodzka-Wald

calls for Poles to look critically and honestly into Polish national history; to accept the

painful and distressing facts of the wartime and early postwar anti-Jewish violence in

Poland. She argues that Grosss detailed depiction constitutes a necessary counterbalance

to the one-sided idealized image of a national history conjured by contemporary

hypocritical manipulators of historical facts. She insists that without accepting the darkest

aspects of Polish behavior towards Jews, Poles will continue to live a lie.

In a similar vein, in the interview Polacy sbardziej nietolerancyjni od innych,

the sociologist and journalist Kinga Dunins warns against failure in coming to terms

with historical truths about the early postwar anti-Jewish violence and in not accepting

this brutal and shameful chapter of history as an integral part of a collective portrayal of

modern Polish society. She evaluates current indifference - if not hostility - towardsFear,

and to the process of coming to terms with this history, as a failure that can only have

detrimental effects on contemporary Polish society, and specifically on its relationships

with ethnic and cultural minorities, both in the present and in the future.


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Fearalso inspired a play about the Holocaust Nic co ludzkie, directed by Pawe

Passini, Piotr Ratajczak and ukasz Witt-Michaowski, staged at the Cultural Center in

Lublin on January 11, 2008.

Conversely, the majority of professional historians, representatives of the RomanCatholic Church (to whom Grosss call was, in a sense, specifically directed), and various

commentators from the major Polish dailiesRzeczpospolita andDziennik, missed Grosss

invitation altogether. Their responses toFearwere by no means uniform: they varied

along different ideological lines. On the whole, these responses were overwhelmingly

negative and did not see inFearany cognitive, educational and moral value. These

responses can be viewed as embedded in fixed modes of thinking, ideological

perspectives and historical frames that constitute a barrier to any engagement with the

subject in a fresh or novel manner.

The negative responses of various representatives of the institutionalized Roman

Catholic Church and journalists for Catholic publications (which are not the subject of

any extensive discussion here) reveal the limits of the self-critical position within the

Roman Catholic Church as far as the Churchs own role in disseminating anti-Jewish

attitudes and in causing violent anti-Jewish actions. The comments of some Catholic

representatives on Grosss brief comparative remarks about anti-Jewish violence in early

postwar Poland and the genocidal violence in Rwanda in the 1990s, also reveal certain

cultural prejudices, and a major ahistorical tendency to naively treat Polish anti-Jewish

attitudes and actions as a special case, that absolutely cannot be compared to any other

cases of anti-minority prejudice and interethnic violence.

So far, the critical review of an AmericanIsraeli scholar, David Engel On

Continuity and Discontinuity in Polish-Jewish Relations: Observations onFear,

published inEast European Politics and Societies, vol. 21, no. 5 in 2007, has been the

most constructive and engaging response toFearby a professional historian. In his

review Engel discusses three interconnected lines of inquiries into Polish Jewish relations

that should be taken up in order to test the validity of Grosss explanatory framework and

his interpretation of the etiology of anti-Jewish violence. Engel suggests a new

comparative diachronic analysis that could reveal whether Polish behavior towards Jews

after the war displayed a novel, virulent quality. He proposes an examination testing


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whether early postwar virulence constituted a social norm or was specific only to certain

social groups. Engel also urges to garner further evidence in order to establish whether

there were any new causes of early postwar anti-Semitism.

In the Polish debate, the most engaging response toFear, and ofimportance forfuture historical discussion, was written not by a historian, but by the young literary

historian and a photographer Elbieta Janicka, author of an important work on the

wartime poet Andrzej Trzebiski. In her critical review Mord rytualny z aryjskiego

paragrafu. O ksice Jana Tomasza Grossa Strach. Antysemityzm w Polsce TuPo

Wojnie. Historia moralnej zapaci, published in the quarterlyKultura i Spoeczestwo,

no. 2, 2008, (pp.229-252), Janicka closely examines each of Grosss main arguments. She

proposes an opposite interpretation of the etiology of anti-Jewish violence to that of the

author ofFear. Her major line of argument is that this violence did not have a novel

quality and that its causes are rooted in the prewar period. Her interpretation is built on

what can be called a constructive discussion or conversation withFear. This approach

clearly differs from the responses of the majority of Polish historians who focused on

historical details and aimed at showing flaws in Grosss discussion of the details, rather

than also critically engaging with his main theses and proposing their own comprehensive

interpretation. Of course Janickas position begs for future historical investigations as to

whether hers and Grosss interpretations, which she presents as mutually exclusive, can

in fact be complementary.

Fearhas the potential to stimulate new lines of historical investigation into the

early postwar anti-Jewish violence. Much of the Polish historical debate aboutFeardoes

nothing to advance knowledge of early postwar Polish-Jewish relations and anti-Jewish

violence, and indeed demonstrates that with the exception of a few individuals, the

majority of its participants tend to be entrenched and locked in fixed modes of thinking

about Polish history and Polish-Jewish relations. These participants are unwilling both

for ideological and methodological reasons to look at this history with a fresh eye, and

to meaningfully engage and converse with new interpretations. Thus, the historical debate

illustrates both the constrains of the Polish historians investigations and simultaneously

provides interesting data for the study of contemporary historical awareness and official

history writing in Poland. It reveals how enmeshed the historians are in particular visions


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of Polish national memory and identity and how they rework these visions to suit

particular contemporary interests.

The voices of historians who took part in the debate can be divided into two

groups: those who belong to the reestablished core ethno-nationalist school, rooted inRoman Dmowskis vision of Poland; and those who are not part of that former group,

including individuals who publicly oppose the ethno-nationalist model of Polish history,

(This is not to say that in some cases such as Krzysztof Jasiewicz, there is no radical shift

of positions from the latter to the former, see Jasiewiczs review of the FilmDefiance).

The ethno-nationalist historians gained an upper hand in the Institute of National Memory

(IPN) in 2005, and hence can promote and implement their vision of Polish history in

educational programs and historical works under the auspices of the IPN institute. As in

the earlier debate aboutNeighbors, the chief protagonists of this group, Marek Jan

Chodakiewicz, Jan ary, Bogdan Musia, Piotr Gontarczyk, John Radzilowski and

Ryszard Tyndorf, issued the most derogatory statements against Gross andFear, echoing

their former positions taken up in the debate aboutNeighbors. Once again they accused

Gross of lacking the necessary scholarly training to carry out historical research, and of

presenting anti-Polish positions that could lead, or had already led, to the sabotaging of

current transnational Polish-Jewish dialogue. There is also nothing new in the ways these

individuals handle the difficult aspects of early postwar Polish history in relations to the

Polish Jewish community. Just as in the case of the Jedwabne massacre of 10 July 1941,

they use a range of strategies to rationalize and justify early postwar anti-Jewish violence

and to minimize its criminal nature.

Typically they shift blame for anti-Jewish violence upon the victims themselves,

by applying as an explanatory concept, a diffused, to a lesser or greater degree, form of

Judeocommunism. At the same time, somehow contradicting themselves, they also claim

that at this point historians do not have adequate evidence to fully grasp and interpret

early postwar anti-Jewish violence and Polish -Jewish relations. Thus the idea that we

do not know everything supposedly should lead, in their view, to the dismissal of any

interpretations of events which do not fit their logic and arguments. Their main aim is to

show Christian/ethnic Polish society in a good light, Polish-Jewish relations as a mixture

of good and bad, and to blame the communist postwar regime, and Jewish participation


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in it for any negative actions taken by Poles against Jews. They also apply the same

themes retrospectively in the discussion of anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1941 to

claim that the Poles, not Jews, were a double or continual victim of Jewish actions

between 1939 and 1949. The individuals belonging to this school explain anti-Jewishattitudes and actions as a rational reaction against anti-Polish actions on the part of Jews,

an explanation that Gross (and others) set out to debunk.

In order to dismiss Grosss thesis about opportunistic wartime behavior of Poles

who despoiled their Jewish neighbors, ethno-nationalist historians have developed a new

theme, one that reinforces the image of the Polish Jews as the bad/untrustworthy

protagonists, and of Christian Poles as the good honorable protagonists. Bogdan

Musia is the author of the most elaborated version of this new theme, conceiving the

surviving Polish Jews as a community of swindlers and cheats who themselves took

advantage of the properties left by their murdered fellow Jews in the post-war period.

One new element in the debate aboutFearwas the official IPNs promotion of

Marek Jan ChodakiewiczsPo Zagadzie. Stosunki polsko-ydowskie 1944-1947during

the launch of the Polish edition ofFearin Poland. Chodakiewiczs work was conceived

as a counterwork toFear, one that would block its positive reception and that would

unmask its alleged anti-Polish character. In other wordsPo Zagadzie was conceived as a

whip directed atFear. This is a good illustration of the extent to which the current

leadership of IPN politicizes history as a discipline. The ethno-nationalist historians treat

the history of Polish-Jewish relations as a zero-sum game, our version or theirs. Such

treatment has become an accepted norm of a historical discourse in the post-Jedwabne

period. This approach might prove the biggest threat to the future scholarly history

writings in Poland and specifically to the integration of the history of Polish-Jewish

relations into Polish history in a way that will not offer an ideological bias.

The second group of historians who took part in the debate, unlike the ethno-

nationalists, does not represent a single uniform ideological agenda. This is a group

consisting of many accomplished, first-rate scholars who have produced cutting edge

works on modern Polish history and on Polish-Jewish relations. With the exception of

Marcin Kula and Andrzej Friszke, the reception ofFearwithin this group was polite but

lukewarm. On the whole they missed the opportunity to take up Grosss invitation to


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critically explore the regnant interpretations of modern Polish history (including their

own positions) and place them in a new light. They also failed to provide a full

constructive counter-interpretation to that of Grosss.

In his article Obrocy Swoich, the social historian Marcin Kula analyses someformal/technical reasons for this lukewarm reception. The first is a major tendency in

history book reviews to concentrate on details only and eagerly search for factual errors

in ones colleagues writings, rather than focusing on main lines of arguments and

interpretation. Polish history writing generally tends to be rooted in a traditional positivist

model, to focus on one period, and to be much more descriptive than analytical and

interpretive. The second interwoven reason is that Polish historians conceive of one

traditional form of writing history as the only proper method of scholarly expression.

Thus they find the choice to depart from the typical descriptive historical narrative by

applying theoretical works and open narratives which self-consciously uncover the

process by which the historian constructs his or her argument, an oddity.

In his article Gross i chopcy narodowcy, Andrzej Friszke takes up Grosss

invitation to question, reexamine and more deeply reflect on contemporary conditions of

writing Polish social history of the 1940s. Friszke correctly identifies a major weakness

in Grosss approach, the exclusion of the prewar historical context from his analysis, and

a lack of nuance in the discussion of some of the issues. But he does not deny the validity

of Gross main theses about wartime spoliation of Jewish property and about the ethnic

Polish composition of the ranks-and-files of the early postwar communist regime in the

making. Friszke notes the strength ofFearin its ability to question and reshape major

historical themes such as the Polish underground states treatment of the Holocaust, the

reaction of the institutionalized Roman Catholic Church to the ongoing destruction of

Polish Jews during WWII, and the attitudes of Polish society, emerging from the war,

towards the newly forming communist regime. Friszke, who himself is a leading

authority on the history of post-1945 underground movements, sees inFear, an

opportunity to rework the general historical portrayal of Polish society of the 1940s and

1950s. But he also viewsFearas a contributing factor to the polarization of the historical

discourse between the ethno-nationalist historical school and the more inclusive

democratic/pluralistic history school, rooted in the PPS traditions. His latter remark


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somewhat misses the point because Gross is not simply a co-producer of this

polarization, but rather is its manifestation. The polarization of the current historical

discourse on Polish-Jewish relations and on other national figures, events and

developments shows a societal divide with deep historical and ideological roots.Historians, like other people born into certain communities, are shaped by certain

ideologies and visions of their national history, which, in turn, influence their own

writings. This approach has been particularly intense in Eastern Europe, but is not unique

to the region.

In her various polite and elegant responses toFear, Boena Szaynok, who is

recognized as the main historical authority on the Kielce pogrom, questions Grosss

approach to the subject and his explanation of the etiology of early postwar anti-Jewish

violence. She is neither keen on the language in which Gross presents his theses nor on

the form in which they are delivered. In her discussion ofFear, she focuses on historical

details pertaining to the discussion of anti-Jewish violence, especially the Kielce pogrom.

In her overview of the Kielce pogrom, she accuses Gross for not taking into account the

conceptualization of the Kielce pogrom put forward by Krystyna Kersten in the early

1990s. According to it, scholars do not know the extent to which this pogrom was a

provocation masterminded by the Soviet or Polish communist forces in order to

undermine the good name of Poland, and to what extent a spontaneous riot. Szaynok

overlooks that the provocation theory as an analytical tool is very problematic, and so far

has not contributed anything constructive to the discussion of the etiology of early

postwar anti-Jewish violence. It should be abandoned altogether because, after all, it is

rooted in the early postwar ideological battle.

Underground and official oppositional forces and the communist regime used the

provocation theory in a propaganda war with each other immediately after the Kielce

pogrom. At the center of all the parties discourse was not the issue of the Jewish victims

and their suffering, but the issue of the blemish made on the good image of Poland by the

Kielce pogrom. Coming from opposing ideological and political stands they all implied

one way or the other that the true Poles had nothing to do with anti-Jewish violence, that

the violence had no spontaneous character. Thus, historians of various ideological

provenances who have incorporated such assumption into their writings, consciously or


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unconsciously tend to minimize the spontaneous aspect of the violence or not deal with a

problem of spontaneity of violence.

Pawe Machcewicz, a first rate historian who played a major role in the debate

about Jedwabne, is also skeptical about the importance or relevance ofFearfor the studyof the subject. Similarly to Szaynok, Machcewicz viewsFearas a one-dimensional work

characterized by a radical interpretation and delivered in sharp biting language.

According to Machcewicz, early postwar violence did not have unique qualities; it was

part of the general daily brutality and violence of the early postwar years. Therefore he

criticizes Gross for neglecting general historical context of early postwar period.

Moreover, Machcewicz claims thatFeardoes not contribute anything new because the

experts are already familiar with the subject and the data, and have described them fully.

This latter position exposes an overwhelming confidence that no new sources could ever

be found and that no new interpretation can ever throw a new light onto the subject. What

is surprising is that such a position should come from the co-author of the two-volume

monograph of historical writing and primary data WokJedwabnego, a remarkable

historians achievement of the debate about Jedwabne. Machcewicz does not seem to

draw a lesson from the fact that many primary sources, in the second volume ofWok

Jedwabnego, were freshly dug out of various local archives and have not yet been fully

utilized.

The future research on the subject of Fear

The continual discovery of new archival material, even partial, in recent years

should alert scholars like Machcewicz to the fact that by no means all archival Jewish,

Polish and other sources have been uncovered and fully utilized in the investigation of the

early postwar Polish-Jewish relations and anti-Jewish violence. Historians still stumble

upon new evidence that could deepen our understanding of perceptions and experiences

of early postwar realities in Poland and that could validate and add a nuance to the

existing interpretations of Polish-Jewish relations. For example, it will be worthwhile to

conduct an analysis of the ample body of contemporaneous accounts, such as

autobiographical testimonies of Polish Jewish children and adults who spent the war in

the Soviet Union and who briefly stayed in Poland before and during the Kielce pogrom,


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before embarking on a further journey via postwar Germany. This material could further

illuminate the experience of Polish Jews in an early postwar Poland and contribute to the

understanding of the major dilemma of the survivors, their experienced chasm between

their dream about the return to their own country and the negative reception theyencountered upon arrival to Poland.

Oral histories, in all its forms and in a variety of settings, are also indispensable

sources to fully reconstruct the mindset of perpetrators and eyewitnesses and the memory

of early postwar anti-Jewish violence. Given the current fetishization of the archive in

Polish historiography, historians are neglecting oral histories projects and are leaving

them to ethnographs such as Alina Caa and Joanna Tokarska Bakir and filmmakers such

as Marcel oziski and Andrzej mijewski.

Although volumes of documents have mainly been published about the Kielce

pogrom, there is no monograph similar to the two volume WokJedwabnego that would

encompass a vital selection of multiple archival, press and oral sources on latent and

violent anti-Semitism and on the entire spectrum of Polish-Jewish relations of the early

postwar period, and on the reactions of Jews and non-Jews to specific events and

developments. Thus, instead of attempting to close the discussion on the subject because

nothing new can be said about it, as Machcewicz implies, one could reflect on how much

work still awaits historians.

Fear, as earlier mentioned, is an invitation to explore new avenues of historical

investigations. Grosss explanation of early postwar anti-Jewish violence is an example

of a rationalistic perspective on ethnic violence, in which there is no independent place

for passion and non-rational perceptions and non-rational stereotypes as triggers of the

violent outbursts against Jews. The violence is viewed as a consequence of rational

action: ordinary Poles widespread collusion with Nazi-driven extermination of the

Jews and the spoliation of Jewish property. In the early postwar period when Jewish

survivors began to return to their home, their non-Jewish neighbors who had stolen their

property or were squatting in their houses had reason to feel fear, as Gross asserts. Thus,

Grosss understanding of fear on the part of perpetrators is also rational. But there is also

a large body of evidence attesting that segments of early postwar Polish society displayed

a fear of Jews that was not rational. They expressed irrational fear of Jews as alleged


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killers of Christian Polish children, and exhibited other related beliefs, adapted to the

early postwar societal conditions, such as no Jewess will give birth until she receives

Christian blood. Special units of the Ministry of Public Security registered that such

beliefs were widely circulated in various strata of early postwar Polish society, not onlyamong peasants and uneducated, but also among the middle class. An investigation of

how these two kinds of fears, rational and non-rational, interacted could advance our

understanding of the explosive nature and indiscriminate character of the early postwar

anti-Jewish violence. It could reveal the extent to which these two fears could be seen as

complementary rather than exclusive.

Early postwar violent anti-Semitism could also be investigated as an emotional

response to events, perceived in a prejudicial way, and embodied in the slogan we will

teach them a lesson or, as William Hagen has suggested in his study of anti-Jewish

violence of 1918-1920, as the enactment of scripts by which perpetrators aimed to restore

their idea of the local normative order and demonstrated their actions as righteous.

What the debate aboutFeardemonstrates is an urgent need for comparative

studies of anti-Jewish violence, both diachronic and synchronic. Comparative analyses

entail a double work for a scholar and involve cooperation with other scholars, yet can be

illuminating. Diachronic analyses of anti-Jewish violence in Poland between 1918 and

1949, like those Engel and Michlic have proposed, would test whether the early postwar

violence had a novel character and became a social norm, as Gross interprets. These

analyses would also reexamine the anatomy of violence and its various participants,

including the role of Christian Polish women in triggering anti-Jewish hostility and

causing an atmosphere of anti-Jewish panic. By looking at this violence from a

comparative perspective we could learn whether this violence was recurrent and had a

hot character, whether it was driven by ethno-nationalist exclusivist anti-Semitic

ideology, and whether the long-standing ethno-nationalist notion of house cleaning

constituted rationalization and justification for the violence all the time between 1918 and

1949 or only during a specific period.

A scholarly comparison of early postwar violence in Poland with early postwar

anti-Jewish violence in Slovakia, Hungary and Ukraine should put an end to the typical

argument in Polish historical and popular discussion that we were not the only ones, the


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violence also happened elsewhere, an argument that from a cognitive point of view is

useless. The synchronic comparison of anti-Jewish violence in early postwar East-Central

Europe could throw a new light on issues such as the ability to attract participants,

indiscriminate character of the violence, its scale and explosiveness, the mix of impulsiveand instrumental elements and the historical contexts. Only by completing this

comparison the degree to which the violent Polish anti-Semitism was dissimilar from

and/or similar to other such occurrences could be established.

Finally, the reactions to Fearindicate an urgent need for further in-depth studies

of the Polish memory of early postwar violence. A detailed discussion of commonalities

and differences in responses to anti-Jewish violence past and present would reveal the

extent to which the current discourse has advanced and whether the arguments use

contemporarily are new and sensu stricto scientific, and whether they have their

intellectual and ideological roots in the previous periods, especially in the time the

violence took place and its immediate aftermath. In light of the responses toFear, the

rather modest expectations of the abovementioned Tadeusz Zaderecki that his work

would facilitate further research and gain intellectual and moral support among people of

goodwill seem applicable toFear.

joanna michlicarticle2historicaldebate

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