Szymon Rudnicki is Professor at the Institute of History, Warsaw University and has long been interested in Polish-Jewish relations. A previous book, Jews in the parliament of the SecondPolishRepublic, won the Klio prize for the best monograph in Poland in 2004. In 2008, for Equal but Not Completely, Rudnicki won the Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska annual award of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.

Rudnicki’s interest in the roots and consequences of Polish antisemitism grew from his earlier historical research on the National Radical Camp, Poland’s extreme right antisemitic nationalist political party, which was founded in 1934. Since 1988, Rudnicki has presented and published numerous papers on Polish-Jewish relations, many of which have been assembled, mostly unaltered, to form the present book. On the cover is an archival photograph of anti-Jewish riots at the University of Warsaw in 1931. The photograph tells the story. It is a grim story.

The articles/chapters are organized according to themes and draw on written records: books, newspaper articles, memoirs and parliamentary records of the time. The chapters deal with antisemitism in various walks of life, the Polish army for example. Many Jews fought, shoulder to shoulder with other Poles, in a variety of pro-independence uprisings and in 1918 volunteered in significant numbers in Pilsudski’s army. I had known this because my father was one of the volunteers. My father idealized Pilsudski whose influence, as Rudnicki notes, held back the worst of the flood of Polish antisemitism until after his death in 1935. Rudnicki shows that Pilsudki’s views, though pro-Jewish initially, gradually became more nuanced. In other chapters, Rudnicki reflects the evolving views of the Catholic Church: from the open-hearted acceptance of Jews which several Polish bishops cited in this book expressed in the early 1880s (after the assassination of the relatively philosemitic Czar Alexander II led to a wave of pogroms), to the progressively harsher views (also cited) of Polish Church representatives, notably the Jesuits. An intriguing chapter describes the notion of ‘asemitism’ – priests urging Christians not to be ‘anti’ in the sense of inflicting physical harm but to keep their distance from Jews, to refrain from social mixing because of the supposed moral sins of Jews and their unpleasant personality traits. From this beginning, racial antisemitism gradually developed. Conversion to Christianity was no longer a sufficient reason to welcome former Jews into the Polish-Christian fold. According to the Jesuits of the time, it took five generations after conversion for a Jew to become socially acceptable.

Political parties followed the same path. In the latter half of the 19^th Century, when the Polish political party system first took off, the right courted the Jewish vote. After 1926, the right became the ruling Sanacja and considered Jews as Polish citizens of Mosaic faith. But, gradually, government support diminished. When a small portion of the Jewish population joined the Communist cause, Sanajca members became further disenchanted. In time, they embraced the nationalist party line, which attributed all of Poland’s economic woes to the Jews.

Rudnicki traces the history of Jewish business boycotts and the infamous “ghetto benches” at universities. As early as 1919, the University of Poznan is said to have established quotas for Jewish admission. Interestingly to me, my father received a doctorate from this University in 1925 and never once mentioned obstacles to his entry or discrimination during his course of study. He may have had it easy because he was a war veteran. Documents show that Polish youth were fervent followers of the National Democrats (Endecja). Rudnicki describes three stages in the nationalist battle for the soul of Polish youth: I) The growth of antiminority sentiment in the 1920s, II) Numerus clausus (school quotas based on population percentage) replaced by numerus nullus (no Jews allowed) and the institution of bench ghettos and outbreaks of violence in the first half of the 1930s, and, III) Increasing violence and political victories for the nationalists in the latter half of the 1930s.

Starting in 1922, Jewish students could not join the traditional student organizations; Polish Christian students demanded that admission of minority students be made proportional to their representation in the Polish population – a numerus clausus. Most university rectors opposed this. Many professors protested. Most students didn’t care. The National Democrats wanted to make it a law, but were repeatedly defeated. In effect, the numerus clausus was instituted in some departments and not in others, in some universities more rigorously than in others. By the late 1920s, Polish students were wearing green ribbons to show that they were antisemitic. They boycotted Jewish stores and put up blockades to make sure that fellow Christians could not enter. Riots and student clashes ensued. In one of them, in 1931 in Vilno, a Christian student was hit in the head by a flying stone and killed. His death was blamed on Jews. Violence escalated. In 1933, the institution of bench ghettos (Christian-Jewish seating separations) were first tried out at the University of Warsaw.

Pilsudski died in 1935, and the National Democrats saw an opportunity to gain a political majority. Antisemitic sentiment grew. An extremist offshoot of Endecja, the ONR, was accused of bombing Jewish establishments. Ghetto benches began being operative on a full scale in the academic year 1935-36 amidst escalating outbreaks of violence. The rectors of the universities generally opposed their establishment, but ultimately gave in for the sake of peace. Some resigned, some blamed the Jewish students for not complying gracefully with the demand for separate seating. Attempts were made to segregate Jewish students by force. To some extent the attitude of individual professors determined how things went. Not wanting to sit in the designated seats, Jewish students stood instead. On the one hand, some professors stood as well, to show their support. Some physically removed the barriers between the seats. On the other hand, some professors ordered the standing students to leave. At the end of 1936, eight students in Lwow, accused of forcing Jewish students into ghetto benches, were legally acquitted of all charges.

In 1937, the association of university rectors, hoping to calm the violence, agreed to separate seating for Christians and Jews. This action had an effect opposite to what was intended. Lwow University students in November 1937 declared ‘a day without Jews.’ The extremist group ONR recommended numerus nullus, — no Jews. While 20.4% of university seats in Poland had been occupied by Jews in the academic year 1928/29, this figure fell to 7.5% in 1937/38. Professors who opposed the militants were attacked at home and at school. Lists of those who had Jewish ancestors were circulated. Three Jewish students were murdered in 1938 at the Lwow Polytechnic College. In 1939 there were two murders, seven students were beaten, one of whom later died. On investigating these incidents, the police found stacks of arms in three student homes – revolvers, hand grenades, ingredients for Molotov cocktails.

Rudnicki points out that he can only document what he discovered in written documents, but this may not represent the views of the majority of Polish citizens. After all, Jews had lived in Poland since the 9^th Century, enjoying religious and political rights and a large measure of autonomy. From the time of Partition in 1795, however, there was no more autonomy for Jews. Legislation banned them from certain professions and placed restrictions on the trades they could practice. By the end of theNineteenth Century, antisemitism, blaming Jews for all of Poland’s troubles, became one of the cornerstones of the platform of the National Democratic Party. For the party and its fellow travelers (which included the farmers, the Catholic Church, the army, professional organizations, and most youth groups) Jews became not only ‘other’ but ‘the enemy’ and the very personification of evil. Other political parties except for the Polish Socialist and Communist parties gradually followed suit during the economic downturn of the inter-war years, borrowing more and more ‘racial hygiene’ notions from Nazi Germany. Poland was not alone. These ideas were rampant throughout Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. They were prevalent in England and France as well. The German invasion of Poland did not bring Christian and Jewish Poles together. Antisemitism continued and in 1941 served as a backdrop to the shocking slaughter of Jews by their Polish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne.

Rudnicki constantly reminds us that the majority of Poles, including students, were probably not interested in politics and neutral toward Jews. Many clerics considered antisemitic acts to be unChristian. Smart politicians were never in favour of alienating a substantial portion of the electorate. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, the reader closes the book with the disturbing realization that what happened in Poland could happen anywhere.

Mary V. Seeman, OC, MDCM, FRCPC, DSc, is Professor Emerita, Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto. She was born in Poland in 1935 and came to Canada in 1941.