Jews in Poland Between the Two World Wars

In no other country were Jews, proportionally, such a huge minority as in Poland. Religiously, economically, and politically Jews varied a great deal. They were an urban and closed group which kept only economic contacts with the rest of the population. In the Polish state they had to struggle for equal rights. Anti-semitism propagated by nationalists was very powerful. In the second half of the 1930s the Polish government (sanacja) adopted the nationalists' slogans and tried to restrict the Jews' economic activity. An expression for the modernization of the Jews was the emergence, in the end of the nineteenth century, of a Jewish intelligentsia. Political parties were established and represented both the Polish state and Jewish national movements. Polish Jews created a rich trilingual culture in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish. The second Polish republic can be considered a golden era for Jewish culture in Poland.