Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (review)

The last decade has yielded a tidy bookshelf of scholarship on Polish-Jewish relations. No longer can one say that this complicated and tragic relationship has been neglected. On that bookshelf, Joanna Michlic's Poland's Threatening Other is a welcome and useful addition. After the recent collection edited by Robert Blobaum, Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland—a book too recent to have received Michlic's attention—Poland's Threatening Other is the first work to examine Poland's antisemitism over its entire modern history.

Michlic explores the ways in which Poles have talked about or imagined the Jews with whom they have shared their lands in the modern era. The central trope in these discussions is that of the Jew as a "harmful alien" in the Poles' midst. As Michlic suggests, this image is quite different from that of key external groups against whom Poles have defined themselves—namely, Germans and Russians. The labeling of Jews as "others," however, has had a deleterious effect on the Polish nation itself; if Jews were "alien," then the society that inhabited the Polish lands could never be made whole without excision. The quixotic pursuit of Polish national purity appears to have no end, even as the number of Jews in Poland has dwindled to the mere tens of thousands.

Michlic never assumes that antisemitism is essential to the Polish character or particular to Poland. Antisemitism, like nationalism, is a phenomenon that has both ancient traditions and distinctly modern attributes. After a brief overview of the pre-modern shared history of Poles and Jews, Michlic focuses on the period since the rise of political parties and national media. Two chapters examine the interwar years, when the exclusivist language of the National Democrats shaped Polish discourse—even as the party itself was excluded from power. The centerpiece of the book is a lengthy chapter on Poles' perception of Jews during the Holocaust. Coverage of the postwar era is more episodic: one full chapter covers the crucial early postwar years, as a brief rebirth of Polish Jewish culture was cut short by pogroms and mass emigration. A second chapter centers on the anti-"Zionist" campaign of 1968. In an all-too-brief concluding chapter, Michlic examines the survival of antisemitic rhetoric in the postcommunist era.

This work is really several books in one. In the end, what appears to be Michlic's main purpose gets crowded out a bit. First, she hesitates to join the constructivist camp entirely. Time and again, as she examines antisemitic rhetoric, she attempts to disprove its assumptions. Thus, for example, in Chapter Six she departs from her discussion of the myth of Judeo-communism to calculate whether it was numerically possible for Jews to control the Communist Party or the Secret Police. This does not help Michlic's argument, as it implicitly concedes that if the number of Jews in power had reached a certain proportion, then Poles' fears would have been justified. Michlic seems to want to tell the story of Jews in Poland and the story of antisemitism there; the whole point, though, is that antisemitism is disconnected from reality. Perhaps a better approach would have been to provide a separate, introductory tour through the Jewish experience in Poland, allowing the myths to be examined on their own.

Poland's Threatening Other is also, in part, a guide to how Poles have looked at their history. Michlic knows the historiography well; one wishes she had more space to show how historians in Poland have tried to push antisemitism to the margins of the Polish experience.

A second problem is that the nuances of antisemitic myths, and their evolution over time, do not get the attention that this reader had hoped they would. Michlic sometimes distinguishes between the various elements of antisemitic myths: Jews as aliens, Jews as polluters, Jews as threatening, Jews as power-hungry, Jews as...