Broken Traditions?: Jewish Presence on the City Councils of Kraków, Poznań, and Warsaw, 1919–1939

According to Lucjan Dobroszycki,

Jewish participation in local and parliamentary elections and the work of Jewish deputies of the state, municipal, and self-governing elected bodies in the Second Polish Republic undoubtedly comprise one of the most intrinsically important chapters in Polish Jewish history. Yet there is no comprehensive study of the various kinds of elections in which Jews took part, both as citizens and as members of a distinct ethnic group, in the years 1919–1939.¹

Dobroszycki did not explore the causes of this lacuna, but they must be sought in long-established historiographical traditions. Jews resident on Polish soil have been seen as a people enclosed in a 'ghetto', completely separated from the rest of society;² as a community exclusively subordinate to the monarchy and only interested, therefore, in dealing with the rulers or the highest levels of the administration;³ and as a social stratum lacking any influence on the political decisions that affected them.⁴ These assumptions have made it possible to ignore the highly visible presence of Jewish members in the autonomous elected bodies of the Second Polish Republic between 1918 and 1939 and account for the failure to undertake research into their activities as representatives of the Jewish population in city councils. In addition, the subject of the city councils is itself a seriously neglected research topic in comparison with the activities of the Sejm or the political parties of inter-war Poland. In the People's Republic of Poland, any analysis of the activities of the city councils and economic and professional self-governing bodies, such as industrial or medical chambers, was unwelcome;⁵ the study of Jewish history was also not encouraged.

Attitudes began to change in the last decade of the twentieth century. This development was linked to the political changes which allowed these bodies to be seen as important institutions within the new democratic systems that were establishing themselves in the former communist bloc, a development which aroused interest in their history in inter-war Poland. Equally important, however, were the changes in historiographical paradigms which led to a greater interest in hitherto less noticed—indeed virtually unnoticed—phenomena, such as the history of everyday life, generational change, regionalism, ethnic minorities, microhistory, and problems of gender.⁶

The changes not only bore fruit in the first books on Jewish participation in the Polish parliament of the inter-war period⁷ but also resulted in attempts to produce material on the participation of Jewish activists in the work of city councils.⁸ These developments are part of a process taking place generally in the 'Euro-American' historiography of Polish Jewry, what Moshe Rosman calls the 'fourth approach', emphasizing the organic and widespread nature of mutual contacts and influences.⁹ Antony Polonsky also supports this approach and, in his monumental work The Jews in Poland and Russia, takes into consideration Jewish activity in city councils and other institutions outside the Jewish community.¹⁰

Analysis of Jewish activity in the city councils has, for the most part, concerned itself with percentages, political options, and alliances. I would like to take a different approach and examine local government over the longue durée, looking at the persistence of certain traditional ways of treating 'the Jewish question' and Jews themselves. This issue is related to the position in the social hierarchy granted to Jews by the majority society's elites and also to attempts by some Jews—and by representatives of other non-elite groups—to challenge this traditional order. My analysis is informed by two authors: Aleksander Hertz (unjustly forgotten by contemporary historians), who argued that the Jews were perceived as a 'caste' until the beginning of the Second World War,¹¹ and Roman Waprński, a Gdańsk-based historian who examined the strong regionalism within the Second Polish Republic and the degrees of distance and familiarity in society characteristic of the country as a whole.¹²

This chapter will examine the evolution of traditions of local government from the partitions into the...