Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive

3. History for the People

49 By the outbreak of the Second World War, Emanuel Ringelblum had become one of the most promising of the younger generation of Jewish historians in Poland. This generation—which included Rafael Mahler, Philip Friedman, Isaiah (Shie) Trunk, Bela Mandelsberg, and others—followed in the footsteps of Meyer Balaban and Isaac Schiper, two older scholars who served as trailblazers for the study of Polish-Jewish history. But whereas Schiper and Balaban spent their formative years of scholarship in the relative peace and quiet of Hapsburg Galicia, this next generation came to maturity in the more turbulent milieu of the reborn Polish state. Like other young Jewish historians, Ringelblum had little hope of pursuing a traditional academic career. Still he deeply believed that Jewish historians in interwar Poland had multiple missions: to help in the Jewish fight against anti-Semitism and for minority rights; to build a much needed bridge between Jews and Poles; and to bring together scholars and ordinary Jews in a mutual project to shape a Yiddish secular culture. Although Ringelblum had earned a respectable record of scholarship, his forte was as an organizer. Largely ignored by their Polish colleagues and hampered by serious financial constraints as well as hostility and indifference both from Poles and within the Jewish community, young Jewish historians in interwar Poland had to shape an unofficial “counter-profession.” They needed journals that would publish their work and seminars where they could discuss research with colleagues , and also the satisfaction of knowing that they were having an impact on the intense but fractious cultural life of interwar Polish Jewry. The founding of the YIVO in Vilna in 1925 was a great step forward but was only a beHistory for the People chapter 3 50 Who Will Write Our History? ginning. Warsaw, not Vilna, became the center of this “counter-profession” of Polish-Jewish historians, and few people contributed more to its development than Emanuel Ringelblum. Emanuel Ringelblum decided to become a historian shortly after entering Warsaw University in 1920. For a time he was tempted by economics and sociology but finally settled on the still largely unexplored field of PolishJewish history, which had become topical and relevant. Now that Jews once again found themselves under Polish sovereignty, the history of Polish Jewry took on a new urgency. Supporters of the anti-Jewish National Democratic party used historical arguments to bolster their call for a political and economic campaign against a Jewish minority which they viewed as harmful alien interlopers.1 Articles and books by Jan Ptaśnik, Zygmunt Balicki, Father Marjan Morawski, Roman Rybarski, and others painted a damning picture of Jewish economic power and political treachery. For instance, in his 1928 study on Polish trade in the sixteenth century, Professor Rybarski, a noted economic historian, stressed the harmful impact of the Jews on the development of Polish cities and the Polish economy.2 In turn, Jewish historians in the young Polish republic began to see themselves as front line soldiers in a battle to convince the Polish public that antiSemitism was not only self-defeating and harmful but rested on a totally erroneous interpretation of Polish history. Historical research quickly turned into a weapon to defend Jewish honor. Certain questions now assumed special importance. How had the Jews contributed to the economic development of Poland? How had Jews participated in Poland’s struggles for independence ? What truth was there to the charge leveled by Polish anti-Semites that the Jews had from the beginning constituted an alien element, indifferent to Poland’s national interests and siding with her oppressors? Aside from the battle against Polish ethnic nationalists, fierce ideological conflict within the Jewish community also engaged the partisan involvement of historians. As Jewish political parties and youth groups clashed over religion vs. secularism, Yiddish vs. Hebrew, Zionism vs. the Diaspora, historians entered the fray. Were the Jewish autonomous institutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries indeed bastions of national creativity and vitality or mainly agents of exploitation and injustice allowing wealthy Jews to fleece their poorer brothers? Could religion take the credit for Jewish survival over the centuries, or should one look to economic factors? Was Yiddish culture a relatively recent creature of political radicalism, or was it rooted in a centuries -old popular tradition? For Yiddishists and Diaspora nationalists, politically committed scholars were especially welcome allies who could show that History for the People 51 the study of the popular...