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Thinking with restriction: immigration
restriction and Polish Jewish accounts
of the post-liberal state, empire, race,
and political reason 1926–39
Kenneth B. Moss
a
a
Department of History, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
Published online: 10 Dec 2014.
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To cite this article: Kenneth B. Moss (2014) Thinking with restriction: immigration restriction and
Polish Jewish accounts of the post-liberal state, empire, race, and political reason 1926–39, East
European Jewish Affairs, 44:2-3, 205-224, DOI: 10.1080/13501674.2014.942147
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2014.942147
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East European Jewish Affairs, 2014
Vol. 44, Nos. 2–3, 205–224, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2014.942147
Thinking with restriction: immigration restriction and Polish
Jewish accounts of the post-liberal state, empire, race, and political
reason 1926–39
Kenneth B. Moss*
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Department of History, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
This paper investigates how educated Jewish observers struggled to understand the
causes of the global immigration restriction that so impacted East European Jewry
in the 1920s and 1930s, and uses their competing explanations, convictions, and
uncertainties to reveal underlying structures of Jewish political understanding in
the interwar period more broadly. Efforts to explain restriction, the ways in
which it seemed both to target Jews and to be part of a general closure of the
developed world, and questions of timing demanded reflection on the most
fundamental questions of the interwar political order. Did state policies flow
from economic reason, and did nationalisation, democratisation, and socialisation
of domestic politics alter this causal pattern? In a world where closed borders
were the default, what difference did statehood or statelessness make? What was
the meaning and implication of the deployment of “race” in others’ debates
about restriction, and what role did global race-thinking play in determining
population policies? What was the causal significance of specifically anti-Jewish
animus, its nature, and the role of Jews’ own choices in determining their
situation? Analyzing a number of loci of Jewish social policy debate, the essay
focuses particularly on the diasporist emigration activist Il’ya Dizhur, the Zionist
sociologist Aryeh Tartakover, and the cooperative-movement activist Majer
Pollner.
Keywords: political thought; Poland; migration; racism; antisemitism; Zionism;
diasporism; empire; state
As the Jews of interwar Eastern Europe sought their footing on the newly unstable political terrain of their region, they also struggled to understand the new forces reshaping
the globe – to understand which institutions and forces would now most profoundly
determine individual life chances and communal fates. Among the questions that
drew the urgent attention of East European Jewish intellectuals and elites (though
not only intellectuals and elites) were: What was the relationship between economic
interests and nationalist or racialist commitments in capitalist societies, and had the
nature of this relationship changed since World War I? How did states work, what
was the significance of the reordered postwar state system, and was the state now a
determinant of economic and political prospects in a way it had not previously been?
What were the conditions and prospects of European imperial rule and colonialism
in the postwar world? What were the implications of the further consolidation of
*Email: [email protected]
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
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K.B. Moss
race thinking in Western and global society, and how did this race thinking relate to
antisemitism?1
This paper investigates how Jewish activists and intellectuals concerned with the
fate of Poland’s Jews – the community of three million that comprised the demographic
core of historic East European Jewry – addressed these questions in the course of their
reflections on a particular and urgent problem: the sharp and sudden global constriction
of Polish Jewish migration opportunities around the world in the interwar period. Their
reflections on this question took shape from the early 1920s in the context of two irreconcilable facts: that masses of Polish Jews wanted to emigrate, and that much of the
rest of the world which had once been open to massive East European Jewish immigration – most importantly the US – was now urgently curtailing it.
That disproportionately large numbers of Polish Jews were desperate to leave
Poland was clear to observers across the ideological spectrum. The number who actually emigrated in the interwar period was substantial, despite the restrictions: between
1921 and 1938, some 400,000 Polish Jews left Poland, 90% for sites overseas. Jews
comprised 10% of Poland’s population but 23.8% of total emigration from Poland
in this period and 50% of permanent emigration.2 More to the point, observers
across the political spectrum recognised that many more Polish Jews wished to
leave. In 1934, one visitor noted that “everywhere I went people crowded around to
ask for certificates to Palestine almost as though I carried them around in my
pocket.”3 In 1936, a figure still committed to diasporist ideas admitted that “the
broad Jewish masses see their only salvation in emigration.”4 By the end of the
1930s, some 180,000 individuals had registered with Poland’s Jewish Central Emigrant Society (JEAS) and the Palestine office in Warsaw that handled enquiries by
Polish Jews wishing to leave for Palestine had some 200,000 names.5 And though
it is clear that desire to leave reached fever pitch in the 1930s, there was massive interest already in the 1920s. In 1926, Jewish activists predisposed to look for local solutions to Jewish problems averred that “[t]he majority of the Jewish population in
Poland wants to emigrate, above all with the goal of attaining the possibility to emigrate to the US” and noted that “[c]ircles and groups for whom the word ‘emigration’
was until recently a distant and foreign concept are now being pulled into the emigration-stream: householders established on solid foundations for generations, small
industrialists, entrepreneurs and the like, for whom the emigration is becoming an
attempt at salvation.”6
By the late 1920s, observers of the Polish Jewish scene were of course also no less
aware that the US, the destination that had admitted nearly two million East European
Jewish immigrants and the only easily imaginable destination for millions more, had all
but closed the doors. Congressional acts in 1921 and 1924 set an annual limit for each
country of origin and pegged the relative size of the quotas for “white” countries to a
calculation of the “the national origins of all Americans” as of 1890.7 Equally crucial
were the raw quantitative limits that accompanied this new categorisation: the total
number of immigrants to be admitted was drastically reduced in relation to pre-war
levels. Immigration from Europe dropped from 364,339 in 1924 to less than half
annually thereafter, demand for visas to America in “southern and eastern Europe
and the Near East” now exceeded supply by a ratio of 78 to one (as opposed to three
to one for Western Europeans), and Polish immigration dropped from some 96,000
immigrants in 1921 (“many of whom were Jewish”) to an annual average of 8111
through the 1920s.8
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East European Jewish Affairs
207
Moreover, as the 1930s progressed, most alternative destinations moved towards
closure too. South Africa’s 1930 Immigration Quota Act “effectively reduced the
flow of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to a mere trickle.”9 In the late
1920s, unprecedented numbers of Jews turned to Latin American destinations, but
these too moved to limit Jewish influx in the early 1930s. In 1934, Brazil’s regime
introduced national origin quotas based on the ethnic makeup of its existing population,
which “affected mainly the Japanese and the Jews.”10 Where South Africa and Brazil
followed the US example of origin-based quotas, other new destinations found equally
effective means to keep Jews out: Argentina, the most important destination for Polish
Jews in the late 1920s, used administrative techniques like charging prohibitive costs
for visas while other destinations limited immigration to professional categories that
essentially excluded Polish Jews.11 Through the mid-1930s, British Mandatory Palestine was the great exception in accommodating large numbers of Polish Jews, but the
British largely closed it after 1936.12 By the end of the 1930s, public agitation against
Jewish immigration was beginning to bear fruit in only recently discovered destinations
like Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, and Venezuela.13
Both the mass emigration drive and the new global restriction generated much
pained attention among both Jews in Poland and among émigré Jewish activists who
remained primarily concerned with the fate of Poland’s Jews.14 The desire of ever
growing numbers of Polish Jews to leave the new Poland raised troubling questions
for all political streams of Polish and world Jewry. It provoked questions about the
economic viability of Polish Jewish life in the long term; about the strength, significance, and permanence of antisemitism in Polish society and polity; about the relationship between perceptions of one’s communal future and personal calculations; and
about the psychic and cultural implications of the conviction on the part of many
Jews that they had no prospects for a decent future. The debates touched off by this
unhappy situation offer a rich source for a history of Polish Jewish political thinking
in the interwar period which I will address elsewhere.15
Here, however, I will focus on Jewish efforts to make sense of the second fact: to
understand what was driving the global contraction of migration opportunities in the
developed world, what accounted for the perceptible targeting of Jews, on the one
hand, and the fact that this was part of a more general global restrictionism, on the
other, and whether the new situation might be changed in the foreseeable future. My
interest is not the particularities of emigration policy debates but rather what they
reveal about Jewish political understanding in the interwar period more broadly. As
they sought to explain restriction, contemporaries reflected on the most fundamental
questions that freighted the interwar political order. Did state policies flow from economic reason, and did nationalisation, democratisation, and socialisation of global politics alter this causal pattern? In a world where closed borders were the default, what
difference did statehood or statelessness make? What was the meaning and implication
of the deployment of “race” in others’ debates about restriction, and what role did
global race thinking really play in determining population policies? What was the
causal significance of specifically anti-Jewish animus, its nature, and the role of
Jews’ own choices in determining their situation?16
Plenty of Jewish observers had something to say about these questions. Some spoke
in mythopoetic language of Jewish exile or in frankly religious terms, like the influential religious leader Elkhonen Vaserman, who interpreted the ever more far-flung
Jewish search for new refuges as the fulfilment of prophecies signalling the messianic
advent.17 But other observers spoke in the register of social scientific inquiry and tried
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K.B. Moss
to understand the situation in this-worldly analytical terms, and it is on this sort of
analysis that the current paper focuses. This paper will focus closely on three figures
who shared a secular policy-oriented concern with Polish Jewish emigration questions:
the Jewish emigration activist Ilya Dizhur, the Labor Zionist activist and sociologist
Aryeh Tartakover, and the credit-cooperative activist turned belated visionary of
Jewish overseas colonisation Majer Pollner. These figures wrote on emigration questions in a sustained fashion. They did so out of a strong practical drive – Dizhur and
Tartakover were active members of international and Polish-centred Jewish emigration
organisations (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the JEAS, respectively) – yet the
problem of restriction compelled them to go beyond practical questions. They occupied
different positions in Jewish political life – Dizhur and Pollner belonged to the essentially diasporist Jewish progressive intelligentsia (the gezelshaftlekhkeyt) and Tartakover was a significant figure in Poland’s Zionist Hitahdut movement – yet were
engaged in conversation and organisational work across those lines. Finally, their writings span from the late 1920s to the late 1930s, falling on both sides of the moment in
1936 when the idea of a mass transfer of Jews became a central tenet of Polish antiJewish policy visions and thus rendered serious discussion of mass Jewish emigration
near toxic.18
My focus on these three figures – with passing attention to the Polish nationalist
social geographer Wiktor Ormicki (himself of Jewish background) – is driven by an
intellectual as well as cultural historical agenda. They are interesting not because
they are obviously representative of some social group but because each was a
serious if necessarily blinkered observer of the great global developments of the interwar period which we are still struggling to reconstruct; if their thought is representative
of anything, it is of the tensions freighting the thought of the East European Jewish
ethnic intelligentsia as a whole.
Before turning to the analysis, a sketch of what is known today about the system of
migration restriction will offer another point of comparison from which to register the
guiding concerns of Polish Jewish thinking about the global situation, and also suggest
why certain key factors were visible to our actors and others less so. Three key features
marked the interwar migration regime. First, as noted, national-origin and ethnic-cumracial categories were now widely applied to Europeans (they had long been directed
against Asians and Africans). Second, the sweeping quantitative restrictions on immigration represented the abandonment among many policy-makers of what had been an
“overwhelming consensus” that economic growth demanded a completely “free movement of the factors of production.”19 Instead, long-held views that immigration should
be subject to restriction on protectionist, nativist nationalist, and racial–eugenic
grounds – views previously neutralised by business interests – now dominated
policy. Third, the state – its policies and practices – now became the key determinant
in shaping migration flows. Building on long-term processes of passportisation and
population categorisation, as well as wartime expansion of interventionism in the
social sphere, state after state now acted on the view that one of its key tasks was to
regulate migration in keeping with a larger population policy vision. This transformation in the role of the state as gatekeeper was realised in practice through the visa
system whereby consular representatives of each state could enforce strict country
quotas at the point of origin.20 The world’s millions of would-be migrants now faced
what John Torpey calls “the successful state monopolisation of the legitimate means
of movement in the post-First World War era.”21
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East European Jewish Affairs
209
Emigration and the state
In 1929, Ilya Dizhur published Di moderne felker-vanderung, a comparative study of
European overseas migration and “emigration-politics/policy” intended “to allow the
Jewish reader to compare the Jewish emigration problem with the emigration
problem among the [other] peoples of the world.”22 Having flirted with a political
career in the diaspora-nationalist Folkist party in the early 1920s, Dizhur had
become a respected figure in the world of American and European Jewish organisations
seeking to facilitate East European Jewish migration, presided over by the American
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). Published with the HIAS imprimatur, Di
moderne felker-vanderung represented an effort to make systematic sense of the new
world of migration restrictions that had taken shape since 1921–4. Its most interesting
claims – and silences – concern its account of the transformed role of the sovereign state
and the negotiated relations between states in the structuring of the migration system.
Ultimately, Dizhur’s treatment of the state and of the state system suggests a kind of
divided insight – a recognition of the dramatically expanded importance of active
state involvement in the postwar migration system coupled with a resistance to
drawing out the implications of that recognition.
Dizhur’s recognition of the state’s role was twofold. First, more forcefully than
many of his Jewish contemporaries, Dizhur attributed the economic woes afflicting
Polish Jewry not only to structural problems (the Jewish professional structure,
Poland’s agrarian economy) but to the economic-nationalist policies of the Polish
state. The “Jewish artisan” could not draw nourishment from the privileges and from
the state-credit that the Polish [one] enjoys,” Jewish workers were “being pushed out
systematically from the monopolistic state endeavors,” and Polish Jewry’s commercial
class was being crushed by a tax policy designed to protect landed interests but also
shaped, in his view, by a will to push Jews out of the economy and society: “to this
is added the well-known credit policies of the Polish bank and the entire Polish financial
world, which consciously treat the Jewish peddler, the Jewish laborer, [and] the Jewish
worker like stepchildren.”23
Dizhur also looked beyond the question of state-level nationalism and its regional
East European significance to underscore the role of the state system in shaping – or
distorting – the global migration regime. The need for international regulation of
migration had become clear, he asserted, “especially in the period after the world
war,” but the form that regulation had taken had so far been determined by “dozens”
of bilateral agreements. Dizhur insisted that this system was fundamentally an obstacle
to a just and sensible resolution of the “emigration-question,” which, as “one of the
sharpest international problems of the twentieth century,” demanded supra-state regulation. He criticised the United States for insisting that “the emigration problem should
be considered exclusively as an internal matter for each separate state.” What precisely
Dizhur meant by claiming that the emigration problem “could only be solved on the
path of international understandings” is unclear; he evidently hoped that the League
of Nations would solve the problem in some fashion.24
This in itself is an interesting datum for the unwritten history of East European
Jewish hopes for liberal internationalism.25 More immediately apposite is how
Dizhur’s recognition that state sovereignty was the decisive factor shaping the emigration system gave way to a (mere) insistence that it ought not to be. Dizhur both
acknowledged and sidestepped the obvious question that would have occurred to his
Jewish readers, namely, what did this structure mean for East European Jews given
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K.B. Moss
that their states related to them as “stepchildren” (though Dizhur voiced some appreciation of practical support for Jewish emigrants within the Polish state).26 Thus, he
focused mostly on civic initiatives to shape emigration rather than state-driven ones
“because … in our case there can be no talk of an official, state emigration policy.”
Yet he simultaneously acknowledged that populations in need of emigration were
best served in the new environment of regulation and restriction by states that could
strike deals for them, as in Italy.27
A balder take on the meaning of the state system for Jews appeared in a 1934 assessment of “the role of emigration in Jewish life” by the Warsaw-based JEAS. The anonymous author(s) underscored the impact of statelessness in a world increasingly
dominated by the nation-state. The JEAS document repeated the common emphasis
on the primarily socioeconomic roots of Polish Jewry’s immediate problems but
suggested a further dimension of the problem: the fact that “the Jewish people is extraterritorial, the Jewish population everywhere constitutes a national minority.” The text
bore no echo of Dizhur’s hopes for supra-state regulation, investing its only hopes for
international intervention in the Jewish communities created by pre-war migration:
“new healthy and important Jewish communities which have – especially in the war
years and post-war years – played a colossal role and brought immeasurable political,
material, and spiritual aid to the old Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.”28
These beginnings of a shift to a focus on statelessness as a special kind of problem
in the postwar world were taken up more directly in a 1936 text by Aryeh Tartakover, a
39-year-old educator and sociologist who combined a budding academic career in
Warsaw, longstanding Zionist commitment, and intensive engagement in Jewish emigration activism through the JEAS.29 Tartakover reiterated the insight that one of the
most significant factors affecting the situation of Jewish emigration was the renunciation among state administrators of pre-war liberal economic principles in favour of a
“statist and to a great degree nationally bound economy.” This led naturally to a
“world-view based limitation on freedom of migration.” In this context, Tartakover
argued, Jewish statelessness became far more problematic in the realm of migration
because, with economic policies around the world essentially controlled by corporatist
states rather than free market principles, the only factor that reliably allowed for amelioration of limits on immigration was state-to-state negotiation: “other peoples can
regulate their emigration questions through agreements, because they are organized
in states and have state means in their hands. The Jewish people does not have such
means.” He followed with a substantially different policy vision than Dizhur’s,
arguing that Jews should seek as strong a state-like body as possible. Jews needed
some sort of body that would bring together emigrationist, productivisationist, and political organisation on a large enough scale to be able to receive an efntlekh-rekhtlekhe
status, that is, to be recognised by states and supra-state bodies as a formal representative of Jewish collective interests and hence empowered to make formal agreements
with states that the latter might respect.
In the mid-1930s, Tartakover cherished hopes that the World Jewish Congress
might play such a role. More modestly, he wondered whether even the Jewish
migration organisations might win such recognition, noting several actual cases of
formal agreement-making between these early NGOs and states, such as a transit agreement struck with the Soviet Union, Lithuania, and Latvia in the 1920s.30 Two years
later, in an anguished text on “the current face of the Jewish emigration-problem,” Tartakover revisited the question of the difference the state might make for would-be
Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe. Writing in the context of the (rapidly fading)
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211
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possibility that Britain might partition Palestine, he took up the question of whether
Palestine might offer refuge to substantial numbers of East European Jews. Based on
the pace of absorption in the early 1930s, Tartakover averred that materially there
was no obstacle to the absorption in Palestine of “hundreds of thousands of Jews …
in the course of a few years.” The obstacle thereto was purely political: “Further
Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel will thus depend, above all, on whether it
will prove possible to overcome [the Palestinian Arab revolt] and to create in the
Land of Israel a Jewish state, according to the proposals of the English government,
which have been confirmed in principle by the League of Nations, as the actual
owner of the land.”31
Economic reason, prejudice, and the sources of immigration restriction
Linked to the question of the state in all of these texts, but reaching beyond, was the
question of why the new era had brought such sharp restrictions on Jewish immigration.
In taking up this question, commentators assayed larger questions about whether policy
towards Jews was really being driven by economic logic or whether some other set of
essentially cultural-ideological factors had to be addressed.
Having started with the question of the role of the states in shaping the migration
system of the 1920s, Dizhur’s Moderne felker-vanderung ended with an extended discussion of why so few of those states wanted Jewish migrants. Dizhur acknowledged
that the foreclosing of emigration opportunities in the postwar developed world –
most obviously in the US – could only be explained by looking beyond purely economic factors to political-cultural ones: “[a]lready the world is divided into two
camps – of emigration-hungry and immigration-satisfied peoples. In the last category
are such peoples who have attained very high level of economic development in the
course a very short time and to wish to rest, to look around, to consolidate themselves
as a nation (the United States). There are also those who have not achieved a comparable level of development even after a long time and who nevertheless do not want to
allow immigration (Australia).” But here and throughout Dizhur’s work this recognition was hedged by a certainty that some set of objective structural factors would ultimately force open new channels of mass migration. The resistance of “immigrationsatisfied” countries like the US and Australia were “ultimately only temporary phenomena. Like it or not, whether in peace or war, it must be the case that the emigrant-masses
will force their way through.”32
Dizhur’s analysis of why Jewish immigration was now so sharply constrained, and
what East European Jews could do about it, followed from this essentially economistic
analysis. At the close of his book, he asserted as self-evident that the fundamental constraint on Jewish immigration was the professional structure of East European Jewry
and above all the dearth of agriculturalists. In turn, this reflected a more general
phenomenon: “this question is central not only among Jews but also among all other
peoples. The immigration problem is today first of all a problem of professional structure.” Dizhur’s argument implied that any seemingly particular opposition to Jewish
immigration stemmed from the same economic logic, for “no one denies that among
Jews this [social-structural] problem is sharper than in the case of any other
people.”33 Hence Dizhur’s closing recommendations for Jewish emigration policy:
Jews had to continue the process of “productivisation” – i.e., proletarianisation and
agrarianisation – on which they were already embarked. Productivisation was the
“pre-condition” for Jewish emigration and the “central Jewish emigration societies”
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K.B. Moss
had to “cultivate a selected emigration” and provide that emigrant pool with the appropriate “professional and linguistic preparation.”34
But one dissonant note troubled Dizhur’s reassurances about the essential rationality of the receiving countries. In one paragraph, on the penultimate page, he
allowed that an extra-economic factor specific to Jews might also be affecting
Jewish emigration opportunities. Whereas when other peoples carried out small-scale
experiments in agrarian retraining — “when, for instance, Switzerland conducts an
experiment with 800 agricultural workers, or Holland with 50 families of farmers
and colonisation in Canada,” — the world sees these as “an adequate demonstration
of the good intentions of these peoples to supply the appropriate elements for the immigration lands.” But “when 30,000 Jews settle on the land in Argentina and tens of thousands in the US and Canada, it’s nevertheless not enough to overcome the old
superstition that Jews are not capable of agriculture.” In passive voice, Dizhur complained that attention was given “only [to] those cases when Jewish immigrants have
been forced to leave [agriculture] (and incidentally, in that respect British immigrants
are much better artists than the Jews). But no one wants to reckon with the positive successes that have been achieved in this area.”35
Thus, Dizhur flirted with the worrisome possibility that opposition to Jewish immigration was freighted by assumptions – perhaps even a “superstition” – regarding
Jewish character. But his text contained this worry by shifting into a defensive
mode. He insisted that “one must nevertheless take into account that all other characteristic features of the Jewish immigrant pool are altogether positive from the standpoint
of the immigration lands” and even detailed those features (familial stability, ready
loyalty to their adopted land) despite the fact that the book’s intended audience was
a Yiddish-speaking readership that presumably needed no convincing.36 Dizhur’s
text thus ducked two painful questions that were also linked in powerful ways:
whether anti-Jewish restriction stemmed from anti-Jewish sentiment that could not
easily be allayed by economic logic, and whether anti-Jewish restriction really might
have something to do with Jewish behaviours beyond the economic sphere. Other analysts did not tread so gingerly.
In 1937, the economic geographer Wiktor Ormicki, himself of Jewish origin but
deeply committed to Polish national identity and a Polish federalist-nationalist
vision,37 authored “Warunki i Mozliwosci Emigracji Zydowskiej” (Conditions and
Possibilities of Jewish Emigration) for the Instytut Badan Spraw Narodowosciowych
(Institute for Research on Nationality Affairs, sometimes represented in English at
the time as Nationality Research Institute). Ormicki’s piece accorded well with the
institute’s general posture towards Poland’s national minorities: informed, scholarly,
open to the direct input of members of minority communities with a Polish-language
scholarly profile and pro-state politics, but concerned above all with serving the
policy needs of the Polish state and the Polish national interest construed in broadly Pilsudkian-federalist terms.38 Here as elsewhere, he wrote with restrained sympathy about
the plight of Polish Jews,39 but did so from the perspective of Polish interests, and his
frank concern was how to maximise Polish Jewish emigration. In turn, he devoted most
of the text to establishing why there was so much overseas opposition to Jewish immigration. By contrast to Dizhur, Ormicki focused on cultural and political factors associated specifically with Jews that generated acute opposition to their immigration, among
them “the opinion that [Jews have] an anti-state disposition and [are given to] subversive activities” and their cultural separatism.40 He allowed that negative attitudes
towards Jewish immigration might involve as much “groundless” prejudice as rational
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East European Jewish Affairs
213
reaction to real Jewish flaws, but insisted that both Polish and Jewish people of goodwill had to think practically and focus on fixing those factors where “the source of evil
truly lies in Jewry” itself by redressing attitudes within “Jewish society, in particular
inside its existing social, ideational, and political organizations.” Ormicki’s conclusion
was sharp: “the existing immigration restrictions are largely due to causes inherent in
Jewry itself, and action toward their removal is an essential step toward the preparation
and easing of emigration.”41
Ormicki was a liberal by the standards of time and place. But his text could only
have been read with consternation by many Jews in a context of rising discourse
about the organised mass transfer of Polish Jews.42 The Jewish socialist Bund led
the counterattack,43 but similar retrenchment played out among many who lacked
the Bund’s blithe faith in coming revolutionary salvation. In February 1937, a
leading activist in the JEAS, one Rotfeld, averred that “the emigration-question …
has recently become the expression of the antisemitic extermination [sic] idea.” The
JEAS had to offer “a correct account of the matter to those in Polish society who champion fantastic plans for the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews to Madagascar,
and Haiti, and other distant lands.” Reminding enthusiastic listeners that Jews had
striven energetically to build Poland, Rotfeld – himself sympathetic to Zionism –
rebuked Zionist leader Yitzhok Grinboym directly by negating the chief term of his
controversial 1935 statement to the effect that there were a million “excess Jews” in
Poland: “there are no excess Jews in Poland!”44 The veteran emigration activist
Yitshok Valk, speaking for Vilna’s JEAS chapter, admonished that open discussion
of the need for Polish Jewish emigration was itself partly to blame for the tightening
immigration restrictions against Jews, because the “emigration-tumult” frightened
potential receiving countries.45
Against the backdrop of this agonised defensiveness, Tartakover distinguished
himself with several books in 1938–9 on the problem of Jewish emigration. Published
in both Yiddish and Polish, these directly confronted the question projected forcefully
into Polish public life by texts like Ormicki’s: why were so few emigration opportunities open to Jews, why were so many publics overseas convinced that Jewish immigration was something to be resisted, and what could Jews do about it?
In Yidishe vanderungen, written in 1938 though published only in 1939, Tartakover
confronted his Jewish readers with an argument about the causes of immigration restriction which accorded much more with Ormicki’s analysis than Dizhur’s. Extrapolating
from “the past few years and from the tendencies visible in the countries taken individually,” Tartakover sketched an emergent system of restrictions in which economic
calculations by states were no more decisive than “national- and race-principles,” concerns about cultural homogeneity, and the “political kosherness” of immigrants.46
Though his concern was primarily with the effect on Jews – “unfortunately, none
too good” – Tartakover paused to stake a larger claim in the international debate
among social theorists regarding the relationship between economic and ideological
factors in the age of the totalitarian state system. Tartakover argued that, however
much it might have once been the case that economic interests dictated state policies
“in the final analysis,” recent institutional developments had rendered this no longer
the case. In “previous decades … the mutual dependence between the economic and
the general political situation [in regard to emigration policy] was strong, as in all
other areas of life (thus, for instance, the granting of equal rights to Jews was an integral
component of liberal economic policy).” Emigration policies had, similarly, once
followed directly from real economic interests. But recent years had seen something
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unanticipated: even higher restrictions despite “more or less clear signs of an
[economic] improvement” globally.
Tartakover did not offer a sustained explanatory theory as to why state policy had
ceased to follow real economic interests. Rather he gestured towards explanations of
two separate iterations of this process. He suggested that US foreclosure of immigration
possibilities in the early 1920s had emerged out of the tension between “the great
slogans of freedom and progress proclaimed after the World War and the negligible
development possibilities of the new states in Eastern and Central Europe” – US
policy shifts were in that sense a simultaneously ideological and economically rational
response to a tension as much ideological and geopolitical as material. Alternatively, he
pointed to the more recent phenomenon of state takeover by extremist regimes which
had reached “a maximal level at precisely the moment when the worst years of the
economic crisis are at an end” not only in “Germany and Latvia and Rumania” but –
fatefully for would-be Jewish emigrants – also in such once promising sites as South
Africa and “many South American states” now “Hitlerised.”47 Either way, Tartakover
warned, “[t]he logic of the previous era has ceased [to obtain]. Political oppression has
transformed itself from a component of economic development into more or less independent factor.” It followed that Jews should not expect rapid improvement in immigration policy even when the global economy improved (something he anticipated,
whereas the text betrays no expectations of an impending global conflict). More specifically, they should not expect that the new ideological factors restricting immigration
policy – national, racial, cultural-cohesion, and political principles – would dissipate
quickly.
Race, antisemitism, and colonial empire
One of the terms that had been absent from Dizhur but that Tartakover took up was
“race.” However, Tartakover’s approach to “race” displayed both serious assessment
of its power as a category shaping global political life and hesitation as to whether it
was really racism that accounted for conscious restrictions on Jewish migration, or
rather a free-standing antisemitism that obeyed a more complicated logic. This negotiation was on display in his account of South Africa’s recently heightened restrictions
on Jewish immigration, which he described as “an exemplar of the curse that hangs over
Jewish emigration in the current moment, much more than over the immigration of
other peoples.” This curse was “special anti-Semitic intention in … immigration practice” which he located not only in South Africa but also in Brazil. Considering the constituent dimensions of this antisemitism and its origins in South Africa, Tartakover
recognised, on the one hand, that these restrictions owed something to the larger
racial imagination of Boer nationalism: they were linked in some way to “the
already present sharp opposition in the country of … the white and the black population.” Yet his analysis presented this race thinking as no more important than nationalist sensibilities that did not follow any clear racial logic, for instance, the conflict
“amongst the whites themselves between the English and the Boers (or as one calls
them more recently Afrikaaners).” More generally, Tartakover construed South
African restrictions on Jewish immigration in terms of a distinct antisemitism that
was more than the sum of its parts: these included race thinking, but also the sense
in South Africa that Jews “don’t assimilate,” i.e., a distinctly cultural nationalism. Tartakover further located the origins of this antisemitism not in some general matrix of
racist logic but in the ideological influence of actual Germans in South Africa: absorbed
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through South Africa’s mandate over Germany’s former colonies, they were now, he
contended, the key bearers of antisemitism.48
Though Tartakover’s predecessor Dizhur had had nothing to say about race thinking a decade earlier, he had addressed European colonial empire in Africa and Asia.
Convinced that Europe would have to find a physical outlet for ostensible overpopulation, and failing to anticipate either independence movements or population explosion
in the developing world, he confidently predicted that the “direction in which emigration will have to proceed in the near future” was from Europe to underdeveloped colonial holdings and the Americas. Left implicit was the potential relevance of this vision
of mass emigration and “industrial” colonisation for East European Jews – a relevance
suggested to eager Jewish readers, perhaps, in Dizhur’s comment that Europe’s powers
would find it “harder to populate than to seize and exploit.”49
It fell to a different author to draw together this strange colonial vision with the later
recognition of the rising power of race as a category, and to present their fusion as a
potential solution to the plight of East European Jewry. The year 1939 brought one
of the most peculiar products of Jewish emigration discourse, Majer Pollner’s Emigracja i przewarstwowienie żydów polskich (Emigration and the restratification of
Polish Jews). Though one historian refers to Pollner as “apparently well-acquainted
with the subject” of mass emigration possibilities,50 Pollner was in fact a latecomer
to it. Without profile as a writer until the mid-1930s, Pollner had worked for a
decade as a travelling inspector for the Jewish cooperative movement in northeastern
Poland, where he encountered “hopeless Jewish poverty.”51 When he had begun to
publish in 1936, Pollner had acknowledged that “the broad Jewish masses see their
only salvation in emigration,” but insisted that, given the absence of emigration opportunities, Jews would have to redouble their efforts at economic self-help.52 By 1939, he
had changed his mind. In Emigracja i przewarstwowienie, Pollner accepted the
common view that Jewish extrusion from Poland’s commercial sector would only
grow worse, and concluded that the restratification of East European Jewry had to be
wedded to mass emigration.53
But here Pollner departed from the generally grim assessment of how few emigration opportunities there were. He insisted that vast swathes of undeveloped land in Australia, “Africa, South America, and even North America” would be opened to Polish
Jews if they were properly retrained so as to be made appealing as immigrants. But
why, against all evidence, would these governments suddenly be willing to accept
masses of Jews?
The answer, in Pollner’s telling, was racism – a looming race war between “Europeans” and the “yellow races,” particularly the Japanese. Drawing on the Polish translation of writings by the famous correspondent (and budding Nazi) Anton Emmerich
Zischka, Pollner contended that, faced with the ostensibly innate expansionism of
the “yellow race,” “white” governments in the Pacific rim would ultimately “realize
the seriousness of the situation, and they will open wide the gates to their countries”
to “immigration from Europe.” Moreover, because the “inevitable danger of flooding
by the yellow race” is greatest in underdeveloped regions, the “white” governments
would encourage concentrated colonisation. Most importantly, they would be willing
to consider “even Jews” as white Europeans, albeit on one condition: that Jews
remake their “occupational structure” (because “no country will accept a
lumpenproletariat”).54
How deeply Pollner shared the racist assumptions he saw at work in the thinking of
“white” governments is not clear. Indeed, the place of race thinking in interwar East
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K.B. Moss
European Jewish culture is an open question, so it is hard to contextualise Pollner’s
remarks in a way that will allow interpretive confidence.55 But whatever credence he
accorded “the Yellow Peril,” he was also able to appreciate the countervailing
insight that “race” was fungible – that anti-Asian racism might render even Polish
Jews “white” in the eyes of the powerful if Jews remade themselves economically.
This suggests an essentially instrumental relationship to the concept.
Moreover, Pollner’s assertion that anti-Asian sentiment in the West could profoundly shape the migration policies of the US, Australia, Canada, and South Africa
among others was well grounded.56 So too, recent scholarship on race-making in this
period suggests that his hope for Jewish “whitening” wasn’t utterly unfounded:
southern Italian immigrants to Australia had been viewed as not really white in the
1920s, but by the 1930s policy-makers concluded that they could be absorbed into
“a homogeneously white Australia.”57 Of course, this hardly renders Pollner’s hopes
realistic: the key factors that rendered Italian immigrants already in Australia palatable
to race-minded planners in the 1930s were that there were few of them, that restrictive
legislation ensured that no more could come, and that they were rapidly assimilating.58
The concentrated mass settlement of Jews that Pollner hoped for would hardly have
appealed to planners committed to these principles.
But the point here is not to assess the realism of Pollner’s hopes. Rather, it is to
underscore that his fantasies of Jewish salvation were not dependent on racist assumptions of his own but rather on a well-grounded assessment of how the racial nightmares
of the “white men” who made immigration policy throughout the Pacific actually
shaped policy. His instrumental relationship to the racism of the powerful points us
towards a distinct kind of Jewish political reason in interwar Jewish political thought.
Antisemitism, nationalist disciplinarity, political reason
Pollner imagined that the Euro-American racism of the “global color line” (to cite Du
Bois) was strong enough to trump antisemitism. His predecessor, Dizhur, had said little
about either, trusting that economic reasoning was both cause and cure of the new
restriction against Jews. In tension with both views, Tartakover insisted on the significance of “special anti-Semitic intention in … immigration practice,” and insisted
further that this antisemitic structure of intention was not reducible to race thinking.
There is good reason to think that Tartakover was right. The particular case of lawmaking that commanded his attention, that of South Africa’s 1930 Quota Act, was not
formally framed against Jewish immigration, but as Gideon Shimoni has shown, that
was the intention behind it from start to finish in the context of intense demand for
restricting East European Jewish immigration in broad social circles and the policymaking community.59 Recent research in the archives of various consular bureaucracies
further suggests the practical impact of conscious anti-Jewish sentiment. South African
embassy staff in Europe actively bent the regulations to reduce Jewish immigration
further.60 Patrick Weil’s work on American consuls reveals a well-developed wordof-mouth culture enjoining special stringency when it came to Jews by the 1930s.61
The larger question of the relationship of antisemitic intention to race thinking is
more complicated, of course, but here too there is good reason to think that Tartakover
was right both in recognising the importance of the race concept in inflecting global
restrictionism against East European Jews and at the same time emphasised the
limits of “racism” as an explanation of anti-Jewish policy. He (like Ormicki) remained
convinced that anti-Jewish restriction was not a function of some sovereign, coherent
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217
system of global racism but a distinct, directed mode of restriction informed by a mix of
quite historically specific concerns about Jews. Above all, it involved a general antagonism to petty capitalism that easily fastened on Jews but which was not necessarily a
mask for antisemitism (and which individual Jews might therefore work around), a
general nationalist (not racialist) concern about assimilability and hence about quantity
of ethnically different migration, and an increasingly robust sociopolitical antisemitism
that could operate powerfully quite apart from racism – that saw Jews as problem not
because of their biology but because of their culture and ostensible ethos. Thus, Shimoni’s account of the passage of South Africa’s Quota Act in 1930 largely confirms Tartakover’s take that although racism was one of the conceptual languages in play in
South African debates, the broad public and governmental consensus in 1930 against
further Jewish influx was driven no less by perceptions of Jewish overrepresentation
in commerce (in which 66% of South African Jews were involved in 1930), arguments
about Jewish unassimilability, a conviction that Jews were dishonest, parasitic, and
misanthropic, and a general populist anti-capitalism directed against the “‘parasitic
middleman’.”62 As the 1930s wore on, expressly racialised antisemitism loomed
larger in South African discourse, but Shimoni’s analysis suggests that older forms
of conspiratorial economic and political antisemitism continued to operate with their
own logic.63
Tartakover’s willingness to take antisemitism seriously but also to recognise its
potential relationship to real-world correlates – like the high percentage of Jews in
trade or concerns about large compact ethnic minorities given to sustained national separation – can be said to have stood in the tradition of Herzlian Zionism. And in keeping
with that tradition he did not abandon hope that certain sorts of Jewish behavioural
change might increase the number who could leave Eastern Europe, at least marginally.
This in turn points to the fact that, for all their differences, Dizhur, Pollner, and Tartakover all agreed that would-be Jewish immigrants would do well to abandon commerce
and retrain themselves as agriculturists or labourers. This view was shared in turn by
most – though not all – of those active in emigration work in Poland.64
But should this view be understood as a practical response to Jewish need, or as an
ideology – as insight into the workings of the global system or as an obscuring of the
workings of that system by intellectuals seeking to shape the Jewish social body? These
activists’ shared economic vision can certainly be read as an iteration of a vision of
Jewish productivisation that, as Derek Penslar and Jonathan Dekel-Chen have
shown, constituted a master ideology of transnational Jewish modernisation programmes from the early nineteenth century on. Western integrationists and Eastern
enlighteners, and later “assimilationists,” many Jewish socialists, and most versions
of Zionism shared the view that Jewish concentration in petty commerce was a root
cause of Jewish problems.65
The fact that something is an ideology does not, of course, mean that it is untrue.
But for scholars committed to Foucauldian intimations about intelligentsias’ innate
will to social power-via-knowledge – and these assumptions pervade much American
work on Eastern Europe66 – it is natural to read figures like Dizhur or Tartakover
through a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” in which their analysis is less an effort to
illuminate the Jewish situation than it is an effort to discipline a Jewish social body.
Tellingly, this was the core contention of one of the reviews of the current article:
“[t]here is a story here about the attempt to reinstitute Jewish collective discipline
against the prospect of imminent collective disappearance, an attempt which involved
not so much the contestation of ‘racialisation’ but the contestation of assimilation.”67
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K.B. Moss
A much cruder variant of this approach is the allegation against the self-proclaimed
progressive elements in the interwar intelligentsia that in their obsession with ‘productivising’ Polish Jewish emigrants, they failed to exploit all of the opportunities potentially open to Jewish emigration and drove down the numbers who might have got
out.68
To address these questions fully would take me far beyond bounds of this article,
but two points should be noted. First, the evidentiary picture complicates any sweepingly Foucauldian reading of emigration work as primarily a nationalist productivisationist disciplinary project.69 This is evident from the composition and activity of the
JEAS: an umbrella organisation that brought together Jewish nationalists of both
Zionist and Folkist hues (including Tartakover and Dizhur, respectively) with nonand indeed anti-nationalists like leading JEAS figure Leon Alter, whose Polonisation
commitments earned him a stint in the new Polish state’s Emigration Office (until
“new reactionary winds” pushed him out) and rendered him fiercely “anti-Zionist
and also anti-Bundist.”70 For all that the latter elements insisted that the JEAS’s task
was to regenerate “the Jewish people” rather than help individual Jews assimilate in
new countries, in practice the JEAS devoted almost all its effort to the practical
work of easing the exit of individual emigrants and their absorption as individuals in
new lands – which is to say, assimilation. It offered popular English, Spanish, and
French classes, lobbied embassies and consuls on behalf of individual emigrants, and
dispensed a good part of the small sums it commanded on the provision of information
and even direct grants to emigrants for the purchase of visas and ship-passes – and I
know of no evidence to suggest that the individual emigrants’ forms or prospects of
Jewish identification made any difference.71 The JEAS’s Zionist members – including
Tartakover – worked hard to reshape it from within against “assimilationist” ideas;72
but, conversely, those who dissented from nationalist emphases on both productivising
and concentrating emigrants included another long-time Labor Zionist and JEAS
member, Valk, who in 1931 contended “that one must approach the question in
purely practical terms and one must take into account the healthy instinct of the emigrant himself, who himself carves out new paths.”73
Tartakover himself devoted much attention to the “problem” of assimilation and
how to instil Jewish communal-national identification in emigrants; indeed, precisely
as the aforementioned anonymous reviewer intuited, he imagined adding a Jewishnational dimension to emigrant preparatory instruction in Poland and emulating
the Polish and German states’ models of actively fostering ties to the home community through emissaries.74 But, at the same time, he recognised that while the best
way to maintain Jewish identity among emigrants would be to concentrate them
in thickly Jewish neighbourhoods, he also acknowledged that the best way to maximise the number of Jews escaping Europe would be to avoid such concentrations,
because these hobbled adaptation and strengthened anti-immigrant sentiment.
There was, he acknowledged, “a powerful and fundamentally tragic contradiction
between the economic and the cultural interests of the Jewish emigration.”75 Tellingly, although Tartakover shared key elements of the “negation-of-the-diaspora”
sensibilities that infused much Labor Zionism, his deep concern for the mounting
suffering of East European Jewry cannot be gainsaid. During the August 1937
debate within Labor Zionist ranks over the Peel Commission’s plan for the partition
of Palestine, Tartakover came out strongly for acceptance of partition in principle as
long as the state could “absorb a large part of the nation.” Further, he rebuked both
sides in the debate for focusing largely on “the positive and negative aspects of this
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219
fateful step [partition]” for the Yishuv alone: “in front of our eyes stands the distress
of the millions in the lands of the Exile who are being suffocated by their political,
economic, and cultural poverty all together and the danger of imminent destruction
hangs over them if their redemption in the land does not come. The voice of the
blood of our brothers cries out from the expanses of Poland, Germany, Romania,
and so many others.”76
Tartakover’s concern for the fate of European Jewry inspired a political fantasy
comparable in its irrealism to Pollner’s: in the midst of the 1936–9 Palestinian
Revolt against the British Mandate and the Yishuv, he clung to the hope that Arab
countries around Palestine might yet recognise the developmental benefits of mass
Jewish settlement in their own “underpopulated expanses” and allow large numbers
of Jews to settle (which would have the added advantage of putting them in the cultural
ambit of the envisioned Jewish state – thus partially overcoming the aforementioned
“tragic contradiction”). Recognising that prospects currently seemed rather dim, he
nonetheless warned his colleagues against undue enthusiasm for “transfer” of Palestinians to minimise “national minorities” in the proposed Jewish state lest the surrounding Arab states adopt the same “principle against us”!77
The line between bold analysis and fantasy was evidently thin. But Tartakover, like
Pollner, mixed fantasy with a claim to political realism that must also be given its due.
And this brings me to my second and final point.
In 1938, responding perhaps to views like those of Valk that emigrant aid organisations should have more trust in individual emigrants’ choice of destination and occupation, Tartakover offered an arresting counterclaim: “We are now being haunted by
the complete chaos of that emigration in previous years, which meant that the emigrant
almost always arrived in his new land unprepared either linguistically or professionally,
and thus, in his desperate struggle for existence, often used means which created the
reputation of being an unwished-for element.”78 Not the regulation but the non-regulation of Jewish emigration in previous years, he argued, was in part to blame for
rising barriers to Jewish immigration, with dire effects for further emigration.
Only careful research in the archives of the receiving countries can determine
whether Tartakover’s claim was correct. But Tartakover’s approach here is interesting
because, as Pollner did with racism, he took the antisemitic interpretive preconceptions
of others as fact, not scandal. The global racialisation of politics from the US and Australia led Pollner to speculate that perhaps this racism, about which Polish Jews could
do little, might offer at least some of them salvation. Like Pollner, Tartakover bypassed
argument over whether the views of receiving countries were right and instead insisted
that Jews had to reckon with these views as facts that they were near powerless to
change but on which their life chances – and lives – might depend. This form of
cross-party political realism demands to be treated as a distinct mode of Polish
Jewish political thinking. It should also be recognised that, in its concern for
maximal rescue of European Jews, it was also a form of humanism.
Acknowledgements
The research for this paper was conducted with the aid of a 2009-2010 Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies and with the support of the 2010-2012
International Research Project on Jewish Migration from Russia and Eastern Europe at the
Leonid Nevzlin Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My thanks to Dan
Moss, Stephan Stach, and the readers for EEJA.
220
K.B. Moss
Notes on contributor
Kenneth B. Moss is Felix Posen Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Johns
Hopkins University. His book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard, 2009)
received the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for best work of Jewish non-fiction from the National
Jewish Book Council. He current project is entitled The Unchosen People: Nation, State, Diaspora and the Polish Jewish Condition in Jewish Political Thought 1928–1939. His work has
appeared in the Journal of Modern History, Jewish Social Studies, Jewish History, the
Journal of Social History among others.
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Notes
1. I treat these questions extensively in my forthcoming book The Unchosen People: Nation,
State, Diaspora, and the Polish Jewish Condition in Jewish Political Thought 1928–1939.
2. Tartakower, Migrations of Polish Jews in Recent Times, 18–19.
3. Hagen, “Before the ‘Final Solution’,” 376.
4. Pollner, “Mit eygene koykhes.”
5. Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 518 n. 43; Cherniavsky,
“‘Aliyat yehudei Polin be-shnot ha-shloshim shel ha-meah ha-’esrim,” 127–33.
6. “Di yidishe emigratsye fun Poyln,” 85–6, 90.
7. Weil, “Races at the Gate,” 276.
8. Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 265, 264, 244.
9. Shimoni, Jews and Zionism, 97.
10. Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”, 166.
11. Tartakover, Yidishe emigratsye un Yidishe emigratsye-politik, 18.
12. Tartakover, Migrations of Polish Jews in Recent Times, 20–1.
13. Tartakover, Yidishe vanderungen, 133–4.
14. See the polemical but bibliographically helpful Marcus, Social and Political History of the
Jews in Poland, 387–410.
15. My forthcoming study The Unchosen People will devote attention to these aspects of the
emigration debate.
16. Given this focus, I do not address the rich literature on the sociocultural realities of emigration and its impacts in East European communal life, as in the work of Gur Alroey or in
Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora.
17. Vaserman, “Ikveta d’meshikha,” 28.
18. Blatman, “Ha-vikuah be-folin bi-1936 al tokhnit ha-evakuatsiah shel Jabotinsky,” 375. In
fact, encouragement of Jewish emigration had been a policy desideratum of Polish government circles since the creation of the state; see Zahra, Exodus from the East, chapter 3.
19. Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 91–2.
20. Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 264ff.
21. Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 122.
22. Dizhur, Di moderne felker-vanderung, 15.
23. Ibid., 69–70.
24. Ibid., 13–14. Cf. Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 247–8.
25. On Western Jewish leaders’ relationship to the League, see Fink, Defending the Rights of
Others.
26. Dizhur, Di moderne felker-vanderung, 78–9.
27. Ibid., 15, 13.
28. Tsen yor “YEAS”, 12–13.
29. Manor, “Prof. Aryeh Tartakover u-mifalo ha-iyuni-ha-meda’i.”
30. Tartakover, Dos yidishe emigratsye-problem un der yidisher velt-kongres, 4–5, 23, 26, 28;
Dizhur’s unpublished memoirs also accord importance to this “agreement between a
private Jewish organization and a full three governments,” which seemed to promise “a
fully legal and well-organized emigration wherein Jews would be treated as full-fledged
human beings and citizens and would not have go through the hell of stealing the
border, of being uninvited guests, of reactionary and antisemitic Polish governments.”
Dizhur, incomplete typescript for Yidn loyfn fun Poyln, 123–4, Dizhur Collection, YIVO
Institute, Record Group 589, microfilm 1.
31. Tartakover, Yidishe vanderungen, 137.
East European Jewish Affairs
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
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40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
221
Dizhur, Di moderne felker-vanderung, 13.
Ibid., 100
Ibid., 102–3.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Jackowski, Do konca wierny Polsce i Geografii, 7, 22, 32ff, 48. Thanks to Stephan Stach
for bringing this book to my attention. See also Ormicki, Zycie gospodarcze kresow
wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, 5–8.
For the Institute’s views, see Paprocki, Minority Affairs in Poland; Boruta, “Instytut Badan
Spraw Narodowosciowych,” esp. 64–5.
Ormicki, Skup zawodowy i handel obnosny w woj. Wilenskim, Nowogrodzkim, Poleskim i
Wolynskim, 35.
Ormicki, Warunki i Mozliwosci Emigracji Zydowskiej, 5–6.
Ibid., 7–8.
Tara Zahra’s forthcoming Exodus from the East, chapter 4, shows, in turn, just how fully
this Polish vision of the mass emigration of its Jews was embedded in a larger transatlantic
consensus among policy-makers and experts that mass Jewish resettlement was a key to
solving both the Jewish question and East European problems more generally.
Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 387–410.
“A delegatn-konferents in der gezelshaft ‘YEAS’,” Moment, 2 February 1937.
Valk, “Vilner opteylung fun der yidisher tsentraler emigratsye-gez. ‘YEAS’,” 275.
Tartakover, Yidishe vanderungen, 141–3.
Ibid., 138–40.
Ibid., 122–9, 145.
Dizhur, Di moderne felker-vanderung, 10.
Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 390.
Pollner, Emigracja i przewarstwowienie żydów polskich, 5.
Pollner, “Mit eygene koykhes.”
Pollner, Emigracja i przewarstwowienie żydów polskich, 17–22.
Ibid., 42–5.
Talk of “the Yellow Peril” was a recognisable topic in Polish Jewish educated discourse by
the 1930s; see Shandler, 167. More broadly, “race” as a concept imputing some possible
social effect to inherited biological difference was already a naturalised category in the East
European Jewish lexicon. A 1908 Russian Yiddish “political lexicon” published in a cheap
pocket edition to help Jews make sense of “the foreign words that appear in Yiddish newspapers, journals, political and economic pamphlets” defined “race” thus: “Peoples, nations
that stem from the same ancient family and have therefore many identical bodily and spiritual marks (skin color, bodily structure, the form of their languages, etc.). The Jews [and]
the Arabs belong to the Semitic race, for instance. Most peoples of Europe constitute the
Indo-Germanic race.” Politishes verterbukh, 1, 90.
Yet, conversely, there is little evidence of far-reaching commitments to race thinking as
a primary mode of social perception in Polish Jewish life comparable to the ramified
analytical racism so widespread in American, Australian, South African, or German
thought, wherein some notion of biological difference served as the key to explaining
social, cultural, and political phenomena. Rather, “race” seems to have functioned
largely as a supplementary category in a political environment structured by older concepts
of difference structured around culture, history, and religion. Thus, Dr Tsemach Shabad, a
leader in Polish Jewish “social medicine,” treated “race” as a concept that could not be dismissed out of hand but strongly inclined towards minimising its explanatory relevance for
“culture” and the “formation of peoples” in favour of factors like “historical development
and environment.” “Rase un kultur” [Race and culture] [review essay of figures including
Franz Boas and W. Goetz], YIVO-Bleter 5:3–5 (1933): 375–83, esp. 380. It may also be
that the galloping racialisation of antisemitic discourse in the West and especially
Germany (though less so in Eastern Europe itself; cf. Hagen, “Before the ‘Final Solution’,”
370) had a sobering effect; this was indeed the case with none other than Tartakover. In
1935, in a second edition of a textbook on contemporary Jewry for Poland’s Hebraist
high schools, Tartakover “completely omitted” “the chapter on the theory of Jewish race
[torat ha-geza ha-yehudi] … because this theory is not sufficiently grounded and is also
222
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
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69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
K.B. Moss
too difficult for young people to understand. I also thought it right to omit this chapter in
light of the alarming moral decline of race theory following the recent occurrences in
Germany.” Tartakover, Ha-am ha-yehudi be-zmanenu, 3.
Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 312–31.
Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 161–2.
Ibid.
Shimoni, Jews and Zionism, 97–108; Peberdy, Selecting Immigrants, 63–5.
Peberdy, Selecting Immigrants, 66–7.
Weil, “Races at the Gate,” 279–80.
Shimoni, Jews and Zionism, 97–108.
Ibid., 109–44.
Tsen yor “YEAS”, 3–4.
Penslar, Shylock’s Children, chapters 3, 5, 6; Dekel-Chen, “JCA–ORT–JAS–JDC.”
See Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, introduction.
Anonymous reviewer for East European Jewish Affairs, 19 March 2014.
This is Marcus’s core accusation in Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland,
387–410.
Cf. Penslar’s careful analysis of this question for German Jewish productivisationists in
Shylock’s Children, 205–16. I don’t wish to suggest that the aforementioned reviewer
would suggest any such simplistic reading; it is worth noting in this context her stimulating
comments on the ambivalences of race thinking: “In view of the anxiety engendered by
‘assimilation’ – despite the constant escalation of anti-semitism and the prospect of immiseration as a result of economic discrimination – no one, not Jews and not Poles, could
afford to dismiss the essentialism of racial doctrine entirely. The reluctance to do so –
and thereby to look like a proponent of assimilation and of Jewish collective demise –
would certainly explain the ambivalence toward the ‘torah’ of race in the pronouncements
of Tartakover and Pollner.” Anonymous reviewer for East European Jewish Affairs, 19
March 2014.
Dizhur, typescript for Yidn loyfn, 72–3, Dizhur Collection, YIVO, RG 589, mf. 1
Dray yor idishe emigratsye, 14–17; Leshtshinsky, “Emigratsye tragedyes,” 235–7, 241.
Tartakover to Natan Meltser, 12 October 1933, Ha-makhon le-heker tenuat ha-avoda a.’sh.
Pinhas Lavon, Tel Aviv: Personal Archives Collection: Tartakover (IV-104-565).
Tsen yor “YEAS”, 6.
Tartakover, Yidishe emigratsye un Yidishe emigratsye-politik, 134. On Polish nation-state
outreach to migrants, see Gabaccia et al., “Emigration and Nation Building during the Mass
Migrations from Europe.”
Tartakover, Yidishe emigratsye un Yidishe emigratsye-politik, 128.
‘Al darke mediniutenu, 130.
Ibid., 132
Tartakover, Yidishe vanderungen, 147.
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