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Occasional Papers
Posted -- January 29, 2001 David Lieberman, "Scholarship as an Exercise in Rhetorical Strategy: A Case Study of Kevin MacDonald's Research Techniques" 3 of 3 |
It will be apparent in the following that the Jews, including Jewish communists at the highest levels of government, continued as a cohesive, identifiable group. [MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, p. 63]The problem with these assertions of general Jewish solidarity with the Communist government is that they are, quite simply, false. Indeed, the evidence that contradicts MacDonald on this is readily available and clearly laid out in Jaff Schatz's The Generation, the principal source informing MacDonald's discussion. The vast majority of surviving Jews who remained in or returned to Poland immediately after the Second World War signaled their lack of faith in what MacDonald calls the "Jewish-dominated" Communist government in the clearest language possible: they left.[T]he general opposition between the Jewish-dominated Polish communist government supported by the Soviets and the nationalist, anti-Semitic underground helped forge the allegiance of the great majority of the Jewish population to the communist government while the great majority of non-Jewish Poles favored the anti-Soviet parties (Schatz 1991, 204-205). [MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, p. 65]
Moreover, the Jewish-dominated government regarded the Jewish population, many of whom had not previously been communists, as "a reservoir that could be trusted and enlisted in its efforts to rebuild the country. Although not old, 'tested' comrades, they were outsiders with regard to its historically shaped traditions, without connections to the Catholic Church, and hated by those who hated the regime. Thus they could be depended on and used to fill required positions" (Schatz 1991, 212-213). [MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, p. 66]
... Poland became polarized between a predominantly Jewish ruling and administrative class supported by the rest of the Jewish population and by Soviet military power, arrayed against the great majority of the native gentile population. [MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, p. 66]
The first wave of returnees reached its peak in April, May, and June 1946, when 213,000 Polish refugees returned from the USSR. Of these 64.1 percent, that is, 136,550 persons, were Jews. At least 20,000 Jewish refugees came back on their own, before the organized groups of repatriates reached Poland. In 1946, the CKZP [i.e., the Central Committee of Jews in Poland] registered 157,240 Jewish repatriates from the USSR. ... Together with approximately 60,000 to 70,000 survivors of concentration camps and soldiers, there were at least 245,000 Jews in Poland in July 1946. [Schatz, The Generation, p. 203]In other words, at the presumed height of "Jewish domination" of the Communist government in Poland (a somewhat indeterminate period, insofar as MacDonald offers only imprecise dates for this Jewish reign of terror), a steady flow of emigration decreased the total Jewish population by more than sixty-six percent; far from offering their allegiance to the Communist government, the "great majority of the Jewish population" got out of Communist Poland as soon as they could. There can be no question that MacDonald would have seen this information in his research: it comes from the very pages he cites (one of them incorrectly, as it happens) in The Culture of Critique on page 65, where he is happy to quote Schatz's statistics on how many Jews had been killed by Poles expressing their opposition to "the Jewish-dominated Polish communist goverment."Despite the strong condemnation of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence by Polish intellectuals, such violence was widespread. Individual Jews were killed on returning to small cities and villages and were victims of the underground's raids on towns, settlements, railroads and buses. Several organized pogroms, which always seemed to begin with blood-libel accusations, also took place. Altogether, by summer 1947, approximately 1,500 Jews were killed in assaults that took place in 155 localities. This was bound to speed up the emigration that was already in motion. Despite the appeals of Jewish Communists, Bundists, and the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, and the promise that the regime would suppress anti-Semitism, by the end of 1947, only 100,000 Jews remained in Poland. [Schatz, The Generation, p. 207; emphasis added]
Most of the Jewish returnees left Poland during the two first postwar years. After this, emigration quietly continued. Thus, 38,000 applications for emigration to Israel were filed between September 1949 and December 1950. Two-thirds of these were approved. ... This wave of emigration was cut off when Poland closed its borders to all emigration. It has been estimated that by the middle of 1949, there were only 70,000 to 80,000 Jews left in Poland. ... As emigration continuously decreased the number of Jews in Poland, in relative terms, the PZPR [i.e., Polish United Workers' Party] members formed an increasing proportion of those Jews who remained in Poland. [Schatz, The Generation, p. 208; emphasis added]
Moreover, returning MacDonald's citations from Schatz to their original context further weakens his position. For example, see pages 204 and 205 of The Generation, where MacDonald, as quoted above, finds the government forging allegiances with "the Jewish population" [MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, p. 65]:
As the underground was strongly anti-Semitic, identifying Jews with the Communist system, the struggle against it became yet another factor that bound those Jews who were planning to rebuild their lives in Poland on the side of the regime. [Schatz, The Generation, p. 204; emphasis added.]Here, as elsewhere, MacDonald's repeated formulation "the great majority of the Jewish population" flagrantly disregards Schatz's distinction between "those Jews who were planning to rebuild their lives in Poland" and those who constituted the actual "great majority," those who were not planning to stay and, as Schatz makes quite clear, did not. MacDonald's assertion [The Culture of Critique, p. 66] that "the Jewish-dominated government regarded the Jewish population, many of whom had not previously been communists, as 'a reservoir that could be trusted and enlisted in its efforts to rebuild the country'" similarly evades distinctions informed by Schatz's discussion of the ongoing Jewish exodus from Poland. The full citation is as follows:
The opportunity for upward mobility [within the government structure] even applied to many of the generation's previously non-Communist peers, especially the former sympathizers, who out of idealistic or opportunistic motives now enrolled with the new government. Against the background of their prewar experience and the Holocaust, the postwar political configurations resulted in their perception of the new regime as their only ally against anti-Semitism. For them, the new regime was very attractive: it was antinationalist, fought anti-Semitism and bigotry, carried the flavor of universalism, and promised a secular society based on humanism and social justice. Most of all, it needed their services, offering them possibilities to work and prospects of social promotion that previously had been closed to Jews. From the point of view of the new regime, these Jews were a reservoir that could be trusted and enlisted in its efforts to rebuild the country. [Schatz, The Generation, p. 212; emphasis added.]Schatz makes clear that it was not, in fact, the whole of the Jewish population whom the goverment regarded as a trustworthy reservoir, but a) those Jews, a minority of the total Jewish population, who were self-selected by virtue of their decision not to emigrate, and b) particularly those who, though not party members before the war, had been party sympathizers. Throughout his discussion MacDonald displays a resolute and, for a social scientist, utterly irresponsible neglect of Jewish emigration as a factor affecting the government's relationship to the Jewish population. Yet this pattern of emigration provides the context for all of the passages in Schatz quoted above, and in fact, for all of the passages in Schatz MacDonald quotes or paraphrases in his own discussion. Indeed, as the pattern of citations offered here indicates, Schatz's discussion of Jewish emigration from Poland is so tightly interwoven with his discussion of the government's relationship with the Jewish population (and with his discussion of Jewish participation in the government) that to have missed it so completely MacDonald would have had to adopt a perversely contorted reading strategy.
The Communist Government and "Jewish Revival" in Postwar Poland
Perhaps the most incitatory of MacDonald's misrepresentations is his charge that
the Jewish-dominated communist government actively sought to revive and perpetuate Jewish life in Poland (Schatz, 1991, 208) so that, as in the case of the Soviet Union, there was no expectation that Judaism would wither away under a communist regime. Jewish activists had an "ethnopolitical vision" in which Jewish secular culture would continue in Poland with the cooperation and approval of the government (Schatz, 1991, 230). Thus while the government actively campaigned against the political and cultural power of the Catholic Church, collective Jewish life flourished in the postwar period. Yiddish and Hebrew language schools and publications were established, as well as a great variety of cultural and social welfare organizations for Jews. A substantial percentage of the Jewish population was employed in Jewish economic cooperatives. [MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, pp. 65-66]MacDonald's paraphrase typically fails to mention that the government's apparent interest in the revival and perpetuation of Jewish life in Poland was coupled with its tolerance and even encouragement of Jewish emigration out of Poland. The passage MacDonald cites in fact outlines "several contradictory factors" that influenced official government policy toward the (steadily declining) Jewish population.
On one hand, the regime was eager to promote the image of being genuinely Polish and to secure the cooperation of the majority of the society. This found expression in efforts to make the PPR into a national party, in appeals to lift the country out of the destruction it suffered during the war through the efforts of the whole nation, and it the call for a "Polish road to socialism." Trying to neutralize the opposition and the image of being run by Soviets and Jews, the regime had to avoid being perceived as pro-Jewish. Moreover, the territorial changes brought about by the war were justified by the regime as having resulted in a new, ethnically united Poland. In addition, hoping to eliminate Western influence in the Middle East through the new Jewish state, the Soviet camp quietly supported the Zionist endeavor. On the other hand, the leadership of the party was totally in the hands of prewar Communists, for whom anti-Semitism was anathema. Moreover, the returning Jews, together with all the other repatriates and resettlers, were extremely important in the speedy settlement of the Recovered Lands. In addition, because a large segment of the society actively opposed the regime or, at least, withheld its cooperation, the regime was in urgent need of recruiting a middle- and lower-class cadre to its media, school system, nationalized industry, and administration and needed all who were willing to cooperate, including Jews. Yet another factor was that the regime was very sensitive to Western public opinion and used the accusation of anti-Semitism as a way of discrediting the opposition. Taken together, all these factors resulted in a policy that offered Jews equal rights and commited the regime to helping revive Jewish life in Poland and that, at the same time, discreetly supported Jewish emigration, especially to Palestine. [Schatz, The Generation, p. 208; emphasis added.]Some of the factors listed in the foregoing passage could easily be construed to fit MacDonald's thesis that the government actively sought to lower its "Jewish" profile. Unfortuately for MacDonald, the government's means to achieve that end -- actually reducing the size of Poland's Jewish population through emigration -- is problematic for his broader themes. First, insofar as two-thirds of all the remaining Jews did leave, the government's methods can hardly be described as "deceptive," a key characteristic of Jewish profile-management from MacDonald's perspective. Second, the departure of most of Poland's Jews is difficult to square either with the larger thesis that Jews took advantage of their unprecedented access to power to maximize their ability to compete with ethnic Poles for resources, or, of course, with the notion that the "great majority" of the Jews perceived the accession of Jewish communists to power as beneficial to their interests.
Much the same could be said for MacDonald's reference to the "great variety of cultural and social welfare programs" the government established for Jews in the immediate postwar years. He is quick to mention the "Yiddish and Hebrew language schools," but he omits the programs providing "vocational and military training [to prepare] some of the returning youth for emigration to Palestine" Schatz describes in the very same paragraph [Schatz, The Generation, p. 231]. Moreover, MacDonald apparently would like his readers to believe that the economic cooperatives he mentions represented a Jewish triumph in the competition for resources, an assessment that would be harder to swallow had he troubled himself to add that these were "a network of 220 Jewish light industry cooperatives ... [which] were seen as a practical instrument for the realization of the goal of changing the occupational structure of the Jewish population" [Schatz, The Generation, p. 231]. Schatz's further description of such ventures (over which MacDonald passes in complete silence) utterly undermines any supposition that these programs might have had much at all to do with enhancing Jews' collective ability to compete for resources or promoting "Jewish economic ... interests" [MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, p. 68]:
[The Jewish activists'] impatient belief in social engineering sometimes took quite pathetic expression, as when they mobilzed Jewish brigades for work in the mines, agriculture, and the factories, hoping to 'proletarianize' the Jewish occupational structure and to prove to their non-Jewish comrades that Polish Jewry was essentially a working-class community. [Schatz, The Generation, p.234-35]It ought also to be noted that MacDonald pointedly avoids giving the actual numbers showing how "substantial [a] percentage of the Jewish population" worked in these cooperatives, although in this case Schatz does report figures, noting that the cooperatives "employed 6,000 Jewish workers in 1947 and some 12,000 in 1949." [Schatz, The Generation, p. 231.] These do indeed represent substantial percentages, but in order to show how substantial -- somewhere between 12% and 15% of the total Jewish population in 1949 -- MacDonald would have had to acknowledge the emigration drain that had reduced that total Jewish population to some 70-80,000 by mid-1949.
On the same page from which MacDonald draws his information about the "substantial percentage" of Jews who worked in the economic cooperatives Schatz begins an extended consideration of the impact on Jewish communist activists of the government's discreet sponsorship of large-scale Jewish emigration.
The activists sincerely believed that the Jewish problem in Poland, in the prewar sense of the word, no longer existed: there were only the concrete needs of the Jewish population to be solved. In their view, the future of Polish Jewry lay in Socialist Poland: as the phrase went, Jews should "unpack their valises," roll up their sleeves, and start working on building a common Polish-Jewish Socialist future. In addition to this conviction, during the early years, there was a strong territorialist mood among the activists. This mood was connected to the Jewish population's growth in Lower Silesia and the program of settling the bulk of the Jewish repatriates in the Reclaimed Territories. Although never carried through, some vague territorialist plans were considered by the highest party authorities and discussed with the top echelon of the activists. Thus, both out of old convictions and new sociopolitical aspirations, they held a principally hostile attitude toward the "Jewish nationalism" of the Zionists, whom they deeply resented and held in ideological contempt. At the same time, however, they were disciplined members of the party, obliged to follow its line. As the Soviet camp supported the Zionist endeavor in the hope of reducing Western influence in the Middle East, the activists were obliged to cooperate with Zionist efforts. In 1948, they ... had to join the Zionists in fund-raising, the recruitment of volunteers for Haganah (which soon became the official Israeli army), and in military training, all carried out with the quiet blessing of the authorities. [Schatz, The Generation, pp. 231-32.]In other words, the continuous flow of Jewish emigration was no more convenient for the Jewish activists than it is for MacDonald's thesis of Jewish unity and cohesion in post-war Poland. Indeed, it seems quite clear that MacDonald's contentions about Jewish unity and cohesion and his wearying invocations of the "great majority" of Jews in Poland have little or nothing to do with evidence drawn from his principal source, which contradicts such assertions repeatedly and decisively. Instead these assertions are fueled entirely by the presuppositions determined by MacDonald's thesis, buttressed by opportunistic readings that demonstrate a consistent pattern of deliberate omission, amounting in sum to a practice very close to a sort of scholarly malfeasance.
Finally, MacDonald's assertion that, owing to the government's sponsorship of Jewish cultural programs, "collective Jewish life flourished in the postwar period" demands comment [MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, p. 66]. At the conclusion of his description of the various cultural and economic programs created or sponsored by the government, Schatz indeed observes that "for those who wanted to participate, Jewish life flourished" [Schatz, The Generation, p. 231; emphasis added], the passage that appears to be the source of MacDonald's paraphrase. Once again, however, MacDonald omits the significant qualification, which communicates context by reference to the preceding discussion of Jewish emigration and which leads immediately to the descripton of on-going tension between Zionist advocates of emigration and Jewish activists quoted above. Any notion that "collective Jewish cultural experience flourished in the postwar period" ought at the very least to be informed, as MacDonald's is not, by an awareness that at this same time the number of Jews in Poland was steadily falling, and would continue to fall until the government determined both that the public relations damage caused by the continuous population drain trumped the convenience of getting the last remaining Jews out of the country, and that the attempt to flood Israel with supposed sympathizers who would tilt the nation's foreign policy to the communist bloc had largely failed.
Any fair-minded reader would recognize immediately that Schatz's comment that "Jewish life flourished" as a result of all of those government-sponsored programs is made in a profoundly skeptical context. In fact, Schatz bluntly observes only a few pages later that "[t]he Jewish world in Poland no longer existed ... " [Schatz, The Generation, p. 237].
Indeed, Poland had become a nearly homogeneous society, and the Jewish world of compact settlements, characteristic occupational structure, specific values and norms, and language and culture, a world that even when mocked and criticized had been the reference point of the generation, no longer existed. Deprived of this world and weakened by the continuous waves of emigration, even the affirmative Jews' Communist vision of a "Jewish sector" shrank to a shadow of its former shape, and ethnic assimilation seemed to define the future of the generation.In short, if MacDonald wants to pretend that "there was no expectation that Judaism would wither away under a communist regime" [MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, p. 65], it is not his cited source that gives him license to indulge the pretense. Certainly those Jewish communists whom Schatz calls "the assimilationists" had every hope and expectation that Judaism would do just that -- and, as it turns out, they were right. Ultimately one has to wonder how anyone could assess a population that in less than a decade's time had seen its numbers reduced by more than ninety-five percent through a combination of genocide and emigration as "flourishing" under any circumstances, especially if that assessment is to be coupled with the implication that this presumed flowering took place deliberately at the expense of another population. That such a claim must reflect a rather morally obtuse perspective may be the least one can say; given the extent to which such claims are embedded in a series of wholesale misrepresentations, the conclusion that they are calculated to arouse passionate resentments in order to achieve some large-scale socio-political effect desired by the claimant ought to be considered well within the range of probability.Moreover, ... even the Jewish Jews were increasingly deethnified and assimilated into several specifically Polish norms and traditions. Since only a few Jewish Jews and none of those in between [the "Jewish Jews" and the "assimilationists"] spoke Yiddish to their children, fewer and fewer children understood it. The use of Yiddish as a living language was increasingly limited to Jewish committees (and to intimate conversations between parents when they did not want their children to understand. ...
The assimilationists, those in between, and a large segment of the Jewish Jews preserved no special Jewish customs in their homes: a complex of Jewish values, norms, and tradition was consciously erased, diminished, or reduced to a Communist Yiddishism. Instead, to a varying degree, all groups increasingly accepted Polish habits and traditions, which was symbolized by the entry of Christmas trees, Christmas presents, or the celebrating of Christian name-days in their homes. In simple terms, the Jewish Jews among the members of the generation limited their Jewishness to a Communist-Yiddishist minimum, while the assimilationists sought to nullify it altogether and consciously strove for ethnic conversion, in which they were passively and at slower pace followed by those in between. Thus, despite all dissimilarities, seen in a larger perspective, these categories were not essentially different. Rather, they represented a varying degree of programmatic or actual deethnification and assimilation. [Schatz, The Generation, p. 241]
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