Jewish Disloyalty 1848 Prussia Hagen

Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914, by William W. Hagen
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German Imperialism and Colonialism. Strong Jewish Disloyalty to Poland

This work is very detailed and technical. It requires an in-depth knowledge of this specific subject to evaluate fully. Hagen also has a tendency to editorialize on events, and to downplay the significance of nationality in favor of class conflicts in German society. (p. 287, pp. 320-322).

UNDEMONIZING THE POLISH NOBILITY

Author William Hagen does not awfulize the Polish serfdom that existed just before the Partitions. For instance, destitution was the lot of only part of the Polish peasantry, while other peasants were self-sufficient and under the benevolent care of their landlords. Some peasants worked large holdings of land, enabling them, for a time at least, to rent their allotment of land instead of working directly for the landlord. (p. 14).

GERMAN POLONOPHOBIA WAS WIDESPREAD

Hagen acknowledges that the derogatory German conception of Poland, as exhibited by the likes of Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Treitschke, von Bulow, and later, Hitler, was widely and early held among Germans in general. He comments, (quote) Attitudes similar to Frederick’s were common in eighteenth-century Germany. The earliest references to Poland in German popular and high literature alike were tinged with superiority and irony: Poland was a land of ox-drivers, wolves, and people in bear skins; the numerous lower Polish nobility were lampooned and denied equality of status by seventeenth-century noble German writers and visitors in Poland…”Turbulent” (VERWIRRT) became a standard adjective to describe things Polish… (unquote). (p. 37).

PRUSSIANS ANTICIPATE NAZIS

The severity of German actions against the Partitioned Poles escalated with time. Interestingly, Berhard von Bulow (Buelow), a onetime diplomat under Bismarck, and “a forceful exponent of Treitschkean nationalism” and of Wilhelminian imperialist claims (p. 180), toyed with the idea of a resurrected Congress Poland, under Hohenzollern auspices, in the event of war with Russia. This new Polish rump state would be a dumping ground for the Poles of Prussian-ruled Poland. (pp. 180-181). Hagen does not mention that much of this happened under Nazi German rule: The German-ruled General Government became a dumping ground for the Poles of that part of conquered Poland that had directly been annexed to the Third Reich.

ENDEK ACTIVISM ELEVATES THE POLES

Hagen provides a good deal of detail on the Polish national movement and its resistance to German de-Polonization efforts. For instance, the political activism of the National Democrats (Endeks), among Poles of all social strata, had been so successful that 93% of eligible Polish voters voted for the Endek-supported candidates to the 1912 Reichstag election. (p. 258). Contrary to the misrepresentation of Endeks as ones tending to support the upper Polish social classes, they actually opposed the upper classes for their excessively conciliatory attitudes towards Poland’s foreign rulers (p. 231), and built a national movement that involved all sectors of Polish society. (see Table 9, p. 257).

JEWISH DISLOYALTY TO POLAND: LARGELY PASSIVE

Poland’s Jews lost any identification with Poland rather soon after the Partitions. Hagen writes that, (quote) In 1793-95, Prussia acquired not only masses of new Polish subjects, but a major proportion of the Commonwealth’s Germans and Jews as well…The Jews also ceremonially welcomed their new Prussian overlords in South Prussia. In Meseritz they decorated their houses and erected a gate of honor for the royal procession. In Poznan, arrayed in what a Prussian writer called their “Turkish dress,” they met the king on the outskirts of town. In the city, they illuminated their ghetto and synagogue and staged a musical concert ending in cries of “Long live Frederick William”. (unquote) (pp. 65-66).

This trend continued. Hagen notes that, “Before 1848, they [the Jews] did not take sides in the conflicts between Germans and Poles.” (p. 104). Hagen exculpates the Jewish neutrality in terms of the negative aspects of past Polish-Jewish relations. But then he refutes himself by the fact of unfavorable German conduct towards Jews, which Hagen freely discusses in this work. There is, for instance, the long German history of persecuting and expelling Jews, which was to happen again in 1883-1885. (p. 132). In addition, the Germans were not the only ones who made positive overtures towards the Jews. The Poles did likewise. For instance, “In 1845 a Polish majority voted to admit Jews into the Poznan town council.” (p. 104). In 1848, “The Polish National Committee proclaimed full Jewish emancipation and civil equality.” (p. 109). Otherwise, Hagen candidly attributes the Jewish neutrality, in Polish-German matters, to the post-1815 Prussian courting of the Jews, as well as the newfound Jewish cultural and social ties with the Germans. (p. 109).

JEWISH DISLOYALTY TO POLAND: NOW OPEN AND ACTIVE

In evaluating the events of 1848, Hagen comments, (quote) Like the Protestant Germans, the Jews, when confronted with the possibility of a reversion to Polish sovereignty, declared themselves openly for the Prussian state. Their decision, not unnaturally, embittered the Poles. In retaliation, the Polish League proclaimed a boycott of German and Jewish firms. But the Poles could not provide alternative services, while a counter-boycott stated by Jewish wholesalers brought the income of the Polish landlords to an embarrassing halt. The wealthier Jews, at any rate, could withstand such onslaughts against their economic positions, through the boycott issue did not die in 1848. Despite these and other tensions, the Jews did not emerge from the revolutionary years as anti-Polish German nationalists. (unquote)(pp. 116-117). Maybe not, but the effects were essentially the same.

JEWS, IN GERMAN-OCCUPIED NORTHWEST POLAND, BECAME MORE GERMAN THAN THE GERMANS

After 1833, the local Jews abandoned their caftans and Yiddish, and assimilated–to German, not Polish, society. Jews became part of the social, literary, and political culture of the Prussian state. (p. 103). After about 1848, while the Poles became bilingual, those Germans and Jews fluent in literary Polish dwindled almost to nonexistence. (p. 153).