LeaNder" wrote: > Kevin MacDonald: I finally manged to find and read part of his exchanges > via the H-Antisemitism search list and what I saw there confrmed my > larger suspicions. In the exchanges I read, he used extensively one > source on (I think) the Jewish Polish community. Double Loyality again. > Apart from the fact - if I got things correctly in the little time I > could devote to the issue - he seemed to completely ignore the decisions > and times that could and must have led the communities to support or > prefer Russia. The most interesting thing was. see that the author of > the book responding and pointing out that he had completely misused his > study, and distorted his views.
I followed this debate to the extent I was able. The Book (The Generation <http://www.amazon.com/Generation-Communists-Societies-Culture-East-Cent\ ral/dp/0520071360/ref=sr_1_2/002-9175189-4210439?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=118\ 5517940&sr=1-2> , by Jaff Schatz) is difficult to come by, and I have not read it. MacDonald argues that Jews played a very central and crucial role in the revolutionary movements in Russia and Europe in the early 20th century, and uses Schatz as a reference to support this argument. This use of Katz' researcj seems to be amply justified by this review taken from Amazon: Schatz estimates that Jews comprised as much as 70% of high and medium level functionaries in the Communist party (pp. 360-361), with overall membership commonly reaching 50-60% (p. 96), sometimes more. In fact, Schatz (p. 96) remarks: "Given this background, a respondent's statement that "in small cities like ours, almost all Communists were Jews' does not appear to be a gross exaggeration". Note that a 50-70% level corresponds to Jews being five to seven times more common in the Communist Party than in the general Polish population. I can't vouch for this summary, but the fact that the reviewer gives exact figures, quotations, and page numbers is encouraging. In his attack on MacDonald Schatz argues that 1. Most Polish Jews were not communists, and 2. Many Polish communists were not Jews. Of course MacDonald never claimed the contrary, and it would not be necessary for his argument to do so. My impression from having followed the debate is that, as usual, a vast array of invective is spewed at MacDonald, but with no substance whatsoever. I will append MacDonald's reply to Schatz. As always, I find MacDonald's contributions to this debate to be thoughful, careful, articulate, and in the highest traditions of scholarship and science. As to his critics ... well, the less said the better. Tim Howells ======================== http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/lieberman.html <http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/lieberman.html> Kevin MacDonald responding to Jaff Schatz, December 10, 1999 on h-antisemitism list: Let me first say that I think Schatz's book is excellent an honest portrayal of a difficult period by someone intimately acquainted with the people, communities, and events he describes. He accuses me of using "isolated quotations this book, disconnecting them from their context, thus falsifying the total picture." This was surely not my intention. I took the quotes to mean what I thought they meant and, since Schatz obviously thinks they don't mean what I thought they meant, I asked (not demanded) that he clarify the relationship between the Jewish population and the Poles during the post-WWII period. However, rather than clarify this relationship and deal with the quotations and the other points I mentioned and rather than show exactly how I have disregarded the facts and have falsified the total picture, he simply states that I have been proven wrong. I said that the book seemed to make three points: that in the post-WWII era there were in fact strong ties between the Jewish community and the Jewish-dominated communist government, that Jews tended to support the government while gentile Poles did not, and that Jewish life flourished during this period. Later in my post, I asked whether I was right in assuming that only a miniscule percentage of Poles welcomed the 1939 Soviet invasion and that the percentage of Jews who welcomed it was much larger. Schatz disputes only the first of these implications. He argues against my conclusion that there were strong ties between the Jewish community and the communist government by saying "The subject of this book, however, was not at all the `relationship of the Jewish population to the communist government' (by the way - what a reductionist approach to reality!), but the life career of a particular - and fascinating - generation of communists." I have no problem agreeing that the life career of these communists was the topic of the book, but, again, please tell me where I went wrong when I relied on the quoted passages to assert that there were strong ties between the Jewish community and the communist government. What is the context that would render my interpretation incorrect or misleading? Moreover, when one makes a statement that "Besides a group of influential politicians, too small to be called a category, there were the soldiers; the apparatchiks and the administrators; the intellectuals and ideologists; the policemen; the diplomats; and finally, the activists in the Jewish sector. There also existed the mass of common people-clerks, craftsmen, and workers-whose common denominator with the others was a shared ideological vision, a past history, and the essentially similar mode of ethnic aspiration" (p. 226); and when one describes Yiddish and Hebrew language schools and publications, Jewish cultural and social welfare organizations for Jews, and Jewish economic cooperatives that employed a substantial percentage of the Jewish population, it would seem to be a reasonable conclusion that there was in fact a Jewish community in Poland- - that the "groupness" of Jews was more than just a chimera. Regarding my interpretation that "the post-WWII government was dominated by ethnically Jewish communists," I can only suggest that people read the book for themselves. As in the CPUSA, actual Jewish leadership and involvement in Polish Communism was much greater than surface appearances; ethnic Poles were recruited and promoted to high positions in order to lessen the perception that the KPP was a Jewish movement (Schatz 1991, 97). This attempt to deceptively lower the Jewish profile of the communist movement was also apparent in the ZPP, the organization created by the Soviet Union to occupy Poland after the war. Apart from members of the generation whose political loyalties could be counted on and who formed the leadership core of the group, Jews were often discouraged from joining the movement out of fear that the movement would appear too Jewish. However, Jews who could physically pass as Poles were allowed to join and were encouraged to state they were ethnic Poles and to change their names to Polish-sounding names. "Not everyone was approached [to engage in deception], and some were spared such proposals because nothing could be done with them: they just looked too Jewish" (Schatz 1991, 185). Jews did indeed vote with their feet, but a lot of the voting seems to have occurred in response to the fact that the government became progressively less dominated by Jews and there was increasing anti-Semitism in the society as a whole. According to Schatz (again, this is my interpretation), after Khrushchev's de-Stalinization speech of 1956 the party split into a Jewish and anti-Jewish section, with the anti-Jewish section complaining of too many Jews in top positions. In the words of a leader of the anti-Jewish faction, the preponderance of Jews "makes people hate Jews and mistrust the party. The Jews estrange people from the party and from the Soviet Union; national feelings have been offended, and it is the duty of the party to adjust to the demands so that Poles, not Jews, hold the top positions in Poland" (in Schatz 1991, 268). Khrushchev himself supported a new policy with his remark that "you have already too many Abramoviches" (in Schatz 1991, 272). This first stage in the anti-Jewish purges was accompanied by anti-Semitic incidents among the public at large, as well as demands that Jewish communists who had changed their names to lower the Jewish profile of the party reveal themselves. As a result of these changes, over half of the Jews in Poland responded by emigrating to Israel between 1956 and 1959. Anti-Semitism also increased dramatically toward the end of the 1960s, culminating in 1968 with an anti-Semitic campaign consequent to outpourings of joy among Jews over Israel's victory in the Six-Day War. Israel's victory occurred despite Soviet bloc support of the Arabs, and President Gomulka condemned the Jewish "fifth column" in the country. Extensive purges of Jews swept the country and secular Jewish life (e.g., Yiddish magazines and Jewish schools and day camps) was essentially dissolved. It is at least reasonable to suppose that these outbursts of anti-Semitism were influenced by the perception among Poles of the role Jews played in postwar Poland. As one intellectual described it, Poland's problems resulted essentially from ethnic conflict between Poles and Jews in which the Jews were supported by the Russians. The problems were due to "the arrival in our country . . . of certain politicians dressed in officer's uniforms, who later presumed that only they- -the Zambrowskis, the Radkiewiczes, the Bermans- -had the right to leadership, a monopoly over deciding what was right for the Polish nation." The solution would come when the "abnormal ethnic composition" of society was corrected (in Schatz 1991, 306, 307). Of course the real issue in all of this was whether there was any shred of rationality in postwar Polish anti-Semitism resulting from the constitution of the Polish government and from the role of the wider Jewish community in supporting and staffing the government. As always, one must make the usual caveats that exaggeration and even fantasies may color the situation once the battle lines have been drawn between groups. But my basic position is that we should not simply assume that every instance of anti-Semitism is utterly irrational. Rather, we should suppose that in general there are indeed real conflicts of interest between groups and that outbreaks of intense hostility are a complex interplay of fantasy and reality. Obviously, I am an evolutionary social psychologist rather than a historian. My analysis is based on social identity theory, with which many historians may not be familiar. It predicts how and why differences in the relative frequency with which ingroup and outgroup members engage in various behaviors are molded by the human mind into essential characteristics of the entire group. My attempt is to explain why anti-Jewish statements had such resonance in this period among Poles, and I think that actual Jewish behavior is part of the explanation.
