10% off all books and free delivery over £50
Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.

From Assimilation to Antisemitism

View All Editions (1)

The selected edition of this book is not available to buy right now.
Add To Wishlist
Write A Review

About

From Assimilation to Antisemitism Synopsis

Before the mid-nineteenth century, Jews in the Polish lands led lives quite separate from their Christian neighbors. As modern ideologies of nationalism gained strength, however, Jewish separateness came to be seen as a problem, even a threat, to the Polish nation. Assimilation, a process by which Jews would become Poles in all but their religious practices, was the solution most often presented by liberal Poles from the late eighteenth century-when the "Jewish question" was first seriously debated in Polish society-until the late nineteenth century. This solution foresaw the cultural, linguistic, and external differences between Catholic Poles and Jews diminishing, thereby allowing Polish-speaking, European-clad Jews to take their appropriate place within the Polish nation.

As Russian cultural and linguistic domination threatened both Polish society and Jews, assimilation was also seen as a means of strengthening the Polish nation. Unfortunately, however, closer relations between Poles and Jews led to increased frictions and even strife between them. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the solution of assimilation was called into question more and more both by Polish antisemites and by Jewish nationalists. By 1914 the gap between "Polish" and "Jewish" had become so great that many declared it impossible to simultaneously be a "good Jew" and a "good Pole."

Weeks examines how the ideal of assimilation was gradually replaced by more exclusionary and aggressive ideologies, culminating in the early twentieth century in widespread Polish antisemitism. He argues that several long-term factors-economic change, political and cultural repression, the general intensification of national consciousness at the time, and the Revolution of 1905-played a part in the deterioration of Polish-Jewish relations. As the hope for Polish cultural and political autonomy dwindled, Jews became an easy target for Poles.

About This Edition

ISBN: 9780875803524
Publication date:
Author: Theodore R Weeks
Publisher: NIU Press an imprint of Cornell University Press
Format: Hardback
Pagination: 242 pages
Series: NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Genres: Social and cultural history
European history