Polish-Jewish Relations 1903–1914: The View from the Chancellery

Old views of Russian officialdom and the question, portraying the Tsarist government as actively fomenting pogroms, have largely been laid to rest in the scholarship of the last twenty years. What has emerged to replace this simple picture of unalloyed evil is a complex picture of wide-spread, practically universal antisemitic feelings (in various forms) within the Russian government and bureaucracy, coupled with, and at times balanced by, a desire to maintain control over any kind of popular movement, and a deep fear that pogroms could quickly degenerate into general attacks on law and order, thereby further weakening the legitimacy of the Romanov dynasty.2 In other words, no historian would deny the pervasive, even reflexive and subconscious, antisemitism of official Russia, but more recent research takes a broader view of Imperial Russia as a whole in which fear of the unwashed masses-even if Russian-was often hardly less important than judeophobia. This new approach to the in Imperial Russia was for many years of necessity based almost exclusively on published sources. In recent years, however, the relaxation of restrictions on archival access in the USSR/Russia has allowed researchers to examine official and unpublished documents which, one hopes, will allow us to speak more precisely and with greater nuance about the Russian Empire's sentiments and policy toward her Jewish subjects.3 Indeed, the interest in Russia's is strong at the present time both in Russia and Poland among historians in the United States, Israel, and Western Europe.4 This paper aims to contribute to the present dialogue by offering a description of the Jewish question as perceived by Russian bureaucrats in the Kingdom of Poland (or, more officially, Vistula Country) during the decade before the outbreak of World War I. Despite the fact that at the turn of the century a large percentage of the Jewish population of the Russian Empire lived in the ten Polish provinces, this region is often slighted in studies of the Jews in the Russian Empire.5 To be sure, these ten provinces did not belong to the Pale of Settlement (cherta osedlosti), and Jews here enjoyed nearly complete equal rights in the legal sphere.6 Jews made up a high percentage of the inhabitants in all ten provinces, ranging from just over 10% in Kalisz and Kielce provinces to nearly 19% in Siedlce province, in all forming roughly one-seventh of the Kingdom's total population. Warsaw was by the turn of the century one of the largest Jewish cities in the Empire, Jews making up approximately one third of the city's total population.7 By the turn of the century, relations between Poles and Jews were rather strained. Since the Warsaw Christmas pogrom of 1881, organized antisemitism had steadily increased its influence.8 Furthermore, the Polish national movement was becoming better organized and more aggressive, and was in most cases overtly antagonistic to the Jews.9 At the same time, the various streams of modernity, ranging from assimilation (or integration) to diaspora nationalism to socialism of diverse hues to Zionism, were very much in evidence in turn of the century Russian Poland, and especially in Warsaw.10 Among both Poles and Jews, the more moderate and acquiescent modes of national behavior (organic work for the Poles, assimilation for the Jews) had reached a crisis of confidence, and the younger generation was looking to more dynamic forms of action which combined social, national, and political goals.11 It was perhaps inevitable that the rise of these more active national and political movements (e.g. the National Democrat party, Bund, Zionists) would engender frictions and even strife between the two largest national groups in the Polish Kingdom, Poles and Jews.12 Where did this new, more volatile political situation leave Russian officialdom in Poland? It should be kept in mind that Tsarist authorities were, on the whole, not particularly sympathetic to either Jews or Poles. …