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History of the Jews in Poland

The history of the Jews in Poland dates back at least 1,000 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Ashkenazi Jewish community in the world. Poland was a principal center of Jewish culture, because of the long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy which ended after the Partitions of Poland in the 18th century. During World War II there was a nearly complete genocidal destruction of the Polish Jewish community by Nazi Germany and its collaborators of various nationalities,[5] during the German occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1945, called the Holocaust. Since the fall of communism in Poland, there has been a renewed interest in Jewish culture, featuring an annual Jewish Culture Festival, new study programs at Polish secondary schools and universities, and the opening of Warsaw's Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Total population

10,000–20,000[1][2]

1,250,000 (ancestry, passport eligible[a]);[3] 202,300 (born in Poland or with a Polish-born father)[b][4]

From the founding of the Kingdom of Poland in 1025 until the early years of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth created in 1569, Poland was the most tolerant country in Europe.[6] Historians have used the label paradisus iudaeorum (Latin for "Paradise of the Jews").[7][8] Poland became a shelter for Jews persecuted and expelled from various European countries and the home to the world's largest Jewish community of the time. According to some sources, about three-quarters of the world's Jews lived in Poland by the middle of the 16th century.[9][10][11] With the weakening of the Commonwealth and growing religious strife (due to the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation), Poland's traditional tolerance began to wane from the 17th century.[12][13] After the Partitions of Poland in 1795 and the destruction of Poland as a sovereign state, Polish Jews became subject to the laws of the partitioning powers, including the increasingly antisemitic Russian Empire,[14] as well as Austria-Hungary and Kingdom of Prussia (later a part of the German Empire). When Poland regained independence in the aftermath of World War I, it was still the center of the European Jewish world, with one of the world's largest Jewish communities of over 3 million. Antisemitism was a growing problem throughout Europe in those years, from both the political establishment and the general population.[15] Throughout the interwar period, Poland supported Jewish emigration from Poland and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Polish state also supported Jewish paramilitary groups such as the Haganah, Betar, and Irgun, providing them with weapons and training.[16][17]


In 1939, at the start of World War II, Poland was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (see Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact). One-fifth of the Polish population perished during World War II; the 3,000,000 Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust, who constituted 90% of Polish Jewry, made up half of all Poles killed during the war.[18][19] While the Holocaust occurred largely in German-occupied Poland, it was orchestrated by the Nazis. Collaboration by non-Jewish Polish citizens, while sporadic, is well documented and the topic has been a subject of renewed scholarly interest during the 21st century.[20][21][22] Polish attitudes to the Holocaust varied widely, from actively risking death in order to save Jewish lives,[23] and passive refusal to inform on them, to indifference, blackmail,[24] and in extreme cases, orchestrating and participating in pogroms such as the Jedwabne pogrom.[25]


In the post-war period, many of the approximately 200,000 Jewish survivors registered at the Central Committee of Polish Jews or CKŻP (of whom 136,000 arrived from the Soviet Union)[25][26][27] left the Polish People’s Republic for the nascent State of Israel or the Americas. Their departure was hastened by the destruction of Jewish institutions, post-war anti-Jewish violence, and the hostility of the Communist Party to both religion and private enterprise, but also because in 1946–1947 Poland was the only Eastern Bloc country to allow free Jewish aliyah to Israel,[28] without visas or exit permits.[29][30] Most of the remaining Jews left Poland in late 1968 as the result of the "anti-Zionist" campaign.[31] After the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, the situation of Polish Jews became normalized and those who were Polish citizens before World War II were allowed to renew Polish citizenship. The contemporary Polish Jewish community is estimated to have between 10,000 and 20,000 members.[1][2] The number of people with Jewish heritage of any sort is several times larger.[32]

After the Holocaust, East European Monographs, 2003, ISBN 0-88033-511-4.

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

Between Nazis and Soviets: Occupation Politics in Poland, 1939–1947, Lexington Books, 2004, ISBN 0-7391-0484-5.

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

"Before the 'Final Solution': Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland", The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Jun. 1996), 351–381.

William W. Hagen

Hundert, Gershon David (2004). Jews in Poland–Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.  0-520-23844-3.

ISBN

Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2014) [1942]. Rohde, Aleksandra Miesak (ed.). German Occupation of Poland. Washington, D.C.: Dale Street Books.  978-1941656105.

ISBN

and Joanna B. Michlic. The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland, Princeton University Press, 2003 ISBN 0-691-11306-8. (The introduction is online)

Antony Polonsky

Jews in Poland. A Documentary History, Hippocrene Books, Inc., 1998, ISBN 0-7818-0604-6.

Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski

David Vital, A People Apart: A Political History of the Jews in Europe 1789–1939, Oxford University Press, 2001.

M. J. Rosman, The Lord's Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth During the Eighteenth Century, Harvard University Press, 1990,  0-916458-18-0

ISBN

Edward Fram, Ideals Face Reality: Jewish Life and Culture in Poland 1550–1655, HUC Press, 1996,  0-8143-2906-3

ISBN

Magda Teter, Jews and Heretics in Premodern Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era, Cambridge University Press, 2006,  0-521-85673-6

ISBN

Laurence Weinbaum, The De-Assimilation of the Jewish Remnant in Poland, in: Ethnos-Nation: eine europäische Zeitschrift, 1999, pp. 8–25

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the : Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1901–1906). "Russia". The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. New York: Funk and Wagnalls. Considerable amount of copy-pasted paragraphs lacking inline citations originate from the Chapter: "Russia" in this source. The encyclopedia was published when sovereign Poland did not exist following the century of Partitions by neighbouring empires. OCLC 632370258.

public domain

Chodakiewicz, Marek Jan (2003). After the Holocaust: Polish–Jewish Conflict in the Wake of World War II, East European Monographs. Columbia University Press.  0-88033-511-4.

ISBN

Cichopek-Gajraj, A. (2021). . Polish American Studies, 78(1), 60–82.

Agency and Displacement of Ethnic Polish and Jewish Families after World War II

. Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society NY: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Dynner, Glenn

(1998). "Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland 1944–1946". Yad Vashem Studies.

Engel, David

Korycki, Kate. Weaponizing the Past: Collective Memory and Jews, Poles, and Communists in Twenty-First Century Poland (Berghahn Books, 2023)

online book review

. Poland and the Jews: Reflections of a Polish Polish Jew, Kraków: Austeria P, 2005.

Krajewski, Stanisław

Levine, Hillel (1991). Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and Its Jews in the Early Modern Period. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.  9780300049879. OCLC 22908198.

ISBN

Stefan Schreiner, Darius Staliūnas (editors). The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews. Rodopi, 2004, ISBN 90-420-0850-4

Nikžentaitis, Alvydas

. The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume 1: 1350–1881 (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009) ISBN 978-1-874774-64-8

Polonsky, Antony

Polonsky, Antony. The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume 2: 1881–1914 (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009)  978-1-904113-83-6

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Polonsky, Antony. The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume 3: 1914-2008 (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011)  978-1-904113-48-5

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Prokop-Janiec, E. (2019). . The Polish Review, 64(2), 24–36.

Jewish Intellectuals, National Suffering, Contemporary Poland

Ury, Scott. Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry, Stanford University Press, 2012.  978-0-804763-83-7

ISBN

Weiner, Miriam; Polish State Archives (in cooperation with) (1997). Jewish Roots in Poland: Pages from the Past and Archival Inventories. Secaucus, NJ: Miriam Weiner Routes to Roots Foundation.  978-0-96-565080-9. OCLC 38756480.

ISBN

A Marriage of Convenience: The New Zionist Organization and the Polish Government 1936-1939 Laurence Weinbaum, East European Monographs; dist. Columbia University Press, 1993

Jewish Communities in Poland and Lithuania under the Council of the Four Lands, The Spread of Hasidic Judaism, Jewish Revolts against the Nazis in Poland (All maps from Judaism: History, Belief, and Practice)

The Cossack Uprising and its Aftermath in Poland