by Sara Bernardo

Created on: October 01, 2008

Sowing the Seeds: The Influence of Germany on Polish Antisemiti

Sowing the Seeds: The Influence of German Writing on Polish Anti-Semitism, 1900-1939.

The phenomenon of Anti-Semitism is one familiar to each corner of the world. Seemingly every region that has at one point had a strong Jewish presence within it has too been privy to varying types and instances of Anti-Semitism. The struggle of the Jewish people to find a safe area of the globe in which to reside has been being waged since the days before Christ; however, the fight for recognition and acceptance within certain nations has been more arduous, poignant and grievous than in other areas. One such example is Poland, a nation that has been forever stained with the shocking displays of racial and religious prejudice dating back to well before the WWII era. Little has been written in regards to the Anti-Semitism that ran rampant in many villages and cities throughout Poland in the Pre-WWII period; however, this subject is one that must be uncovered in order to properly capture Jewish life inside this precarious nation before the Third Reich came to power.

While Anti-Semitism is certainly evidenced both by eyewitness accounts as well as governmental policies of the period, little has been uncovered as to why much of Poland steadfastly adhered to a doctrine of racial and religious prejudice and persecution similar to that which has followed the Jewish population to each of their settlements for nearly three millennia.
Many of the racially-charged beliefs that penetrated a large fraction of Polish society were spawned in Germany, which, unlike many other European nations brandished little to no state sponsored Anti-Semitism until the rise of a number of far-right political parties in the 1920's and 30's.
Whereas much of the prejudice that was evident in Polish society was that of a religious nature due to the prevalence of orthodox Catholicism and the cultural norms that come with it, the onslaught of anti-Jewish literature from Germany was far more racial in nature and often stressed not the religions inadequacies of the Jewish populous, but the racial inferiority of the entire ethnic group.

Further strengthening the widely held views on Jewish inferiority were the influential writings and ideas pushed to the forefront by writers such as German author Eugen Karl Duhring, whose 1881 book Die Judenfrage aus Rassen-, Sitten-, und Kulturfrage was fraught with anti-Semitic ideas and was soon widely published within

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