The Attitude of Christian Churches in the Kingdom of Poland toward Jews in 1855–1915

Introduction

“Strange thing! For several years I have been talking with ‘biting sarcasm’ about priests and noblemen, our merchants and craftsmen, or German industrialists, and yet none of these gentlemen accused me of anger or spreading superstition and hatred. But when I first touched on the Jewish position, I was immediately warned.”¹ “It seems impossible to address the Jewish question without causing clamor and resentment. Everything can be criticized, even mathematical certainties, everything can be mocked, only the Jewish question must be stroked in the right way and still with a very delicate hand, in a velvet glove”² – Bolesław Prus wrote in his Chronicles (1889).

What these words reveal, apart from the personal bitterness of the author and the historical context, is how delicate the matter itself remained and how hard it was to discuss various aspects of the Jewish question sine ira et studio. Even today, historical Polish-Jewish relations spark a great deal of controversy. Bolesław Prus’ statement sounds like a warning, but it also forces us to ask the following question: what is important to remember for a historian, who studies the complicated Polish-Jewish relations and – in the case of this work – the attitude of Christian Churches toward Jews, not to fall into the trap of simple generalizations or black-and-white schemes? This is certainly not an easy task. It seems that an important condition for avoiding this threat is, on the one hand, the adoption of the longue durée perspective in research to maintain a necessary distance, and on the other hand – the understanding of the examined issues with a reference to a wide and complex socioeconomic and religious backdrop of a given epoch.³

This book deals with the relationship between the Roman Catholic, Evangelical, and Orthodox Churches and Jews in the Kingdom of Poland from 1855 to 1915. I should immediately emphasize that it is not about the Church understood in the institutional sense or as a community of the People of God. None of these models corresponds to the essence of the account presented in the work. Rather, I shall seek to analyze the opinions, statements, programs, and actions concerning Jews undertaken by clerics as the “people” of the Church. Indeed, their voice had a profound influence on the formation of the social-religious consciousness of the ←11 | 12→whole masses of the faithful. In addition, I refer to various opinions of lay people connected to the Church. The following analysis of source material gives insight merely into some Christian and ecclesiastical circles of influence. Nevertheless, it seems representative.

The issues addressed in this monograph are still poorly recognized in the Polish historiography. In the interwar period, neither Polish nor Jewish historians had dealt with this issue.⁴ Indeed, the same applies to the post-war period.⁵ Noteworthy, the collection of works of the Jewish Historical Institute, which had operated in Poland since 1947, lacks a single text concerning this period. The overwhelming majority of the Institute’s work deals with the history of Jews in 1939–1945. In the 1960s–1970s, Artur Eisenbach had studied the history of Jews in the nineteenth century, which resulted in a series of quality works. The author, ←12 | 13→however, focused mainly on the internal structure of Jewish population, its legal status, and the participation of Jews in Polish national uprisings.⁶

It is worth mentioning an interesting polemic that broke out in the Kwartalnik Historyczny in the first half of the 1980s and exerted an inspiring influence on the discussion of some of the issues addressed in this book.

The polemic was triggered by Stefania Kowalska-Glikman’s article, entitled “Małżeństwa mieszane w Królestwie Polskim. Problemy asymilacji i integracji społecznej” (Mixed Marriages in the Kingdom of Poland. The Problems of Assimilation and Social Integration), which covered the period of 1815–1870.⁷ The article met criticism from Jakub Goldberg, who accused Kowalska-Glikman of neglecting the issue of marriages of Jewish converts⁸ arranged by the clergy, while also demonstrating that the guidelines regulating this process developed by Charles Borromeo in the second half of the sixteenth century were still valid in the nineteenth century. In light of these guidelines, the clergy was responsible for arranging marriages between Jewish neophytes and born Catholics.⁹ In her response to Goldberg’s remarks, Stefania Kowalska-Glikman argued that she never found any sources from the period under study which would prove the programmatic and organizational activity of the Catholic Church in the field of arranging mixed marriages.¹⁰

Without dwelling on the subject matter of this dispute, one should simply note that the arguments employed by the adversaries, and the very fact of their disagreement, indicate the need for a broader discussion of the attitude of Christian Churches toward Jews in the Kingdom of Poland.

The changing political situation in the country since the second half of the 1980 created a favorable atmosphere for dealing with “difficult themes.” It also ←13 | 14→encouraged more extensive research on the past of Jews in Poland. This was reflected in a considerable number of works and articles on Jews and Polish-Jewish relations published over the last fifteen years.¹¹ Particularly helpful for the discussion of this subject are academic works which discuss the issues of assimilation,¹² anti-Semitism,¹³ and religious conversion.¹⁴

A vast majority of the works dealing with the religiousness, location, and activity of Christian Churches in the discussed period concerns the Roman Catholic Church and the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession. In the first case, one should mention studies on religiousness, its manifestations and conditions, and the social-religious teaching of the Church. The works of Daniel Olszewski deserve special attention, especially his Polska kultura religijna na przełomie XIX i XX wieku (Polish Religious Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century).¹⁵ This is the first historical work which sets the problems of Polish religiousness in a broader context, exploring rich source material. It is worth noting that the author does not limit his account to Catholicism. He also recognizes the role of other Christian denominations and Churches in the process of shaping this religion. Also Ewa Jabłońska-Deptuła¹⁶ and Edward Walewander¹⁷ take up these themes.

In turn, Czesław Lechicki,¹⁸ Ireneusz Kaczmarek,¹⁹ and Jan Mazur²⁰ have studied the problems of Catholic journalism in the discussed period. One should content, however, that despite this absence of a work – with the exception of Jan Mazur’s study on the theme of “Catholic Thought” – which would analyze the content of Catholic writings against a broader socioeconomic and ideological backdrop of the epoch, thereby providing a better insight into the type of mentality dominating in the community of Catholic writers and journalists.

Stanisław Litak,²¹ Daniel Olszewski,²² Stanisław Kotkowski,²³ and Stanisław Gajewski²⁴ discuss the social structure of the clergy, especially its intellectual formation and social activity. In addition, it is worth mentioning Aleksy Petrani’s studies²⁵ on the policy of the tsarist authorities toward the Church, Adam Stanowski’s thesis, Bolesław Kumor’s fundamental work on the organizational and territorial structure of the Church in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries,²⁶ and Franciszek Stopniak’s work on the Church in Lublin and ←16 | 17→Podlachia regions.²⁷ This last study deserves a special credit for its strong reliance on archival materials.

There are not many works concerning the history of the Evangelical Church in the Kingdom of Poland. These are mainly the studies by Eduardo Kneifel,²⁸ Woldemar Gastpare,²⁹ and Tadeusz Stegner.³⁰ The works of the first two authors, however, are more textbook and factual in character, for they neglect a broader socioeconomic background and do not go into a deeper analysis of the Protestant community itself. Still, these deficiencies find compensation in the works of Tadeusz Stegner, who shows the evangelical community not only as a religious group but also in the perspective of social, political, and national processes which took place in the Kingdom of Poland.

In turn, the history of the Orthodox Church in Poland has been rarely discussed and largely overshadowed by research on the Uniate Church. The works of Henryk Suchenko-Suchecki³¹ published before the war, or those of Janusz ←17 | 18→Woliński³² and Wacław Zaikyn,³³ certainly do not fill this gap. The same applies to more recent studies by Mirosława Papierzynska-Turek,³⁴ Anna Frączek (Krochmal),³⁵ and Witold Kołbuk.³⁶ Only Anna Frączek’s studies are entirely devoted to the discussed period. The others, valuable and informative as they are, focus merely on the general situation and role of the Orthodox Church in the Kingdom.

The source base of this book consists of materials of various provenance: the Russian State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg, all national and diocesan archives, and the Jasna Góra Archive, which gathers sources from the territory of the Kingdom of Poland. The State Historical Archive provided information on the location of Jews in the Kingdom of Poland in the early 1870s (Teodor Berg’s report) and on the state of Jewish education. They constitute an interesting source of information about the central authorities’ policy toward Jews in Congress Poland and personal opinions of the authorities concerning the Jewish question. It is important to emphasize that because of both time limitations and the enormity of the source material, the presented analysis is based on a partial query.

The material stored in national and diocesan archives does not exemplify mass tendencies and remains largely incomplete. The reason behind this state of affairs might be the loss of archival sources caused by the turmoil of the wars. For instance, files from Kuyavian-Kalisz diocese were destroyed in 1920, while those from Warsaw Archdiocese burned down in 1944. Similarly, the majority of the files of religious orders – which were confiscated after the dissolution of monasteries by the tsarist authorities in 1864, and which were reclaimed through revindication after the First World War and transferred to the Warsaw University Library – vanished during the Warsaw Uprising.³⁷ Moreover, the condition of ←18 | 19→the sources in some diocesan archives leaves much to be desired, making it very difficult to conduct an effective query. This applies especially to the archives in Siedlce and Sandomierz.

An extremely interesting document, which sheds light on the conditions of the missionary activity of the Catholic clergy in the Jewish community of the Kingdom of Poland before the mid-1950s is the manuscript of an anonymous author found in the Diocesan Archive in Kielce.³⁸ The only thing we know about this author is that he was a priest, most likely with higher education; he came from Warsaw Archdiocese and was well versed in the issues he discussed. However, it is difficult to figure out what was the purpose, and who were the intended recipients, of this text.

The sources stored in the Diocesan Archive in Łomża provide interesting information not only about social unrest in the Suwałki Governorate against the backdrop anti-Jewish incidents which occurred in 1881–1882 but also about the attitude of state and ecclesiastical authorities toward this issue.³⁹

The sources from other archives, regrettably scarce, give us a better insight into some issues related to the process of converting Jews into Christianity. They reveal, among other things, the complexity of various factors that have conditioned this process. In this respect, the most interesting source is the correspondence of Catholic clerics concerning Jewish neophytes (the Jasna Góra Archive, the State Archive in Włocławek, and the Archdiocesan Archive in Lublin). In addition, the archival query provided, unfortunately also fragmentary, statistical data concerning religious conversion of Jews.

This book largely refers to social-religious periodicals and diocesan magazines, in particular: Przegląd Katolicki (Catholic Review; 1863–1914), ←19 | 20→Polak-Katolik (Pole the Catholic; 1908–1914), Posiew (The Seed; 1908–1913), Zwiastun Ewangeliczny (The Evangelical Annunciator; 1876–1882, 1898–1914), Głosy Kościelne w sprawie Kościoła Ewangelicko-Augsburskiego (Church Voices Concerning the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland; 1884–1890), Kholmsko-Varshavskiy yeparkhal’nyy vestnik (Chełm-Warsaw Diocesan Annunciator; 1877–1905), Varshavskiy yeparkhal’nyy listok (Warsaw Diocesal Newspaper; 1906–1915), Kholmskaya tserkovnaya zhizn’ (Chełm Church Life; 1906–1913), Kholmskiy narodnyy listok (Chełm People’s Newspaper; 1906–1913), and Izraelita (Israelite; 1866–1914). They were a rich source of insight into the clergy’s views on the Jewish question, not only from a religious point of view, but also from a social and post-liturgical point of view. In addition, the book refers to lay journalism, memoirs, and diaries. Unfortunately, memoirist publications are rare – a lack felt most acutely in the case of clerical writings. It is worth noting at this point that the book explores rarely discussed sources such as collections of homilies, parish teachings or textbooks on pastoral theology used in Catholic seminaries. They are an extremely valuable supplement to the material from other archives, as they shed light on the mentality of certain ecclesiastical circles.

At the end of the book, the Annex to Chapter 4 is attached. It is a selection of archival materials, chronologically arranged and dating from 1854–1913. They provide interesting information about the difficulties associated with the ←20 | 21→evangelization of Jews. They also reveal various aspects of the conversion process, e.g. they shed light on factors which influenced individual decisions to change one’s confession.

It is very important to continue research on the social origins of Christian spirituality in the Kingdom of Poland, its intellectual formation, recognized authorities, socioeconomic attitudes, and the mentality of the clergy.⁴⁰ Results of this research will certainly bring us to a better understanding of many phenomena and processes which indirectly affected the relationship between Christian Churches and Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The same applies, perhaps even more so, to the need for examining the attitude of Jewish opinion-forming circles toward Christianity in the discussed period. However, one should be aware that the Hebrew and Yiddish languages – the languages of archival materials and the press – still constitute an important barrier for researchers of these issues. I hope that this work will make up, at least partly, for the severe gap in Polish research and encourage further studies.