The census returns for the Slavic eastern minorities present problems. Since the adherents to the Eastern Orthodox and Uniate (Greek Catholic) confessions came almost exclusively from among Belorussians, Ukrainians, and Russians, it is somewhat discrepant that the sum of the worshippers in these two churches (table 2) should substantially exceed the sum of these three ethnic minorities (table 1), and it appears that many Belorussian and Ukrainian adherents to the Orthodox and Uniate rites were persuaded or pressured to declare themselves Polish by ethnicity. In addition, Roman Catholic Belorussians often identified themselves as believing in “the Polish faith” and were accordingly recorded as Polish by ethnicity as well. Being politically still somewhat immature—though not as much so as Polish propagandists of the Right often alleged—such eastern-minority peasants might have been ready to have their nationality or language, but not their religion, recorded incorrectly. The majority of Belorussians were Eastern Orthodox, the minority Roman Catholic; and Ukrainians were Uniate in ex-Habsburg eastern Galicia, and Orthodox in the ex-tsarist kresy. It should also be noted that the rate of population increase (table 3) was highest in the eastern provinces where these two ethnic groups were concentrated and constituted the rural majorities. Hence, some skepticism is elicited by the statistics purporting that the combined percentage of Ukrainians, Ruthenians, “locals,” and Belorussians in Poland as a whole rose between 1921 (18.4) and 1931 (19.2) by as little as 0.8 percent (table 1).
Throughout the entire country, the socioeconomic pressures accruing from this high rate of population increase were aggravated by the interwar throttling of emigration outlets. Furthermore, the failure of industrialization to develop sufficiently to absorb the bulk of this increase meant that approximately four-fifths of the population remained confined to the villages. The census recorded 17.1 percent of the population as urban and 82.9 percent as rural in 1921, and 20.4 percent as urban and 79.6 percent as rural in 1931. Here the official census definition of an urban locality was one with a population of ten thousand or more.
6
Before commencing a chronological analysis of interwar Poland’s politics, this is a suitable point to scan her society’s relations with the ethnic minorities. Polish culture had historically been magnetic and absorptive. The old commonwealth’s assimilation of non-Polish gentries has been mentioned. Somewhat surprisingly, this power of Polish culture to attract other people continued even after the loss of independent statehood. Still more surprisingly, it first waned (initially unperceived) during the second half of the nineteenth century among the allegedly still primitive eastern neighbors (Lithuanians, Ukrainians, later the Belorussians), while it remained potent in the west, among the supposedly more advanced, heavily germanized, Silesians, Kashubs, and Mazurians, and the border-Germans proper, who continued to be culturally and linguistically repolonized and polonized throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This imposing magnetism of Polish culture, even in the absence of a Polish state, seduced many interwar Poles, especially on the Right, into underestimating the new recalcitrance of the still young nationalisms of the country’s ethnic minorities, and hence into rejecting a federalistic in favor of a centralistic constitutional structure.
Of the four important minorities, the Belorussians and Ukrainians were as overwhelmingly agricultural and rural in social structure as the Jews were commercial, artisanal, and urban, while the Germans were mixed. The two Slavic minorities were also consciously autochthonous in the regions of their settlement, while the Jews and Germans were somewhat on the defensive, the former having been invited to Poland in medieval times and the latter having come as modern colonists. While the three Christian minorities intially enjoyed the patronage of neighboring powers of their own ethnicity and might in theory realize their national aspirations through yet another truncation or even partition of the Polish state (ignoring for the moment the realities of Stalin’s own hostility toward Ukrainian nationalism), the Jews’ political dilemma was more problematical. Having no contiguous “mother country” into which to be incorporated, and hence no clear ethnic interest in the territorial fragmentation of Poland, their political stance oscillated between general ethnic-minority solidarity against Polish domination on the one hand, and occasional efforts to come to a particular arrangement with the ruling Poles on the other—an arrangement by which they would hope to trade their endorsement of the state’s territorial and political integrity and of its governments in return for special recognition of their cultural peculiarities and educational needs. Alas, as rightist ideology permeated Polish society ever more deeply, the governments, in turn, somewhat reluctantly acceeded to popular anti-Semitism and rebuffed such overtures for an authentic accommodation. Hence many Jews sought a third alternative, Zionism.
Already at the moment of Poland’s rebirth, the Jews had been caught in the crossfire of Polish, Ukrainian, Bolshevik, and White Russian armies and bands: 1919 was a traumatic year in East European Jewish history. Later, they were held responsible for inducing the Paris Peace Conference to impose on Poland the Minorities Protection Treaty of June 28, 1919, which was intended to shelter the minorities against coerced assimilation by guaranteeing them legal equality as well as civil and political rights. Poland resented this treaty as implicitly denigrating her sovereignty, since the established powers, many of whom also housed substantial ethnic minorities, did not commit themselves to the same international legal obligations as they enjoined upon the new states. The frequent petitions filed against Poland under the terms of this treaty at the League of Nations, both by the minorities themselves and by interested (malevolently interfering, in the Polish view) states, embittered the Poles. And, as neither the treaty nor the League had enforcement teeth, eventually the minorities became cynical. Finally, on September 13, 1934, Poland unilaterally refused further cooperation with the international bodies that monitored the treaty, pending the universalization of its obligations to all states.
The vast bulk of Polish Jewry was culturally unassimilated, and the pattern of its economic structure was almost the reverse of the general society’s (table 4). The high, and allegedly provocative, prominence of Jews in the developing urban economic sectors of commerce, industry, culture, and communications, and their virtual absence from agriculture can be illustrated even more vividly through the proportions of adherents to the various religions engaged in the several economic sectors (table 5). In other words, whereas table 4 gives the total Jewish and Gentile populations across the various economic sectors, table 5 gives the religious distribution within these sectors. (Economic identification by linguistic criteria would have been more helpful than by religious ones for reconstructing the separate economic profiles of the other minorities and of the Polish majority, but unfortunately it was not available.)
TABLE 4
POPULATION BY ECONOMIC SECTORS (INCLUDING DEPENDENTS). 1931 CENSUS
TABLE 5
ECONOMIC SECTORS BY RELIGION. 1931 CENSUS (IN PERCENTAGES)
Lest, however, an erroneous impression be here conveyed, that a thoroughly affluent and powerful Jewish minority dominated the modern nerve-centers of interwar Poland, the following considerations should serve as correctives: (a) the census category of “Mining and Industry” included many small and technologically obsolescent sweatshops and handicraft establishments; (b) Jews, like the other minorities, were emphatically underrepresented