The Anti-Semitic Riots on the Territories of the Kingdom of Poland at the Beginning of Independence

Abstract

The last year of the Great War brought the enhancement of the activities of the political parties, both the Polish and the Jewish ones, as well as deterioration of Polish-Jewish rela-tions. The attitudes reluctant to cooperate with the Poles took hold among the Jews or rather a belief that there were no actual chances for the agreeable fixing of its principles. Another reason for the mutual grievances became forcing the national and cultural autonomy by some of the Jewish parties and the attempts to search for the adherents of such demands in the West. The events in Lvov (Lviv, Lemberg) and the growing Polish-Ukrainian conflict in the Eastern Galicia became yet another inflammatory point in the Polish-Jewish relations. The rumours, which reached the Kingdom of Poland saying that the Jews sympathised with the Ukrainians in Galicia and ‘shoot the Polish soldiers at the back’ added to the traditional accusations addressed at Jews (cooperation with the Germans and Austrians, sympathising with the communists), one more element, the consequences of which are hard to ignore. At the same time, the anti-Semitic propaganda has collected all the oppositional declarations of the Jews and their critical remarks about the Polish rules and then, distorting them consciously, presented the Jewish population as an element hostile to the Polish state, which in general was not true. In autumn 1918, the Jewish population greeted the liberation of the Polish lands with fear. Those were not groundless fears: one could notice, as early as in spring that year that the hostility towards the Jews undertook the increasingly severe forms. The serious anti Semitic riots took place in the Kingdom of Poland in November 1918, and some of them, like the one in Kielce and probably in a few other towns of the Kielce Province, were in fact pogroms. The next year brought a new wave of anti-Jewish pogroms and violence.