How to exit conspiracies of silence? Social Sciences Facing the Polish-Jewish Relations

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How to exit the conspiracy of silence? Social sciences facing the Polish-Jewish relations

Research of and investigation into the Polish-Jewish relations is hindered by the effects of a conspiracy of silence that has been surrounding them for years. To a much larger extent than any other subject of history are they not directly accessible (as otherwise assumed by naïve realism) but instead, intermediated by a complex system of evasions we are not aware of. An interdisciplinary competence is a prerequisite for analysing them – one that Marcin Kula has described as a ‘historic sociology and psychology.’ As he wrote, both of these sciences

“are focused today on contemporaneity, on questionnaires or (as psychologists do) on experimental research. In fact, the human history should, and indeed can, be a fundamental observation field. Generalisations derived from it may help understand history in place of its being just described.”1

A successful attempt at combining sociological and historical competencies was recently published in a technique-related synthetic study by Eviatar Zerubavel, author of the first-ever thorough analysis of social conspiracy.2 Tabooisation was before then tackled by anthropologists (Mary Douglas) and sociologists (Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman), but no-one has so far presented this phenomenon in a systematic, scientifically reliable and interesting manner comparable to what the Israeli-American scholar did. The concept in question may be applied with success to the Polish historic conditions. I shall outline, through a few approaches, the circumstances in which social conspiracies were accumulating around the Polish-Jewish relations in the after-war period, so as to pave the way for analysis of the difficulties in researching the title issues. I. The conspiracy-of-silence theory may be deemed to reply to the question once formulated by Jeffrey K. Olick, a German memory researcher:

“If narrative is constitutive of identity, an instrument of politics (i.e. rhetoric) and an expression of culture (i.e. representation), what happens when an organization – small or large – family, social movement, or nation state – cannot tell such stories in an unproblematic fashion?“3

The answer is: in such situation pathologies of silence appear. Initially, a transitory and subsequently, increasingly durable deformation of the actors’ identity and memory; next, as the witnesses die out and concealments cumulate, the same becomes true of their descendants. Using the categories from Marianne Hirsch’s vocabulary, such a situation may be referred to as postmemory.4 It is, to a considerable extent, a complicated version of silence conspiracies in the sense applied to this term by Zerubavel5.

No surprise, then, that after several decades of communism that controlled public space in Poland, the social reality remains continually non-transparent and strongly unsettled, particularly in the sphere of memory. There have been a number of factors contributing to this

1 Marcin Kula, Uparta sprawa. ydowska? Polska? Ludzka? [‘A Stubborn Case: Jewish? Polish? Human?’] Kraków 2004, p. 123. 2 Eviatar Zerubavel, Elephant in the Room. Silence and Denial in Everyday Life, Oxford 2006 (hereinafter, E). 3 Jeffrey K. Olick, Politics of Regret. On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility, New York – London 2007, p. 5. 4 Post-memory is a feature of experience of those who were growing up in the shade of stories of events that had taken place before they were born. Their own memories had to give way to the stories which took shape in traumatic circumstances, never fully understood or reproduced. See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames. Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1997, p. 22. I have broadened the category proposed by M. Hirsch, which was initially applied to the psychological situation of children victims of the Holocaust. 5 E 6, 8.

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unsettlement, the major one among them the censorship-imposed ban on representation of the experience of the last war. In the course of the Second World War, an unprecedented change of the cultural landscape took place in that the Polish Jews have disappeared. This euphemism, actually concealing the Shoah and its aftermath6, is an allegory of the breach that has left a marked impression upon the Polish psyche.

One form of silence that responded, in a sense, to the silence imposed by the communist censorship was silence kept by those Jews who had not left Poland. It was associated with various concessions made to a local form of socialism which was to a significant extent a ‘national’ socialism. The censorships’ suppression was responded to by a defensive silence also by members of conspiracy organisations of the Home Army (AK) and National Armed Forces (NSZ). The authentic image of the occupation was enshrouded by this silence. Authentic – meaning non-postured and ambiguous, filled with details too shocking to be recalled. One such detail being, for instance, the killing of Jews explained or justified by the victims’ (real or imaginary) collaboration with the two occupiers, banditism7, communism, or committed with no justification whatsoever.8 The communist authority’s attitude to those concealments was ambivalent. Although prison or the capital punishment was imposed for wartime murders of Jews and anti-Semitism was condemned verbally, it would be rather hard to name any factual actions levelled against it. One has to be satisfied in this respect with a mention of the never-issued anti-anti-Semitism decree which the Jewish milieus were anxious for after the Kielce pogrom.9 Marcin Kula wrote about the period in question:

“The establishment was eager to discard their label of ‘Judeo-communism’. As for themselves, they were convinced that a deep anti-Semitism surrounded them. Since they were willing, and were supposed to, rule the country, they chose to muffle this field of conflict. Some communist leaders felt awkward, after all, in regard to their own Jewish descent. They desired to forget about their background and wished the Jewish cause to disappear in Poland – through emigration of the Jewry’s remainder or through concealment.”10

So, silence again: itself triggered by silence and responding to yet another silence. The cycle went on as follows:

1. The image of the past was censored by the authorities; any political representation of the AK or NSZ military formations was banned – this being coupled with ban on mentioning any anti-Semitic incidents in contacts with the Soviets (in the partisan warfare), including murders of Jews committed by leftist formations such as the Peasants’ Battalions (BCh),

6 This text does not deal at all with phenomena associated with the trauma of witnessing the Holocaust. For my discussion on those matters, see e.g.: Historia jako fetysz [‘History as a fetish’], in: Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Rzeczy mgliste [‘Things Undefined’], Sejny 2004. 7 See e.g. Instruction by the NSZ Commander (Colonel Ignacy Boziewicz – ‘Czes!aw’) for ‘Special Action No. 1’ no. 1/12/1942, regarding a.o. annihilation of “members of gangs [incl. certain Jews, named elsewhere therein], as they are an element that has been incited [against us] by the enemy or they are acting as local bandits against the lives and property of the Poles for whom the occupiers do not care. A p p e a r i n t h e e a s t e r n a r e a s d r e s s e d i n G e r m a n u n i f o r m s , acting with all the occupier’s cruelty and ruthlessness against the Ukrainians. In the remainder area of the G[eneral]-G[ouvernement], the action is to assume the appearance of robbery (…)”. Quoted after: Narodowe Si!y Zbrojne na Podlasiu [‘The National Armed Forces in Podlasie area’], vol. 3, ed. by M. Bechta, L. ebrowski, Bia!a-Podlaska 2003, pp. 15-17. 8 See e.g.: P.Reszka, D.Libionka, wito zmar!ych w Rechcie [‘The feast of the dead at Rechta’], Karta, no. 46:2005, pp. 122-135, (www.ceeol.com). Also, see: Tadeusz Markiel, Zag!ada domu Trinczerów [‘The annihilation of the Trinczer family’], Znak, no. 4: 2008 (http://niniwa2.cba.pl/zaglada_domu_trinczerow.htm). 9 Quoted after: Leszek Olejnik, Polityka narodowociowa Polski w latach 1944–1960 [Poland’s national policies, 1944–1960’], Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu "ódzkiego ["ód University Press], "ód 2003, pp. 396-397. 10 Marcin Kula, Lewicowy intelektualista wobec pogromu kieleckiego [‘A leftist intellectual faces the Pogrom of Kielce’], in: M. Kula, Uparta sprawa…, op. cit., p. 154.

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People’s Army (AL) or the People’s Guard (GL) (commanded by Grzegorz Korczyski, Edward Gronczewski and others)11; anti-Semitic cleansings immediately after the war12.

2. Defensive silence observed by the underground army soldiers threatened by arrests; and, defensive silence kept by Jews who have decided to stay in Poland; self-censorship applied to inconvenient facts from the past.

3. Concealment by the authorities of the real dimensions of anti-Semitism13, while pretending to purse anti-Semites.

How the decision to conceal (the cycle’s central link) was being made (and how burdensome it subsequently appeared to its makers) is described by Jerzy Ficowski, in a letter to Andrzej Ropelewski, author of one of the first books overcoming the Stalinist period’s conspiracy:

“I thought many a time of the matters you’re asking about. Myself being not quite active or ‘spurty’ any more, but still can remember my old and primeval PRP-time [i.e. during what was the People’s Republic of Poland] conversations and arguments. Among other things, I was asked ages ago by a pal of my age if he should get published a story told earlier on about various meanness of certain AK [Home-Army] soldiers/partisans/insurgents. And my answer was ‘no’. These accounts were about a Ukrainian crucified on a Warsaw fence during the Uprising. Aha! A bonfire was lit at his feet… About a German clumped on an AK barricade as a ‘living shield’, etc., and the like. About a Jewish family being murdered in the Warsaw ghetto area by AK-men. My peer AK member was addressing me, another AK-man. My position was that in a situation of terror and enslavement of a country, you shouldn’t join the party of authors of the ‘spit-covered reactionary dwarf,’ accusatory slandering; even if some real piece of news were to be used, which – as it was rather easy to foresee – would be generalised and made part of a chorus of calumnies. But how about today? In a Poland that’s stupefied and fouled – yet free? What I have in mind throughout is criminal acts against humans, against the ‘neighbours’, already a proverbial phrase. Can one write about it? you ask rhetorically. Oh yes. No silence will ever cover it – and I deeply believe so. It has already failed to do so.”14

It seemed at that time that all these stories would be told at a later date, once the country is free. These calculations have failed, though. As trauma researchers instruct us, matters as subversive as truth should be spoken at the time, and when such time is over, one should be prepared to 11 Piotr Gontarczyk, Z genealogii elit PZPR. Przypadek Stefana Kilianowicza vel Grzegorza Korczyskiego [‘From the genealogy of elites of the Polish United Workers’ Party. The case of Stefan Kilianowicz alias Grzegorz Korczyski’], Glaukopis, no. 1:2003. 12 For a discussion of ethnic cleansing occurring immediately after WW2, see my text entitled Nastpstwa Holocaustu w relacjach ydowskich i w pamici polskiej prowincji na przyk!adzie Klimontowa sandomierskiego [The aftermath of the Holocaust in Jewish accounts and in the memory of the Polish province, on the example of Klimontów, Sandomierz district’], in: Nastpstwa Zag!ady [‘The Aftermath of the Shoah’], ed. by J.Adamczyk-Garbowska, Feliks Tych, Warsaw 2010 (forthcoming). 13 Cf. Adam Kopciowski, Zajcia antyydowskie na Lubelszczynie w pierwszych latach po drugiej wojnie wiatowej [‘Anti-Jewish occurrences in the Lublin Land in the first years after the Second World War’], in: Zag!ada ydów. Studia i materia!y [‘The Annihilation of Jews. Studies and materials’], 2007, no. 3. See also: Olejnik, Polityka narodowociowa Polski w latach 1944–1960, op. cit. Also, the utterance made by Witold Kula in 1946, excised by censorship (as quoted by Marcin Kula in his Lewicowy intelektualista wobec pogromu kieleckiego, op. cit., p. 162, 163): “The situation that presently prevails in Poland is unbearable to the Jews. I was recently making the "ód–Wroc!aw route by train. Some Jewish family travelled there beside me. Honestly, I am not exaggerating things by saying that there was not a quarter of an hour during which I would not have heard, from one or another of the passengers, some jeers, jokes, remarks, calls, reminders, pretended jargon or yd!aczenie [= speaking with heavy accent, ridiculing a Jewish pronunciation].” … “An average Polish intellectual is not aware of that a Jew cannot travel by car in Poland, while he uses the railway reluctantly; that he is afraid of sending his kid to a holiday camp; that he would not dare appear in any small jerk town; that he is only getting clustered in one of the largest cities as he cannot quietly walk down the streets before the dusk even in a medium-sized town. It would take a hero to agree to live in such an ambience after the six years of torment.” 14 A letter by Jerzy Ficowski to Prof. Andrzej Ropelewski, dated 22nd September 2002; courtesy of the addressee. Andrzej Ropelewski published in 1957 a book on his Home-Army recollections (Wspomnienia z AK, Czytelnik , Warsaw).

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confront the burden of well-domesticated lies. Due to particular circumstances, there appeared no conditions in Poland to face the heritage of pre-war anti-Semitism, whose intensity in the years preceding the occupation was only a little weaker than in Germany. This issue was first pointed out to by Aleksander Smolar:

“In the other countries under German occupation anti-Semitic programs were proclaimed by collaboratorationist governments and parties whereas the underground was, as a rule, anti-fascist, democratic and hostile to anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was part of a betrayal syndrome. Paradoxically, Poland was the only country where anti-Semitism has preserved not only a patriotic and national legitimisation (reinforced by the Soviet occupation of 1939–1941) but also a democratic one. The anti-Semitic National Democracy formed part of both the authorities in exile and those at home. Owing to the very fact that Polish anti-Semitism did not bear a stigma of cooperation with the Germans, it could excellently thrive during the war not only in the streets but also in the underground press, in political parties, in armed forces.”15

It did thrive much better after the war. In a country gagged by the ‘people’s democracy’, anything contrary to the new authorities was considered a patriotic attitude, regardless of the increasingly common alliances with these authorities. Transferral of aggression from communists into Jews was but a matter of time16 – well-established as it was by the estimable genesis of the notion of ydokomuna (Judeo-communism), dating back to the nineteenth century. Once the authority fought anti-Semitism, this circumstance alone would suffice for anti-Semitism to become a ‘patriotic attitude’ – even if it had been unknown to Poland.17 What role was played there by rationalisation of plundering of Jewish property and by enormous post-war enrichment of some who ‘fed on the Jewish stuff’?

Smolar goes on saying:

“In the West, the left proved victorious in the war in moral terms: it was to dominate the intelligentsia quite soon. Soviet labour camps, Stalin’s tyranny were not noted; no investigation was made of what was hidden behind the communists’ democratic rhetoric. A traditional type of right-wing awareness was decomposing, embarrassed as it was by a spiritual kinship – be it most distant – with fascism, collaboration with the occupiers, hostile attitude to democracy. It was different in Poland, though. Owing to peculiar local circumstances, the right wing was national, anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic at the same time. The end of the war did not make it re-evaluate things. There was a tragedy of the nation; there was no crisis of a right-wing consciousness.”18

In today’s Poland, one has to really take into account this heritage, extremely difficult to overcome due to disappearance of witnesses, deformation of memory and accumulated influences of politics of history.

15 Aleksander Smolar, Tabu i niewinno [‘The Taboo and Innocence’], Aneks no. 41-42:1986, pp. 89-134; reprinted in Gazeta Wyborcza, 11th May 2001. 16 As Marcin Kula cautiously states: “It would be worthwhile to ask whether, to an extent at least, anti-Semitism could at that time [i.e. immediately after the war] have been a derivative of the then broadly appearing rejection of the new political system.” In: M. Kula, Uparta sprawa, op. cit., p. 158. 17 For a late-date trace of such thinking, you are referred to a significant utterance by Stanis!aw Szwarc-Bronikowski, a Home Army soldier from the Sandomierz Land, concerning Mieczys!aw Moczar described as the one who ‘cleansed the People’s Army from anti-Polish elements’ (quoted after: www.slowoludu.com.pl/gazeta/codzienna/2002/VIII/22/6.pdf). Also, see the feelings occurring in pre-war Lithuania after the Soviet army’s invasion: “Those Lithuanians who suffered from the NKVD immediately before the Wehrmacht came over were convinced they were persecuted by Jews, and this because, among other things, the Soviet authority treated in those times anti-Semitic actions and riots as ‘counter-revolutionary activity’. This caused a feedback – as Algis Kasperavicius [Antysemityzm na Litwie 1939-1941/’Anti-Semitism in Lithuania, 1939–1941’] recognises; punished by the Stalinist secret police; they considered themselves as victims to the Jews.” Quoted after: P. G!uchowski, M. Kowalski, Odwet. Prawdziwa historia braci Bielskich [‘Retaliation: The true story of Bielski brothers’], Warszawa 2007. 18 Smolar, Tabu i niewinno, op. cit.

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II. As the ban on articulating the identity was very painful, numerous conspiracies of silence occurred in the course thereof or afterwards.19 Their function was to alleviate the pain and enable deeply divided and mutually hostile people to live a shared life.

Speaking in morphological terms, conspiracies are classed into two categories: one being an ‘open secret’20 and the other, a ‘skeleton in the closet’ situation. A public secret is known to everyone21 whilst a skeleton-in-the-closet is known to a few.22 In circumstances of long-lasting ban on representation and of extinction of witnesses, a conspiracy of silence may turn into a skeleton-in-the-closet. There are many indications of such a situation having occurred in Poland – as revealed by publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbours in 2000. It is this situation that the wave of contradiction may be ascribed to – as expressed in e.g., the establishment of a Committee for Defence of the Repute of Jedwabne, or the activities of the National Remembrance Institute after its former president Leon Kieres concluded his term-of-office.

Conspiracies of silence continue to be a ‘social conditioning of knowledge’ in the area of Polish-Jewish relations. Research of this subject-matter would miss the point if we do not take into consideration what Hans-Georg Gadamer describes as Wirkungsgeschichte23 , i.e. the way in which history affects our interpretation of this subject and within this subject. The history of the subject matter invisibly affects us, that is, de facto, ‘works’24 in the language we use to talk about it. Once we talk about the past in a language we have inherited, this past is closer to us than we believe it is – in any case, closer than we have become accustomed to see it in a positivistic illusion conceiving of language as a submissive transparent instrument and of recognition as a process under complete control. Risking an old-fashioned phrase, one may say that what has passed has not departed, since it is continually present in our speech and thought-related categories, in the form of a ‘cuckoo’s egg’ (so named by Kazimierz Wyka).25 I have just used the first person plural form, consciously and with no provocative intent behind it. A

19 To occur, conspiracy requires at least two individuals who would avoid a tough, pain-causing or baffling subject-matter, and so produce mutually reinforcing stategies of obstructing undesirable information. Within conspiracy, the cooperating phenomena of concealment and denial are identifiable. The scope of denial goes beyond what Freud had in mind while writing on intrapersonal relations. What Zerubavel deals with – i.e. the social aspect of denial – is entirely opposite. 20 The phenomenon of conspiracy of silence is illustrated by Zerubavel using the American linguistic cliché ‘elephant in the room’. Polish would probably use its conventional equivalent ‘rope at the hanged person’s house’, which is however unable to render a collective nature of conspiracy being tacitly entered into by all members of a society. Zerubavel uses the phrase ‘elephant in the room’ exchangeably with ‘public/overt secret’ which description is close in the Polish language to a suggestion made by Dorota Krawczyska in her essay on J.-T. Gross’s Neighbours titled Prawdy ukryte na powierzchni – ‘Truths hidden on the surface’ (publ. in Res Publika Nowa, no. 1:2001). It is however made different from ‘skeleton in the closet.’ 21 E 9: “Like silence, denial involves active avoidance. Rather than simply failing to notice something, it entails a deliberate effort to refrein from noticing it. Furthermore, it usually involves refusing to acknowledge the presence of things that actually beg for attention, thereby reminding us that conspiracies of silence revolve not around those largely unnoticeable matters we simply overlook but, on the contrary, around those highly conspicupous matters we deliberately try to avoid”. 22 The diference between the two above-described types of concealment tends to be conventional, however. Those present in the room may hide behind unawareness, as President Nixon did in the context of the Watergate scandal, pretending that the ‘elephant in his room’ was a ‘skeleton in the party’s closet’ he was not aware of at all. 23 Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote in Truth and Method, wrote that “historical consciousness is itself situated in the web of historical effects. By means of methodical critique it does away with the arbitrariness of the ‘relevant’ appropriations of the past, but it preserves its good conscience by failing to recognize the pressupositions – certainly not arbitrary, but still fundamental – that governs its own understanding, and hence falls short of reaching that truth which, despite the finite nature of our understanding, could be reached. In this respect, historical objectivism resembles statistics, which are such excellent means of propaganda because they let the ‘facts’ speak and hence simulate an objectivity that in reality depend on the legitimacy of the question asked”. See his Truth and Method, Continuum, New York, 1975, p. 300. 24 Jean Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer. A Biography, Yale Univeristy Press, Yale 2003, pp. 92 & 165. 25 See my text Skaz antysemityzmu, Teksty Drugie, no. 1/2:2009.

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‘social framework of memory’ determines researchers and informants alike. The lesser are they aware of this framework, the former swap over with the latter all the more efficiently.

Those are the reasons why it is hard to figure out today an advanced study of the past other than one that analyzes itself from the point of view of an effect of history on the language. It is in its vocabulary, in its peculiar metre, concealments, as well as in what gets expressed in it too easily, that opportunities of our cognition are resolved. This takes place ever before a research is started.

These thoughts are nothing new. They appeared in international humanities along with ‘turns’ becoming en vogue (imitating Heidegger’s Kehre), the linguistic turn26 being the initial one; it was followed by the historic27 and ethical28 turns. Polish historic and social research reacts to them with increasing frequency. Of high merit in this respect have been the methodological school of Jerzy Topolski and Ewa Domaska29 and the Warsaw-based historic school of Marcin Kula30. New theories are easy to develop in abstract conditions but it is much tougher to apply them to a reality so tabooised as Polish-Jewish relations. Those who have succeeded are then to be appreciated even more; works by historians and sociologists cooperating with the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw may be mentioned here (for example Helena Datner, Alina Ca!a, Anna Landau-Czajka as well as historians from the Centre for Research on the Extermination of Jews, led by Barbara Boni). Among younger-generation scholars, worth mentioning is Marcin Zaremba and his interdisciplinary essay on the ritual murder myth in the post-war Poland31, along with a book by Marta Kurkowska-Budzan titled Antykomunistyczne podziemie zbrojne na Bia!ostocczynie. Analiza wspó!czesnej symbolizacji przesz!oci [‘the anti-Communist armed underground in Bia!ystok county area. An analysis of our contemporary symbolisation of the past’], which is quite interesting methodologically32. III. Whoever deals with the issue mentioned in the title is very well aware of differences of opinions among those researching that topic. The image of Polish-Jewish relations produced by studies of ethnographers and qualitative sociologists33 essentially diverts from the one offered by quantitative sociologists. This fact may be dismissed with Kierkegaard’s mischievous

26 The Philosophy of Discourse. The Rhetorical Turn in Twentieth-Century Thought, t. 1, ed. by Chip Sills, George H.Jensen, NH: Boynton /Cook Publishers, Portsmouth 1992. 27 The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. by Terrrence J.McDonald, Ann Arbor 2008 [1996]. 28 Andrzej Szahaj, Zwrot antypozytywistyczny dope!niony [‘The anti-positivist turn: complemented’], Teksty Drugie, no.1/2:2007, pp. 157-164. 29 Jerzy Topolski, Jak si pisze i rozumie histori. Tajemnice narracji historycznej [‘How to write and understand history: the secrets of historic narrative’], Pozna 2008; Ewa Domaska, Mikrohistorie. Spotkania w midzywiatach [‘Micro-histories. Meetings in inter-worlds’], Pozna 2005; idem, Historie niekonwencjonalne. Refleksja o przesz!oci w nowej humanistyce [‘Unconventional stories. An afterthought on the past in the new humanities’], Pozna 2006. Also, see an anthology of translated essays Pami, etyka, historia [‘Memory, Ethics, History’], ed. by E. Domaska, various translators, Pozna 2002. 30 Marcin Kula, Krótki raport o uytkowaniu historii [‘A brief report on exploiting the history’], Warszawa 2004; idem, O co chodzi w historii [‘History: what’s it all about?’], Warszawa 2008; idem, Uparta sprawa…, op. cit.; idem, Wybór tradycji [‘Tradition selected’], Warszawa 2003; idem, Noniki pamici historycznej [‘The carriers of historical memory’], Warszawa 2002. 31 Marcin Zaremba, Mit mordu rytualnego w powojennej Polsce. Archeologia i hipotezy [‘The myth of ritual murder in post-war Poland. The archaeology and hypotheses’], Kultura i Spo!eczestwo, no. 2:2007, pp. 91-135. 32 Published: Kraków 2009. It is the first attempt at identifying/defining, in sociological categories, the role of the National Remembrance Institute (IPN) as an influential and ambivalent social actor. 33 Not limited to studies by Alina Ca!a (Wizerunek yda w polskiej kulturze ludowej [‘The image of Jew in the Polish folk culture’], Warszawa 1987) but inclusive of books by Ewa Banasiewicz-Ossowska (Midzy dwoma wiatami. ydzi w polskiej kulturze ludowej [‘Between the Two Worlds: Jews in the Polish folk culture’], Wroc!aw 2007); Anna Malewska-Sza!ygin (Wyobraenia o pastwie i w!adzy we wsiach nowotarskich 1999-2005 [‘The notions of State and authority in Nowy-Targ-region rural areas, 1999–2005’], Warszawa 2008); Ireneusz Jezierski (Od obcoci do symulakrum. Obraz yda w Polsce w XX wieku [‘From otherness to simulacrum. The image of Jew in 20th-century Poland’], Kraków 2009); or, the already-mentioned Marta Kurkowska-Budzan, plus, my own research work and published studies – see footnote 50.

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remark whereby any philosophy that starts off with an assumption naturally ends up with this particular assumption34; but perhaps there is more to it in the case at stake.

I am not going to deal with individual characteristics of each participant of the discourse; rather than that, I should like to say something about its underlying collective conditionings. Ludwik Fleck has called them thinking styles elaborated by thought collectives. The discovery Fleck has made, naming it a ‘comparative theory of cognition’, broke away with approaching the cognition as a two-element relation between the subject and the object, the cognising (subject) and the cognised (object). As Fleck wrote, the third element of this relation is the status of knowledge; this factor must obligatorily be taken into consideration, thus preventing one from succumbing to ahistoricity whilst contending with cognitive relativisms. It is embodied by a thought collective.

Fleck defined a thought collective as a community of people who associate by exchanging thoughts or by reciprocal intellectual influence. What we have there is a carrier of development of an area of thought, a determined status of knowledge and culture, that is, a defined thinking style. Thus, the thought collective creates the missing element of the relation of subject – object. When a view is strongly consolidated within a thought collective, it penetrates into the daily life and becomes a linguistic phrase. In that case it literally becomes a view and any objection to it is unthinkable, unconceivable.35

Each of us participates in several thought collectives simultaneously; they form us and restrict us. For perception of the Polish-Jewish relations, what matters most is certainly membership in the social group we identify ourselves with: the group being responsible for the formation of each of us. Albeit of major importance, these conditionings are not easily analysable. I will therefore consider the secondary, professional memberships, hoping that on this basis something specific can be said about the social conditioning of our perception of the Polish-Jewish relations. In this sense, this present article follows up another of my texts, written years ago, entitled Historia jako fetysz [‘History as a fetish’] and dealing with the difficulties historians encounter when it comes to appropriate problematisation of the Polish-Jewish relations36.

If we agree with Eviatar Zerubavel that the acts of seeing, listening and speaking37are incontestably socially-conditioned, we shall become aware that the cognitive filters enabling us to differentiate between a noise and what we deem to be communication (e.g. music played in a concert hall vs. commotion or coughing) are not ‘natural’ to the extent that the filter enabling us to discern admissible pieces of evidence from those not being taken into account by a court is not natural, either. The fact that we recognise a thing as piece of ‘noise’ does not stem from the very ‘nature of things’ – in fact, it is rooted in active definitions of figure and background, using which we automatically screen the perceptive material we have received. “After all, what scientists actually notice is a product of the specific manner in which they focus their attention as a result of a particular cognitive orientation they acquire as part of their professional socialization”, Zerubavel states38. Various professions limit their members’ scope of attention whilst some others master their skills in spotting the slightest details. “Whereas some professions explicitly limit the scope of their members attention, others specifically train them to try to notice ‘everything’, as evident from comparing the highly restrictive style of mental 34 Quoted after: Joyce Appleby, Lyn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History, W. Norton & Co. 1995, p 263. 35 Ludwik Fleck, Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv (1935), publ. in English as Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1977. 36 Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Historia jako fetysz, in: idem, Rzeczy mgliste, op. cit. 37 E 8-9. 38 E 21-22. Taking the example of the major Polish debates on the past, it can be shown to what extent perceptive abilities of specialists in the various domains may differ – primarily, of historians, sociologists and anthropologists. See e.g.: Piotr Forecki, Spór o Jedwabne. Analiza debaty publicznej [‘The dispute on Jedwabne. An analysis of the public debate’], Pozna 2008.

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focusing so common among experimental researchers (who are trained to manipulate variables in a pronouncedly decontextualized manner) or surgeons to the way police detectives and investigative reporters, for example, are trained to look for evidence practically ‘everywhere’”.39

In our quest for a method enabling a possibly complete description whilst deferring judgement – a method that is possibly closest to natural social relations – we shall certainly encounter ethnography. As a minimum, it has always stood for an “attempt to understand another life world using the self – as much of it as possible – as instrument of knowing”40. Two more (requisite but insufficient) conditions tend to be added to this minimal definition of ethnography: fieldwork and ‘thickness’. The latter notion41, meaning that understanding is produced “via richness, texture, and detail rather than parsimony, refinement, and (in the sense used by mathematicians) elegance“42, stood at the origins of anthropology for exhaustiveness, then, for holism (an attempt to grasp the rules of the cultural system in its entirety – as pursued by American culturalists, such as Ruth Benedict) and, in the most recent time, a primacy of contextualisation (George Marcus, the anthropology of interpretation). As John and Jean Comaroff have expressly put it:

“If texts are to be more than literary topoi, scattered shards from which we presume worlds, they have to be anchored in the processes of their production, in the orbits of connection and influence that give them life and force.”43

While registering the reality in terms of a phenomenological vision, ethnography approaches its sources differently from the kind of sociology which seeks representativeness.44 It approaches them not in a history-like manner, as history tends to value brought-about sources to the extent they may lead to determining the facts. Although ethnographic sources may be helpful to a defined end, an anthropologist primarily considers them for their autonomous value, seeking in them testimonies of collective representations – fears, dreams and daydreams, phantasms, response stereotypes, norms opposed to values, real values opposed to declared values45, on the basis of which what is referred to by sociologists as ‘attitudes’ is being born46.

Having referred the reader in the footnote to the works characterised by an ethnographic approach47, I will now pass to the discussion of differences between the images of attitudes of Poles toward Jews as generated by various academic domains.

39 E 21-22. 40 My depiction of the topic in this paragraph follows: Sherry B. Ortner, Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal, in: The Historic Turn, op. cit., p. 281ff. 41 Coined by Clifford Geertz, in his Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, in: Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, New York 1973. 42 Ortner, Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal, op. cit., p. 282. 43 John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Westwiev Press, Boulder 1992, p. 34. 44 In this context, cf. the remark by R. J. Grele, Envelopes of Sound. The Art of Oral History, Chicago 1985, p. 132: “When historians say that a witness is not statistically representative of the whole population, or, of some particularly important segment, they create a false problem, thus blurring another, much deeper one. Witnesses are selected not because they resond to some abstract statistical norm but because they impersonate certain historic processes. A question should then be posed here about the concept of a historic process adhered to by the scholar (that is, about his/her vision of history) and about how the pieces of information gathered refer to it. The real issue at stake is about history and not statistics.” I will resume this thread in my discussion (following below) with the social ontology proposed in Prof. Antoni Su!ek’s lecture. 45 For a reference to the concept of pattern/norm in Jan Mukaovsk#, see: R. Tomicki, Norma, wzór i warto w yciu seksualnym tradycyjnych spo!ecznoci wiejskich w Polsce [‘The norm, pattern and value in the sexual life of traditional rural communities in Poland’], Etnografia Polska, vol. XXI:1977, pp. 43-60; for further references made thereto, see Alina Ca!a and Pawe! Buszko, reference literature quoted in footnotes 35 & 50. 46 Cf. Antoni Su!ek’s lecture Postawy spo!eczestwa polskiego wobec ydów w wietle bada sondaowych, 1967–2007 [‘The attitudes of the Polish society against Jews, in the light of poll-based research, 1967–2007’], in: Nastpstwa Zag!ady, op. cit. 47 See a monographic volume of the periodical Societas/Communitas, titled “Polityki pamici [‘The policies of memory’], edited by Joanna Tokarska-Bakir and Anna Zawadzka, no. 2(8):2009.

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IV. Since the status of opinion polls responds to reasonable criticism in the public debate in such a resistant manner, it must be founded on solid foundations, well concealed against the eyes of critics lamenting over it. The American sociologist Joel Best believes that popularity of polls in the Euro-American public discourse is associated with the cult of science which forms the basis of today’s society.

“There are cultures in which people believe that some objects have magical powers; anthropologists call these objects fetishes. In our society, statistics are sort of fetish. We tend to regard statistics as though they are magical, as though they are more than mere numbers. We treat them as powerful representations of the truth. We treat them as though they distil the complexity and of reality into simple facts. We use statistics to convert complicated social problems into more easily understood estimates, percentages and rates. Statistics directs our concern: they show us what to worry about and how much we ought to worry. In a sense, the social problem becomes the statistics and because we treat statistics as true and inconvertible, they achieve a kind of fetishlike, magical control over how we view social problems. We think of statistics as facts that we discover, not as numbers we create.”48

I have at hand a copy of a lecture by Professor Antoni Su!ek Zwykli Polacy patrz na ydów [‘Ordinary Poles looking at Jews’]49 – an important text as it summarises twenty-year poll-based researches of Poles’ attitudes towards Jews. One of the most valued Polish sociologists presents there in a concise form the most important traits of the changing attitude of Poles to Jews. Mr. Su!ek’s lecture is free of a statistical fetishism referred to by J. Best. I do hope that my criticism of the Su!ek text will be read and interpreted in this spirit as well.

The first thing that is conspicuous to me in it is the narrative in which the figures commented on by the author have been inscribed. This narrative is consistently comforting – for, although the distance between Poles and Jews “is continuously large, [it is] but slowly diminishing”50 Although in the middle of the previous decade Poles’ dislike of Jews has reappeared – “which was associated with the outbreak of severe disputes about the history of Poles and Jews during the last war and, particularly, with the conflict around Owicim/Auschwitz,” Professor Su!ek assures us somewhat arbitrarily – but “democracy can deal with remission of aversion” and “it is important that the summary balance of this influence [i.e. of democracy] is positive”.51 The author quite overtly constructs this narrative as optimistic. He announces on the very outset that multinational studies will be referred to (being all the more reliable that they have been carried out in different countries for organisations of American Jews). This is important, Su!ek believes, “in view of the thesis whereby our country is rather unique in its adversity as regards the matter being concerned”52.

This particular point of Su!ek’s reasoning is, in a sense, more interesting than the data he quotes. It was first expressed by Ireneusz Krzemiski who had pioneered the studies on this topic, in his comments of 1992 – then in the form of a reprimand given to ‘journalists’ and ‘Jewish organisation activists’ (the name of Claude Lanzmann being mentioned in the context)53 who stood by the image of Poland as an anti-Semitic country. Also the final part of

48 Joel Best, Damned Lies and Statistics. Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and the Activists, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 2001, p. 160. 49 This lecture was delivered at the University of Warsaw on 17th December 2009 within the cycle Dziesi wyk!adów na nowe tysiclecie [‘Ten Lectures for a New Millennium’] (hereinafter, ‘S’). My acknowledgements to Professor Antoni Su!ek for having provided me with a written copy of the text. 50 S6. 51 Ibidem. 52 S2. 53 Ireneusz Krzemiski, Antisemitism in Today’s Poland. Research Hypotheses, in: Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 27, no. 1:1993, p. 128.

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the book he edited, Czy Polacy s antysemitami [‘Are Poles anti-Semitic?’] (1996) leaves no doubt as to this researcher’s attitude in the matter under discussion.

“This book,” Krzemiski wrote, “certainly reaffirms that anti-Semitism occurs in Poland. As opposite to this country, in France or Germany such anti-Semitism tends to manifest itself in attitudes rather than overt behaviours. However, on the other hand, the stereotype of Pole as anti-Semite is an unfair simplification. The appearance of this new stereotype renders it difficult for Poles to confess their guilt against Jews and to achieve mutual understanding.”54

When I compare these three texts – I. Krzemiski’s article from twenty years ago, his book published fifteen years ago and the new lecture by Antoni Su!ek – what astonishes me is the thesis, surprising as it is in the context of an academic discourse, claiming that ‘injustice’ is done to Poles charged with anti-Semitism. Su!ek’s lecture proves it through quoting comparative studies situating Poles, roughly, at the level of Austrians. Entering into a discussion with a stereotype is what surprises me, in fact. More astonishing, though, is inclusion in Krzemiski’s studies of a thesis of the causal relationship between the ‘unjust’ stereotypical labels and wished for changes taking place in Poles’ attitudes toward Jews. Poles, the researcher seems to tell us in his book, would like and possibly could change, ‘improve’, but the ill-willing ‘pro-Jewish’ activists, unfairly stigmatising them, prevent them from so doing.55 In other words, anti-Semitism would have disappeared a long time ago, were it not for the cursed anti-Polonism!

I should like to be understood correctly: I am not expressing my opinion on a possible anti-Semitism of Poles, whether it is the case or not. Also, I am not expressing my view on the thesis claiming that ‘unjust treatment’ intensifies or increases anti-Semitism. What I should like to ask is merely the following: - How come the researchers and the respondents have reconciled a position whereby a

certain stereotype is ‘unjust’ (are there any ‘just’ stereotypes, by the way?)? Are they not bothered by the puzzling ‘we’/‘us’ they appeared as a result?

- Since a stereotype is mainly informative about its carrier (as we can learn from e.g. Sander L. Gilman), then, why should the studies concerning Poles at all speak about how they are estimated from the outside, in the eyes of their domestic critics, ‘foreigners’ and/or ‘Jewish activists’? Would you please forgive me, but this looks like we were only capable of talking about ‘Jews’, in spite of strenuous attempts at talking about Poles.

As to the first question: complementing the studies on Polish anti-Semitism with a comparative perspective, Antoni Su!ek quotes the opinion of the sociologist S. M. Lipset: “Those who know a single country do not know any.” However, sightseeing may have various purposes to it: “it may be a quest for one’s self, an escape from one’s self, a penance or punishment” (Boles!aw Miciski). What is it like in this particular case?

As to the second question: as Mr. Su!ek says, “we even learn our emotions and feelings”56. Indeed – with the following corrective remark: what we actually learn is not only emotions and feelings, but also how to e x t i n g u i s h them. Let us take as an example the anxiety that is incited in many at becoming aware that a third of the Polish society still would not like to have a Jew in their family, or a Jew as the President of the Republic (still, a third of the polled would respond so in both cases!). Will this sense of anxiety get intensified or alleviated if such a society member hears from a sociologist that “the concession for marriages involving ethnically alien individuals, not only Jews, is very low in Poland”, or, that “a third [of the voters] would

54 Czy Polacy s antysemitami? Wyniki badania sondaowego [‘Are Poles anti-Semitic? The outcome of a poll-based survey’], ed. by I.Krzemiski, Warszawa 1996, p. 303. 55 Ibidem, pp. 147-8: “Milieus whose inclination is pro-Jewish tend to present the image of anti-Semitism in this country in a particularly black and dramatic manner. A good example can be offered, among others, by a part of the Liberty Union [political party], particularly the one stemming from the former ROAD political environment. 56 S 4.

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‘certainly not’ cast their vote on a President candidate with a Jewish background, which is also true for someone of a German, Russian or Ukrainian descent”57?

The ‘yes, but’ structure, upon which Su!ek’s comforting reasoning about the reduction of Polish anti-Semitism is based, is not only of a reporting but also a strongly persuasive nature. It would be incomprehensible if we did not know the hidden underlying premise for this persuasion. It is clearly expressed in Ireneusz Krzemiski’s statement, quoted above, on what hinders a possible transformation of Poles’ attitude toward Jews and their ‘mutual understanding’. It is namely the ‘stereotype of Pole as anti-Semite’ and its carriers that are to be blamed for this unsatisfactory state of affairs! Not the anti-Semites who cynically manage the ethnicity, not the politicians or clergymen such as the Rev. Chrostowski or Bishop Stefanek or, lastly, Bishop Pieronek, but, on the contrary, the propagators of that naughty stereotype who, raising a clamour, claim that “the problem of anti-Semitism does exist and is a serious one”58!

It is worth reminding here that the statement claiming that it is the fight against anti-Semitism which preserves, if not produces, anti-Semitism, is a rhetorical stratagem as age-old as Christian-Jewish relations are. Jews themselves not infrequently tended to use it themselves, fearing certain consequences. In the late 19th century, the time of August Rohling, it was directed, for example, at the Protestant theologian Hermann Strack who had authored a book on Jews being blamed for ritual murder.59 Five decades later, Joshua Trachtenberg mentions this same trick in the foreword to his book The Devil and the Jews, published in 1943. A clergyman of his acquaintance tried to discourage him from continuing his research, arguing that the times – it was in 1939 – were unsuitable for attracting attention to such unpleasant issues. What to dig this dirt out for, at a moment when anti-Semitism has got so much intensified? But Trachtenberg thought: can there possibly be any better moment for it?60

After J. T. Gross’s Neighbours was published, the author was asked a very similar question (‘what to dig the stuff up for?’) by Ryszard Bugaj, once a leading Labour Union party activist, later advisor to President Lech Kaczyski.61

Although, similarly to twenty years ago, virtually no-one could be found to speak in defence of stereotypes, yet given the experiences of the past and, especially, the durability of intellectual anti-Semitism, on which Helena Datner focused already in the 1990s, Ireneusz Krzemiski’s expression does need to be reviewed. Wasn’t it so that among those who have been referring to anti-Semitism, the laudable alertness for stereotypes (‘anti-Polonism’!) was expressed in muffling the ‘activists’ protests without a good reason? Doesn’t a ‘public good’ of this sort, comprehended in such a peculiar manner, concealing anti-Semitism in a hope that it will get extinguished by itself some day – overlap with the effects of the communism-imposed ban on speaking of the uniqueness of the annihilation of Jews, with the result that other Polish conspiracies of silence (with respect to blackmailing, murders of Jews committed by various underground formations during the war, the pre-war Church’s attitude toward Jews) have for good turned into a ‘skeleton in the closet’ – a skeleton that is incessantly discovered anew? What a role in this complex process has been played by the stigmatisation of the notion of ‘activist’, or, the logically and morally suspicious dichotomy of ‘philo-Semitism/anti-Semitism’? No special perspicacity is required for identifying it as an instrument of social control. A great example of deciphering and intuitive overpowering of that mechanism is the

57 S 8. 58 Czy Polacy s antysemitami, op. cit., pp. 147-148. 59 Hermann Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice. Human Blood and Jewish Ritual. An Historical and Sociological Inquiry, transl. by H. Blanchamp, London 1909; originally published as Der Blutaberglaube in der Menschheit, Blutmorde und Blutritus, Berlin 1891. 60 Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews. The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism, foreward; Philadelphia, Jewish Publications Society, 2002. 61 R. Bugaj, Prawda historyczna i interes materialny [‘ Historic truth and material interest’], Gazeta Wyborcza no. 6-7/1/2001.

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statement of Rafa! Betlejewski, an artist, author of a national-scale social action ‘I miss you, Jew’ (www.tskni.com):

“A radio asked Betlejewski directly about how he would respond to an accusation that he acts out of a Jewish inspiration. The reply was, ‘But I do act out of Jewish inspiration. By all means, yes!’“62

I shall resume the issue of social control in the conclusive section of this text. Before then, however, I intend to deal with elementary methodological issues regarding the idea of poll as a tool for investigating the Poles’ attitudes toward Jews. V. Professor Su!ek is an experienced researcher and he is aware of how imperfect his method can be. He writes of it as follows:

“[A poll/questionnaire] finds it tough to reach the deeper layers of consciousness, the social subconscious – where the demons are nestling. Moreover, the polled are inclined to conceal socially unwelcome opinions, trying to appear politically correct. The advantages of poll are more important than that, though. Being a representative study, it shows the views of the entire society, in particular, of its ‘ordinary people’, rather than being limited to our own acquaintances or the circles whose involvement at either side is so considerable that it stands out. As polls are repeated, they show the actual changes in the society and prevent impressionistic opinions – that it’s better and better, or, that it’s worse and worse.”

The advantages of poll are undisputable – including, in the first place, its representativeness that is unattainable to ethnographers.63 Yet Su!ek disregards its drawbacks as he considers that they exert a minimum impact on the outcome’s reliability, close to the limit of statistical error.64 The experiences of researchers conducting fieldwork research in today’s Poland have brought about completely different conclusions. Based on conversations recorded in Polish provincial areas as well as in big cities, it seems that political correctness is not only a ‘marginal element’ but at times, in studies such as Polish-Jewish relations, it takes on the proportions of a first-rank driver which may soon completely reshape the social studies in Poland.65 On the one hand, it may sadden the scholars as it will entail difficulties in creating sources, whilst imbuing with optimism on the other: ‘being ashamed of anti-Semitism’ and of anti-Jewish reflexes is becoming increasingly frequent across the milieus, from traditional rural environments which were reached by the post-2nd-Vatican-Council voice of the Catholic Church66 to the modern urban ones67. A ‘political correctness’ obfuscates the picture whilst

62 Agnieszka Kowalska, Zawodowy tskniciel [‘The professional yearner’], Gazeta Wyborcza, 27/1/2010. 63 The strong points of a poll become its curse at the same time, though. They include laconic nature of the outcome which are well understood by journalists and politicians, as well as their easy de-contextualisation that enables to instrumentalise them. This is why opinion polls so frequently play an off-scientific role. 64 This sentence, uttered by Mr. Su!ek while delivering his lecture, has not been included in its written version I have used herein. 65 The opinion of social psychologists can be referred to here – to quote e.g. Prof. Janusz Czapiski, author of a cyclic review titled ‘Social Diagnosis’: “The spirit of conservatism may get reinforced. The attitudes in reality are more conservative than the polls may reflect.” Interview: Janusz Czapiski, Polak grupowo nie umie [‘Poles cannot do it in groups’], Gazeta Wyborcza, 28th Dec. 2009. 66 As for the issues under discussion, the voice of Pope John Paul II was what mattered most; cf. my Legendy o krwi, op. cit., e.g. p. 412. A different picture of the phenomenon in question (post-Council opinions not contributing to a religious affinity with Jews) has been generated by the research done by Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs (1998–2008): among the secondary-school youth, the rate of positive answers to the question “Are our contemporary Jews burdened with a responsibility for the cruficiction of Christ?” has increased almost twofold – from 8.5% to 15.1% – between 1998 and 2008. This was particularly marked among students of technical schools (technikums) (8.0% to 11%) and so-called basic/junior vocational schools (9.5% do 25%). It is possible that the change in the opinions of young people, who are increasingly resistant to overtly educational influences, has to do with a response to ‘shaming.’Witnessing of a ‘correctness’ does not erase a view or opinion but rather, possibly reinforces it as someone’s own, ‘genuine’ one. (I owe this observation to Anna Zawadzka.)

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being an interesting picture in itself. It is indicative of a progressing modernisation of the country. It would be naïve, though, to believe that it abolishes anti-Jewish prejudices. Only deepened interviews can clarify the extent to which it does so at all.

What we nowadays colloquially refer to as ‘correctness’ contributes to the informer’s ‘façade’ – following the Erving Goffman’s term68. According to Goffman, a façade conceals the individual’s traits s/he is not willing to reveal, for some reason or another, which means that there also exists a different face of the interlocutor which the researcher cannot possibly access, unless s/he has encountered a so-called privileged informant, applied a deepened interview or social experiment with a good result and, moreover, has analysed them correctly. While cleverly avoiding the ‘depth/surface’ dichotomy, Goffman provocatively suggests that the façade is no less true at all than the ‘inner I’ we strive to recognise. It does not however mean, (at least for Goffman), something reverse – namely, that the said ‘inner I’ should be less true than the façade is. Nonetheless, such a conclusion is implied (perhaps unintentionally) by the utterance by Antoni Su!ek and I quote it again:

“Being a representative study, [poll] shows ... the views of the entire society, in particular, of its ‘ordinary people’69, rather than being limited to our own acquaintances or the circles whose involvement at either side is so considerable that it stands out. As polls are repeated, they show the a c t u a l changes in the society and prevent impressionistic opinions – that it’s better and better, or, that it’s worse and worse.” [Spaced out by JTB]

I am not over interpreting the intent, am I? It would stand for a syllogism: ‘unattainable to representative research’ = ‘untrue’, so we deal here with a radically positivistic utterance – this style having seemingly been exhaustedly commented upon.70 Considering the title of the Su!ek lecture, one may get an impression that inasmuch as poll-based sociologists reach ‘ordinary Poles’, owing to the methods they apply, the men-in-the-street, including ethnographers traversing the Polish province, are doomed, by definition, to fragmentary knowledge of ‘non-ordinary Poles’ such as ‘our acquaintances’ or the most conspicuous ‘activists’. Let us then remind that it is just the opposite: save for the pollers, poll-based sociologists do not usually deal with utterances of real people set in their contexts but rather, with a c o n s t r u c t produced by a method which takes out a sector from the polled persons’ views which it is capable of understanding and processing in line with the representativeness criteria it has assumed. This is a mortifying obviousness. More mortifying may only be its being omitted by sociologists who explain the results generated on this basis.

Being a “natural method for investigation into mass attitudes,” poll answers many questions while provoking quite a number of them at the same time. For instance, it is assumed that “polls focus on the centre, the main current of the society, it being tougher for them to reach extreme groups – elites shaping the mass opinion as well as peripheral groups being particularly receptive to prejudices against aliens.”71 The space-related terminology (‘the centre/peripheries’), the hierarchies of descriptions (‘elites’ – ‘main current’ – ‘peripheral groups’) as well as designations such as ‘our acquaintances’ and ‘activists’ versus ‘ordinary

67 Consider the ‘restyled façade’ in journalists and columnist of Rzeczpospolita, a leading Polish daily, such as Rafa! A. Ziemkiewicz, Piotr Semka or Piotr Skwieciski. Also, cf. Anna Zawadzka, Rzeczpospolita jednego narodu [‘The Commonwealth of One Nation’ – exploiting a pun on the daily’s name] (forthcoming). 68 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York, Anchor, 1959. 69 As a commentary to this formulation, I cannot resist quoting Clifford Geertz, author of the famous Interpretations of Culture (1973, p. 22), who categorically rejects notions such as ‘ordinariness/typicality’ as well as a ‘general model of (the) society’, considering them to be passkeys and instances of sociological abuse. In his opinion, assumption of any such notion at the outset of an analysis means that the analysing party’s system of values is unconsciously adapted to the analysis’s subject. Instead, Geertz argues, we ought to assume that this subject is merely unknown to us. 70 For instance, see Leszek Ko!akowski, The Alienation of Reason, transl. by N. Guterman, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1968. 71 Su!ek, Postawy spo!eczestwa polskiego wobec ydów, op. cit., p. 2.

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people’ suggest that the data selected by the researcher are set in an order according to a g r o u p criterion, rather than with regards to the c o n t e n t s whose carriers are members of such groups. This in turn means that we cannot imagine, for example, someone whose attitudes partly make him or her a member of a mainstream group, and partly of some ‘extreme group’.72

However, the ethnographic research done by my team makes it apparent that the problem of local elites (e.g. in Sandomierz area, small towns in Podlasie, Zamo County) is not an extremism of some alleged ‘extremist groups’, but rather, the mainstream group’s views, proving e x t r e m e as they are from the standpoint of the historic truth – the said group primarily including the intelligentsia, town elites (a pharmacy dispensary owner, a priest, a graphic artist, a former provincial restorer of historic monuments, female staff of a museum, a female librarian, high-school teachers)73. Another problem is their tolerant attitude toward even more extreme opinions. The like phenomena cannot possibly be noticed or explained on the grounds of a collective concept of sets that is seemingly suggested by poll-based surveys (or rather, their above-described interpretation).74 If, however, we were to assume a distributive criterion on the grounds of social ontology, we could figure out representations of what Su!ek refers to as ‘extremities’ within an individual member of the mainstream group as well as mainstream representations within an individual belonging to an extremity. Only such a standpoint could essentially be free of being potentially charged with essentialism.

Antoni Su!ek decidedly renounces essentialism. He does so through the second segment of his lecture’s title where, along with ‘ordinary Poles’, some (unspecified) ‘Jews’ appear. As he makes it clear:

“The Jews Poles think of are not limited to those living in Poland today. They also include those Jews who once used to live in Poland – whether after the war, before it, or even earlier on: the Jewish nation as a whole. These are ‘symbolic’ Jews, a collective entity and, simultaneously, a structure of collective imagination. For a prejudiced mind, these distinctions are not quite of significance. The thing is that it assumes essentialism. The assumption is that people of some ethnical category are basically the same anytime, anywhere, some ethnic essence residing in each of them.”75

What position the researcher should assume against the ‘essentialism’ of their informers, being criticised here, so as not to replicate it himself? If the categories included in his questionnaire questions are going to be as essentialist as suggested by the undifferentiated category called ‘Jews,’ regardless of the results achieved, they will merely reproduce the discourse framework inherited from the informers.76 Poll-based questions are contextualised by definition; hence, we

72 As a matter of fact, only this depiction of social ontology enables understanding of the famous public opinion paradoxes, such as e.g. those described by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004). 73 The historic truth is shown therein in an ‘optional’ fashion, as if it were but a subject of opinions admissible in a democratic country. In as early as the 1960s, Hannah Arendt wrote on the danger of transformation of the truth about facts into opinions (“as though the fact of Germany’s support of Hitler or of France’s collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of Vatican policies during the Second Wolrd War were not a matter of historical record but a matter of opinion. “) See her essay “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future, New York, Penguin Books, 1968, p. 236. For specific examples of transformation of the truth into opinions, see utterances of informers in Joanna Tokarska’s-Bakir book Legendy o krwi, op. cit., e.g. p. 488ff. 74 For more on the distributive and collective criteria in the theory of sets, see: Ma!a encyklopedia logiki [‘A Concise Encyclopaedia of Logic’], ed. by W. Marciszewski, Wroc!aw/"ód 1988, pp. 224, 228. Just as a reminder, the researcher who was the first to get grouded upon a distributive (generic) rather than collective (genetic) comprehension of the subject of ethnographic research was Jan-Stanis!aw Bystro, founder of the modern ethnography, who in his Wstp do ludoznawstwa polskiego [‘An Introduction to Polish ethnography’] (1926) described it as a science with “certain determined cultural contents, rather than one about social groups”. 75 S1. 76 This issue is related in ethnography with the so-called emic/etic issue; cf. e.g.: Alan Dundes, From Etic to Emic Units in the Structural Study of Folktales, in: idem, The Meaning of Folklore, ed. Simon J.Bronner, Utah State University Press, Logan 2007, pp. 88-100.

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will not get to know which ‘Jews’ have been meant by the respondents.77 The question then appears: what are we counting, in that case?

Yet, the problem with assumptions, so formulated by the sociologist, is more serious than that and it lies in the two opening sentences of the text in question:

“Those Poles who h a v e e l e m e n t s o f a J e w i s h i d e n t i t y a s p a r t o f t h e i r n a t i o n a l i d e n t i t y form a very small fraction of the society. There is not more than a per mill – a thousandth – of them: that much has remained out of the pre-war Jewish society, numbering a few million. Moreover, those scarce Jews are not distinguishable in the community; rather than being a perceivable minority, they are blended in a broader society. Nonetheless, Jews occupy quite a room in the social consciousness and are subject to emotions, not infrequently bad ones.”

It is an unquestionable truth at first glance – the Holocaust, the annihilation, took place in Poland, followed by recurring ethnic cleansings. The number of Poles openly appearing as Jews is relatively low, although no-one – apart from anti-Semites – has ever undertaken the effort to count them (I am obviously not talking about the religious community statistics). If however we take a closer look at the sentence under discussion, we shall see that we cannot be so certain of it at all. As long as clichés such as ‘confessing to/disowning Jewishness’ function in this country, the actual percentage of ‘Poles having elements of a Jewish identity as part of their national identity’ in the society as a whole will remain unknown; similarly, we cannot be sure of what should actually be thought of sentences such as: “Only very few of them [i.e. the informants] have had a chance to meet any Jew in person”78, or: “‘Jews’, ‘people of Jewish descent’ or ‘politicians with a Jewish background’ have no special influence on politics, economy or the mass media and, what is more, they even do not exist as a separate entity in those areas.”79 It is obvious that the sociologist eradicates in this way a mitologisation of Jewish influences which is a constituent of anti-Jewish ideologies. One may consider, however, whether he does more good or evil through suppressing the possible ethnic differences without even problematising ‘what conditions the possibilities’80 of their manifestation. What he namely does is unintentionally intensifying the tension produced by any pure identity.

Apart from anti-Semitism, the mass media is another factor which Antoni Su!ek would be inclined to associate with overstating the number and influence of Jews.

“It might seem to some people that Jews in Poland are numerous, since much is being said and written about Jews, their history, culture and Polish-Jewish relations: just leaf through a Sunday edition of Gazeta Wyborcza or Rzeczpospolita [the leading Polish dailies].”81

Even though the aforementioned papers might devote an excessively large room to the topics in question, they do it quite in proportion to this factor’s symbolic influence to Polish ‘imagined communities’ (so to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase). When taking into account how much has been contributed to Polish culture by people who have ever been, rightly or not, associated with Jewry or Jewishness; and having regard to how much energy the occurrence of this concept triggers in public discourse, we shall come to the conclusion that Polish culture and history are its products to an outstanding extent; hence, the anti-Semites claiming that the said history and culture are partly – and always too much – Jewish, can be said to be right, paradoxically

77 When asking about ‘Jews’, the etnographer has at his/her disposal the context of a given utterance and can always ask more detailed questions. 78 S 4. 79 S 10. 80 In the sense Pierre Bourdieu refers to them in his Pascalian Meditations, Palo Alto, Ca, Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 217, and before then, Michel Foucault in his The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, 1963 [1977] 81 S 3.

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enough.82 A reflex of rebellion that is continually triggered by such a phrasing tells you more of a Polish ‘imagined community’ than any extensive and detailed studies, not to mention opinion pools. Is it similarly so in America, Germany, or France?83

Although the postulate of integration of the culture and output of the Polish Jews has been highlighted for a long time now by historians84 as well as literary scholars85, the Polish ethnicity86 has been stubbornly dissenting from Jewry and defining itself in an opposition to it. At the same time, political correctness increasingly commonly suggests euphemistic descriptions of the past, such as ‘multi-culturality’87, so much in use today – a term that flattens the pre-war Polish-Jewish realities, filled as they were with discrimination and violence. What our contemporary Polish ethnicity is really like, we shall not get to know taking the informers’ word for granted. To identify it, we should follow the fundamental structural assumption whereby the meaning resides in the manner in which semiotic objects (i.e. ‘Poles’ and ‘Jews’) are systematically situated against one another.88 It is only from mutual relationships – rather than from what is merely declared verbally – that we can learn something about them.

For the reasons discussed in the introductory section, a national-democratic vision of the national community, based upon the concepts of blood and descent, has prevailed in Poland, whilst the concept of self-identification, culture and citizenship has not grown popular. This translates into the rules of representation in the Polish public discourse. ‘Objects’ such as ‘Jews’ and ‘Poles’ are fetishised – that is, presented as autonomous and alien to one another to the extent that a breach of the manner of their presentation as described above easily actuates a reflex described in psychoanalysis as ‘fear of taint’.89 This fear is signalled, for instance, by gossips about a Jewish origin of politicians which can ruin the careers of those running for president with extreme efficiency, as it recently occurred in the Ukraine90 – a phenomenon known to Poland quite well (see e.g. Anne Applebaum piewsz dam w Polsce? [‘Anne Applebaum to be Poland’s First Lady?’], a piece of news published 21st Jan. 2010,

82 All the more that a similar depiction is only applicable with Jews and not e.g. Russians or Germans who have contributed to the building of Polish culture but tended to get dissolved in Polish ethnicity at an imcomparably faster pace. 83 Cf. Jean-Yves Potel, La fin de l’innocence. La Pologne face à son passeé j u i f , Editions Autrement, Paris 2009; spaced out by JTB. 84 See Marcin Kula, Duski historyk pyta o Jedwabne [‘A Danish historian asking about the Jedwabne massacre’], in: idem, Uparta sprawa, op. cit., p. 146: “I should hope that in some time, the Jewish history will be taught on a scale which it befits to use while teaching about the numerous citizens of the pre-war state [rather than just mentioning them on the occasion of their annihilation], whereas e.g. the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising will be mentioned in the teaching and journalism not only in terms of a Jewish movement in a Jewish ghetto – albeit it was so indeed – but also as the first large-scale armed fight in a city under occupation.” 85 Literatura wielu narodów. Z Leonardem Neugerem rozmawia Roman Paw!owski [‘The Literature of Many Nations. Leonard Neuger talks to Roman Paw!owski’], Gazeta Wyborcza, 5th Sept. 2000: “Poland was a multinational country and, as a matter of fact, a history of literature in Poland, rather than of Polish literature alone, should be created.” To a much larger extent, such ‘washout’ concerns the philosophical and religious though; see e.g. 700 lat myli polskiej [‘Seven Hundred Years of the Polish Thought’], a compendium in several volumes published by PWN, Warszawa 1977. 86 I am using this term in the sense given to it by Frederic Barth (Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 1969) and as updated by Steven Cornell, Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race. Making Identities in a Changing World, Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks–London–Delhi 1998. 87 This term, dating to 1980s, is a blatant anachronism with respect to the realities of the discrimination occurring in the pre-war time and earlier than that. As it ignores the dominant position of a majority, depicted by it as an equivalent partner in the rivalry, it brings about false implications and plays a masking part in the discourse. 88 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics [Cours de linguistique générale, first publ. 1916]. Also, see: Eviatar Zerubavel, Social Mindscapes. An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology, Harvard University Press, Harvard 1997; idem, Time Maps. Collective Memory and Social Shape of the Past, Chicago University Press, Chicago 2003. 89 Cf. e.g. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London 2001, e.g. p. 127ff. 90 The case of Arseniy Yatsenyuk; see: Mariusz Zawadzki, Oby tylko prezydentem nie zosta! yd [‘Let’s keep a Jew away from the presidency’], Gazeta Wyborcza, 4th Jan. 2010. As we can remember, similar messages accompanied Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s presidential campaign of 1990 in Poland.

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http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/2120008,11,1,drukuj.html). This is coupled with unobtrusive systems of signalling familiarity and avoiding suspicions of strangeness, which – let us hope so – will at last be subject to a systematic sociological description, some day.

A visual aspect of this fetishisation has been detected and expressively described by Professor Marcin Kula in his account of the Jedwabne funeral ceremony of 2001:

“Many elderly Jews came over to Jedwabne for the celebration day, clearly distinguishable by their appearance – at least, such comers were shown on television. The reporters who during the celebration of the Jedwabne murder anniversary asked some people on Israeli streets about their opinion would often target their camera at orthodox Jews, rather than passers-by wearing jackets, like most of us do. It was the former group that apparently could more expressively symbolise the Jewish opinion or simply look more attractive film-wise. In sum, the impression was possibly strengthened during these celebrations that Poles are Poles while Jews are Jews: dissimilar; simply, different people; merely, Jews. Instead, I would welcome the strengthening of an attitude stressing that Jews are people – just like anyone else. I would welcome the strengthening of an opinion whereby the same people can be Poles and Jews in one, there can be Poles of Jewish origin – a national identification being, all in all, a matter of self-determination, citizenship, and culture.”91

In the public space, Jews still tend to be perceived as aliens relative to the ‘national body’, being genetically and generically distinct from Poles. Sociologists should not have anything to do with it. It ensures them a greater influence on the social reality than fighting unfair labels attached to their compatriots by ‘foreign journalists’ and ‘Jewish activists’ does.92 Beside historians, it is them – sociologists the opinion-poll users, and not anthropologists or qualitative sociologists – that are the ‘legislators’ in today’s Poland, applying the word’s meaning proposed by Z. Bauman. It is them to establish the norms of identity discourse and ‘what conditions the opportunities’ for this discourse – for instance, by setting the self-determination categories in the recent national census, as we can learn from the following account:

“A general national census pollster pays me a visit. The question about nationality offers you just a single option and moreover, you have to give a ‘no’ answer to the question about the Polish nationality first. Apparently, I am not allowed to feel a Pole and a Jew at the same time.”93

91 M. Kula, Dyskusja o Jedwabnem czy o Polsce [‘Is it a debate on Jedwabne, or, on Poland?’], in: idem. Uparta sprawa, op. cit., p. 138. The day I am writing this (13th January 2010), Rzeczpospolita daily has published an article by Piotr Zychowicz, Pamitnik ydówki z dwóch powsta [‘A Jewess’s diary from two uprisings’]. The diary was written by Pola Elster who had fought in the Warsaw Rising and was killed in oliborz district on 27th September 1944. “Why did Jews fight at the Poles’ side in 1944?”, asks the journalist in his note. As long as the reply given by Szymon Ratajzer (‘Kazik’), a soldier with the Jewish Combat Organisation (OB) and a Ghetto Uprising hero (“We were citizens of Poland and considered fighting for our homeland to be our duty”) is rather obvious, the question comes to one’s mind, what sort of assumptions with respect to Poles and Jews Mr. Zychowicz must have made to utter such a question at all. 92 Ireneusz Krzemiski, Antisemitism in Today’s Poland. Research Hypotheses, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 27, no. 1:1993, p. 128. 93 The quotation goes on as follows: “Moreover, the Polish language in itself does enforce a certain way of determining one’s self. While talking about myself, I have to choose between naming myself a ‘Pole of Jewish origin’ and a ‘Polish Jewess’. By contrast, living in America, I could introduce myself as an ‘American Polish Jew’ which would mean that I am an American, a Pole and a Jew/Jewess’ on an equal basis.”; Anna Bikont, My z Jedwabnego [‘We from Jedwabne’], Warszawa 2004.

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Summary Research of and investigation into the Polish-Jewish relations is hindered by the effects of a conspiracy of silence that has been surrounding during the Communist era. To a much larger extent than any other subject of history are they not directly accessible but instead, intermediated by a complex system of evasions we are not aware of. Tabooisation was tackled before by some anthropologists and sociologists, but no-one has so far presented this phenomenon in so systematic, scientifically reliable and interesting manner comparable to Eviatar Zerubavel‘s monograph on conspiracies of silence did. The concept in question may be applied with success to the Polish historic conditions. The paper outlines, through a few approaches, the circumstances in which social conspiracies were accumulating around the Polish-Jewish relations in the after-war period, so as to pave the way for analysis of the current difficulties in researching the title issues. The analysis is made on the basis of an important text by one of the most renown Polish sociologists, Prof. Antoni Su!ek. His lecture titled ‘Ordinary Poles looking at Jews’ was delivered at the University of Warsaw, Poland, on 17th December 2009 within the cycle ‘Ten Lectures for a New Millennium’. It summerises the Polish twenty-year poll-based researches of Poles’ attitudes towards Jews.

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How to exit conspiracies of silence? Social Sciences Facing the Polish-Jewish Relations

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