300
PARTISAN REVIEW
anti-Nazi resistance and as Cardinal Wojtyla was friendly and sym–
pathetic to Krakow's Jews.
As for the State: on the eve, practically, of the Nazi invasion, the
emigration of Jews was considered a key agenda item by Poles at a
London conference, and in May 1939 a government spokesman reiter–
ated that nothing had changed in the policy towards Jews, saying "we
expect to diminish the number of Jews in Poland." These stupid
leaders all but betrayed their country's best interests by playing this old
game instead of preparing against the Nazis.
It
is impossible to forgive
Church, State, nation for the total lack of physical and moral support,
as Professor Heller maintains, with which the Jews had
to
face their
final martyrdom. The outrage continues today-not much guilt is
evident in Polish society as almost all evidence of a Jewish presence
and su(£ering have been effaced or scarcely acknowledged.
One rehearses this melancholy story in order to recall and better
understand the moral and historic weight supporting the idea of a
Jewish nationalism.
It
should be self-evident by now that there is a
specifically Jewish peoplehood and destiny, but certain kinds of third
world and New Left attacks upon Israel (even when an effort is made,
for whatever reason,
to
separate " Jew" from "Zionist") have placed the
question of the nature of Jewish nationalism once more before us.
The Jewish Left in Poland-Socialist, Bund, Communist-earns
high marks for its determined resistance to anti-Semitism, in which it
was often joined by their non-Jewish comrades, the only Poles, by and
large, who consistently opposed anti-Semitism. But of course that was
not done in the name of Jewish nationalism, which was invariably seen
as a reactionary force, but against what was regarded as a diversion
from class struggle. Anti-Semitism was seen as a phenomenon that
rested on an economic underpinning-change that and the disease
would surely disappear. Along with, naturally, a specifically Jewish
presence in the brave new world. I repeat these platitudes only because
the same simplicities seem
to
inform many Left arguments at present.
In Poland very few people on the Left thought through or were
comfortable with a truly pluralistic,notion of culture, one that envi–
sioned real autonomy, giving full weight to the realities that bound a
people as
they
saw and determined them. Jewish Socialists and
Communists failed, ultimately, to reach the Jew in the street because of
their intransigent anticlericalism and the opposition
to
Zionism (in
this regard, the Bund was even worse, according to Heller, than the
Communists). The mass of ordinary Jews understood, in their despair
and desperation, a truth about their condition that many of the non-
