THE UNDERMINING OF THE POSITION OF THE ‘POSITIVISTS’

THE REVOLUTIONARY CRISIS in the tsarist empire and the abandonment of the policy of ‘transforming’ the Jews into useful subjects seriously undermined the authority of those who favoured integrationist politics. While integrationist views were still widely held within the Jewish elite, politics emphasizing Jewish peoplehood now gained strength. So too did socialist ideas, whether expressed in universal or in Jewish terms. Attempts to organize Orthodox Jews to participate in political life were also a feature of the period.

This new politics was, above all, a response to antisemitism. But it also stimulated further hostility to the Jews, reviving old fears that the Jews constituted a ‘state within a state’. The new Jewish politics was not able to establish a hegemonic position even in tsarist Russia, where it first emerged. It faced even more opposition elsewhere in the Jewish world, and the years between 1880 and 1939 were marked by bitter ideological conflict.

In the Kingdom of Poland (see Map 2) the undermining of the position of the Polish integrationists, the Positivists, the exponents on Polish soil of a variant of Western liberalism, and the Jews who were associated with them took place more slowly than did the parallel process in the tsarist empire. The wave of pogroms of 1881 at first provoked relatively little response in the Kingdom of Poland. For this reason the anti-Jewish violence which broke out in December 1881 in Warsaw engendered widespread shock both in positivist circles and among the prointegrationist Jews.

The pogrom began in Holy Cross Church in central Warsaw on Christmas Day. A panic in the church resulted in a stampede which caused the deaths of around twenty people. When a member of the crowd shouted that the rush had been caused by a Jewish pickpocket, anti-Jewish violence erupted. Two Jews were killed and a great deal of property was destroyed, the damage amounting to over a million roubles.