Becoming Polish Mainstream

This chapter traces the trajectories of Jewish scholars in the aftermath of the First World War. It narrates how scholarship by Bałaban, Schiper, Schorr, Mahler, and Ringelblum, among others, crafted a Polish Jewish communal narrative that offered the approximately three million Jewish citizens in the new Polish state a unified sense of their past in the Polish lands. These Jewish historians shared the belief that history was a crucial tool for the work of answering questions arising in the current situation, as well as for achieving the aspirations of the Jews in the new Polish nation. History provided a model for Jewish cultural autonomy as well as for inter-ethnic relations. The chapter investigates the struggle of these Jewish historians to get their scholarship included in the broader Polish historiography and examines the difficulties they encountered as Jews in their professional lives. It also examines whether Jewish students who entered the universities became part of the country's historical guild, or whether they were forced to create a parallel system of academic institutions.