Themes and Trends of Historical Enquiry

This chapter explores the broad topics and genres of Polish Jewish historiography addressed by historians in the 1920s and 1930s. It presents the most important topics repeated in academic and popular contexts: Polish–Jewish relations in the past, with particular attention to the Jewish contribution to the country's economic prosperity and to Poland's struggle for independence, and the internal life of individual Jewish communities, their leaders, and their institutions. When writing about Polish–Jewish relations in previous centuries, and particularly in their accounts of conflict and coexistence, Jewish historians in interwar Poland paid close attention to mutual cultural influences between Jews and non-Jews, attempting to account for instances of friction and anti-Jewish violence. The chapter focuses on the ways in which Jewish historians presented Polish Jewry as a social, cultural, and political entity closely linked with the history of Poland. It assesses how Polish Jewish historical writing took on a direct political meaning as a response to the treatment of these subjects by contemporaneous Polish historiography.