Antisemitism in the 1930s—The Non-Fascist Countries

The mass unemployment resulting from the Great Depression, alongside Hitler’s successes, was a factor contributing to the rise of antisemitism. Jews were increasingly perceived as competition for jobs and wages—whether by students, who sometimes had slim chances for decent employment, or by peasants, who saw the Jews as middlemen scooping up income due to those who were actually growing the crops.² It was a simple matter to shift these potential class and generational conflicts to ethnicity, given that many regarded Jews as a foreign element, even if they possessed citizenship.

Wiktor Drymmer, a prominent Sanation-era politician, recalled: “In the closing years of our independent existence there were frequent and critical, though not hostile, discussions concerning certain attributes of the Jewish society. Two main Jewish traits were the focus: their alienation and predatory and exclusive possessiveness.”³ This self-absolving opinion demonstrates how the Polish government viewed some of their citizens, despite being far from the anti-Jewish nationalist or radical parties.

In Eastern Europe it was commonplace to accuse Jews of, on the one hand, insufficiently assimilating, and on the other, over-occupying the most prominent places in society; even if taken at face value, this smacked of a certain paradox. It was not explained how hostility was to aid assimilation, and even those politicians with aversions to Jews must, at some point, have wondered how they would be replaced after their emigration. In a private letter of 1940, Regent Horthy wrote: “As for the Jewish issue, I’ve been an antisemite all my life.” At the same time he confessed “it is not practicable to eliminate the Jews in a year or two […] and replace them with the incompetent, mostly worthless, swaggering [Hungarian] element, for we would go bankrupt.”⁴ This did not prevent the admiral’s regime from passing laws in 1938 and 1939 that deprived Jews of many civic rights and freedoms—though the severity of these laws was still no match for the brutalities of Italy and Germany.

Poland introduced no similar laws on a national level, though some colleges took the initiative to limit the number of Jewish students (numerus clausus) and create “desk ghettos.” Even moderate politicians, like the circles of Bunt Młodych and Polityka, the publications of the young Jerzy Giedroyc, saw forced emigration as the best, if not the only alternative.⁵

At the same time, ten per cent of the victims of Katyn were Jews,⁶ which shows that they still accounted for much of the social elite at the close of the interwar period. The suggestion by Stanisław Lem’s biographer⁷ that antisemitism may have prevented him from studying at the academy of his dreams is somewhat doubtful, given that Jews still made up eleven per cent of the Lwów Polytechnic’s students in 1938.⁸

As before, racism was not the sole domain of Central and Eastern Europe. “Antisemitic France was unquestionably a reality, and some of the country’s finest writers […] put their pens in service to it.”⁹ In the USA Ivy League rectors restricted their numbers of Jewish graduates (at Yale, up until the early 1960s),¹⁰ and marriages between Blacks and whites remained illegal in some states until the latter half of the 1960s.¹¹