From Assimilation to Antisemitism: The 'Jewish Question' in Pland, 1850-1914 by Theodore R. Weeks (review)

Abstract

reviews 557 Crews acknowledges that official attitudes towards Muslims changed sig nificantly in the latter part of the nineteenth century, initially in response to Shamil's stubborn resistance in the North Caucasus, and later because of growing fears of Pan-lslamism. However, he fails to draw the necessary conclusions when summing up. After a passing reference to the significant fact that after 1910 Muslims were entirely excluded from the nascent parliamen tary system on thegrounds of their religion, he cites a single petition from 1910 as evidence that even so 'Muslims were unprepared to give up on the State as a potential ally in the imposition of Islamic Orthodoxy' (p. 346). This turns out to be a rambling storyof a dispute between thewidow of a village mullah who provided free tuition to Muslim girls, and a licensed statemullah who was tryingto close down her school as he resented losing the fees for this teaching. Crews's category error is clear here: even ifwe take the widow's story at face value, thisdispute is not about religion per se, let alone what did or did not constitute 'orthodoxy', but a local feud over money, inwhich both sides have attempted to invoke state authority to trump the other. In any case, Crews does not tell us what, if any response this provoked from the authorities. This is typical of the strange disjunction between evidence and argument throughout the book. Other minor criticisms are that the end-notes are difficult to use and there is no bibliography, infuriating in conjunction with abbreviated citations, although presumably the Press is to blame for this.The 'Epilogue' concludes with a bizarre assertion that modern European States are now seeking to impose restrictions on 'Freedom of Conscience' in a manner reminiscent of the tsarist state (p. 369), although he fails to give any examples of this. Crews is tobe applauded forhis aims in thiswork, for the amount of archi val research which he has done, and for the often fascinating detail ofMuslim litigiousness which the anecdotes he uses reveal, but his thesis is overambi tious.The evidence he cites (and inmany cases misunderstands) is insufficient to support even his conclusions about the continued centrality of Islam to the tsarist state's administration of Muslim regions of the Empire after i860, let alone his argument that the state itselfbecame central toMuslim belief. School of History Alexander Morrison UniversityofLiverpool Weeks, Theodore R. From Assimilation toAntisemitism: The Jewish Question' in Poland, 1850-1gi4. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb IL, 2006. x + 242 pp. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. $40.00. 'The Vistula will not become theJordan; rather, only for a timewill itswaters be polluted with the effluent of Zionism and the sewers ofJewish industry' (p. 3). So wrote one contributor to the avowedly liberal, new monthly, Kultura Polska, in 1911. Anyone who has read Brian Porter's groundbreaking study of the emergence of Polish nationalism's lurch to the ultra-right inWhen Nationalism Begins to Hate (Oxford, 2000) will hardly be surprised by the vitriol. Yet, paradoxically, Kultura Polska still represented a mainstream position 558 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 within a Polish patriotic camp ostensibly stillcommitted toJewish assimilation. Theodor Weeks's new work, in foregrounding the intelligent)} debate on the Jewish question,' provides a valuable corollary to Porter, not least by suggesting how the politics of ongoing occupation itselfcrystallized xenopho bic sentiment, to cast even assimilated Jews as betrayers of Polish national destiny. This, then, isnot a book about the development of an increasingly diverse and complex Jewish community inRussian administered Poland, nor actually about either folk or Christian antisemitism. Indeed, Weeks sees the role of theCatholic church as a constant throughout thisperiod, accepting its Jewish negativity but lacking responsibility for the new political judeophobia. Simi larly,while some attention ispaid toJan Jelenski and his journal Rola, a true Polish forerunner of a populist gutter antisemitism so prevalent elsewhere in northern Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, this is only to dismiss his influence on the likes of celebrated liberal positivists, such as Boleslaw Prus and Alek sander Swietochowski, as theirown Jewish' commentaries turned increasingly acerbic and barbed. In many respects this is a familiar European story, in which purveyors...