How to Exit the Conspiracy of Silence?

Abstract

On the subject of the Polish-Jewish postwar relations, this paper deals with the pathology of public discourse known as the “conspiracies of silence” phenomenon (see Eviatar Zerubavel, The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life , 2008). The concept in question may be applied to the Polish historic conditions. It helps to problematize the circumstances in which social conspiracies were accumulating around the Polish-Jewish relations in the postwar period so as to pave the way for analysis of the current difficulties in researching the title issues, particularly those that emerged while using a quantitative and qualitative approach to research Polish attitudes toward Jews. The resulting polemical analysis is made on the basis of a text by one of the most renowned Polish sociologists, Prof. Antoni Sułek. His lecture titled “Ordinary Poles Looking at Jews” was delivered at the University of Warsaw, Poland, on 17 December 2009, within the cycle “Ten Lectures for a New Millennium.” It summarises the Polish twenty-year poll-based researches of Poles’ attitudes towards Jews.