Jewish Students and Christian Corpses in Interwar Poland: Playing with the Language of Blood Libel

Natalia Aleksiun

doi:10.1007/s10835-012-9163-5

Abstract

This article focuses on the antisemitic discourse that surrounded the controversy over the provision of cadavers to medical departments in the Second Polish Republic. In the pages of the student press and at student rallies, activists argued that Jewish medical students should be barred from dissecting Christian corpses. They demanded that Jewish communities provide corpses for dissection on a regular basis as a condition for continued training of Jewish doctors. The discourse surrounding the cadaver affair combined nationalist language with religious vocabulary, suggesting that the affair was motivated as much by religious concerns as by nationalist ones. Drawing on notions of Jewish criminality and arrogance, allegations of a Jewish sense of religious superiority and disregard for Christian values, and fears of Jewish exploitation of Christians to fulfill their own collective needs, the cadaver affair played with concepts reminiscent of blood libel.

Highlights

In the Second Polish Republic, controversy concerning the provision of Jewish cadavers for dissection appears to have erupted first in Vilnius
This article focuses on the antisemitic discourse that surrounded the controversy over the provision
activists argued that Jewish medical students should be barred from dissecting Christian corpses

Summary

Background

In the Second Polish Republic, controversy concerning the provision of Jewish cadavers for dissection appears to have erupted first in Vilnius. The struggle to ban Jews from dissecting Christian corpses was an act of self-defense, a moral and national obligation of the medical youth striving to “protect Polishness every step of the way.”[38] The right-wing Polish academic press portrayed the Jews—especially Jewish community leaders—as knowingly exploiting Christians in refusing to forgo religious rituals for the bodies of their own dead. As representatives of the National Union of Polish Academic Youth argued, “the lack of cooperation on the part of Jewish society in providing corpses to dissecting rooms constitutes an insult to the religious feelings of all Christian students and causes harmful disruption to the course of academic medical training.”[40] Gentile students argued that by placing the responsibility on the Christian community to supply specimens for autopsies, the Jews were implying a false sense of religious superiority. From a non-Jewish perspective, the cadaver affair may have represented a way of forcing Jews to break with their own religious tradition and to become “Christianized” in a sense, or at least more secular and assimilated

In Defense of Christian Patients

Conclusion