The politicisation of traditional Polish Jewry: Orthodox German rabbis and the founding of Agudas Ho‐Ortodoksim and Dos yidishe vort in Gouvernement‐General Warsaw, 1916–18

Abstract

In 1916, in the midst of the First World War, Orthodox German rabbis Dr Emanuel Carlebach and Dr Pinchas Kohn played a crucial role in founding and developing the organisation of an Orthodox party in Poland named Agudas Ho‐Ortodoksim. These attempts to politicize traditional Polish Jewry were opposed by a significant part of Polish Jewry. While some circles of traditional Jews disapproved the engagement in politics as a modern and un‐Jewish phenomenon, as a threat for their concept of Judaism, secular Jewish groups objected the new party’s purely religious and strictly anti‐nationalist orientation. This orientation imposed upon Aguda by the two German rabbis led to serious clashes between them and Jewish national groups. To avoid any allusion to Zionism, especially to the Mizrachi, the religious current within the Zionist movement, Kohn and Carlebach even neglected Eretz Israel‐activities at first. Given the fact that activists of the organised Orthodox youth rejected such a stance, Aguda was eventually forced to change its policy in this regard. At the end of the First World War, the two German rabbis had to leave Warsaw due to the withdrawal of the German troops. However, what they left behind was an important Orthodox party organisation and a daily newspaper, to be taken serious by the other Jewish political groups and by the Polish authorities. Nevertheless, the accusation of foreign influence prompted the leaders of Aguda to change its name and to found a new daily immediately after the departure of Kohn and Carlebach.