French Newspaperman Blames Polish People, Not the Government, for Prevalence of Anti-semitism

The well-known French journalist, Albert Londres, who was recently sent to Poland by the Paris daily, “Petit Parisien,” has written for that paper an article in which he declares that the ingrained anti-Semitism of the Polish people, not the government, is to blame for anti-Jewish discrimination in Poland today. Among other things Londres says:

“The Polish government is placing the Jews outside the pale of its social life. It bars them from all offices. Where formerly Jews did hold government posts, they are now being dismissed—from the railways, mails and salt mines. The minister has dismissed the last Jewish postman, on the excuse that Jews don’t know how to walk. Do you hear, Jew, of what you are being accused? Jew, eternal wanderer, you don’t know how to walk! Even the porters on the railway stations have asked for the dismissal of the Jewish porters and won their demand. Recently in Lodz, Polish Socialist workers struck against the employment of Jewish workers in the textile mills, whose proprietors are Jews. Feeling that they are surrounded by walls on all sides, the Jews have retired to Nalewki (the Jewish section of Warsaw).

“The slogan of Polish society is: ‘Nothing but Poles.’ The President of the Republic is the President of Poles and not the President of the Jews. Pilsudski wanted to adopt a policy which isn’t anti-Semitic, but he didn’t succeed. In Poland there are three and a half million Jews. The total population of the country is thirty millions. A Jew can neither be a member of the administration, of the army nor of a university. The workingman’s sources of employment are cut off, he is not taken into the factories, the intellectual cannot reach the higher rungs of the social ladder. Why all this?

“Because every Polish government is powerless when it comes to solving the Jewish problem. The ingrained Jewhatred is stronger than anything else. This is the worst part about the slavery which Polish Jews have to undergo today.

“Undoubtedly Poland hates the Jews, it has put them outside the pale of its national life, and this in a much more energetic form than the Czarist government ever did. Poland declines to recognize those Jews who refuse to assimilate themselves. Poland wishes to be no more Jewish than the Jews are Polish. Poland is stronger than the Jews. They are choked, they are destroyed, they are bespattered with mud. But do not believe that they are whining for mercy. If you will bend an ear, you will always hear the avowal, ‘We are Jews’.”