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On the edge of destruction: Jews of Poland between the two world wars
118
Short reviews and book notes
monasticism was to await a later time in the last quarter century) .
- most spectacularly
Hitchins's book thus illustrates the operation of Orthodoxy and its rules . If you believe that the heart of the faith, operatively, is the Liturgy then churches as buildings (or as wheeled wagons, as used earlier in Rumania's turbulent history) are vital, and the priesthood embedded in a local catchment area . This being so, accommodation with the ruling power is necessary wherever armed national struggle is out of the question . The aim is to gain as much within the accommodation as possible, and this was the background to ~aguna's tactics (as also the Church's in this last quarter century) . Further, nationalism is potent in reinforcing church loyalty and conversely, because of Rumania's history ; but reins must be kept on the secularizing tendencies of nationalism . This is illustrated in ~aguna's caution in his relations with the intellectuals of the period - for him modernization of the Church was important, and that was a rather different matter . It is interesting to reflect that contemporary, Communist Rumania reveals a variant on ~aguna's policy . The Church can live with atheistic socialism partly because to be independent the latter needs the patriotic spirit woven into Orthodox piety ; while the Church is better identified with Rumanian identity precisely because the official secular ideology is theoretically internationalist . The volume is solid, dry and could in places be more analytic . It could use better maps . But it charts an important period in the evolution of modern Rumanian Christianity . Ninian Smart University of Lancaster
CELIA S . HELLER, On the Edge of Destruction : Jews of Poland between the Two World Wars . New York, Columbia University Press, 1977 . xii + 369 pp . $14 .95 . In 1939 there were about 3,300,000 Jews in Poland, a tenth of the population . By 1945 at least three million had been killed, perhaps 50,000 survived on Polish soil, and the Jewish community in Poland had been as completely destroyed as the medieval Jewish community in Spain whose final destiny it was destined to eclipse . In this sense the war against Nazism was not won, but lost . Professor
Short reviews and book notes
119
Heller, who teaches sociology at Hunter College, New York, has taken as her subject the history of the Polish Jews between 1918 and 1939, years when they were already being increasingly persecuted by the new Polish state, which refused to accept the idea that a Polish Jew - a Pole of Mosaic faith - was no more remarkable than a Polish Roman Catholic . If her book has a weakness it is her failure to look very closely at the Poles themselves ; she is too easily, if naturally, tempted by gibes at the Polish concept of 'honour' . But her concern is not with Polish antisemitism, but with the spectacle of a great Jewish community, whose fate she knows, drifting slowly towards the Holocaust, convinced until the last moment that the problem was how to survive routine, if savage, Polish persecution . Even in the 1930s the Polish Jews believed that they still had free choices of action . The first of these was to stick to the traditional view that patient endurance of suffering somehow contained within itself the seed of redemption, if only because in the end the persecutors would grow tired and go away . The second choice was the policy of accommodationism, which produced a generation of middle-class Jews in the 1930s who often felt a closer identity with Polish ideals of manhood than they did with the bent back of defiant submission . The third was the still newer creed of Zionism, but in fact, as Professor Heller shows, the way of escape to Palestine was shut, partly by British restrictions on entry into the country, and partly by Jewish poverty . (Indeed, the poverty of the vast majority of the Jewish population was probably its great offence in the eyes of the Polish ruling class .) Even before the German invasion of 1939 one sees signs of a change in the Jewish attitude to the situation, for the Jewish (socialist) Bund had begun to allow its militia to fight Polish nationalists on the streets in the effort to limit persecution . This was an important stage in the modification of Jewish religious consciousness which, in Polish terms, was completed in the Warsaw Rising, but which was to manifest itself more obviously in the Israeli attitude to violence since the end of the Second World War . Professor Heller could hardly have treated the story of Polish Jewry during the Nazi occupation without writing another book, but certain of her themes need to be extended into the 1940s, because the Polish catastrophe, not least its irreversibility, remains a potent element in Jewish religion and politics . One can only congratulate Professor Heller on a cool, well-documented book, which is of value to the historian, the sociologist, and the specialist in minority and Jewish studies . She has worked extensively in Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew inter-war literature,
120
Short reviews and book notes
examined some of the Jewish use of a group of about 300 of young Jews, collected in Jewish Scientific Institute
daily press, and made great autobiographies and diaries Poland in the 1930s by the in Vilno .
John Kent University of Bristol
DAVID L . SNELLGROVE, TADEUSZ SKORUPSKI, The Cultural Warminster, Aris and Heritage of Ladakh : Volume I . Phillips, 1977 . xvi + 144 pp . Illus : 20 colour plates and 144 black and white . £12 .50 . Ladakh, the most western of the Tibetan Buddhist lands, is a part of the State of Kashmir and Jammu . Unequally divided between India and Pakistan at the time of partition thirty years ago the State has been a cause of dissension ever since . An already uneasy situation was further exacerbated when the Chinese built a road crossing the north-east corner of Ladakh . The Republic of India countered these two threats by stationing large numbers of troops in the area, and by sealing it off to all outside visitors . It was thus impossible to visit Ladakh until 1974, when the ban on visitors was suddenly lifted . By a happy chance Dr Snellgrove and a research associate, Tadeusz Skorupski, were on their way to Nepal when they learned of this change . Radically altering their plans they were able to make a short visit to Ladakh in September of that year, and return some six weeks later for a longer stay of three and a half months . Taking in the monastery of Lamayuru on their journey by jeep from Srinagar in Kashmir they divided their stay between the monastic complex of Alchi, and the establishments which could be reached from a base at Leh . Although Ladakh has been subject to Islamic influence since the fifteenth century and has a large Islamic population, it was ruled by a Hindu monarchy from 1834 to 1947 . Yet its culture is predominantly Buddhist and it is of this culture that the book treats . However, the authors acknowledge (p . 15) 'there is nothing within the purview of this volume which can be regarded as wholly indigenous to Ladakh, Ladakh has gathered into its highly cultured areas a remarkable collection of art styles' . It must be borne in mind that the book under review is Volume I of a two-part publication . The aim of the work is limited to 'an overall presentation of the largely Buddhist heritage and to a special study of the paintings
Short reviews and book notes
monasticism was to await a later time in the last quarter century) .
- most spectacularly
Hitchins's book thus illustrates the operation of Orthodoxy and its rules . If you believe that the heart of the faith, operatively, is the Liturgy then churches as buildings (or as wheeled wagons, as used earlier in Rumania's turbulent history) are vital, and the priesthood embedded in a local catchment area . This being so, accommodation with the ruling power is necessary wherever armed national struggle is out of the question . The aim is to gain as much within the accommodation as possible, and this was the background to ~aguna's tactics (as also the Church's in this last quarter century) . Further, nationalism is potent in reinforcing church loyalty and conversely, because of Rumania's history ; but reins must be kept on the secularizing tendencies of nationalism . This is illustrated in ~aguna's caution in his relations with the intellectuals of the period - for him modernization of the Church was important, and that was a rather different matter . It is interesting to reflect that contemporary, Communist Rumania reveals a variant on ~aguna's policy . The Church can live with atheistic socialism partly because to be independent the latter needs the patriotic spirit woven into Orthodox piety ; while the Church is better identified with Rumanian identity precisely because the official secular ideology is theoretically internationalist . The volume is solid, dry and could in places be more analytic . It could use better maps . But it charts an important period in the evolution of modern Rumanian Christianity . Ninian Smart University of Lancaster
CELIA S . HELLER, On the Edge of Destruction : Jews of Poland between the Two World Wars . New York, Columbia University Press, 1977 . xii + 369 pp . $14 .95 . In 1939 there were about 3,300,000 Jews in Poland, a tenth of the population . By 1945 at least three million had been killed, perhaps 50,000 survived on Polish soil, and the Jewish community in Poland had been as completely destroyed as the medieval Jewish community in Spain whose final destiny it was destined to eclipse . In this sense the war against Nazism was not won, but lost . Professor
Short reviews and book notes
119
Heller, who teaches sociology at Hunter College, New York, has taken as her subject the history of the Polish Jews between 1918 and 1939, years when they were already being increasingly persecuted by the new Polish state, which refused to accept the idea that a Polish Jew - a Pole of Mosaic faith - was no more remarkable than a Polish Roman Catholic . If her book has a weakness it is her failure to look very closely at the Poles themselves ; she is too easily, if naturally, tempted by gibes at the Polish concept of 'honour' . But her concern is not with Polish antisemitism, but with the spectacle of a great Jewish community, whose fate she knows, drifting slowly towards the Holocaust, convinced until the last moment that the problem was how to survive routine, if savage, Polish persecution . Even in the 1930s the Polish Jews believed that they still had free choices of action . The first of these was to stick to the traditional view that patient endurance of suffering somehow contained within itself the seed of redemption, if only because in the end the persecutors would grow tired and go away . The second choice was the policy of accommodationism, which produced a generation of middle-class Jews in the 1930s who often felt a closer identity with Polish ideals of manhood than they did with the bent back of defiant submission . The third was the still newer creed of Zionism, but in fact, as Professor Heller shows, the way of escape to Palestine was shut, partly by British restrictions on entry into the country, and partly by Jewish poverty . (Indeed, the poverty of the vast majority of the Jewish population was probably its great offence in the eyes of the Polish ruling class .) Even before the German invasion of 1939 one sees signs of a change in the Jewish attitude to the situation, for the Jewish (socialist) Bund had begun to allow its militia to fight Polish nationalists on the streets in the effort to limit persecution . This was an important stage in the modification of Jewish religious consciousness which, in Polish terms, was completed in the Warsaw Rising, but which was to manifest itself more obviously in the Israeli attitude to violence since the end of the Second World War . Professor Heller could hardly have treated the story of Polish Jewry during the Nazi occupation without writing another book, but certain of her themes need to be extended into the 1940s, because the Polish catastrophe, not least its irreversibility, remains a potent element in Jewish religion and politics . One can only congratulate Professor Heller on a cool, well-documented book, which is of value to the historian, the sociologist, and the specialist in minority and Jewish studies . She has worked extensively in Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew inter-war literature,
120
Short reviews and book notes
examined some of the Jewish use of a group of about 300 of young Jews, collected in Jewish Scientific Institute
daily press, and made great autobiographies and diaries Poland in the 1930s by the in Vilno .
John Kent University of Bristol
DAVID L . SNELLGROVE, TADEUSZ SKORUPSKI, The Cultural Warminster, Aris and Heritage of Ladakh : Volume I . Phillips, 1977 . xvi + 144 pp . Illus : 20 colour plates and 144 black and white . £12 .50 . Ladakh, the most western of the Tibetan Buddhist lands, is a part of the State of Kashmir and Jammu . Unequally divided between India and Pakistan at the time of partition thirty years ago the State has been a cause of dissension ever since . An already uneasy situation was further exacerbated when the Chinese built a road crossing the north-east corner of Ladakh . The Republic of India countered these two threats by stationing large numbers of troops in the area, and by sealing it off to all outside visitors . It was thus impossible to visit Ladakh until 1974, when the ban on visitors was suddenly lifted . By a happy chance Dr Snellgrove and a research associate, Tadeusz Skorupski, were on their way to Nepal when they learned of this change . Radically altering their plans they were able to make a short visit to Ladakh in September of that year, and return some six weeks later for a longer stay of three and a half months . Taking in the monastery of Lamayuru on their journey by jeep from Srinagar in Kashmir they divided their stay between the monastic complex of Alchi, and the establishments which could be reached from a base at Leh . Although Ladakh has been subject to Islamic influence since the fifteenth century and has a large Islamic population, it was ruled by a Hindu monarchy from 1834 to 1947 . Yet its culture is predominantly Buddhist and it is of this culture that the book treats . However, the authors acknowledge (p . 15) 'there is nothing within the purview of this volume which can be regarded as wholly indigenous to Ladakh, Ladakh has gathered into its highly cultured areas a remarkable collection of art styles' . It must be borne in mind that the book under review is Volume I of a two-part publication . The aim of the work is limited to 'an overall presentation of the largely Buddhist heritage and to a special study of the paintings