In this richly documented study, Shlomo Netzer surveys the formative period of Jewish politics in inter-war Poland. The period under consideration (1918-1922) witnessed not only the recovery of Polish independence, but also the elections for the Constituent Sejm, the crystallization of the Polish parliament and constitution, the signing of the Minorities Treaties, the protracted struggle over the borders of the Polish state, the Polish Soviet war, and the 1922 elections to the Sejm and Senate. All these events influenced the form and direction of Jewish political activity during this critical time, and in his internally-directed study Netzer is careful to keep the historical background in view and avoid becoming lost in the labyrinth of inter-party polemics and editorial broadsides.
After a useful short introduction on the history of independent Jewish politics under the various partition regimes, the author chronicles the struggle of Jewish elected representatives to secure civil and national rights for Polish Jewry, a struggle which to some extent has been described elsewhere, if not in such detail. Netzer also provides a fascinating almost week-by- week account of the abortive attempts to set up an agreed national representative body for Polish Jewry, and the tensions and frictions that this process engendered. In the final analysis, both government interference and Jewish internal divisions prevented the formation of such a body.
In the course of this survey of Jewish political activity, Netzer successfully conveys to the reader the three planes on which Jewish representatives were forced to operate. On one level, they spoke from the Sejm rostrum and in committees for legislation that would guarantee or at least would not curtail Jewish individual or group rights. On another plane, they heard on an everyday basis the complaints of hundreds of Jewish citizens who had been dealt with unfairly by government bureaucrats and looked to the parliamentarians for justice or relief. Finally, on several occasions the Jewish deputies carried out extra-parliamentary negotiations with the government which aimed at a more general improvement of the Jewish position in Poland. In each of these spheres, however, Jewish political activity achieved at best limited success.
