The national minorities made up over 30 per cent of Poland's population in the inter-war period. This was not exceptional in Central Europe, where practically all countries included a substantial percentage of minorities; the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia were even.less uniform from the national or linguistic point of view.

The problem of the ethnic minorities in the Second Republic - their socio-economic situation, their role in the political and cultural life of the country, their relations with the state - is one of the most neglected fields of post-war Polish historiography. The situation improved only slightly in the 1970s, minimally as regards the Jewish question; in Poland this still remains the domain of highly specialized publications (mainly the Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute) which do not reach the general reader.

To be sure, the authors of synthetic or monographic studies concerning the history of the Second Republic have been unable totally to ignore the problem of the nationalities, although their approaches often give rise to reservations. For instance, when Andrzej Ajnenkiel published in 1980 the second volume of his political history of Poland (this one covering the period between 1926-1939) national minorities were treated sparingly. In describing the results of the 1931 census, the author briefly discusses the size and socio-professional structure of the Jewish population and the rising influence of the Zionist movement in the second half of the 1930s. Elsewhere, the Jewish population appears almost exclusively as the object of anti-semitic propaganda and pogroms organized by nationalists of both Polish or, more rarely, Ukrainian camps. Ajnenkiel provides economic explanations for national tensions:

Anti-semitism is examined more extensively by Henryk Zieliński,who draws attention to the way in which Polish-Jewish economic competition was accompanied by ‘animosity over customs, religion and the acknowledgement of different value systems’ (p. 318).