Page 137 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

populations as impediments to modernity. With various representatives of the new Polish state

struggling to assert their own positions as civilizers, the question of Jewish “backwardness” became

entangled with intra-Polish competitions that relied on including and excluding different groups of

people at different times. Indeed, the policies put forward by self-appointed civilizers reflected what

they saw as local exigencies, rather than simply a consistent importing of rigid civilizational

hierarchies from an imagined center further west. It is only within this more locally grounded

framework that we can imagine how the role of towns, often promoted as civilizational centers

radiating out to the surrounding countryside, could also be reversed. In light of Volhynia’s peculiar

national and religious configurations, some Polish elites imagined how the peripheral areas that

directly encircled a town—places that were neither fully urban nor completely rural—might instead

end up civilizing the urban center.

DEFINING TOWNS IN THE BORDERLANDS

In the eyes of many Polish elites, Volhynia’s low levels of urbanization, like its high illiteracy rates,

lack of paved roads, and poor hygiene levels, were another indication of its backwardness. According

to official Polish statistics published in 1930, only 10 to 15 percent of Volhynia’s inhabitants were

classified as an urban population (ludność miejska), putting the province far below the national

4
average of between 25 and 30 percent, itself low in comparison with countries further west. But

backwardness was also measured in the particular character of these urban settlements. The towns

that did exist were, demographically speaking, quite small—Volhynia’s largest town, Równe, had a

population of just over 30,000 inhabitants in 1921, while the provincial capital, Łuck, was home to

4 Rzeczpospolita Polska: atlas statystyczny (Warsaw, 1930), Table 3 [no pagination]. Włodzimierz Mędrzecki puts
the number at 12 percent in 1921. Mędrzecki, “Przemiany cywilizacyjne i socjotopograficzne miast województwa
wołyńskiego, 1921-1939,” Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej 1, (1995): 109. On comparative levels of
European urbanization, see Béla Tomka, A Social History of Twentieth-Century Europe (London and New York,
2013), 313-315.

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