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distinct demographic makeups: in the town, whose total population was actually smaller than that of

the village, Jews were recorded as constituting 96 percent of the total population, whereas in the

village, almost 93 percent of the inhabitants were classified as either Orthodox (86.3 percent) or

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Roman Catholic (6.3 percent) Christians. Although they increasingly found themselves in a tightly
squeezed economic situation, local Jews, who were generally less assimilated than their

coreligionists in western and central Poland, were vital to urban economic life, running a high

percentage of trading establishments and interacting economically with peasants in the rynek (central

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market square).

Within such settlements, it was certainly true that many Jews, like their non-Jewish

neighbors, lived in what visitors to the region—and even some shtetl inhabitants—considered to be

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impoverished circumstances. Indeed, during the interwar years, urban-based Zionist activists drew
on tropes that were remarkably similar to those of non-Jewish Polish modernizers. They too engaged

in acts of comparison, launched a mission to politically modernize the “backward” and “Asiatic”

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Jews of the shtetl, and made the case for their own Europeanness in the process. But while these
groups sought a specifically Jewish version of modernization, albeit one based on pan-European

concepts of what modernization meant, those on the anti-Semitic Polish right unsurprisingly took a

20 “Wyciąg z protokułu XIII-go nadzwyczajnego posiedzenia Rady Miejskiej w m. Dąbrowicy. Działo się w m.
Dąbrowicy w dn. 4 maja 1933 r w lokalu Magistratu,” AAN MSW (Part 1) 300/433.
21 On percentages of Jews who ran trading establishments, see Ignacy Schipero et al., Żydzi w Polsce Odrodzonej:
działalność społeczna, oświatowa i kulturalna (Volume II) (Warsaw, 1932-3), 465. See also Yehuda Bauer, “Sarny
and Rokitno in the Holocaust: A Case Study of Two Townships in Wolyn (Volhynia)” in The Shtetl: New
Evaluations, ed. Steven T. Katz (New York, 2007), 258.
22 Jewish and non-Jewish travelers to the western borderlands of the Russian empire during the nineteenth century
had frequently pointed to the poverty of shtetl life, while the author of an autobiography submitted to a YIVO
competition for Jewish youth in Poland during the 1930s described the narrow streets in the “Jewish neighborhood”
in Włodzimierz as “muddy and filthy” and the building in which he and his family lived as resembling a “hovel.”
See Pinchuk, “The Shtetl,” 499-501; Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the
Holocaust, ed. Jeffrey Shandler (New Haven, CT, 2002): 304-305.
23 Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky's Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism (Princeton, 2017),
particularly Chapter 5. Ben-Cion Pinchuk also points out that some Zionist activists evoked the image of the
pauperized shtetl as evidence that the sojourn of Diaspora Jews in eastern Europe was temporary. See Pinchuk, “The
Shtetl,” 500. For an article promoting the positive role played by Jews as a group in developing urban spaces, see W.
Rotfeld, “Żydzi i rozwój miast,” Przegląd Wołyński, December 26, 1926, 4.

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