Page 146 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Simultaneously, however, state officials introduced technocratic solutions to what they

identified as pressing urban problems and recruited cadres of experts to carry out these tasks in ways

31
that involved both implicit and explicit criticisms of urban Jews. In particular, they attempted to
reform municipal government, an area in which they deemed Jews to have undue negative influence.

Following the arrival of Piłsudski-backed officials in Volhynia, town authorities were subjected to

more regulation from the political center in order to do away with what they saw as Jewish

32
incompetence and amateurishness. The tensions between these two approaches—the rhetorical
inclusion of Jews as an important part of the urban landscape and modernizing schemes built on

assumptions about Polish technocratic superiority—force us to reconsider the idea that Piłsudski,

Józewski, and their supporters were simply romantic products of the kresy, men whose positions of

33
tolerance toward Jews were grounded in their biographies.
As was the case across Poland, Jews in Volhynia were largely excluded from positions in

state government, but they did hold most of the seats on locally elected town councils (rady

34
miejskie). Józewski laid particular criticism at the door of these councils, which, he claimed, were
wielding power in the interests of the Jewish community only, a position that was reflected in

numerous articles on the pages of the Volhynian Review. For instance, journalists writing in the

newspaper criticized Jewish council members whom they accused of trying to name urban streets

after people who did not have relevance beyond the Yiddish-speaking community. One issue that

apparently split the Polish and Jewish members of the council in Łuck, Volhynia’s provincial capital,

31 Stefan Rohdewald, “Mimicry in a Multiple Postcolonial Setting: Networks of Technocracy and Scientific
Management in Piłsudski's Poland” in Expert Cultures in Central Eastern Europe: The Internationalization of
Knowledge and the Transformation of Nation States since World War I, edited by Martin Kohlrausch, Katrin
Steffen, and Stefan Wiederkehr (Osnabrück, 2010), 63-84.
32 Hanna Kozińska-Witt, “The Union of Polish Cities in the Second Polish Republic, 1918-1939: Discourses of
Local Government in a Divided Land,” Contemporary European History 11, no. 4 (2002): 557.
33 On the idea that people from the kresy were more tolerant of difference, see Feliks Gross, “Kresy: The Frontier of
Eastern Europe,” Polish Review 23, no. 2 (1978): 12. Historians have made passing references to Józewski’s dual
position toward Volhynia’s Jews. See Mędrzecki, Inteligencja polska, 193-4; Snyder, “Life and Death,” 80.
34 Raphael Mahler, “Jews in Public Sphere and the Liberal Professions in Poland, 1918-39,” Jewish Social Studies 6,
no. 4 (1944): 291-350.

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