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and in some cases, even portrayed them in negative terms. Since regionalism sought to highlight the
shared history and folkloric traditions of two rural Slavic populations, the demographically Jewish

towns that were discussed in Chapter 4 threatened to act as conduits for the wrong kind of “foreign”

cultural imports, whether in the shape of new fashions, dances like the tango, or modern songs. If the

village “from long ago preserves a great love of native songs,” one article in a regionalist journal

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stated, Jews and townspeople in general were little interested in such music. At the same time,
however, regionalists did not exclude towns and their predominantly Jewish populations from the

project entirely, but rather sought to shoehorn Jews into their version of Poland’s tolerant history.

Indeed, proclamations of philo-Semitism—the welcoming of Jews into the Polish-led regionalist

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project—were always based on assumptions about what passed as acceptable Jewish behavior.
In order to offer an alternative to narratives about the aesthetic damage that Jews had done to

Volhynia’s towns over the long nineteenth century, regionalists turned to signs of Jewish culture that

were embedded in urban landscapes. Most significantly, they emphasized the architectural value of

synagogues that had been built prior to the Russian imperial period and symbolized the historical

connections between Jews and the Commonwealth. The Great Synagogue in Łuck, for instance,

functioned as a lens through which regionalists viewed the history of Poland’s tolerance toward Jews,

not least King Zygmunt III’s decision to grant privileges to the town’s Jews during the seventeenth

century. An article in Volhynia’s regional journal The Candle (Znicz) from 1935 depicted the

synagogue as a monument distinguished less by its “Jewishness” and more by its place within two

(interrelated) architectural traditions. Situating the synagogue in the broader history of the European

Renaissance, the author compared it to the Campanile in Venice and the Cathedral of Orvieto, while

65 “Praca etnograficzna Wołyńskiego Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk”, Wołyń, May 3, 1939, 3.
66 Józef Lasocki, “Kultura muzyczna na Wołyniu”, Znicz, October 1934, 23.
67 For an exploration of the anti-Semitic implications of philo-Semitism, see, for instance, Bennett Kravitz, “Philo-
Semitism as Anti-Semitism in Mark Twain’s “Concerning the Jews,”” Studies in Popular Culture 25, no. 2 (2002):
1-12.

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