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wounded. As was the case in the rest of Poland, Volhynia’s Jews also found themselves under
renewed threats of physical violence. Local police reports indicated that there was “more and more

hatred against Jews from the Christian population,” with anti-Semitic trends linked to the increased

influence of Endecja activists and their supporters among local members of the Roman Catholic

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clergy. In Dubno county in late 1937, Catholic priests aided the anti-Semitic actions of the National

Democrats, providing rooms for meetings at which the “battle with Jewish trade” was discussed,

exhorting congregations to buy only from Catholic stores, and giving permission for anti-Semitic

99
leaflets to be distributed in the church and churchyard. Reports also noted that National Democratic

activists agitated in Volhynian villages about the necessity of organizing Poles “in the fight against

100
the Jews.” Although boycotts were less successful in the eastern borderlands (except in several
larger cities, none of which were in Volhynia), expressions of anti-Semitism were on the rise.

At the same time, however, efforts to remove Jews from Poland did not come from the

traditional sources on the right alone, but also emerged from those who promoted the rational,

technocratic approach that had long been associated with the Sanacja. While distancing themselves

from the rabid anti-Semitism of the National Democrats, Piłsudski’s epigones in Warsaw agreed that

Poland’s three million Jewish citizens were a problem with which the state had to deal. Prime

Minister Felicjan Sławoj-Składkowski’s 1936 speech to the Polish parliament, in which he suggested

that economic boycotts against Jews (but not violence) were acceptable, has become the most

97 It is difficult to ascertain completely accurate figures on the number of Jews killed and injured. See William W.
Hagen, “Before the ‘Final Solution’: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar
Germany and Poland,” Journal of Modern History 68, no. 2 (1996): 370-377. See also Israel Cohen, “The Jews in
Poland,” Contemporary Review (July/December 1936): 716-723.
98 AAN UWW 38/95.
99 “Miesięczne sprawozdanie sytuacyjne nr. 12 za m-c grudzień 1937r. z ruchu społ.-polit. i narodowościowego,”
DARO 448/1/1/11od. As the historian Konrad Sadkowski has pointed out, clerical anti-Semitism was built on more
than just traditional Judeophobia, but developed out of clergymen’s efforts to retain political, social, spiritual, and
economic power at a local level. Konrad Sadkowski, “Clerical Nationalism and Anti-Semitism: Catholic Priests,
Jews, and Orthodox Christians in the Lublin Region, 1918-1939,” in Anti-Semitism and Its Opponents in Modern
Poland, edited by Robert Blobaum (Ithaca, 2005), 171-188.
100 “Miesięcznie sprawozdanie sytuacyjne Nr. 9 z ruchu społeczno-politycznego i narodowościowego na terenie
województwa wołyńskiego za miesiąc IX 1936r.,” AAN UWW 33/4 [document page no.]

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