Page 59 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

speaking landowners, had become so entangled in the social, economic, and even linguistic order of

Russian imperialism that they could not be embraced unconditionally. Articles in the Borderland

Pole reflected the Guard’s ambivalence toward Volhynia’s Jews, particularly when it came to their

loyalty to the state. Even as they praised Jewish willingness to work with Poles, the Guard’s

representatives went on to hope that such signs were not “artificial and false decorations, beyond

which lie hidden permanently hostile and deceitful participation in activities and agitation that are

69
harmful to us.”
More specific arguments revolved around the ways in which Jews were allegedly hoarding or

selling food on the black market and therefore engaging in behavior that was detrimental to both the

broader community and Polish attempts to create political stability in the occupied territories. While

such tropes had become common among anti-Semites in wartime Warsaw, Berlin, and Vienna, the

Guard’s activists were less interested in fantastical right-wing claims of a global capitalist conspiracy

and instead implied that Jews, who had long played the role of economic middlemen between

landowners and peasants, were simply behaving in ways that were antithetical to Polish economic

70
interests. A typical report from Łuck county in the autumn of 1919 accused Jews of working in

cahoots with local landowners, meaning that “the majority of grain ends up in the hands of black-

71
marketers, usually Jews.” According to another report sent to Józef Piłsudski in January 1920, Jews
also combined their exploitative economic practices with an adherence to both imperialism and

Bolshevism, or at least with a disregard for the interests of the Polish state in the face of these twin

enemies. By taking grain away from farms and sending it to Kowel county, from whence it was

69 “Obchody narodowe w Kowlu,” Polak Kresowy, July 20, 1919, 4.
70 Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Austrian Empire (New York, 2004); Belinda Davies, Home Fires
Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, 2000), 132-135; Robert Blobaum, A
Minor Apocalypse: Warsaw During the First World War (Ithaca, 2017), 134-170. For an example of right-wing
propaganda focusing on Jewish world conspiracies against Poland, see “Przed wojną domową z Żydami,” Myśl
Niepodległa, July 5, 1919, 409-414. On Jews as economic middlemen in this area prior to the war, see Weeks,
Nation and State, 59-64.
71 “Wyciągi z raportów kierownika Straży Kresowej pow. Łuckiego za rok 1919,” TSK 201/112.

59