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compared their city with the towns of the former Russian Pale of Settlement, which, they argued,

were “ridden” with the Jews who usually made up a much higher percentage of the urban population

(over 90% in some settlements). In 1919, during the borderland wars, such sensibilities had been

reflected in their most violent form in pogroms carried out by Poznanian troops against what they

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saw as the uncivilized eastern Jews of the shtetl. But there were also early calls to act economically

in order to break up the so-called Jewish monopoly of kresy towns by sending in Polish traders and

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artisans from Poznań. During the early 1920s, Endecja journals in the western city emphasized that
Jews were to blame for a mixture of sins in the east: having a pernicious influence on the ignorant

Ruthenian population, acting as the bearers of anti-modern influences, and constituting remnants of

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both imperial Russian rule and Bolshevism.
Such claims allowed Poznanians to use the figure of the “uncivilized” eastern Jew in order to

construct what Polishness meant within the competitive atmosphere of the new state. In their eyes,

Jews were what historians in other contexts have called “internal strangers”—people who are

perceived and depicted as perpetual foreigners, despite the fact that they and their families have lived

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and worked in a place for generations. While many Jews in Volhynia had much deeper personal

connections to this area than the men in far-off Poznań could ever reasonably claim for themselves,

the latter argued that their national and civilizational rights to determine the region’s development

trumped those of local Jews. Moreover, and in line with other trends in the early 1920s, Poznanian

Endeks sought to resist accusations of imperial collaboration by claiming that Poles in the Russian

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empire had been corrupted by the foreign influences of both Russians and Jews. As an article in the

77 Jerzy Borzęcki, “German Anti-Semitism à la Polonaise: A Report on Poznanian Troops’ Abuse of Belarusian
Jews in 1919,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 26, no. 4 (2012): 693-707.
78 In the end, the policy had limited results. See Witos, Moje wspomnienia, 169.
79 On the reactions to the elections in the Poznanian press, see Marek Figura, Konflikt polsko-ukraiński w prasie
Polski Zachodniej w latach 1918-1923 (Poznań, 2001), 271-276.
80 An interesting point of comparison is the situation of Somalis in Kenya who, as Keren Weitzberg points out, have
lived within the country’s borders for several generations but continue to be seen as “internal strangers.” Weitzberg,
We do not have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya (Athens, OH, 2017).
81 Moskal, Im Spannungsfeld von Region und Nation, 34.

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