Juifs en Pologne

After World War I, Poland's Jewish community, the largest in Europe, tried to escape from the ancestral ghetto. But under Poland's successive postwar régimes — parliamentary democracy, authoritarian populism, neo-fascism — the Jews' hopes broke on the deeply rooted antisemitism of almost ail sectors of Polish society. From the pogroms of the 20s to the racist régulations of the 30s, interwar Poland, that of both Paderewski and Pilsudski, displayed an active antisemitism which preceded the Nuremberg laws. In the light of this tragic expérience, the historié backdrop to Isaac Bashevis Singer's great novels, it is easier to understand the extermination of Poland's Jewish community after 1940. The "final solution " of the Jewish question had been widely explored by interwar Poland.