Roman Dmowski - Anti-semitism and Anti-German

Anti-semitism and Anti-German

Dmowski was an anti-semite and Social Darwinist who saw life as a zero-sum game in which any gain made by one group came at the expense of another. Dmowski often stated his belief in a "international Jewish conspiracy" aimed against Poland. In his essay "Żydzi wobec wojny" (Jews on the War), which comprises pages 301-308 of his 1925 book Polityka Polska i odbudowanie państwa (Polish Politics and the Rebuilding of the State), Dmowski claimed that Zionism was only a cloak to disguise the Jewish ambition to rule the world. Dmowski asserted that once a Jewish state was established in Palestine, this would serve as a nucleus for the Jewish take-over of the world. In the same essay, Dmowski accused the Jews of being Poland's most dangerous enemy and of working hand in hand with the Germans to dismember Poland. Dmowski believed that the 3,000,000 Polish Jews could not be assimilated and that they were far too numerous. In his own words, "a little salt may improve the taste of the soup, but too much will spoil it.".

For Dmowski, one of Poland's principal problems was that not enough Polish-speaking Catholics were middle-class, while too many ethnic Germans and Jews were. To remedy this perceived problem, he favored a policy of confiscating the wealth of Jews and ethnic Germans and redistributing it to Polish Catholics. Dmowski was never able to have this program passed into law by the Sejm, but the National Democrats did frequently organize "Buy Polish" boycott campaigns against German and Jewish shops. The first of Dmowski's anti-semitic boycotts occurred in 1912 when he attempted to organize a total boycott of Jewish businesses in Warsaw as "punishment" for the defeat of some Endecja candidates in the elections for the Duma, which Dmowski blamed on Warsaw's Jewish population. Throughout his life, Dmowski associated Jews with Germans as Poland's principal enemies; the origins of this identification stemmed from Dmowski's deep anger over the forcible "Germanization" policies carried out by the German government against its Polish minority during the Imperial period, and over the fact that most Jews living in the disputed German/Polish territories had chosen to assimilate into German culture, not Polish culture. In Dmowski's opinion Jewish community was not attracted to the cause of Polish independence and was likely to ally itself with potential enemies of Polish state if it would benefit their status.

On the other hand, in his "Polska polityka i odbudowanie państwa", 1925, he stated: "Polska bez Żydów, byłaby jak zupa bez pieprzu – bez smaku." (Poland without Jews would be like soup without pepper - insipid).