Agnieszka Friedrich

 In the early 1880s, when Russian politics took a strong anti-Semitic turn, a campaign was initiated in order to limit the number of Jews in the bar. The anti-Semitic weekly Rola took active part in this campaign. Rola claimed that a once respected profession had lost its social prestige because of the inflow of Jewish members into the bar, to which they had introduced the logic of financial profit. Its journalists condemned the moral relativism of Jewish lawyers, who had begun to “infect” Polish social life when they gradually took over public offices. This was facilitated by the professional and social links between Jewish and Polish barristers, who together formed a “Jewish-atheist clique.” According to Rola, the Polish bar was to be healed by elimination of unhealthy competition through the limitation of the general number of licensed barristers, introduction of official limits on the number of Jews in the barrister profession, and outlawing of the so-called private barristers with no formal legal education, whose members were mostly Jewish. When in 1889 the numerus clausus was officially introduced into the bar, Rola ceased to be interested in this topic. This sudden change of direction invites a suspicion that the weekly could have been inspired from the outside, while its activities were part of the persecution campaign of Jewish barristers organized by the Russian authorities.
 

Rola was the first periodical in Poland of an unequivocally anti-Semitic profile. An essential element of its ideological programme was combatting Jewish assimilation. According to Rola, processes of assimilation were responsible for generating a new type of Jew – liberal, assimilated and unprincipled – and therefore much more perilous to Polish national interests than the model of a traditional, Orthodox Jew.

Rola, the leading Polish anti-Semitic weekly (published in Warsaw in the years 1883–1913), referred to the Talmud quite often on its pages. In addition to the less numerous texts which attempted to provide the historical circumstances of the Talmud’s origins and its subsequent history, there appeared—more frequently—statements that argued the disastrous impact the Talmud had had on the mentality of the Jewish people till modern times. Relying on the Talmud interpretations authored by August Rohling, Rola carried the arguments of German anti-Semitism onto the Polish grounds. The most important issue for the periodical were the Talmudic references to the social life of the Jews, and especially to the relations with the non-Jewish world. Acknowledging that there were also noble and sublime passages in the Talmud, the former were indicated as being dominant, having provided an incentive for a fraudulent, hypocritical attitude towards non-Jews, especially Christians. In one article the hostile attitude of the Talmud towards women was pointed out. Both the Talmud itself and the adjectives “Talmudic” and “Talmudistic” constituted in Rola’s vocabulary the synonym of falsehood, deception, duplicity in the attitude and behavior of the Jews, or—more rarely—the backwardness or even absurdity of some of their beliefs.