Demography of Jews in Poland – there are no sources which would allow to determine the exact number of Jews living in the Polish lands since the Middle Ages onwards; only rough estimates can be provided. The earliest accurate data can be found in the documents pertaining to the collection of the 1764 poll tax. Jews settled in the Polish lands in several waves. In the early 14th century, only ca. 1,000 Jewish people lived in Poland.
In the second half of the 14th century and in the 15th century, this number grew significantly. The tax register most likely drawn up in 1507 mentions 54 Jewish communities; however, ca. 30 localities have been omitted. It can be estimated that ca. 90 communities existed in Poland in the early 16th century (some towns even boasted two, for instance Lviv or Kazimierz near Kraków). They were generally small, each having from a few dozen to a hundred members; only the largest communities were composed of several hundred people. Historians estimate the number of Jews living in the Polish and Lithuanian lands in the early 16th century at ca. 10,000–24,000. In the late 16th century, the number of communities throughout the Commonwealth grew to ca. 200, with varying populations.
According to documents dating back to 1619, for example, over 3,000 Jews lived in Poznań and its suburbs. Many communities, particularly in the eastern regions of the Commonwealth, only had a few dozen members. According to estimates, there were from 80,000–100,000 Jews living in the Commonwealth in the early 17th century; by the end of the century, the number may have grown to as many as 200,000. The substantial population growth over the course of one century was not caused exclusively by the influx of settlers from other European countries. Despite the high mortality rate, disease, and frequent Tatar attacks, the natural growth rate of the Jewish population was higher than that of the general population of the Commonwealth. Many factors contributed to this phenomenon: Judaism put more emphasis on hygiene, opposed people remaining unmarried, and did not have religious orders. It was allowed to get married from the age of 13, and Jews were not required to serve in the army. During the 16th and the 17th century, the Jewish population started to move from the western to the eastern areas of the Commonwealth.
The percentage of Jews living in the east grew particularly fast in smaller towns. Jews also began to more frequently settle in the countryside, where they would lease inns and mills. The Khmelnytsky Uprising caused a sharp decrease in the size of the Jewish population (even by as much as 20–25%); this was due to numerous pogroms perpetrated against Jews and Jewish migration resulting from the terror. The wars of the mid-17th century and the early 18th century led to economic collapse of many cities, which hampered further development of local Jewish communities.
On the other hand, Jewish settlement was supported by many privileges, most frequently issued by the nobility; these contributed to the growth of older Jewish communities and the establishment of new ones in the last quarter of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th century. In the years 1764–1766, new rules were introduced to the collection of poll tax among the Jewish population; according to the regulations, the tax was levied individually on every Jew over one year of age and not collected as a lump sum, as it had been until the reform. According to preserved sources, poll tax was collected from ca. 600,000 Jews. Taking into account that some evaded the tax and some were infants, we can estimate that there must have been ca. 750,000–900,000 Jews living in the Commonwealth at that time, which would account for ca. 6% of the total population.
As a result of the Partitions, most Polish Jews – ca. 500,000 people – found themselves under Russian rule. The tsarist government soon imposed a number of restrictions on the Jewish population. They were removed from villages and ordered to move to towns and cities. The authorities defined specific areas where Jews were allowed to reside (settlement zones). In 1827, as much as 80.4% of Jews from the Kingdom of Poland lived in towns; in 1865, this percentage rose to 90.5%. Concomitantly, the Jewish population was growing in size and beginning to constitute a larger and larger percentage of the entire population.
In the years 1816–1913, the population of the Kingdom of Poland grew by 381%, while the Jewish population grew by 822%; as a result, their percentage within the population as a whole increased from 7.8% to 14.9%. This was partially due to the influx of Jews expelled from other areas of the Russian Empire and people migrating in search of work. In addition, the Jewish population of Congress Poland had a particularly high natural growth rate. Over the last 30 years of the 19th century, the Jewish population of eleven of the Kingdom’s largest cities grew significantly: in Warsaw, for example, it quintupled in size, while in Łódź it grew twenty-fold. The largest concentration of Jews in the Kingdom – and in the entire world – was the Jewish community in Warsaw. The high natural growth rate among Jews was mitigated by their migration to Western Europe and America.
Ca. 65,000 Polish Jews lived in the Prussian Partition, mostly in the area of Greater Poland (52,000 people in 1816, that is 6.3% of the region’s population). For the most part, they settled in urban areas, which was a consequence of legal restrictions imposed on the Jewish population. In 1816, a whopping 96% of the Jewish community in Greater Poland lived in towns and cities. In the late 19th century, Jews began moving to larger urban centres. In 1910, 6% of Jews living in Prussia resided in cities with population over 100,000.
The largest community in the Prussian Partition was located in Poznań; other significant concentrations of the Jewish population were located in Oborniki, Szamotuly, Leszno, Ostrów, Kępno, and the Opole region. The late 19th century saw constant decline in the number of Jews living in the Prussian Partition, caused by mass migration to other towns of the Reich and to the United States. In the years 1824–1890, over 65,000 Jews migrated from the Grand Duchy of Posen.
According to government figures, 171,000 Polish Jews lived in the Austrian Partition after 1772, while in 1795 – as many as 215,000, constituting 9% of the total population. The Jewish population continued to grow steadily over the following years. In 1850, there were ca. 333,000 Jews living in Galicia; in 1869, there were 576,000 (10.6% of the total population); by 1910, the number had already reached 871,000 (10.9%). In the 19th century, Galician Jews constituted almost two-thirds of the Jewish population in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
As in the Russian and Prussian partitions, they lived primarily in cities, sometimes becoming the dominant ethnic group; in 1910 in Brody, for example, they comprised 71.2% of the population; in Buczacz – 57.3%; in Rawa Ruska – 57.2%; and in Stanisławów – 51.3%. The late 19th century saw a decline in the growth rate of the Jewish population, the cause of which was, just like in the case of other partitions, mass emigration. In the years 1881–1910, ca. 236,500 Jews migrated from Galicia, primarily to North and South America. They also moved to larger Austrian cities, such as Vienna, which in the second half of the 19th century became the second largest concentration of Jews in Europe after Warsaw.
World War I brought significant changes to the distribution and number of Jews living in Poland. People fleeing from warfare zones, discrimination, and pogroms in Russia and Ukraine all resulted in mass migratory movements of the Jewish population. The commander-in-chief of the Russian Army, Prince Nikolai Nikolaevich, accused Jews of engaging in activities harmful to the army and ordered for them to be removed from all areas affected by the war. The evacuations from central Poland and Galicia intensified in early 1915. The largest group of displaced Jews – ca. 80,000 people from 140 cities, towns, and villages – reached Warsaw.
A total of 500,000–600,000 people were affected by the prince’s decree; the mass displacement campaign was only suspended because of the threat of German and Austrian counteroffensive. Fearing the approaching Russian Army, thousands of Galician Jews escaped to Hungary, Moravia, Bohemia, and Vienna; ca. 77,000 Jewish people arrived to the Austrian capital. Special camps were opened for the refugees, who were provided with shelter and food. It is estimated that around a half of Galicia’s Jewish population, that is ca. 400,000 people, left their homes. In the last two years of the war, Jews continued to leave the Polish lands. For the most part, they moved to German cities outside the areas affected by warfare.
In the first years after 1918, once Poland regained its independence, the Jewish population was growing with the returning refugees, primarily from the territory of Russia (ca. 600,000 people). Smaller groups were coming back from Austria and Czechoslovakia. Figures from national censuses and estimates for 1939 indicate a steady growth in Poland’s Jewish population. In 1921, there were 2,845,400 Jews living in Poland; in 1931 – 3,113,900, and in 1939 – 3,460,000. Although the numbers indicate an upward trend, Jews started to constitute a lesser and lesser percentage in the total population: from 10.5% in 1921 to 9.8% in 1931 and 9.7% on the eve of World War II. This was the result of dwindling natural growth among Jews (in the years 1921–1925, the growth rate amounted to 15.6%, in 1926–30 – to 12.6%, in 1931–1935 – to 12.3% and in 1936–1938 – to 11.15%) and increasing migration, particularly among young people.
The distribution of the Jewish population of Poland was uneven, concentrated primarily in the cities and towns of eastern and, to a lesser degree, central regions of the country, a visible legacy of tsarist laws. As many as 76.4% of Jews lived in cities; only 23.6% lived in the countryside. The proportions for the Christian population were reversed: 22.1% lived in urban centres, while 77.9% resided in rural areas. A fourth of all Polish Jews lived in one of the five following cities: Warsaw, Łodź, Lviv, Kraków, and Vilnius, representing a total of 24.6% of Poland’s total Jewish population. In each of those towns, Jews comprised over 30% of the local population. The percentage of Jews in the eastern provinces and in Warsaw was even greater (in Polesie it amounted to 49.2%, in Volhynia – to 49.1%, in Lubelskie Province – to 42.9%, in Nowogrodzkie Province – to 42.6%, in Białostockie Province – to 38.7%, in Stanisławowskie Province – to 34.8%, in both Warszawskie and Tarnopolskie Province – to 34.7%). In many towns, Jews constituted more than a half of the total population (e.g. Jędrzejów – 73.1%, Pinsk – 63.4%, Węgrów – 60.45%, Kobryn – 55.6%, Tomaszów Lubelski – 54.0%, Slonim – 52.8%, Brody – 50.5%). In the western provinces, the percentage of Jews among the total population was negligible; in Poznańskie Province and Pomorskie Province, the Jewish community amounted only to 0.3% of the entire population.
In October 1939, Polish territories were divided between the occupying forces. Some of the areas seized by Germany (including Pomerania, northern Mazovia, the Suwałki region, Silesia, and Greater Poland) were annexed to the Reich along with their Jewish populations (ca. 600,000 people). The General Government was established in the remaining territories; the local Jewish population amounted to 1.5 million people. From the very start, the German authorities took steps to isolate Jews from the general population. Jewish people were deported to ghettos opened in numerous towns; in 1941, the Nazi regime implemented its mass extermination plan.
Ca. 1.2 million Polish Jews resided in the Soviet occupation zone. In late 1939 and early 1940, when the borders between the two zones were not sealed, many Jews (ca. 300,000) escaped to the Soviet-controlled areas. The authorities strove to eliminate Jewish cultural and religious identity in their respective occupation zones. Arrests and deportations primarily affected social and political activists, as well as people enjoying particularly high esteem among the Jewish community or those recognised as “enemies of the people” (merchants, industrialists, the intelligentsia). From February 1940 to March 1941, about one million Polish citizens were deported, ca. 30% of whom were Jews. Some were sent to labour camps, while others were forced to perform physical work in cities, kolkhozes, and sovkhozes in the northern oblasts of the Soviet Union.
In June 1941, after the German-Soviet war broke out, the Germans began carrying out their plan for the Endlösung. The Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen launched mass executions of Jews and a campaign of terror on an unprecedented scale. Half a million people were murdered in the Borderlands; those who survived were closed in ghettos and later sent to death camps. Some Polish Jews managed to escape, either on their own or with the help of Soviet authorities. Ca. 4,000 Jewish people joined the Anders Army. The Soviet authorities allowed tens of thousands to leave for the Far East (primarily to Shanghai), and one thousand were granted permission to migrate to Palestine.
Overall, the losses among the Jewish population caused by World War II amounted to ca. 85–89%, which means that just 10% of the entire Jewish population survived the war. After the liberation, Jews coming out of hiding were registered by the Polish government as part of the programme to help Holocaust survivors. The first institution founded for this purpose was the Office for Aid to the Jewish Population, operating under the auspices of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN). By October 1944, the office had registered 8,000 people. In September 1944, the PKWN and the Soviet government signed an agreement on the repatriation of Poles and Jews. From November 1944 to 1948, over 200,000 Jews returned from the Soviet Union. This number does not include former prisoners from liberated concentration camps, partisans leaving the forests, children saved by Polish families and hidden in monasteries, as well as people hiding on the “Aryan side” and on “Aryan papers.” Their number is estimated at 50,000. However, many of them soon left Poland.
According to the data of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, 74,000 Jews were registered in the country in June 1945; by late 1946, this number grew to 192,000. The biggest Jewish communities lived in the following provinces: Górnośląskie, Łódzkie, and Dolnośląskie. Repatriates from the Soviet Union were usually sent to the western territories, first to Silesia and later to Szczecin. The number of Jews residing in Poland was dwindling due to emigration, which began on a mass scale after the Kielce Pogrom on 4 July 1946. By early 1947, ca. 140,000 people had left the country. In March 1947, just 93,000 Jews were listed in the register of the Central Committee; two years later – 95,000. The years 1949–1950 brought another wave of mass migration, this time to Israel, as a result of which the number of Jews in Poland was reduced by half. In the 1950s, no citizens were allowed to leave the country, and it was only in late 1955 and early 1956 that migration resumed and ca. 30,000 people left Poland. The last centres dominated by the Jewish population disappeared or were liquidated, and the Jewish youth became assimilated to the Polish culture. Following the events of March 1968, the last large wave of migration took place, reducing the number of Jews living in Poland to just a few thousand (ca. 5,000–6,000 in 1998).
Hanna Węgrzynek, Gabriela Zalewska
The entry was originally published on the Diapozytyw portal, previously owned by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. It is an excerpt from the book Historia i kultura Żydów polskich. Słownik by Alina Cała, Hanna Węgrzynek, and Gabriela Zalewska, published by the WSiP.
