That said, I still think Michael's case for a Jewish population in Poland lower than 3.1 million is pretty weak, and he's ignored some of my points, but I'll add a new one (and again, see Mendelsohn's chapter on Poland in Jews of East Central Europe Between the Wars)
Although the figure of 13% Polish speakers among Jews may seem high, it pales in comparison to the 1921 census data which showed nearly 27% of Polish Jews claiming to be Jews by religion, but Poles by nationality. Nor is that generally considered to be an exaggeration. Moreover, a significant number of those who claimed to be Poles by nationality were precisely those Hasidim who Michael feels were unlikely to be Polish speakers. Why would these obviously religious, unacculturated Jews make such a claim? To challenge the secular Jewish nationalists, most notably the Zionists, for whom Jewish identity was precisely a matter of nationality and not religion, a notion which horrified traditionalists. So, given that number, it becomes perhaps less shocking that ten years later, 13 percent of Poland's Jews (in other words, only half those who claimed to be Poles by nationality) would claim Polish as their mother tongue. Indeed, even many Zionists spoke Polish, and apparently (again, Mendelsohn, 32) Hashomer Hatsair used conducted themselves in Polish, as did the Zionist press in Galicia
It is also worth pointing out that, in fact, Galicia under the Dual Monarchy had a strong movement towards Polish in the fin de siecle. I'd never seen these number before, but apparently, in the 1900 census, in which Yiddish was not an option, nearly 80% of Galician Jews chose Polish as their spoken language (by comparison, in the 1897 Russian census, in which Yiddish was a choice, only 13% of Warsaw's Jews chose Polish) [url]http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics ... opedia/url]
While doubtlessly, many of those would have chosen Yiddish had that been on the list, considering the linguistic similarities between German and Yiddish, and the fact that German was the language of the empire, that number suggests a pretty sizable grasp of, and appreciation for, Polish in Galicia even three decades before the 1931 census. Considering how disproportionately Galician Jews contributed to that 13% in 1931, this can't be ignored, particularly considering the details i already presented, which I'll reiterate.
1. As noted by Mendelsohn, by 1931, most Polish Jewish children were in Polish language schools, and even among Hasidim, Polish was increasingly being spoken.
2. Once you accept the that De Sztrem tampered with census data, it's a little strange to ignore the strong probability that he would do so to weaken their position, in light of actual conditions in Poland in 1931. First of all, the Polish government in 1931, under Pilsudski, wasn't concerned with a "Jewish problem," they were concerned with a nationalities problem. And in this light, the problem wasn't too few Jews, or Ukrainians, or Germans, it was too many. Having been forced to sign the Minorities Treaty, the Polish government did all it could to ignore its dictates, and the to weaken the legislative strength of the minorities. That was a lot easier to do if there were fewer of them, Jews included. So while I would also disagree with you that they exaggerated the Jewish population later as well (both for the same reason, and because in Poland, where many cities were a third or more Jewish, you hardly had to exaggerate their numbers), I've certainly seen no evidence to suggest that they were doing so in 1931, which is the matter at hand. Madagascar, etc, were proposals of the late 30's, not the early 30's.
Moreover, the inflation of Polonized Jews in Galicia would seem to be precisely the sort of tampering that would be effective and fairly easy to do. Without actually increasing the number of Jews, you still succeed in downplaying the importance of Ukrainian in a heavily Ukrainian province, all by simply counting Polish as the mother tongue of Jews who actually do (based on the above info) speak the language.
I don't know enough about how they arrived at the numbers you cite for January 1942, but those numbers clearly don't tell us much about the population in September 1939, since by January 1942, in addition to tens of thousand of Jews who fled south rather than East, 25,000 Jewish POWs who died or were murdered in captivity,[url]http://www.zchor.org/meirtchak/biblio.htm/url] thousands of Jews in hiding, there were also tens of thousands of Jews who had been murdered (especially in 1941) and, one imagines, many Jews who had simply died of illness or starvation and the rigors of old age in that environment (not to mention the effects of higher infant mortality, and in all likehihood, lower birthrates). So if the German numbers suggest 3.1 million Jews in 1942 (which is already higher than the number you cited above:
Careful analysis of all the true data leads to the adoption of a maximum of 3 million Jews in Poland in 1939; the figure could indeed have been lower./quote]
the actual number of Jews in 1939 would have been higher still.
Incidentally, the source you just cited viewtopic.php?f=111&t=147213&p=1364901&hilit=marcus#p1364901 is the one I mentioned above that argues that there was considerable undercounting of the Polish Jewish population.
And simply as a matter of logic, your argument that the census would have exaggerated the number of Polish-speaking Jews in order to highlight the existence of a Jewish problem wouldn't even make sense in 1937. The argument about the Jewish problem was precisely that Jews were unassimilable. Here's from a declaration from the Peasant Party in 1935 (Mendelsohn, 72)...all citizens in Poland irrespective of creed and nationality must enjoy equal rights. The Jews, however, as has been proved, cannot be assimilated and are a consciously alien nation within Poland...
It then goes on to argue about economic policy, and that while it supports the principle of equality for Jews, it hopes to send them elsewhere. The Jewish Problem, as perceived by Polish antisemites, wasn't like the Gifpilz in Germany, the assimilated Jew who tries to pass himself as one of the Volk and is dangerous because he pretends to be like you. Rather, he's the unassimilable outsider who cannot be assimilated and can never join the nation. In that context, inflating the number of Polonized Jews would only weaken the argument against the Jews.
Ultimately, we have a census in 1931 that puts the Jewish population at over 3.1 million, and so far, not real evidence has been presented to show that it should be lower. Given natural growth and the limited outlets for emigration in the 1930's, the figure of 3.3 million in 1939 is certainly not unreasonable, and if Marcus is right about undercounting, it could certainly be higher.
