The Burned Statute: Medieval Jews, Modern Poland
- EPOCH
- 9 hours ago
- 9 min read
Hannah Scott-Ravikumar | University of Oxford
In 2021, at a white nationalist rally in Kalisz, Poland, a statute issued over eight centuries ago was burned to cheers from the assembled crowd.
The statute, known as the Statute of Kalisz, had been issued in 1264 by Duke Bolesław the Pious of Greater Poland, which was a medieval duchy situated in the centre of modern Poland. Considered a foundational document for the Jewish community of Poland, the Statute of Kalisz was essentially a charter of civil liberties afforded to Jews living in Greater Poland. The statute was expanded over the centuries and created a relatively stable environment for Jews in Europe so that by the 1930s, the Jewish community in Poland was the second largest in the world.
When the statute was burned in 2021, the crowd chanted ‘this is Poland, not Polin’ - Polin being the historically Hebrew name for Poland.
On the same day that the rally was reported in the press, Polish politician Grzegorz Braun proclaimed on Twitter/X that the Statute of Kalisz was an ‘obvious forgery’, and that this ‘fact’ had been established by a Polish academic named Romauld Hube in the nineteenth century. It was not a coincidence that this declaration came at the same time as the antisemitic rally in Kalisz; it was likely an attempt by Braun to downplay the severity of the burned statute. Braun later rose to notoriety two years later, when he used a fire extinguisher to douse a menorah in the Polish parliament; he has recently made comments denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz.
The Statute of Kalisz, however, is not an obvious forgery. It was first issued in 1264 and followed a pattern well-established by its neighbours of Austria, Czechia, and Hungary. The clauses within the statute detail the rights that Jews are able to enjoy in Greater Poland, such as freedom of movement, freedom to practice their faith, and freedom to buy and sell as they pleased. There are clauses which give safeguards for Polish Jews who might face accusations from Christians in court, and clauses which allow Jews to be tried near their synagogues rather than going to civil court. Overall, the rights established within the statute allow for a stable Jewish community.
Statuimus, quod nullus Iudeus iuret super rodale ipsorum, nisi sit pro magnis causis, que se extendunt usque ad L. marcas argenti, vel sit ad nostram presenciam evocatus. Pro minoribus vero causis, iurare debet ante scholas, ante ostium dicte schole.
We decree that no Jew should swear upon his scroll [ie, the Torah] itself, unless for a great penalty, which expands up to fifty marks of silver, or if called to our presence. For minor penalties, he must swear before the synagogue, before the door of said synagogue.
Clauses such as that quoted above show that there was great consideration when it came to Jewish communities in Poland. This clause both acknowledges the onerous work involved in bringing the Torah scroll out of the synagogue to swear an oath and acknowledges the severity of the case which would necessitate the scroll’s presence. Additionally, it specifies a location where Jews could swear their oaths in cases, which would place Jews by the synagogue and therefore with their community. By doing this, the charter ensures that Jews could have community support when facing legal procedures.
Although the Polish statute was by and large copying what had been previously established in neighbouring countries, the Statute of Kalisz contains a few clauses unique to Greater Poland. Some seem strangely specific, such as a clause that allows Jews to accept horses as pawns, which one can only imagine was placed within the charter because of a situation that had already arisen and perhaps generated conflict. Another clause establishes the right of Jews to buy and sell whatever they pleased, and allowed them to ‘touch bread’:
Statuimus eciam, ut Iudei vendant omnia libere et emant, panem tangant, similiter ut Christiani; prochibentes vero, penam nostro palatino pro eo solvere tenebuntur.
We decree also that Jews may sell and buy everything freely, they [can] touch bread, similarly to Christians; those who prohibit this will be obliged to pay a penalty for this to our voivode [governor].
This may, to modern readers, seem straightforward, but in the medieval period, this was unique. Jews in other regions of Europe faced restrictions on what they could buy from Christian markets, and sometimes they were isolated completely from the wider Christian economy except in the matter of moneylending. However, Jews in Poland could participate freely in marketplaces, which meant that they were defying church doctrine; in short, this clause meant that Jews had the right to be members of the broader community.
The statute initially only applied to Jews who lived in Greater Poland, due to the fractured nature of Poland in the thirteenth century. However, by 1320, with the coronation of Władysław Łokietek, the kingdom was reunified. His son, King Kazimierz the Great – the only Polish monarch to receive this honorific – reissued the Statute of Kalisz in 1334, the year after he was crowned, so that it applied to the entirety of the Polish kingdom. Kazimierz himself was so favourable to Jews that what became the Jewish district of Kraków was named after him; his reign was, and is, associated with Polish prosperity. Through his constant reissues and ratifications of the Statute of Kalisz, Kazimierz ensured that the statute would remain law in Poland even after his death.
This is not to say that there were not attempts to repeal the statute. By the mid-fifteenth century, the statute had become a burden to the nobility, who were growing in power and prestige. There were, after all, no exemptions for nobility when it came to repaying debts to Jews. King Kazimierz IV faced enormous pressure from both the church and the nobility to repeal the statute; although he had previously ratified the statute and expanded the privileges within it, by 1454 he had repealed some of the privileges, one of which is detailed below.
When Grzegorz Braun claimed that the statute was a complete forgery, he was referring to the generally favourable attitude towards Jews that is evident throughout it. Ironically, there was indeed a likely forgery within the statute, in one particular clause. Historians have postulated that this clause was added in the fifteenth century, at the same time that some privileges were being rescinded. The clause reads as follows:
Si Iudeus super possessiones aut literas bonorum immobilium pecuniam mutuaverit, id quoque ille cuius res est probaverit, nos Iudeo et pecunias et literarum pignus abiudicari statuimus.
If a Jew lent money upon his properties or letters, and the one whose property it is has proved it, we wish that the pledge [i.e., property] with his money and letters be taken away from the Jew.
Given that the Polish statute followed the pattern of its predecessors, the clause was more likely to originally have been closer to this clause from the Czech statute of 1254:
Item si iudeus super possessiones aut literas magnatum terre pecuniam mutuaverit, et hoc per suas literas et sigillum probaverit, iudeo aliorum pignorum assignabimus obligata aut eis eas contra violentiam defendemus.
Likewise, if a Jew has lent money to a magnate of the late upon his properties or letters, and he has proved this through his letters and seal, we will assign to the Jew the obliged pledge and we will defend it for him against violence.
In the Polish version, it is clear that this is a negative for the Jew: the noble or magnate could take land that Jews owned away, simply by proving that the land was initially theirs, not the Jew’s. This was likely a situation that arose when magnates borrowed money from Jews, using their land as a pledge, but then did not pay back the money and so the Jew took ownership of the land. Under this clause, the magnate could therefore not pay the Jew what he was owed and still claim back the land that had been offered as a pledge.
However, the version from the Czech statute shows exactly why this particular clause might have been a target of the Polish nobility: the Jew in the Czech statute is protected by the king against the nobility. If this clause existed within the Polish statute as well – as it likely did prior to the forgery – it would have been perceived as a burden to the nobility, that they would not have a claim over land owned by Jews and that they would face the monarch’s power should they challenge a claim to that land. The Statute of Kalisz, or at least the version that exists today, did likely have a forgery, but it was the clause least favourable to Jews that was inauthentic – not the rest of the statute.
Throughout the following centuries, Poland went through a series of political upheavals and, eventually, partition. Although the statute was left behind in the partition, the memories of an independent Poland were not, and a new nationalism began to emerge in the late nineteenth century. Two factions, led by Jozef Piłsudski and Roman Dmowski respectively, battled for what Poland’s national story should be following independence. Piłsudski imagined a multiethnic Poland, hearkening back to the prosperity of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Dmowski imagined a homogenous Poland, one where the word Polish was synonymous with Catholic, and Jews were expelled from the country altogether. Dmowski, and many who followed him, believed that Poland had suffered partition and persecution in part because of foreign elements, of which Jews were one.
For a time, Dmowski and his vision for Poland was forgotten by the mainstream; his hardline antisemitism was particularly difficult to grapple with in the wake of the Holocaust. However, after the fall of communism in 1989, Poland began to reclaim its national identity, and thus Dmowski’s homogeneous vision for Poland emerged once again. Modern politicians, such as Grzegorz Braun, have taken Dmowski’s politics into the twenty-first century.
This convergence of nationalism and Dmowski’s antisemitism, then, leads to sobering scenes such as the one described at the beginning of this article: the burning of a medieval statute granting Jews civil rights to applause and cheers, and the denial of the statute’s existence in the medieval period. When being Polish becomes equated with being Catholic, the very existence of Polish Jews for eight hundred years is conveniently erased.
So why does a medieval statute of Jewish rights matter so much to modern white nationalists in Poland? In short, because its existence denies the foundation of their movement: that being Polish in the medieval period was a privilege extended to those who were not Catholic. From Bolesław to Kazimierz, and even to the last king of Poland, Stanisław August, acknowledging the importance of Polish Jews to Poland was essential for the kings who governed the country. They recognised that Poland was better with Polish Jews, and sometimes even relied on Jews to run the mints, collect taxes, and build up the Polish economy, such as Yousef of Kalisz, who was minting coins with Hebrew letters even before the Statute of Kalisz was issued, and Lewko, who undertook many jobs for Kazimierz the Great including minting coins, collecting taxes, and running salt mines.
This is an inconvenient truth for those who wish to rewrite the Polish national story into a story of homogenous Polish Catholicism. And so, they burned the evidence.
Further Reading:
Robert Chazan, ed., The Cambridge History of Judaism Volume Six, the Middle Ages: The Christian World (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Volume I: The Origins to 1795 (Clarendon Press, 1981).
Antony Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland 1921-1939: The Crisis of Constitutional Government (Clarendon Press, 1972).
W. F. Reddaway, The Cambridge History of Poland: Volume I, to 1696 (Cambridge University Press, 1950).
Moshe Rosman, Categorically Jewish, Distinctly Polish: Polish Jewish History Reflected and Refracted (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2022).
Nada Zečević, and Daniel Ziemann, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Central Europe (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Hannah Scott-Ravikumar is a second-year DPhil student in medieval Polish Jewish history at the University of Oxford. Her work focuses on Jewish legal rights and the development of the medieval Polish state. Additionally, she writes creatively, and her work can be found in Unfortunately, Literary magazine. She is originally from Iowa, but currently lives in Oxford.
