![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Tatar-mosque-Kruszyniany-e1532517015730.jpg\")
This particular mosque apparently dates from the 18th<\/sup> century, but the community that built it has been in the region since the mid-17th<\/sup> century. They are Tatars, descendants of the Golden Horde that reached Eastern Europe shortly after the death of Genghis Khan. Since I\u2019m traveling here as part of a project on borders and migration, and in particular looking into my own family\u2019s history, when I read about the Tatars I immediately wondered what happened to them during the Nazi occupation.<\/p>\nThe short answer is not much \u2013 but the longer answer is complicated and interesting, because there was a lot of overlap between the Tatar and Jewish communities. In part that was simply because they lived in the same region, so necessarily overlapped with each other as they overlapped with Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Poles, Lithuanians, and everyone else who happened to be around. But because there weren\u2019t many Tatars \u2013 at most around six thousand and by the 1930s more like half that \u2013 and Jewish and Muslim traditions share some important characteristics, Tatars turned to the much larger Jewish communities for some functions that in other parts of the world would have been managed by Muslims.<\/p>\n
For example, Tatars tended to buy their meat from Jewish ritual butchers, whose methods of animal slaughter are similar to halal rules, and in some communities also had their sons circumcised by Jewish mohels operating under the supervision of an imam.<\/p>\n
The shared practice of circumcision took on a new significance during the Nazi period, because the Nazis could expose Jewish men who were attempting to pass as Gentiles by examining their penises and some Jews in northeastern Poland attempted to pass this test by claiming to be Tatars. Holly Robertson Huffnagle, who has written a study of Tatar-Jewish relations, tells several stories of Jews who survived the Nazi period in this way, one making up a Tatar biography on the spur of the moment, others borrowing identity papers from Tatar friends or leaving their children with Tatar neighbors. <\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Of course, many more Jews survived by passing as Polish Christians or were hidden by Polish Christians \u2013 the Tatar community was limited to a small area of the northeast \u2013 and there were also some stories of personal clashes and of Tatars who worked with the Nazis. On the whole, though both Jews and Tatars recall regular, close, and friendly interactions before that period and Jewish refugees and survivors seem in general to recall the Tatars with particular affection.<\/p>\n I hadn\u2019t known about this quirk of the Nazi racial laws (though, once I started looking, there turns out to be a rich literature), and it underlines just how crazy those laws were. The Karaim were a clever bunch and had already gotten themselves exempted from Russian anti-Semitic laws and taxes by arguing that they were from a branch of Jews who had immigrated to the Crimea in the first century BC and hence had an alibi proving they were not around Jerusalem during the crucifixion. The Nazis didn\u2019t much care about that, but crazy as it seems, many of them were extremely assiduous about establishing the details of their race theories.<\/p>\n That is something I\u2019d never thought about, and it deserves some thought. I\u2019ve just read a long paper by Kiril Feferman on the effort the Nazis put into determining whether or not the Karaim should be considered Jewish,<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> <\/span>and it was not just an arbitrary decision: they commissioned studies, consulted experts from several countries, debated the various opinions, and finally concluded that the Karaim, though practicing a Judaic faith based on the Torah, were practicing a different form of Judaic faith and were not racially Jewish \u2013 hence, were not Jews for purposes of extermination.<\/p>\n Feferman notes that this craziness included elements of realpolitik<\/em>: the Nazis wanted to maintain good relations with the Turks and other Muslim powers, and the Tatars claimed the Karaim as allies, especially in the USSR, where both had a history of opposing the Bolsheviks. He notes that the Nazis also made exceptions for a few other \u201cquasi-Jewish groups\u2026 such as the Georgian and Bukhara Jews in France and the Mountain Jews in the North Caucasus\u2026\u201d and by now my head is spinning.<\/p>\n So, getting back to the Tatars: the \u2026and while on that search I also learned that Rudolf Nureyev was a full Tatar and took pleasure in describing himself as a Mongol barbarian.<\/p>\n Of course that reminds me of the German and Austrian Jews in the interwar years who blamed rising antisemitism on the influx of Ostjuden<\/em> \u2013 Jews from Eastern Europe \u2013 who were strange, poor, and whose arrival was regarded by many western European Jews as causing ill feeling towards proper Germans and Austrians who happened to be Jewish.<\/p>\n That story is usually told with the moral that the western Jews lacked solidarity with their eastern brethren and their punishment was to share a common fate. But I\u2019m going with a different moral: racism and nationalism are sicknesses and discrimination doesn\u2019t make anyone immune from them.\u00a0 The Nazis viewed Poles as a lower species of humanity, fit only for menial labor \u2013 and why should German Jews have felt more solidarity with Polish Jews than German Christians felt with Polish Christians? One can argue that they were oppressed, so should feel sympathy with their co-religionists who were still more oppressed, and some did. But many felt that after centuries of discrimination they were finally becoming recognized as normal Germans and Austrians and the Ostjude were messing that up.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not trying to provide answers, but I\u2019m interested in the questions. Everything I\u2019ve found about the relationship between Tatars and Jews frames that story around coexistence in a vanished past when people of different faiths were neighbors and got along with one another. That story is of course simplified, but the recollections seem honest and I\u2019m sure they reflect real experiences in many communities and situations. I find it\u00a0 appealing, both as a counterpart to the more familiar stories of Polish Christian antisemitism and as a reminder that Jews and Muslims throughout much of history have lived in overlapping communities and formed common alliances. But like all such stories, it is complicated. I\u2019m on a long journey, and this is just one stop.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently spent a quiet couple of days in Kruszyniany, a tiny town in northeastern Poland that is notable for having the country\u2019s oldest functioning mosque\u2026 and thereby hangs a tale. Indeed, several tales. This particular mosque apparently dates from the 18th century, but the community that built it has been in the region since … Continue reading Tatars, Jews, and so forth… some thoughts in northeastern Poland<\/span> ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/210px-Jakub_Szynkiewicz.png\")
Robertson also writes that the Tatar Mufti of Poland, Jacob Szynkiewicz, helped protect the Karaite Jews by calling Goebbels to make the case that they were racially Turkic. I haven\u2019t found corroboration of that particular story, but there is plenty of evidence that the Nazis considered the Karaim related to the Tatars both by ancestry and as communities that interacted on a regular basis \u2013 and therefore (except in a few notable instances) did not subject them to ghettoization or extermination. As a result, some Jews \u2013 meaning Ashkenazim \u2013 also managed to survive the holocaust by passing as Jews \u2013 meaning Karaim.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Bronson-as-indian.jpg\")
tour of the mosque in Kruszyniany was conducted entirely in Polish, so I understood virtually nothing, but I did catch the words, \u201cCharles Bronson\u2026Charles Buchinski.\u201d I assumed the guide was claiming Bronson as a Tatar, so checked and found that yes, indeed, his father was apparently a Tatar from Lithuania, and this touch of Mongolian heritage presumably was what made him so easy to cast as a Native American\u2026<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/borderblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Polish-anchor-in-Krusziniany-cemetery.jpg\")
On a more serious note, the Tatars have recently been caught up in the anti-Muslim violence sweeping Europe. A mosque built by Tatars in Gdansk in the 1990s was firebombed in 2013, and in 2014 the historic mosque and cemetery I visited in Krusziniany were defaced with anti-Muslim slogans and a drawing of a pig. Which is ugly, and the ugliness is underlined by a story in the New York Times<\/em> that quotes local Tatars blaming the violence on the influx of Muslim immigrants, which they see as raising justifiable concern among Poles that is causing friction where none existed before.<\/p>\n