'What also surprised me in the biography was the striking difference between Jews in Italy and in Poland. [...] Leopold Infeld’s autobiography [...] describes the Jewish ghettos in Poland as being almost completely isolated from the general population. [...] She was utterly surprised when she first saw the Jewish quarter in Warsaw, remarking: “The Jews in side curls and kaftans made me feel that I was living in two different nations.'
I wonder if she was failing to distinguish between various kinds of Jews. Compare the majority of American Jews today, and the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn, for example. This, too, was the case in Poland, home to the vast majority of the world's Jews at the time. On the one hand, there were a number of assimilated Jews and Poles of Jewish ancestry (like Tarski, Brzechwa Steinhaus, and so on). On the other, there were plenty of religious Jews of a more orthodox strain. And given that 1/3 of the population of Warsaw was Jewish, it would be difficult to imagine otherwise.
'What also surprised me in the biography was the striking difference between Jews in Italy and in Poland. [...] Leopold Infeld’s autobiography [...] describes the Jewish ghettos in Poland as being almost completely isolated from the general population. [...] She was utterly surprised when she first saw the Jewish quarter in Warsaw, remarking: “The Jews in side curls and kaftans made me feel that I was living in two different nations.'
I wonder if she was failing to distinguish between various kinds of Jews. Compare the majority of American Jews today, and the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn, for example. This, too, was the case in Poland, home to the vast majority of the world's Jews at the time. On the one hand, there were a number of assimilated Jews and Poles of Jewish ancestry (like Tarski, Brzechwa Steinhaus, and so on). On the other, there were plenty of religious Jews of a more orthodox strain. And given that 1/3 of the population of Warsaw was Jewish, it would be difficult to imagine otherwise.