An Unchosen People

An Unchosen People offers a revisionist account of interwar Europe's largest Jewish community, challenging traditional narratives of Jewish agency by exploring nationalism's pathologies, diaspora's fragility, Zionism's promises, and the necessity of choice.

What did the future hold for interwar Europe's largest Jewish community, the epicentre of global Jewish hopes? As the 1930s approached, intrepid analysts posed these questions to discover a Polish Jewry grappling with "no tomorrow". Confronted by antisemitism and the collapse of liberalism, some Polish Jews moved beyond progressive aspirations and religious certainties, probing the transformation of the nation-state, assessing the true power of minority communities, and seeking to uncover where a future might lie—and for whom.

The story of modern Jewry is often depicted as one of creativity and contestation. Kenneth B. Moss, however, traces a pivotal moment of Jewish reckoning with diasporic vulnerability, nationalism's intimidating potency, Zionism's promises, and the necessity of choice. Moss examines the works of Polish Jewry's most profound thinkers as they faced political irrationality, state crises, and the limits of resistance.

He reconstructs the desperate creativity among activists striving to counteract despair when its causes could not be addressed, and he revives a forgotten grassroots history of critical thought and political exploration among ordinary Jews—young and powerless—as they laboured to envisage a viable future for themselves, potentially in Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally.

Focusing on a pursuit of realism rather than ideals, Moss redefines the history of modern Jewish political thought. While much scholarship strives to highlight Jewish agency over a collective future, An Unchosen People uncovers a darker tradition characterised by painful compromises amid a daunting political landscape, positioning Polish Jewry as a paradigmatic illustration of the minority experience in the nation-state.