Think Globally, Act Locally: Capitalism, Crisis, and Jewish Credit Cooperatives in Interwar Poland’s Eastern Provinces

Credit cooperatives provided cheap credit to the Jews of Eastern Europe during the destruction and displacement of the First World War, through the emergence of modern nation-states in the wake of multiethnic empires, and the economic transformations and upheavals that followed. The largest and most robust network of Jewish credit cooperatives developed in the lands of interwar Poland, where Jews made up only ten percent of the Polish population but more than half of the population reliant on trade for their livelihood. Because in Poland a disproportionate number of Jews were reliant upon trade for their livelihood and a disproportionate number of those reliant upon trade were Jewish, the question of the fate of commercial capitalism yoked the Jewish question to the problem of capitalism.

Currency reform and recessions large and small, as well as shifting political alignments on the national level, shaped the debate about what kind of economy and polity Poland should have. If there was to be a future for Jewish trade in Poland, what form should it take? Nationally-bounded credit cooperatives offered a compelling answer to this question. This paper looks to practices of economic self-help by the Jewish national minority in Poland’s eastern provinces—where Jews made up a larger share of the population—as a locus for responses to changing conditions in multiethnic borderlands. Drawing on periodicals of the Jewish cooperative movement, contemporary writing about the cooperative movement in Poland, and records from the Second Polish Republic’s Cooperatives Council, this paper mines the practices of activists and members of local Jewish credit cooperatives in the eastern provinces of Poland for examples of how a global imaginary of cooperative organization, the legal and political framework of minority status within a nation-state, and regional and local dynamics of multiethnic society shaped practices of economic life.