IN the first half of the twentieth century the fundamental instrument of social communication in the Western world was the press. This was true not only for societies that took the form of modern states, regardless of their internal systems, but also for ethnic and stateless groups. Newspapers and periodicals are among the most important sources of documentation for understanding social, public, and political life. As a rule, historians appreciate this, but they treat the press almost exclusively as a source of facts or opinions; they rarely examine it as a separate, autonomous element of social life, and most scholars who deal with the history of the press ignore the importance of this independent role. Alongside descriptions of events and political opinions to which the press gives a certain permanence, in itself the press constitutes a social fact of considerable significance. The purpose of this essay is to describe the Jewish press in Poland during the period 1918- 39 as a socio-political and cultural phenomenon. Rather than concentrating on individual publications, the discussion will centre on the entity which they formed as a whole.

Recent works dealing with the Polish section of the interwar diaspora do not generally focus on the press, even though it is used copiously to support arguments. Marian Fuks, in his book on the Warsaw press, devotes much attention to the period 1918-39, but the work is not very accurateand is largely a description of individual titles, albeit given in an interesting and detailed way. Only recently have detailed bibliographies by Paul Glikson and Yechiel Szeintuch emerged. The authors themselves regard these as ‘introductory': the works contain not only press publications but also almanacs, reports, and even brochures. The available lists do not allow us either to decide what constitutes a newspaper and what does not, and fail to give reliable information on circulation numbers or print-runs.

During the interwar years nothing on the subject emerged from within the Jewish community. The only available material from that period either originates from official sources or was prepared by antisemitic ‘experts on Jews'. All these works deal with a limited period and amount to statistical lists rather than descriptions of the press.