Jeszcze Warszawa czy już Moszkopolis? Futurystyczny obraz stolicy w polskiej antysemickiej prozie przełomu XIX i XX wieku
Still Warsaw or Moszkopolis Already? Futuristic View of the Capital in Polish Anti-Semitic Turn-of-the-Century Prose

Summary/Abstract: In 1817, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, a political commentator and writer engaged in the cause of the reform of Poland's Jews during the Grand Sejm and after the partitioning of the country, wrote a story entitled Rok 3333 czyli sen niesłychany (The Year 3333 or a dream unheard of). While his intentions differed from those of his subsequent imitators, the work nonetheless contains a conglomerate of prejudices making up the phantasmat of Judeo-Polonia. This novelette, first published in 1858, was reprinted many times, including in “Rola”, the first anti-Semitic weekly, edited by Jan Jeleński in the years 1883-1909. Already in 1883, in only the fourth issue of the magazine, Jeleński published a short story: David's Monologue and Dream on New Year's Eve, whose plot was set in 2082 in New Jerusalem, once known as Warsaw. The Jews' migrations to Warsaw and the growth of their population were a course of concern to right-wing political writers, even though this process was a result of industrialization and of making up for delays in economic development of towns located in the Russian partition zone. The turning point in the demonization of the problem was also the polarization of opinion and intensification of anti-Semitism in the wake of the 1905 Revolution and the elections to the State Duma. Already earlier, however, thanks to the writers the phantasmat of Judeo-Polonia captivated the artists and readers, one example of this being the novel by Antoni Skrzynecki Warszawa w roku 2000. But while this phantasmagoria was supposed to be an example of a "negative Utopia", the book Odżydzona ojczyzna (The Motherland De-Judified) written in 1914 presents the benefits of implementing an anti-Semitic program. By that token, in imaginary 1938, the Jewish Warsaw ceases to exist.

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