Daily Inspiration Quote by Bronislaw Geremek

Geremek’s line is a scalpel: it cuts through Poland’s self-image by naming an ugliness that can survive even when its supposed target has largely vanished. The formulation “anti-semitism and no Jews” is deliberately paradoxical, exposing prejudice not as a reaction to lived contact but as a portable cultural habit - a story a society tells itself to organize fear, grievance, and belonging. Calling it “pathology in its purest state” borrows the language of medicine to strip away excuses. If the “symptom” persists without the “cause,” then the problem is internal: a social illness sustained by myth, memory, and political utility.

The context matters. Postwar Poland was radically homogenized; the Holocaust annihilated Polish Jewry, and later emigration - accelerated by state-sponsored anti-Semitic campaigns, especially in 1968 - further emptied Jewish presence. Yet anti-Semitic tropes remained available as a kind of shadow politics: “the Jew” as scapegoat for communism, capitalism, cosmopolitan elites, or moral decay, depending on the needs of the moment. Geremek, a historian and a public figure associated with democratic opposition, is also signaling that reckoning with the past is not optional nation-building homework; it’s a test of civic health.

The quote works because it refuses the comforting idea that intolerance requires proximity. It suggests something colder: hatred can become an identity technology, maintained even in the absence of real neighbors. That’s why the word “pathology” lands - it implies recurrence, inheritance, and a failure to metabolize trauma into honest history.