National Minorities Affairs (Sprawy Narodowosciowe), scholarly quarterly, interwar Poland, 1927-1939 | Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

It was a bi-monthly/quarterly periodical published in Warsaw by the Research Institute for National Minorities under editorship of Stanislaw Paprocki in 1927 – 1939

This publication reflected largely an inner perspective inherent and intrinsic to Ukrainian, Jewish, German and other national minorities of interwar Poland.

This Journal is structured according to the mosaic of national minorities in interwar Poland. Every issue contains program, editorial and analytical articles, elucidating a theme related to ethnonational sphere. Then in a rubricated form the current a state of being for the given national minority. The themes normally chronicle the current state of political, social, cultural and economic affairs with regard to every sizable national minority in interwar Poland.

The Second Polish Republic, although striving to a nation-state status, or the state with the domineering Polish national cause, remained a multiethnic country with the 30 percent of non-Polish population. The largest ethnonational group were Ukrainians, constituting from 5 to 7 millions. The second largest ethnonational, or according to the official designation, religious group were Jews, amounting to 3.1 million people. The third largest national group were Germans, comprising 740,000 people.

In political sense, Ukrainians and Germans were irredentists. The extent of unacceptance and degree of denial legitimacy to the Polish state vary. Political aspiration of Ukrainians and Germans also differed. The Ukrainians were territorial ethnonational group, living on the ethnic Ukrainian territory. An eternal Ukrainian agenda was establishing Ukrainian independent state in all ethnic Ukrainian territories. The Germans, although living in the newly acquired Polish territories (former German), were state people and largely were seeking reunification with Germany. The Jews were neither territorial, nor state ethnonational or religious group. They constituted largely urban population. In central Poland, Galicia and western Volhynia, Jews constituted from 30 to 60 percent of the urban population. In political sense, Jewish nationally oriented political parties strived to attain equal civil, economic and cultural rights with non-Jewish citizens. Jewish Orthodoxy largely was concerned with preservation of observance and free execution of all religious rites and did not confront Polish authorities otherwise.

This journal reflected on a full specter of ethnonational and religious affairs in interwar Poland.