Masada said:
What are the origins of Polish antisemitism?
Hard to say, but Polish antisemitism is a relatively young phenomenon. It is not "centuries old".
Danish 19th and early 20th century writer who worte a book about Poland - Georg Brandes (born as Morris Cohen) - wrote:
"(...) There are so many Jews in Poland, because the Poles gave them shelter when entire Europe was persecuting this nation. And Poland is free of the kind of xenophoby typical among the Germans, which is called antisemitism. (...)"
He wrote this in 1885 (he lived in period 1842 - 1927). He was considered as an anticlerical person, by the way.
German antisemitism is older than Polish but also not many centuries old, even though some guys like Goldhagen claim to have found an special racist german gene. Of course this is rubbish and a racist (anti-German) view in itself - there is no such thing like a "racist gene".
This is not the matter of genes but of ideological influences and theories developed over time and rooted in culture or state ideology. In Germany these ideological views were much older than Hitler, but also much younger than the history of Jews in Germany - racist antisemitism aka "scientific" antisemitism (the most destructive kind of antisemitism, which eventually led to Nazi ideology and its implementation in practice - the Holocaust) in Germany dated back to the 18th and 19th centuries and to various German thinkers of that era (Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the main developer of this ideology Huston Stewart Chamberlain, who was born British but lived and worked in Germany). Pogroms were not typical just for the Russian Empire - in the 19th century there were numerous antisemitic excesses in Germany - there were cases of murdering people with "non-Germanic look" commited by students costumed in old-Germanic clothes and armed with "skull and crossbones" daggers.
Poles did not have an opinion of anti-Semites at that time.
Polish 19th century and early 20th century literature was not antisemitic - it was philosemitic - as noticed by Polish-Jewish journalist, Mieczyslaw Grydzewski:
"(...) It was the only literature in the world, which not only from time to time created noble and upstanding Jewish characters, but also assigned the inspirational function to them. Jankiel of Mickiewicz, Judyta of Słowacki, Zygier of Żeromski, Rachel of Wyspiański - all these Jewish characters play the role of people who give patriotic inspiration, they are awakeners of Polishness. (...)"
Also for example in "Ziemia Obiecana" by Reymont, one of the three main and good characters is a Jewish businessman Welt Moryc.
The stereotype of Polish anti-Semitism was created mostly after WW2 and keeps living until modern times.
For example according to the tourist guide titled "Hiking Guide to Poland" - 40% of modern Poles are "militant antisemites".
If you subtract children and old women, it means that around 70% of adult Poles - men and women - are "militant antisemites".
According to Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, between 10,000 and 15,000 Polish families in occupied Warsaw during WW2 helped saving Jews.
Warsaw included 900,000 Polish population (as of late 1941). How many members could each family have? - perhaps 6 on average.
So up to 10% of Polish population of Warsaw helped saving Jews, while being threatened by death penalty for doing this.
Ghetto Rising veteran Simcha Rotem mentioned surnames of 8 Polish men and women who helped him the most to survive (many more helped him to lesser extent). Of them two were executed for helping a Jew. To save one Jew, long-lasting and top-secret cooperation of many people was necessary.
To denounce 50 Jews, only one blackmailer was enough.
If the number of blackmailers really exceeded the number of those who helped - then no Polish Jews would survive the war, and many did.
But vast majority of the society neither helped, nor denounced - they were just trying to survive and feed their own families.
Most people when facing danger, instinctively save their lifes and lifes of their close relatives first and do not risk it for others, for "strangers".
Capacity for / predisposition to act like heroes, is a feature that only few percent of people have. The fact that majority of Poles were not heroes, gave birth to the myth of Poles being antisemites who observed with satisfaction or at best neutrality how Germans butchered Jews in their own homeland.
