(1809–1868), lawyer and journalist. Born in Warsaw, Ludwik Ozjasz Lubliner attended a Piarist (Catholic) school against the wishes of his observant parents. As a student at a polytechnical college, he then joined the uprising of 1831, during the course of which he received numerous injuries and was decorated with military honors.
After being denounced to the authorities for his political activities, Lubliner was obliged to leave the Russian-controlled area of Poland. He fled to Kraków and enrolled at the university, but the Russians soon demanded his expulsion from there as well. He then settled in Belgium, with brief periods in France. From 1834 to 1836 he studied law in Belgium, and began to practice as a lawyer in 1838. In 1832, he had joined the social revolutionary Towarzystwo Demokratyczne Polskie (Polish Democratic Union; TDP) and collaborated closely with the Polish historian and moderate socialist leader Joachim Lelewel.
Lubliner campaigned against Russian policies in the divided Poland and against antisemitism among conservative circles both in Poland and within the exile community. As a journalist and political organizer, he supported the Polish uprising in Kraków of 1846 and the January uprising of 1863. In his political activities, which shaped his life, Lubliner aimed for three goals: Polish independence, a democratic Polish society, and the unrestricted and unconditional emancipation of Polish Jewry. He formulated these principles in his Des Juifs en Pologne. Examen de leur condition sous le point historique, législatif et politique (On the Jews of Poland: Treatise on Their Condition from a Historical, Legal and Political Point of View; 1839). In this text, Lubliner criticized the social order in Poland, the political influence of the Catholic clergy, and the aristocracy’s unwillingness to reform.
Pointing to the emancipation of the Jews in France and Belgium, Lubliner accused the insurgents of 1830 of having neglected the opportunity to integrate Jews into the independence movement. Like Jan Czyński and Leon Hollaenderski, Lubliner expected an unconditional emancipation of Polish Jews to be followed by acculturation and integration into Polish society. His positions, which he explained in a number of shorter works and articles, were adopted during the failed Kraków uprisings of 1846 and 1862 by Count Aleksander Wielopolski, who incorporated Lubliner’s points into the emancipation legislation for the Kingdom of Poland. After the German Revolution of March 1848, Lubliner acted as the TDP’s envoy to the debates of the German national assembly, where he launched an appeal for an independent Poland.
Artur Eisenbach, Wielka emigracja wobec kwestii żydowskiej, 1832–1849 (Warsaw, 1976); Artur Eisenbach, Emancipation of the Jews of Poland, 1780–1870 (Oxford, 1991); Eligiusz Kozłowski, “Lubliner Ludwik Ozeasz,” in Polski słownik biograficzny, vol. 17, 615–617 (Wrocław, Warsaw, and Kraków, 1972).
Translated from German by Deborah Cohen