Sewers and Songs: On Jewish Filtration and the Collapse of European Memory

What remains of a city when it can no longer filter difference?

Every year in Warsaw, the Festival of Jewish Culture — named after Isaac Bashevis Singer — brings music, poetry, and memory back to the city. And every year, the presence of that memory must be protected by a police perimeter.

Police do not stand idly. They are there to physically protect the audience and performers from direct attacks — increasingly carried out by pro-Palestinian groups.
In recent editions of the festival, activists stormed concert halls and doused Jewish musicians with red paint.

These are not political interventions. They are attempts at symbolic annihilation — assaults on visibility, artistic expression, and Jewish presence itself. Across Europe, Jewish music is no longer safe in public.

Meanwhile, far-right Polish politicians like MEP Grzegorz Braun issue threats and perform grotesque acts of symbolic violence. In one notorious episode, Braun attempted to extinguish a Hanukkah menorah with a fire extinguisher — inside the Polish Parliament. In 2006, Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich was physically assaulted on a street in Warsaw.

But the story of Jewish Warsaw runs deeper than protests, tweets, or fire extinguishers. It runs — literally — beneath the surface, through a forgotten infrastructure built not with slogans, but with pipes.

I. Jewish Filtration and the Modernization of Warsaw

Few today remember that Warsaw’s modern sewage system — the city’s circulatory and excretory organ — was designed by British engineer William Lindley but implemented by Jewish engineers, contractors, and laborers.

At the time, antisemitic publications accused Jews of “taking over the city” by spreading canalization. A 19th-century pamphlet titled The Sewerage of Warsaw as a Tool of Judaism and Charlatanry framed the introduction of sanitation as part of a Zionist conspiracy — as if draining excrement posed a threat to civilization.

And yet it was this so-called “Jewish urbanism” that brought hygiene, dignity, and modernity to a city that, for centuries, had neither toilets nor drainage.
During the reign of King Stanisław August Poniatowski, a literal mountain of excrement stood near the Royal Castle.

Even today, Warsaw remains partially unfiltered. Septic trucks still operate across entire districts. Eighty years after the war, the capital of Poland still breathes through clogged lungs.

The absence of Jewish filtration has consequences.

II. From Sewage to Salvation: The Uprising’s Hidden Infrastructure

During the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the underground sewer system — once mocked as “Jewish engineering” — became the final infrastructure of Polish resistance.
As Nazi forces leveled the city above, thousands of fighters and civilians moved, coordinated, and escaped through the very tunnels once ridiculed by antisemites.

These were not just pipes. They were dark, narrow, fetid — but they formed a topology of survival. Built, in part, by the very people the city would later erase from memory.

This is not a metaphor. It is historical irony: the persecuted built the paths that saved the persecutors.

III. Possest Does Not Function Without Difference

Jewish filtration. Jewish music. Jewish topologies.

These were not cultural ornaments. They were infrastructures — forms of organizing intensity, sound, space, and life.

In the philosophical model of Possest, filtration does not work without difference. And difference does not exist without furrows.

Jewish presence was not symbolic. It was structural.

IV. Europe Cannot Digest Its Own History

Jews brought swing music to Poland. Jews built Warsaw’s sewer systems.
Jews laid the pipes — and kept the city dancing. And when the city choked on smoke and blood, it was Jewish-engineered tunnels that kept it breathing.

Today, the pipes rust. The concerts — like the sewers — must be protected.
Europe chants slogans — but does not clean its pipes.

It praises diversity — but fears filtration. It abolishes the Jewish furrow — and wonders why the swamp returns.

A city without filtration becomes a swamp.
And a Europe without Jews does not purify — it putrefies.

Sources:

• The Sewerage of Warsaw as a Tool of Judaism and Charlatanry, anonymous pamphlet, late 19th century (archival PDF available).
• Documentation of public threats and symbolic violence by MP Grzegorz Braun (Sejm Hanukkah incident, 2023).
• National press coverage of physical assault on Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Warsaw, 2006.

Originally published on The Times of Israel blog — Y. Schimmelpfennig’s Chronicle of Filtered Cities

By Y. Schimmelpfennig