FROM the 1600s until 1939 Poland was the global centre of the Jewish people, home to the world’s largest Jewish population and its greatest nexus of religious, cultural and political activity. Yet for many more recent visitors, such as the thousands of Israeli schoolchildren who tour the sites of Nazi death camps each year, the telling of Polish Jews’ history has been overwhelmed by the story of their extermination. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, whose permanent exhibition opens this month, attempts to restore some balance. “We have a moral obligation to honour the way that [Polish Jews] lived for 1,000 years,” says Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, the exhibit’s programme director. “The Holocaust is not the beginning of the story, and it’s not the end.”

Ms Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a Canadian-Jewish curator whose own father emigrated from Poland in 1934, has a sophisticated exposition philosophy that resists grand narratives. She prefers to immerse visitors in the material and let them draw their own conclusions. But politics clearly plays a role in the exhibition’s design, as well. Post-war Poles, repressed under Soviet Communism, did not begin addressing the Holocaust until about a decade ago, and many are angered by accusations that their people played an active role in exterminating the Jews. Presenting the long history of Jewish vitality and coexistence with Poles alongside episodes of violence, and letting visitors make of it what they will, helps to thread that political needle.

This is not to suggest that the museum downplays the Holocaust. Its building is directly opposite the memorial to the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, and the core exhibition devotes a large section to Jewish suffering under the Nazis. But it also explains how and why Jews came to Poland, stayed and prospered. Poland’s Jagiellonian dynasty began extending privileges to Jews in the 13th century, and the constitution of 1573 guaranteed freedom of religion. For Jewish visitors weary of ideological histories focusing on genocide and resistance, these exhibitions may feel like a breath of fresh air. For Polish visitors the emphasis on religious tolerance in Poland’s golden age is something to be proud of.

A new institution with a only small budget, the museum has a tiny Judaica collection. Where artefacts are needed, the designers have copied objects from other collections or from archival photos. An impressive example is the decoratively painted interior of an 18th-century wooden synagogue (pictured), one of thousands that once dotted the Polish countryside. Volunteers using period hand-tools recreated the synagogue’s roof and bimah, the pulpit from which the Torah is read.

The multimedia sections thrust visitors into the confusing immediacy of the periods they depict, resisting the temptation to interpret them in the light of subsequent events. “We don’t want to foreshadow, we don’t want to back-shadow. We don’t want to prophesy,” Ms Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explains. The section devoted to the Polish Second Republic of 1918-39, designed as an urban street, presents the bewildering history of inter-war Jewish struggles between religious, socialist and Zionist parties as if no one had any idea it was all about to be wiped away; after all, they did not.

But the museum seems so reluctant to provide master narratives that, at times, it fails to offer any narrative at all. It uses design metaphors instead of labels, for example, even if this fails when the metaphors are unclear. One room intended to depict an 18th-century Enlightenment salon comes across as more like a hotel lobby. Anti-Semitic material is sometimes presented with dangerously little commentary; accounts of Jews accused of blood libel or desecrating hosts do not always make clear the falsity of the accusations.

Those who wish to take issue with museum exhibitions can always find something to criticise. Konstanty Gebert, a journalist and senior member of Warsaw’s Jewish community, worries that the exhibit devotes more space to the history of Poland’s partitions than to the Jewish religion as such. Israelis may be discomfited to find that the secular Jewish labour movement, the Bund, was more popular than the Zionist movement in the inter-war years.

Other risks come from outside the museum: plans to build two memorials to Polish gentiles who rescued Jews during the Holocaust have drawn protests from intellectuals worried that they distort the full story. The vast majority of gentiles did nothing to help the 2.7m Polish Jews murdered by the Nazis, and the Polish pogrom in Kielce after the war convinced many of the roughly 250,000 who survived the Holocaust that they should leave.

Still, the exhibition’s attempt to balance the story of Polish Jews’ suffering with a celebration of Polish Jewish prosperity is a sign of the times. For the past 25 years the Polish government has been consistently pro-Israel. Its promotion of the new museum’s narrative of religious tolerance during Poland’s golden age is part of an overall attempt to identify the country with core European values. That effort has gained urgency due to the conflict in Ukraine. As the sense of a Russian threat intensifies the need to identify with Europe strengthens. Meanwhile, the country is undergoing an unexpected Jewish revival. Among artists and intellectuals, Jewish identity is seen as hip. Warsaw boasts a Jewish school and half a dozen thriving synagogues, and towns from Lublin to Chmielnik are restoring Jewish architectural artefacts and teaching Israeli folk dance. If it seems increasingly clear that an exhibition on Polish Jewry should not overemphasise its disappearance, that is partly, and unexpectedly, because it seems to be coming back.