Poland's president Andrzej Duda has threatened to strip an esteemed Polish-American scholar of a state honor in punishment for his work that exposes uncomfortable historical episodes of Polish anti-Semitism.

The office of the president of Poland requested the re-evaluation of the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit medal , which was given in 1996 to Prof. Jan Gross who wrote the 2001 book “Neighbors” about a 1941 pogrom perpetrated against Jews by their non-Jewish countrymen in the town of Jedwabne.

“Due to numerous petitions for the withdrawal of a medal granted to Jan Tomasz Gross, the President’s Office has asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as the legal applicant, to take a position on the matter,’’ a statement said.

An historian at Princeton University, Gross left the country in 1969 after an ant-Semitic purge on dissidents. . He said in an Op-Ed published last year by Germany’s Die Welt newspaper that Poles killed more Jews than Germans during WWII.

The move against Gross is part of a broader effort by Poland's new conservative ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), to focus on honorable episodes in Polish history and fight any messages that the new leaders feel are harmful to the country's image.

In an open letter, several Polish historians said stripping Gross of the award would represent a threat against "freedom of scholarly research" and that Gross deserves only "gratitude and respect" for sparking needed debates about the past. The letter was signed by historians, Holocaust experts and others based at universities in Poland and abroad.

Duda, leader of PiS, won Polish presidential elections last year. During the electoral campaign, Duda criticized his rival, former president, Bronislaw Komorowski, for apologizing for the Jedwabne massacre. Duda called Komorowski’s apologies an “attempt to destroy Poland’s good name.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called on the Polish government "to stop the harassment" of Gross and said the move against him "appears to be a politically motivated attempt to intimidate and threaten all those who expose the history of anti-Semitism in Poland."

In the meantime, the Polish government is also preparing a bill which could see five-year prison sentences for anyone found guilty of using the expression "Polish death camp" to refer to Auschwitz or other extermination sites that Nazi Germany operated in German-occupied Poland.

The expression, which has been used from time to time by foreign journalists and politicians, always infuriates Poles.