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This chapter discusses anti-Jewish violence in twentieth-century Poland. Historical research has tended to focus on descriptions of individual riots, such as the Przytyk pogrom of March 9, 1936 and the Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946, or on discussion of a particular historical period. There has been no attempt to explore the similarities and differences between the mechanisms of and reactions to anti-Jewish riots. The chapter looks at the link between the myth of the Jew as the ‘Threatening Other’ and eruptions of anti-Jewish excesses between 1918 and 1939 and between 1945 and 1947, concentrating on the extent to which this myth influenced the initiation and evaluation of anti-Jewish violence in these two distinctive historical periods. The term ‘violence’ refers to the following types of actions: inflicting damage on Jewish properties, including private homes, shops, institutions, and synagogues; slander; physical harassment; assaults; and murder. The chapter also outlines the socio-historical context in which the anti-Jewish violent disturbances and riots occurred in both periods.

This chapter compares Jewish responses to the anti-Jewish violence of the early twentieth century to postwar efforts by survivors to document the Holocaust. Looking at victim testimony collection projects that emerged in the wake of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, World War I, the Ukrainian pogroms of 1917-1921, and the Holocaust itself (as exemplified by Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes archives in the Warsaw ghetto), it argues that the historical commissions and documentation centers perpetuated a unique genre of popular history writing—khurbn-forshung (destruction research)—that eastern European Jews had already developed decades before World War II. These precursors shared the goals of communal self-defense and legal, material, and moral redress and saw documenting atrocities as a way to mourn and commemorate the dead. Although the research techniques developed by earlier documenters bear direct similarities to those used later and provide a frame of reference, local conditions in the countries where survivors found themselves after the war played an equally important role.

This chapter addresses the issue of the historicity of the Hebrew First Crusade narratives. It has previously been noted that earlier generations of researchers hardly reflected on the historicity of the 1096 Hebrew narratives, since they assumed its facticity. The chapter examines two general issues, which are the date of composition of the narratives and the goals of the narrators. It then uses the technique of citing multiple testimonies as examples and compares them carefully. This is followed by a discussion on the distinction between the portrayal of the Christian majority and the depiction of the Jewish minority. The chapter includes sections on the crusade and the crusaders, the Jewish responses to the persecution by crusading bands in western Germany, and the portrayal of anti-Jewish violence.

From the last decades of the nineteenth century through the first decade of the twentieth century, Jewish communities in the Russian and Habsburg Empires experienced different cycles of pogroms, with waves of anti-Jewish violence in 1881–1884, in 1898, and in 1903–1906. World War I and the Russian Civil War marked a new phase in pogrom violence. Unlike previous pogroms, which were largely spontaneous attacks, the violence during this period emerged under the auspices of organized military activity and turned into full-blown military actions. During the interwar period, instances of collective violence targeting Jews persisted in independent Poland, in particular after 1935, and occasionally took place in Romania. The rise of aggressive anti-Jewish policies by growing right-wing organizations and publications, and the worldwide economic crisis of the 1930s, served as fertile ground for the violence. Anti-Jewish violence is complicated, as the perpetrators’ motivations vary based on time and place, as do the victims’ and onlookers responses. The violence is often an intimate affair that revolves around the experiences and emotions of the exploited and the marginal—the men, women, and children caught up in the maelstrom of physical violence and suffering. Above all, pogroms broke out in borderland regions, in the midst of political and economic disarray, in places where ethnicity played a formative role in ordering and dividing diverse communities. Pogrom violence often served as a convenient instrument to punish and terrorize Jewish communities, fulfilling a function similar to what lynching did to Black Americans.

This chapter examines the Kielce pogrom. On July 4, 1946, the most horrifying outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in post-war Poland took place in Kielce. On that day, ordinary citizens of this central Polish town, together with soldiers and militiamen, murdered forty Polish Jews and injured more than a hundred. This was not an isolated act of anti-Jewish violence in this early post-war period, but one of many such events which took place between 1945 and 1947. Nevertheless, it was striking because of its dimensions, because of the brutality with which it was accompanied, and because of the participation of local forces representing the new communist authority. The Kielce pogrom was the most powerful indicator that Jews were not to be welcomed to restore their lives among the ethnic Polish population. The chapter then assesses the extent to which anti-Jewish attitudes were prevalent among Polish society during and after the Kielce pogrom.

As discussed in this chapter, Jewish political activists worked during World War I to centralize Jewish communal organizations and establish local and Russia-wide self-government. In the midst of war, widespread anti-Jewish violence, and a refugee crisis, Jewish activists (like those of other nationalities, including Russians) seized the opportunity to build institutions that might actualize their national autonomy. The war created the need for relief on a massive scale, and the organization of such relief dramatically expanded the scope of activities undertaken by Jewish communal organizations. Furthermore, the war provided both the governmental leeway and urgent crisis necessary to centralize Jewish communal organizations under a single body in St. Petersburg, controlled by a mix of the Jewish financial elite and professional activists. Thus this chapter traces how the war led to a form of proto-autonomism that laid the foundation for genuine Jewish political autonomy.

This chapter looks at the west European Jewish response to antisemitism. Most observers in Europe and abroad assumed that the defeat of Nazism would bring an end to anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence. Although governments expressly banned overt antisemitic propaganda, neo-fascist groups continued to demonstrate on the streets of the major cities of western Europe, scrawl graffiti on walls, and disseminate tracts. Influenced by both Jewish resistance efforts during the Holocaust and later by the military triumphs of the Yishuv and then of the new Jewish state, French activists in particular insisted upon the need for a more aggressive and assertive response in the form of new defensive political organizations. Tensions between Jews and their fellow citizens in post-war western Europe were not always overt, however. The tensions between Jewry and the larger society could be seen in such issues as the treatment of Jewish deportees and the memorialization of Holocaust victims.

This chapter explores the broad topics and genres of Polish Jewish historiography addressed by historians in the 1920s and 1930s. It presents the most important topics repeated in academic and popular contexts: Polish–Jewish relations in the past, with particular attention to the Jewish contribution to the country's economic prosperity and to Poland's struggle for independence, and the internal life of individual Jewish communities, their leaders, and their institutions. When writing about Polish–Jewish relations in previous centuries, and particularly in their accounts of conflict and coexistence, Jewish historians in interwar Poland paid close attention to mutual cultural influences between Jews and non-Jews, attempting to account for instances of friction and anti-Jewish violence. The chapter focuses on the ways in which Jewish historians presented Polish Jewry as a social, cultural, and political entity closely linked with the history of Poland. It assesses how Polish Jewish historical writing took on a direct political meaning as a response to the treatment of these subjects by contemporaneous Polish historiography.

This chapter uses an intersectional approach to analyse the practices and experiences of and reactions to anti-Jewish violence in Poland and Hungary from 1918 to 1922. It explores how people articulated the violence against Jews and shows that gender, age, political, and class hierarchies played important roles in people's interpretations of it and how it represented a break from 'normal times' or, more specifically, from established norms about who violence should touch and how it could be administered. The chapter then examines how Jewish communities, with the assistance of groups like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), sought to reconstruct Jewish life and shore it up against current and future threats, how the hierarchies shaped their strategies of self-defence, and how the relief organizations restored the hierarchies. It focuses primarily on the experiences of physical violence in the large Jewish communities of Lwów, Vilna, and Warsaw in Poland and Budapest in Hungary. While Poland and Hungary differed in significant ways, their Jewish communities' experiences and interpretations of violence shared common themes. Furthermore, the JDC's vision for Jewish communities had important gendered and classed components that shaped its relief and reconstructive work across all of eastern Europe.

This chapter addresses the position of Jews in Lithuania between the two world wars. Although the history of inter-war Lithuania reveals many political failures, it is clear that, even during the authoritarian period, civil society continued to develop. Illiteracy was largely eradicated and impressive advances were made in social and intellectual life. In addition, land reform created a prosperous farming community whose products made up the bulk of the country's exports. The first years of Lithuanian independence were marked by a far-reaching experiment in Jewish autonomy. The experiment attracted wide attention across the Jewish world and was taken as a model by some Jewish politicians in Poland. Jewish autonomy also seemed to be in the interests of Lithuanians. The bulk of the Lithuanian lands remained largely agricultural until the First World War. Relations between Jews, who were the principal intermediaries between the town and manor and the countryside, and the mainly peasant Lithuanians took the form of a hostile symbiosis. This relationship was largely peaceful, and anti-Jewish violence was rare, although, as elsewhere, the relationship was marked by mutual contempt.

This chapter presents three documents describing the anti-Jewish violence in Lida and in Vilna in April 1919. The documents on Lida come from the collection of the supreme command of the Polish army in the holdings of the Tsentr khraneniia istoriko-dokumentalnykh kollektsii (Moscow Centre for the Preservation of Historical and Document Collections). Lida was a small town about 60 miles south of Vilna, with which it was linked by rail. In 1919, its population was about 5,500, of whom the majority were Jews (67.7 per cent according to the census of 1897). Disputes arose almost immediately after the town was recaptured by Polish forces in April 1919, on the scale and reasons for the anti-Jewish violence which followed the establishment of Polish control. On 18 April 1919, the report of the Polish central headquarters covering the military developments in Lida claimed that ‘the Jewish population assisted the Bolsheviks by shooting Polish troops’.

During the Great War, the Russian army carried out atrocities against thousands of Jewish civilians in front zones, both within the Russian Empire and in Russian-occupied Galicia. Such pogroms were unprecedented in the history of the Russian Empire. While earlier waves of pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 1880s and early 1900s had been instigated by local populations and not the Russian government, during the war, the Russian military as an institution carried out the violence. The army systematically engaged in plunder, rape, and murder of Jewish civilians in front zones. They justified their actions as protective measures against so-called enemy aliens. This chapter examines sources that reveal why and how Russian Jews became victims of the very armed forces that were supposedly fighting on behalf of their own country. It locates the causes of anti-Jewish violence in three contexts: (a) a preexisting belief among military elites that Jews collectively constituted an unpatriotic and unreliable population, (b) accusations from the very top of the military’s chain of command regarding “Jewish espionage,” and (c) the retreat of the Russian army in spring and summer 1915, accompanied by brutal violence that targeted Jews and their property.

This chapter reviews the book Enemies for a Day: Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuania under the Tsars (2015), by Darius Staliūnas. In Enemies for a Day, Staliūnas explores the ethno-religious tensions between Jews and Lithuanians during the long nineteenth century. The book deals with issues of antisemitism and acts of violence committed against Jews in the provinces of Vilna, Kovno, and Suwalki, the northwestern regions of the Russian Empire in which Lithuanians constituted the majority. It provides a detailed analysis of blood libels that occurred in the region during the period and compares anti-Jewish violence in the Lithuanian provinces with the situation in the Belarusian provinces and in Eastern Galicia (of the Habsburg Empire) and with Lithuanian-Polish conflicts regarding the language of supplementary services such as sermons and processions in the churches.

This chapter assesses the wave of pogroms of 1903–06. The pogrom in Siedlce, which took place in September of 1906, was the last outbreak of the wave of violence which began in Kishinev in April of 1903. The main railway line from Warsaw to Terespol and on to Moscow ran through the town and was responsible for its expansion in the last part of the nineteenth century. It also accounted both for its strategic importance and for the presence there of a significant socialist movement. These factors explain the role of the Russian army, and in particular the Libau regiment, as well as the Monarchist League in organizing the pogrom. Estimates of Jewish casualties range from twenty-three dead to 100 dead and 300 wounded. The chapter highlights an account written in Russian by Józef Bekker, who was a well-known Yiddish journalist. Bekker's account illustrates many aspects of the problems raised by the wave of pogroms of 1903–06, in particular the vexed question of the degree to which this was orchestrated centrally and the role of the army and local tsarist officials in initiating anti-Jewish violence.

This chapter contains a number of book review essays that come under the umbrella of history, social science, and biography. Topics covered include the role of Jews in sports segregation in the U.S. and the career of Jewish historian Shmuel Ettinger. One biographical books examined here focuses on the life and career of Jewish historian Elias Bickerman. Another book consists of three thematic parts that suggest a broader understanding of Jewish urban life. Other topics covered by these books reviewed here include the history of anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe, violence in the early Soviet period in the Crimea, and the study of women and gender in Jewish history. The final book reviewed focuses on anti-Jewish violence in Russia.