The larger methodological question this raises is the relationship between affect and action, between word and deed, between, in our context, antisemitism as ideology or attitude and pogroms. Those essays that fall in our period but outside Russia are sufficiently distinct to suggest some mid-level generalizations that both contrast with and illuminate the Russian situation. Let us begin with four essays treating anti-Jewish violence in Galicia, Moravia, and Croatia, all parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, plus Romania. In each case they occurred on a smaller scale in their numbers and destructiveness, compared to events in the Russian Pale in the same prewar decades.[211] This was due in part to a more consistent opposition to anti-Jewish violence on the part of both local and central Habsburg authorities. The four studies deal predominantly with disorders among peasants, due perhaps to the relative absence of pogroms in the Empire’s large cities (outside the Polish provinces), where the police exercised a firmer hold on public order. In two cases, the conflicts were not binary, affecting only Jews and the native nationalities, but involved German and/or Hungarian policies and languages. In Moravia and Croatia violence was disproportionately directed at Jews, perceived as partisans or even as agents of the hated nationalities. In Galicia and Romania, the violence was precipitated by a mixture of resentment of Jewish economic exploitation and longstanding antisemitism, reinforced by the proactive role of Catholic clergymen. All these essays present a mixture of attitudinal antisemitism and resentments at the position of Jews in social and political structures during the birthing of new nationalisms. In Moravia, for instance, Jews voted with the German parties which defended Jewish rights, earning the resentment of Czech nationalists.
Three essays on pogroms in the Russian Northwest find that the great resentment of Russian and/or Polish domination ameliorated Lithuanian and Belorussian relations with Jews in their region.[212] These borderlands of both the Empire and the Pale, if compared to the greater violence of the southern and southwestern Pale, are distinguished by the relative absence of pogroms. In contrast to the Habsburg lands, where Jews were perceived as allied with the resented German or Hungarian overlords, here Jews were seen as allies against Russian and Polish domination. The article by Staliūnas and Sirutavičius explains the outburst of anti-Jewish violence during the Nazi occupation as wholly due neither to Nazi influence nor to a native antisemitism. Lithuanians lived through the Russian imperial and interwar eras in relatively peaceful coexistence with Jews, given the size of the Jewish population and the antisemitism of neighboring regions. It was mostly the trauma of Soviet occupation in 1939 and the divergence of political leanings between Lithuanians and Jews that precipitated mass anti-Jewish violence aimed at Communism considered as a Jewish enterprise.
Klaus Richter’s detailed study of a small pogrom in eastern Lithuania in 1905 does not contradict those findings, but uncovers nuances that shed light on the nature of pogroms far beyond Lithuania. In exploring the causes of fires in the shtetl of Duseto that precipitated a pogrom after destroying several buildings owned by local peasants, Richter leaves open the possibility that Jews could have started them, as the peasants insisted, despite the findings of an official investigation that exonerated them. He does not contend that Jews started the fire, only that Jewish commercial competitors were capable of such tactics against rival peasant merchants, suggesting that the kind of aggressive self-assertion described in Petrovsky’s shtetl study was probably still alive in shtetl’s of the 1905 era. The willingness of Jews in remote Duseto to assert and defend themselves is related to a second suggestive observation by the author, namely that such behavior surprised the police, who
against the backdrop of the large scale pogrom in Kishinev, the police in Lithuania grew extremely cautious, as large crowds of Lithuanian Jews gathered to mourn their Bessarabian brethren. This time, the officials feared the Jews more than the Lithuanian peasants… The police superintendent (pristav) of Vilnius reported on the high degree of determination among Jews to strike back against pogromists beyond the limits of their own shtetls. On May 25, 1903, for instance, he encountered a crowd of more than five hundred Jews who wanted to make their way to nearby Vileyka… where allegedly there had been rumors of an impending pogrom. The superintendent dispersed the crowd with the aid of mounted policemen. With such measures, the police reinforced the conviction among peasants that the tacit rules of anti-Jewish riots excluded the ability of Jewish resistance.
Richter sees Jewish self-defense as breaking an unwritten code about how pogroms were supposed to work, thereby angering the pogromists and providing them an “alibi for murder”.[213] Quoting a German study, he suggests that Jewish resistance broke with the “historic pattern of anti-Jewish violence [that] demanded submission, huddling in houses, a passive acceptance of the script of a ritual drama”.[214] The notion of pogroms as the enactment of a social ritual with its own rules has been mentioned by others, but has yet to receive the attention that it would seem to deserve.[215]
These diverse essays on anti-Jewish violence explore important new avenues of inquiry, seconding and reinforcing John Klier’s conception of pogroms as a prism through which to examine Jewish-gentile relations in all their complexity. The result is a view of pogroms that makes them part as much of Russian (Czech, Romanian, Galician, etc.) history as of Jewish history. Antisemitism was the common coin of the violence, to be sure, but it took many forms, combining with and shaping itself to diverse other grievances and locales and performing varying functions for the non-Jewish populations involved. Like Klier’s study, the essays in the pogrom collections show Jewish-gentile relations to have been an interactive process. Klier’s embattled Jewish elites interacted with Russia’s highest governing authorities, their principal opponents. In Austria-Hungary Jews had the protection of the Habsburg authorities to a degree not possible in Russia. However, pursuing their own interests during a period of growing nationalist exclusionism, they also encountered violent opposition, though more sporadically and on a smaller scale than occurred in Russia.
All this argues against efforts to find a single definition of the causes and meaning of pogroms. At the same time, we are not left with the prospect of treating every pogrom as a unique event. These essays suggest instead that anti-Jewish violence can be most accurately understood in specific historical contexts, be they Klier’s world of relations between government policy, personnel, and Jewish leadership, or the clash of East European new nationalisms with native Jewish populations, or Frankel’s diachronic study of Russian-Jewish nationalist and socialist politics coming to birth in a failing empire beset by revolutionary oppositions. All three of these contexts were present in microcosm in Kiev, where Jewish leaders interacted with the city’s political and business elite, where Jews became political scapegoats for a rising nationalist movement, and where they responded with new political movements of their own, both moderate and radical.
The studies of Meir, Hillis, and Petrovsky highlight other historical aspects of anti-Jewish violence, other differences that time and place have made in its quality and effect. Whether Kiev’s Jews represented some kind of Jewish metropolis, their history of both success and trauma was clearly the product of the specific restrictions and opportunities that their unique position in Kiev presented them. By contrast, Petrovsky’s study of the smaller towns and settlements in Kiev’s hinterland suggests that the violence Jews suffered