The first scholarly account of massive and fateful pogrom waves, interpreted through the lens of folk culture and social psychology.

Widespread anti-Jewish pogroms accompanied the rebirth of Polish statehood out of World War I and Polish–Soviet War. William W. Hagen offers the pogroms' first scholarly account, revealing how they served as brutal stagings by ordinary people of scenarios dramatizing popular anti-Jewish fears and resentments. While scholarship on modern anti-Semitism has stressed its ideological inspiration ('print anti-Semitism'), this study shows that anti-Jewish violence by perpetrators among civilians and soldiers expressed magic-infused anxieties and longings for redemption from present threats and suffering ('folk anti-Semitism'). Illustrated with contemporary photographs and constructed from extensive, newly discovered archival sources from three continents, this is an innovative work in east European history. Using extensive first-person testimonies, it reveals gaps - but also correspondences - between popular attitudes and those of the political elite. The pogroms raged against the conscious will of new Poland's governors whilst Christians high and low sometimes sought, even successfully, to block them.

Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.

Anti-Semitism, as it has existed historically in Europe, is generally thought of as having been a phenomenon of the political right. To the extent that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century leftist movements have been found to manifest anti-Semitism, their involvement has often been suggested to be a mere fleeting and insignificant phenomenon. As such, this study seeks to examine more fully the role that the historic European left has played in developing and espousing anti-Semitic views. The authors draw upon a range of primary and secondary sources, including the analysis of left- and right-wing newspaper reportage, to trace the relationship between the political left and anti-Semitism in France, Germany, and Great Britain from the French Revolution to World War II, ultimately concluding that the relationship between the left and anti-Semitism has been much more profound than previously believed.

"This book employs archival research and statistical analysis on an original dataset of a summer 1941 wave of anti-Jewish pogroms to show that pogroms occurred not where antisemitism was strongest, but where local Jews challenged local non-Jews' dreams of national dominance"--

Imperial Odessa: Peoples, Spaces, Identities is a book about a cosmopolitan city written by a cosmopolitan scholar with a literary flair. Evrydiki Sifneos conceives Odessa as more of a fin-de siècle east Mediterranean port-metropolis than as a provincial port-city of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century due to two of its principal characteristics: its function as a hub of international trade and travel, and the multi-ethnic character of its inhabitants. The book unfolds around two interpenetrating axes. The first one introduces a new "peripatetic" approach that discovers the space of the city; and the other, the one that has given it its dynamic, is the socio-economic transformations that germinated within the political changes.

This volume focuses on the consequences that the First World War had on the Jews living in the notorious Pale of Settlement within the frontiers of the Tsarist Empire. The research is entirely based on a solid documentary study, consisting of the documents of the Joint Distribution Committee and references to many historiographic works. Rather than dealing with the military aspects of war, the book focuses on the political consequences, and in particular on the economic and social changes that the conflict generated. The Jewish communities experienced a personal tragedy within the general tragedy of war, as they were particularly “damaged”, not only by violence and persecutions – suffering from the pogroms of Cossacks and local populations – but also by the evacuations and expulsions ordered by the military. It meant that a great part of the Jewish population was forced to leave their residence and, in many cases, compelled to wander for several years or even to emigrate. In addition to this, after the outbreak of World War I, the Russian Jews became “hostile elements” who were viewed as potential spies and traitors, and were subsequently targeted by a new wave of discriminatory measures that were based on two myths of contemporary antisemitism: the “stab in the back” and the conspiracy of Jewish Bolshevism. From this perspective, what happened during the Great War could be seen as an anticipation of the tragedy that affected Eastern European Jewry in the following decades.

Thoroughly researched, this study highlights the historical scholarship that is one of the lasting legacies of interwar Polish Jewry and analyses its political and social context. As Jewish citizens struggled to assert their place in a newly independent Poland, a dedicated group of Jewish scholars fascinated by history devoted themselves to creating a sense of Polish Jewish belonging while also fighting for their rights as an ethnic minority. The political climate made it hard for these men and women to pursue an academic career; instead they had to continue their efforts to create and disseminate Polish Jewish history by teaching outside the university and publishing in scholarly and popular journals. By introducing the Jewish public to a pantheon of historical heroes to celebrate and anniversaries to commemorate, they sought to forge a community aware of its past, its cultural heritage, and its achievements---though no less important were their efforts to counter the increased hostility towards Jews in the public discourse of the day. In highlighting the role of public intellectuals and the social role of scholars and historical scholarship, this study adds a new dimension to the understanding of the Polish Jewish world in the interwar period.

The Jews of Pinsk is the most detailed and comprehensive history of a single Jewish community in any language. This second portion of this study focuses on Pinsk's turbulent final sixty years, showing the reality of life in this important, and in many ways representative, Eastern European Jewish community. From the 1905 Russian revolution through World War One and the long prologue to the Holocaust, the sweep of world history and the fate of this dynamic center of Jewish life were intertwined. Pinsk's role in the bloody aftermath of World War One is still the subject of scholarly debates: the murder of 35 Jewish men from Pinsk, many from its educated elite, provoked the American and British leaders to send emissaries to Pinsk. Shohet argues that the executions were a deliberate ploy by the Polish military and government to intimidate the Jewish population of the new Poland. Despite an increasingly hostile Polish state, Pinsk's Jews managed to maintain their community through the 1920s and 30s—until World War Two brought a grim Soviet interregnum succeeded by the entry of the Nazis on July 4th, 1941. For the first volume of this two-volume collection, see The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1880 at www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=1442.

This book traces the hardening of Christian attitudes to Jews, Judiasm and their history during the second half of the Middle Ages.