Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920
Cambridge University Press, 4/19/2018
EAN 9780521884921, ISBN10: 0521884926
Hardcover, 566 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 3.2 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
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.
Introduction
culture and psychology of the Polish–Jewish relationship
Theoretical footnote
ethnic violence in social science and historiography
Part I. War, Hunger, Revolt
Galicia, 1914–1918
1. Peacetime precursors, Russian invasion, and the first wartime pogroms, 1914–1916
2. West Galicia's Jews, 1917–1918
objects of envy, targets of rage
3. Polish dawn, Jewish midnight
the November 1918 Pogroms in West Galicia and Lwów
4. Reading the November Pogroms
rage, shame, denial, denunciations
Part II. National Independence's After-Tremors
5. Jews in Russian Poland, 1914–1919
German friends, Russian enemies, Polish rivals, Zionist prophets
6. In National Freedom's morning light
disarray in Warsaw, social war in Galicia
Part III. Pogroms' Path Eastward, 1919–1920
7. Soldierly antisemitism, Pinsk massacre, and Morgenthau's mission
pranks, exorcisms, explanations, exculpations
8. On apocalypse's edge
army and Jews during the Polish–Soviet War, 1920
9. In Armageddon's shadow
anti-Jewish violence in the Polish–Soviet War Zone, July-October 1920
10. In Eastern anarchy's orbit
Polish soldiery among Cossacks and anti-Bolshevik Warlords
Conclusion
lords of commerce, lords of communism – print antisemitism, popular anti-Judaism
Bibliography
Index.