Antisemitism and Pogroms

Abstract

Antisemitism and Pogroms Anna Cichopek-Gajraj (bio) In the last decade, there has been an outpouring of important his-torical research on anti-Jewish violence, in general, and pogroms in Eastern Europe, in particular. Elissa Bemporad, Tim Buchen, David Engel, William W. Hagen, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Artur Markowski, Daniel L. Unowsky, Jeffrey Veidlinger, and Steven J. Zipperstein, among others, have redefined the field. While appreciating the significance of the Baronian antilachrymose turn in Jewish historiography, they have seriously considered the outsized impact that mob violence has had on Jewish lives in the modern period. Questions about the relationship between antisemitism and violence often framed their analyses, offering critical new insights. This historiographical violent turn has little representation in Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism, an otherwise brilliant volume. The chapter on pogroms by Jeffrey Kopstein—a renowned political scientist and coauthor of the influential Intimate Violence, on the 1941 pogroms in the Polish borderlands—focuses on political theory while leaving little room for the rich findings of the aforementioned scholarship. This short essay attempts to fill that gap. Kopstein is certainly right that "scholars disagree about the necessary and sufficient criteria for the term [pogrom]'s proper application."1 Historians, for example, hardly agree on its definition or even its utility as a category of historical analysis. Artur Markowski, in his important study of the 1906 pogrom in Białystok, argued that arriving at an all-encompassing definition is not only impossible but ultimately useless since every pogrom has varied mechanisms, causes, and consequences. He thus broadly defined it as "an act of collective violence, associated with an attack against Jews."2 David Engel also famously challenged the usefulness of the concept by asking: "What exactly is gained by grouping together under a single rubric" disparate occurrences of anti-Jewish violence? Do they "really have anything in common significant enough to warrant placing all of them under a single analytical heading?"3 Indeed, the term is burdened with longue durée paradigms and misconceptions such as its exclusive association with Russian or Eastern European history, assumptions of "backwardness" of the perpetrators, the involvement of the powers that be (conspiracy or provocation), and finally, the prominent role of [End Page 174] antisemitism as its major explanatory tool. Yet scholars, including Kopstein and myself, insist on using it to describe and explain anti-Jewish violence. Perhaps we do so out of habit, or perhaps because no other term allows the placement of Jewish ethnicity at the center of analysis. Donald L. Horowitz defined a pogrom as "a subcategory of the ethnic riot," that he understood as "an intense, sudden, though not necessarily wholly unplanned, lethal attack by civilian members of one ethnic group on civilian members of another ethnic group, the victims chosen because of their group membership."4 What makes the pogrom a useful analytical category is thus its ethnic coding, or as Rogers Brubaker and David D. Laitin explained, "ethnic difference [that] is integral rather than incidental to violence."5 The presumed modernity of ethnic categories does not make the concept unusable for other historical periods.6 Kopstein's analysis of violence in Alexandria (38 CE) and Valencia (1391) best illustrates how "contemporary scholars use 'pogrom' to describe anti-Jewish riots and 'exclusionary violence' in virtually every era of Jewish history from antiquity to the present."7 Still, historians of modern Eastern European Jewry view the eighty years of recurring pogroms in the region as a specifically modern urban phenomenon. Eugene M. Avrutin and Elissa Bemporad, in their introduction to a documentary history of pogroms in Eastern Europe, defined them as "mob attacks or deadly ethnic riots that were usually, but not always, carried out in urban settings."8 Engel underscored the modernity of pogroms by analyzing the role of states as major players in what he called "a particular interval [1860s–1940s] in the long-term historical evolution of public attitudes toward the modern state and its role in society."9 He argued that pogroms occurred when "a higher-ranking ethnic or religious group" claimed collective injury while lacking confidence "in the adequacy of the impersonal rule of law to deliver true justice."10 In other words...