Ethnicization of Anti-Bolshevism

Abstract

The chapter analyses with a comparative approach the phenomenon of anti-Jewish violence in 1919–1921, in Hungary and Ukraine. After the October Revolution and the end of the First World War, both countries experienced a phase of political and military chaos, which gravely affected the Jewish population. The documents of the Joint Distribution Committee, with the information collected on the ground by JDC agents, in particular, are very significant in order to understand the implications of this brutal violence, which was the consequence of different historical factors, as well as of local circumstances, but in any case has to be understood in a transnational dimension, as the result of political vacuum emerging on the ruins of the old empires. Anti-Jewish violence of 1919–1921 represented an important step in that process of radicalization, brutalization and ethnicization of politics that effected Europe in the interwar period. Under this perspective, the White Terror in Hungary and the pogroms in Ukraine illustrate two aspects of the same tragedy of anti-Semitic violence. Despite evident distinctions, both cases could be seen as two expressions of the reaction against the spectre of Judeo-Bolshevism, which represented a crucial factor in the context of a “war that never ended”.