Motta, Giuseppe The Great War against Eastern European Jewry, 1914–1920 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 581 war did not have sufficiently deep roots to sustain Russia through the turmoil of revolutions and a civil war that drove wedges deep into Russian society. The Soviet regime largely ignored the direct experience of the First World War, subsuming it into the October Revolution, and failing to construct memorials to the soldiers who had died fighting for Russia. As Stockdale suggests, the new regime used some of the generic qualities identified during the war — love of the motherland and the like — in its own construction of a Soviet identity but the war itself, however, remained as a ghostly presence hidden behind Bolshevik ideas of patriotism and citizenship. School of History Peter Waldron University of East Anglia Motta, Giuseppe. The Great War against Eastern European Jewry, 1914–1920. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2017. 270 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. £61.99. Giuseppe Motta’s book examines the dynamics and consequences of violence inflicted on the Jews of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires during and after the Great War. Based largely on secondary sources and the documents of the Joint Distribution Committee, it focuses on the pitiful situation of Russian and Polish Jews in wartime and during the revolutionary turmoil, which lasted until the early 1920s. Throughout this turbulent period, Jewish communities were targeted by the belligerent armies and insurgent bands, in part due to traditional religious and socio-economic antagonisms, but also on account of an alleged worldwide ‘Judeo-communist’ conspiracy. As a result, robberies, expulsions and pogroms claimed thousands of victims, turning tens of thousands of Jews into refugees and unwanted migrants. The book’s strengths lie in its rich historiographic foundation and abundance in factual details. Well-written and free of academic jargon, it should inspire interest not only amongst scholars, but also general readers. The author methodically describes the evolution of anti-Jewish prejudices from the nineteenth century to the deportations by the Russian army in World War One, when the existing negative stereotypes of Jews were reinforced by a ‘spyfever ’, which permeated all war-zones. Motta also shows that in the wake of the state-collapse in Russia and Austro-Hungary in 1917–18, anti-Jewish violence became much more widespread and extreme, often acquiring the form of punitive expeditions (p. 81). Nor did the end of the Russian civil wars bring relief to the beleaguered Jews, as various insurgencies continued to claim their victims (p. 167). SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 582 The situation of Russian and Ukrainian Jews in 1914–20 has been wellcharted , but the book’s most original elements are its detailed descriptions of the activities of the American Joint Distribution Committee and the Russian Jewish Aid Society to the Victims of War (EVOPO), which attempted to alleviate the plight of Jews by sending funds and acting through diplomatic channels (pp. 41, 57), and the travails of Jewish refugees in the Far East. TheGreatWarconstitutesagoodoverviewofoneofthemosttragicperiodsin Jewish history, but its main flaw is its lack of any sort of conceptual framework (possibly because its main target is a general audience). Consequently, all the chapterstelltheirownparticularstory,whichcompelsthereadertosurmisethe correlations between them and the author’s principal objectives. Accordingly, without some form of analytical apparatus, the book’s title appears misleading, for its geographic scope in fact covers the Pale of Settlement within the Russian Empire and Galicia and Bukovina within Austro-Hungary. The reader is thus left to guess, while other important territories of East European Jewry such as Hungary, Romania or western Poland are not covered. Also, since World War One witnessed the large-scale persecution of non-Jewish ethno-cultural or national groups — such as the Germans in Russia, the Rusyns in AustroHungary and the Armenians in Turkey — the book would have benefited from placing the plight of Jews in a broader historical context, briefly highlighting the commonalities and differences of these cases. Numerous inconsistencies in name-and-locality spelling demonstrate the difficulties of dealing with regions with frequently changing borders. The author disregards any convention (perhaps an explanation or a chart of alternative names would have been helpful), using Polish, Russian, English and Ukrainian spellings randomly — for example, Chernihiv in Ukrainian, but Ekaterinoslav in Russian, although both places are located...