In Search of a “Social Science of the Holocaust”

In 2012, Charles King made a convincing case for the integration of Holocaust studies and the political science of violence to create cross-fertilization between these two burgeoning, but relatively separate, fields of study.¹ Evgeny Finkel’s newly published book demonstrates the potentially rich benefits that can come from this integration, making a significant contribution to the “social scientific turn” in Holocaust studies. Methodologically, Finkel chose to focus on “meso-level research” (political science–speak for the space between national-level and individual-level factors), which he identified as one of the least developed types of analysis in studies of mass violence.² Ordinary Jews traces the choices of Jews in the ghettos of Kraków, Białystok, and Minsk, while arranging these choices around a set of six carefully defined categories of behavior: cooperation, collaboration, cooption, compliance, evasion, and resistance. A number of old and new ideas sprout from Finkel’s impressive effort.

Least surprising for readers familiar with the Holocaust will be that the strategies chosen by most Jews in these ghettos fall into the categories of either coping or evasion, while very few detainees chose compliance and resistance. Yet, the prewar trajectories that catapulted Jewish detainees into these strategies of survival form the most interesting findings of Ordinary Jews. Finkel compellingly argues that the choices of Jews were rooted in prewar political realities, as crystallized in the types of Jewish communities and the interactions between Jews and Gentiles. One of the core conclusions of Ordinary Jews highlights that Jews acted inside the confinements of their previous social networks and cultural realms: “people who were more integrated into non-Jewish society were more likely to choose evasion. Those who occupied a predominantly Jewish social milieu and had Jewish support networks were more likely to opt for coping.”³ In other words, Jews from Minsk, who were highly integrated culturally and linguistically and who had numerous Gentile friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, were much more likely to escape and hide outside the ghetto, while Jews from Białystok, by contrast, who had previously been closely tied to a dense network of largely Jewish communities and had been more culturally isolated from local Gentiles, were predisposed to choosing coping (inside the ghetto), rejecting evasion, even when faced with imminent death. In Finkel’s account, the pre-Holocaust political regimes of Poland, the Soviet Union, and even the Austro-Hungarian Empire become leading explanations of the type of social connections forged between Jews and Gentiles.

With this major point, Evgeny Finkel transforms the discussion of the issue of regional differences during the Holocaust. Earlier research by Yitzhak Arad, Barbara Epstein, Yehuda Bauer, Ray Brandon, Wendy Lower, and Jan Gross, among others, when read together, indicated the possibility that Gentiles from the territories west of the Soviet (pre-1939) border were more hostile toward Jews during World War II, while Gentiles from the neighboring Soviet territory were less inclined to harm their Jewish compatriots.⁴ My own comparative research on Jewish-Gentile relations in the Soviet-Romanian borderland during the Holocaust argued that, in places where states encouraged integration between Jews and non-Jews, important interethnic social connections were forged, leading to more cooperation and less violence in Jewish-Gentile interactions.⁵ By exposing the regional patterns of behavior of the Jewish population, Ordinary Jews significantly reinforces and further develops the above-mentioned ideas by introducing new approaches, concepts, and theories. Equally importantly, all of these studies, taken together, indicate that different types of societal relations had a separate, independent role to play during the Holocaust, and this pertains to both Jews and Gentiles.

Another principally important result revealed by this book is that, despite what conventional wisdom would lead us to believe, “what the Jews knew,”⁶ when they knew it, and where simply does not provide significant traction to explain their actions. As Finkel states clearly, “knowledge and information alone cannot explain the variation in behavioral strategies across and especially within communities.” In fact, the experiences discussed in this book will take the reader to an even more dire conclusion: when confronted...