A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917-1920 (review)

The first century Rabbi Hanin’s saying “Pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear of it, people would swallow each other alive” is a well chosen epigraph for Henry Abramson’s A Prayer for the Government. Although the prayer, as so often in the history of the Jewish people, did not avert the catastrophe of the pogrom-ridden civil war years in Ukraine, it aptly expresses the motifs and circumstances which shaped Ukrainian-Jewish relations in the period between 1917 and 1920. To Abramson, light and darkness characterize this period. On the one hand, it was a bright chapter of rapprochement between two insular and mutually distrustful nationalities, but, on the other, it was also one of the darkest chapters in Jewish history, when war and large-scale civil disorder ruptured this new Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement.

In telling this tragic story, Abramson follows in the footsteps of revisionist historians who have critically reevaluated the Jewish experience in Imperial Russia (Rogger, Stanislawski, Klier, Aronson, Haberer) and the short-lived Ukrainian state of 1917–1920 (Hunczak, Mintz, Zaitman). The result is a work that eschews black and white story-telling, which has been the hallmark of traditional Jewish and post-1926 Ukrainian historiography. In the best tradition of historical scholarship, Abramson transcends the parochial, stereotypical, and apologetic tone which divided Jewish and Ukrainian writings into highly subjective trends of interpretation that “generally focussed on either the anti-Jewish pogroms or the participation of Jews in the Ukrainian revolutionary movement” (p. xvi). What we get instead is a balanced and well researched interpretative analysis of the circumstances that brought about the sudden blooming—and withering—of a “newborn friendship” between Jews and Ukrainians. Viewing this relationship from both perspectives, Abramson’s Prayer is as much a chapter of Ukrainian as it is of Jewish history.

An excellent introduction highlights the cultural, social, and economic features which shaped the interaction, but also solitary nature of two distinct nationalities in the course of several centuries. Highly contextual in approach, Abramson’s analysis is evenhanded and detached. Though cognizant of the suffering this interaction caused Jews at various points in history, his portrayal of “Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times” does not represent another installment of Leidensgeschichte and unmitigated Judeophobia. He firmly takes issue with simplistic explanations and the notion that the nature of Ukrainian-Jewish relations can be reduced to “Ukrainian antisemitism.” Attributing the latter to “Jewish Ukrainophobia” rooted in large part in the experience of the Holocaust, Abramson unequivocally rejects this mind-set in view of the historical record which shows that the “essence of Ukrainian grievances against Jews” down to 1917 was basically economic in motivation and that over long periods of time Ukrainians and Jews interacted peacefully and profitably (p. 31). War and revolution telescoped these age-old grievances and mutually beneficial relations into two years of hope and disillusionment. A good background and interpretative framework thus provided, the stage is set for the central themes of the book: the establishment of Jewish autonomy and how it operated in practice (Chapters 2 and 3); the impact of the pogroms on the Jewish population and its detrimental effect on Ukrainian-Jewish relations which spelled the end of autonomy (Chapters 4 and 5).

The establishment of Jewish autonomy in the wake of the February Revolution testifies the willingness, even eagerness, of Jews and Ukrainians to work together in the building of a multinational and democratic Ukraine. The rapprochement of their respective political elites was facilitated by different but compatible reasons. For the Ukrainian socialist leadership support for Jewish autonomy derived from ideological as well as pragmatic political considerations (the socialist vision of a harmonious multi-ethnic society, recognition of Jewish middle-class professional expertise, and political reinforcement for Ukrainian autonomous aspirations vis-à-vis Petrograd). For the Jews, socialists and Zionists alike, Ukrainian acceptance of the principle of national-personal autonomy...