Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920 by William Hagen (review)

In 2018 Poland celebrated the centenary of the reestablishment of national independence following World War I. But that period was also a time of immense danger for the Jews of East Central Europe. William Hagen's book explains the centrality of Judeophobia in pogroms that killed hundreds in the Polish lands and up to 50,000 more further east, where Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian (both Red and White) forces clashed. While the pogroms are well studied, Hagen provides an overarching framework to explain these murderous anti-Jewish events. Rather than focusing on economic competition or modern antisemitic ideology as the key motivations, Hagen explores how more deeply engrained Christian and peasant cultural notions led to the outbreaks of violence.

The book is divided into three parts: World War I, the immediate postwar period, and Poland's eastern wars of 1919–1920. The chapters blend chronologically, since they weave back and forth between the Austrian and Russian territories of partitioned Poland, where most Polish Jews lived. The main geographic emphasis is Galicia, both the eastern region centered on Lemberg/Lwów/L'viv and the western part centered on Kraków. Despite the large population of Ukrainian peasants in eastern Galicia, Hagen discusses mostly Polish peasants and townspeople.

A long introductory and theoretical section (sixty-six pages with preface and notes) traces the rise of "Jewish antipolonism" (p. 19), including as representative voices the village mayor and writer Jan Slomka and economics professor Franciszek Bujak. Such Christian conceptions of Jewish malice, mixed with persistent popular beliefs in magic, created a mistrust of Jews and even the fear of extermination and "Judaization" (pp. 31, 34).

The main text begins with a Polish Jewish lawyer's comments on the "Judas Fest" in 1914, a pre-Easter tradition in Galicia at which an effigy of a Jew was burned. Things only got worse for Jews when the war started. The Russian occupation of Lemberg and the reconquest of eastern Galicia by Austrian forces saw tense and often violent situations. Habsburg officials frequently suspected Jews of disloyalty and an unwillingness to fight (p. 85). For many other Galicians, the deprivations in food and coal led to accusations that the Jews were price-gouging. While the language of economic exploitation played a big role, Hagen makes it clear that the instigators of pogroms were not primarily motivated by financial benefit (pp. 300–301).

Hagen is thus not as interested in how ethnic agitators fomented violence through speeches and pamphlets, but instead how violence was an enactment of social-psychological and popular cultural codes. As Hagen puts it, "the educated political classes' print-antisemitism was itself a rationalization, in seemingly modern and scientific dress, of historically deeper anxiety and animus" (p. 65). For Hagen, nationalist rallies merely provided the backdrop and opportunity for pogroms since they supplied the critical mass of people (p. 267).

Hagen focuses on the symbolic motivation and expressive meanings of collective violence, often undertaken against the state (p. xiii). He examines a wide array of pogrom types, some not ending in deaths. Yet most manifested common cultural scripts that sought to keep the world in balance through a participatory performance of strength (pp. 54, 301). Hagen draws on insights from E.P. Thompson and other scholars of the "moral economy" (pp. 56–57, 152) to show how hard-pressed peasants and townspeople followed a subconscious need for self-validation in uncertain times. The peasants' quest for "emancipation" from Jewish influence was also true for the professional and educated classes: a fantasy of "de-Judaizing" Poland (pp. 16, 143).

Despite the emphasis on culture, politics still figures prominently in the book. Nationalist agitators transformed the older blood libel into a secular Jewish threat against the nation. As Hagen observes, the "removal of 'medieval Jewry' would fit Poland to stride into a bright modernity, cleansed of historic blemishes" (p. 317). For him, attacks on the Jews of Galicia served to delegitimate...