Anti-Jewish Violence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (review)

Violence erupted unexpectedly, on the third day of the Orthodox Christian Easter celebrated on April 26 that year, and swept all over the city. It lasted three days, and it took the authorities another three days to take the situation completely under control. Fifty-five people died and almost 2,000 were injured in violent confrontations - quite a high toll (to compare: over the three days of the Kiev pogrom in 1905, 47 people were killed and over 300 injured ¹ ). The raging mob looted and destroyed property, set houses on fire, causing multimillions in damages. The clashes had a clear interethnic aspect, with one minority group being particularly targeted for its presumably unfair business practices and cultural self-isolationism.

The 1992 Los Angeles riot described above (alternatively named - and thus interpreted - as the Rodney King Riots, the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Disturbance, and the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest) had nothing to do with Jews, Russians, or Russia, yet its description in general terms is striking in its structural similarity to archetypal Jewish pogroms in Late Imperial Russia. The similarity may well be accidental and superficial. Or, one may argue, those parallels between such different events question the perceived uniqueness and uniformity of the very phenomenon of "Jewish pogrom."

The absence of any interest on behalf of historians toward the nature of urban riots in Russian modern history (not of the seventeenth century) ² resulted in the strikingly one-sided perception of all instances of civic unrest as fundamentally ideologically motivated: either revolutionary or counterrevolutionary. Accordingly, unorganized and undereducated masses are believed to rally for "surrogates" of these ideal types: either "progressive" or "reactionary" causes (e.g., demands for higher wages vs. an anti-Semitic rampage). Therefore, all instances of mass-scale outbursts of violence were expected to bear an embedded deeper meaning and reflect a general constellation of socioeconomic and fundamental political factors. A limited repertoire of those factors (revolutionary movement, economic conflicts, interconfessional strife, and nationalist mobilization) determined a rigid and unvarying classification of individual acts of communal violence. Both the Kishinev massacre of Jewish residents in 1903 and the "Kazan commune" days of October 1905 were immediately branded by observers as "Jewish pogroms" because Jews were among the victims, even though during the trial of pogromists in Kazan, those Jews who suffered from the mob insisted that they had never experienced anti-Jewish attitudes before. ³ Thus, the singularity and universality of the category "Jewish pogroms" is hinged upon the indiscriminate lumping together of a broad variety of incidents of intercommunal violence into several rigid categories of ideological confrontation − but also upon a fundamental belief in the self-evident meaning and boundaries of Jewry (both by modern scholars and as ascribed to pogromists and their victims a century ago).

The collection Anti-Jewish Vio lence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History aims at revisiting the older historiographic orthodoxy of the "pogrom paradigm" that treated pogroms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a single phenomenon, a historically developing and amplifying spiral of ethnic violence. Remarkably, the late John Klier was among the initiators of this publication project that grew out of the conference "Anti-Jewish Violence: Reconceptualizing 'the Pogrom' in European History, 17th−20th Century," held in Stockholm in May 2005 - just as he was instrumental in the elaboration of the "pogrom paradigm" that the new collection set up to deconstruct. ⁴ Klier was one of the most dynamic and original scholars of the late imperial period, and his sudden death in 2007, in the opinion of this reviewer, has significantly weakened the methodological foundation of the collection that was produced without him.

Structurally, Anti-Jewish Violence consists of three uneven parts ("Twentieth-Century Pogroms", "Responses to Pogroms", and "Regional Perspectives"), de facto...