Pogroms, Peasants, Jews: Britain and Eastern Europe’s ‘Jewish Question’, 1867–1925 by Sam Johnson (review)

What did nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britons think about eastern European Jews? Historians have so far addressed this question from a highly Anglocentric perspective, considering (among other things) the impact of large-scale immigration from Jewish eastern Europe to Britain after the 1880s, the emergence of a thriving eastern European Jewish culture in London’s East End, and the passing of the 1905 Aliens Act. Stating at the outset her view that Britain was never so entirely separate from the continent, Sam Johnson takes a different tack in this richly documented monograph, which traces British responses to the various crises and travails that beset eastern European Jews in Romania, Russia, and Poland from 1867 until 1925.

The book performs two key functions. Chronologically, it serves as a much-needed bridge between recent work on mid-Victorian Anglo-Jewish international activism and important books by Mark Levene and Carole Fink that relate to Anglo- Jewish activism and the plight of eastern European Jews during the First World War and its aftermath. Thus Johnson covers, on the one hand, the running sore of Romanian Jewish inequality and persecution and, on the other hand, the rise of anti-Jewish violence in Russia and Poland from the 1880s, through the Kishinev pogrom, to the First World War and beyond.

Conceptually, Johnson seeks to move beyond the world of Anglo-Jewish activism, setting it alongside the emergence of late Victorian and Edwardian experts on eastern European culture and politics: men like Bernard Pares, who did much to shape the world of eastern European studies in Britain today, but whose sympathy for Russian culture and the Tsarist regime rendered him at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the plight of Russia’s Jews. This line of inquiry serves as a revealing counterpoint to the better known narrative of Jewish responses, providing helpful context to the activities of Lucien Wolf, the Conjoint Foreign Committee, and others. Likewise, Johnson’s exploration of the role of British intellectuals, who forged links with their eastern European counterparts, in facilitating the transmission of continental anti-Jewish attitudes to Britain is a promising perspective that adds considerably to our understanding of the dissemination of anti-Jewish discourse. The distinction she draws between British attitudes toward autocratic Tsarist Russia and martyred, Catholic Poland is similarly illuminating. In exploring these issues during the First World War, and specifically the work of embedded journalists based with the Tsarist armies and writing for the British press, Johnson adds a new dimension to analyses of the British response to anti-Jewish violence in the East.

These more original elements of the book focus primarily on the Edwardian period. The picture that Johnson presents of the better-covered late Victorian years and, particularly, the Romanian crises and the pogroms of 1881 and 1882 offers less that is new to the informed reader. In this context, it is curious that Johnson does not do more to situate these episodes in the longue durée of nineteenth-century Jewish activism, fleshing out the ways in which the responses to Romania and the pogroms in the Ukraine built on strategies originally developed during the Damascus Affair of 1840 and elaborated by Moses Montefiore during the decades that followed. When and why these strategies began to alter is a subject that merits greater attention than Johnson chooses to give it.

Despite her commitment to viewing British history in European context, Johnson rapidly loses sight of the comparative perspective and never really sets her own findings alongside work on the Jewish question in other parts of western Europe or, indeed, North America. Alternatively, she might usefully have set the British response to Jewish crises in eastern Europe against the British response to other tragic eastern European episodes, most notably the Bulgarian atrocities or the Balkan wars of the early 1900s. This, too, would help us to see what was...