Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust

186 Pages·2018·2.064 MB·English

by  Jeffrey S. Kopstein, Jason Wittenberg

INTIMATE VIOL ENCE

INTIMATE
VIOL ENCE
Anti- Jewish Pogroms on the
Eve of the Holocaust
Jeffrey S. Kopstein and
Jason Wittenberg
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON
Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from
the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512
East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2018 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Kopstein, Jeffrey, author. | Wittenberg, Jason, 1963– author.
Title: Intimate vio lence : anti- Jewish pogroms on the eve of the
Holocaust / Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg.
Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017048064 (print) | LCCN 2017051368 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501715266 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501715273 (pdf) |
ISBN 9781501715259 | ISBN 9781501715259 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Jews— Persecutions— Poland— History—20th century. |
Pogroms— Poland— History—20th century. | Antisemitism— Poland—
History—20th century. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)— Poland. |
Poland— Ethnic relations.
Classification: LCC DS134.55 (ebook) | LCC DS134.55 .K68 2018 (print) |
DDC 305.892/4043809041— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2017048064
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For Max and Isaac
— J.K.
For Dahlia
— J.W.

Contents
Preface ix
1. Why Neighbors Kill Neighbors 1
2. Ethnic Politics in the Borderlands 22
3. Mea sur ing Threat and Vio lence 43
4. Beyond Jedwabne 57
5. Ukrainian Galicia and Volhynia 84
6. Pogroms outside the Eastern Borderlands 114
7. Intimate Vio lence and Ethnic Diversity 127
Appendix: Pogroms in the Eastern Borderlands, Summer 1941 137
Notes 143
References 153
Index 167

Preface
This book grew out of an invitation to a conference on the Holocaust and its
local contexts. Jan Gross’s Neighbors had been published several years earlier and
debates continued (and still continue) to rage about who had committed the Jed-
wabne pogrom and why. It was an unexpected opportunity to bring together two
impor tant streams of scholarship that had never adequately been integrated: the
large social scientific lite r a ture on intercommunal vio lence and a new genera-
tion of Holocaust historiography that situated the vio lence in specific communi-
ties, each with its own backstory. Could the theories and approaches used to ex-
plain ethnic vio lence in other contexts help explain the neighbor- on- neighbor
vio lence that broke out in hundreds of communities in the eastern Polish bor-
derlands as the Germans passed through in summer 1941?
Our intuition was that the roots of more than two hundred 1941 pogroms were
located in the ethnic demographics and pol iti cal be hav ior of the interwar era, in-
formation that we had already been collecting for a proj ect on the ethnic origins
of dictatorship and democracy. The historical lit er a ture focuses on anti- Semitism
and beliefs about Jewish support for communism. The social science lit er a ture,
which does not analyze these pogroms in any detail, suggests the answer lies in
the economic and po liti cal threat to pogrom perpetrators by those who would
become their victims. Our data could speak to these arguments. We discovered
a connection between interwar pol iti cal be hav ior and the occurrence of pogroms
that centered on the local pol iti cal milieu and, in part ic u lar, non- Jewish rejec-
tion of Jewish efforts to achieve national rights within Poland.
We were not working in a vacuum. Other scholars before and during our re-
search had already started the slow and painstaking job of documenting pogrom
occurrence and nonoccurrence; we supplemented this work with our own ar-
chival and secondary research across multiple languages. To this we added our in-
terwar census, electoral, and other data. We sought out the expertise of many
historians who specialize in Poland and the Holocaust, and the following deserve
special mention: Doris Bergen, John Connelly, Sol Goldberg, Antony Polonsky,
Anna Shternshis, and Timothy Snyder. We have presented this research at many
institutions and conferences and have benefited tremendously from the feedback
of our colleagues in po liti cal science, history, and Jewish studies.
Data collection is not only tedious, but expensive. We could not have completed
this proje ct without generous funding from the National Science Foundation, the