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Preparing the Ground? On Proving Causation versus Association Between Pogroms and the Holocaust

2023; Purdue University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sho.2023.a918850

1534-5165

Polly Zavadivker,

Cambodian History and Society

Preparing the Ground? On Proving Causation versus Association Between Pogroms and the Holocaust Polly Zavadivker (bio) In an essay of 1988 entitled “the paradoxical politics of marginality,” the late Jonathan Frankel pointed to the largely uncharted terrain of the “Jewish situation” in Europe in the years 1914–1921. He urged a holistic approach to the events of those years, that scholars treat them not as independent or discrete conflicts—world war, revolution, fall of empires, civil war, nation-state formations, and birth of a socialist society—but rather, an era of continuous cataclysm. The marginality of European Jews, especially in terms of state power, he argued, informed a paradox: state and popular violence ran rampant in war and revolution, laying bare the Jews’ utter dependence for physical security on state authorities; paradoxically, that violence was often fueled by (mostly) mythical and paranoid perceptions (in lockstep with a longer heritage of European antisemitism) of Jews as powerful and shape-shifting others: foes within or behind the national cause, always allied with the enemy. These beliefs informed the espionage libel used by the Russian Army to rationalize mass deportations of Jews from front zones in 1915; and three years later, the Judeo-Bolshevik mythology that animated pogrom perpetrators from 1918 to 1921. Frankel recognized the break that separated ideological antisemitic state and popular violence in 1914–1921 from earlier histories of anti-Jewish violence. The ideologically inspired forced migrations and mass murder of those years constituted a veritable watershed, and moreover, he suggested, set European Jewry and Europe itself on a trajectory that culminated in the Second World War and Holocaust. The First World War, Frankel argued, appeared in hindsight as “the opening episode in a prolonged era of political cataclysm.” Within three decades, “one world war led inexorably to the next.” How exactly? In World War I the Jews in many areas had to suffer mass expulsions and innumerable pogroms directed specifically against them. In retrospect these atrocities [End Page 251] taken together with the genocidal slaughter of the Armenian nation in Anatolia can be seen to have done much to prepare the psychological ground for the attempt to be made some two decades later to wipe out the Jewish people totally.1 It was an elusive claim at best, yet it raised an intriguing question, and just as importantly, linked the Jewish situation of 1914–1921 to the longer history of twentieth-century racial ideology and genocide in Europe. The volume edited by Frankel in which his essay appeared, entitled The Jews and the European Crisis, 1914–1921, included original research by Steven Zipperstein, Efraim Sicher, and others, and provided some promising starts to investigate those lacunae and their ramifications. Then about three decades went by, with little attention to that scholarly agenda. Of course, many other things happened. After 1991, western scholars looked anew at the Jews of Imperial Russia, Eastern Europe, and the USSR, having been freed from the constraints of Cold War thinking and able to deploy new theoretical models, forge scholarly contacts and conduct fieldwork across previously closed borders, and explore troves of archival material. In the past few years, it seems to me, we’ve seen a turn in East European Jewish historiography from the revisionist trends that characterized much of the field after 1991. As part of this turn, scholars have reassessed the lachrymose years from 1914 to 1921. And several have resurrected Frankel’s idea of these years as an “opening episode” to an era of modern violence that culminated in the Holocaust. Semion Gol’din (as a student of Frankel’s at the Hebrew University) was something of a pioneer in this research, taking up the question of the Russian Army’s anti-Jewish policies during World War I in a Russian-language book published in 2018 (made available in English translation last year).2 Even before then, scholars in Eastern Europe and Russia began to publish important document volumes about wartime and revolutionary pogroms, including Volodymyr Serhiichuk’s collection of 1998 and Lidiia Miliakova’s volume in 2007, in Ukrainian and Russian, respectively.3 Since then, Jeffrey Veidlinger, along with Elissa Bemporad, Paul Hanebrink, Irina Astashkevich, Brendan McGeever, William Hagen...