The daily life of genocide - History, Twentieth-century history & later - TLS 02.08.

2021, 23:38

My Account

History

The daily life of genocide

Pogroms and a ‘lachrymose’ view of Jewish history

By Michael Stanislawski

March 1, 2019 Read this issue

Roosevelt to the Russian Tsar: “Stop your cruel oppressions of the Jews”, 1904

IN THIS REVIEW

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-daily-life-of-genocide/ Page 1 of 8
The daily life of genocide - History, Twentieth-century history & later - TLS 02.08.2021, 23:38

THE PLUNDER
The Anti-Jewish riots in Habsburg Galicia
264pp. Stanford University Press. $65.

Daniel Unowsky

POGROM
Kishinev and the tilt of history
288pp. Liveright. £22.

Steven J. Zipperstein

ANTI-JEWISH VIOLENCE IN POLAND, 1914–1920

566pp. Cambridge University Press. £71.99 (paperback, £24.99).

William W. Hagen

ANATOMY OF A GENOCIDE
The life and death of a town called Buczacz
480pp. Simon and Schuster. £25.

Omer Bartov

In May 1903, the thirty-year-old Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik, then living in Odessa, was sent by a

Jewish historical commission to investigate the horrors of the bloodiest pogrom so far in the history of the
Jews of the Russian empire: the Kishinev pogrom, which occurred the previous month and counted among
its dead forty-nine Jews and 600 raped or wounded. After interviewing an untold number of victims and

witnesses, Bialik retreated to his in-laws’ estate in the Ukrainian countryside, ostensibly to write up a sober
report of the horrors. When he returned to Odessa in the autumn, however, he produced what would
become one of the most important and controversial poems in Hebrew literature, “In the City of Slaughter”.

Rather than chronicling the murderous acts of the pogrom-mongers, Bialik turned his poetic gaze – and
poetic ire – on two separate but connected topics: the passivity of the male Jewish population of the town,
who, he alleged, cowered in the corners of their devastated homes as their wives and daughters were raped,

beaten and killed; and, even more virulently, on the Jews’ God, or in his view their pitiful, emasculated,
preposterously impotent God, who had abandoned them to their plight, a deity who himself announced,

“Your God has abandoned you – yours is a pauper-lord, poor during your life and poorer still at your
deaths”. Linking these two objects of derision in Bialik’s poem is the image of the pogrom survivors
cramming the bones of the victims into knapsacks and selling them as precious wares in the marketplace, in

order to evoke sympathy from the gentiles. At this point the poem erupts in a line so incendiary to Jewish
sensitivities that it was edited out of the first editions: “ve-kha’asher shnorartem tishnoreru” – just as you
have always been (pathetic) beggars, you will always remain (pathetic) beggars, a point underscored by

Bialik’s Hebraization of the Yiddish word shnorer to make his accusation even more devastating.

Twenty-three years later, a young Jewish historian roughly the same age of Bialik at the time of Kishinev had

recently been hired as a professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. Salo
Wittmayer Baron was a native of Tarnów in Austrian Galicia who had graduated from both the University of

Vienna and the Vienna Rabbinical Seminary, and came to America to propound a revolutionary new view of
Jewish history – rejecting, as it were, the wares the victims of Kishinev were selling in those knapsacks. In an

article entitled “Ghetto and Emancipation” published in the then prestigious Menorah Journal, Baron

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-daily-life-of-genocide/ Page 2 of 8
The daily life of genocide - History, Twentieth-century history & later - TLS 02.08.2021, 23:38

article entitled “Ghetto and Emancipation” published in the then prestigious Menorah Journal, Baron
condemned the previous understanding of Jewish history as a specious “history of suffering and learning”,

what he derided as the “lachrymose” view. Jewish history, Baron insisted, was what the Jews were doing
between pogroms: what they were thinking, writing, selling, buying, building. Moreover, the belief that the

Jews had suffered more than any other group in history was preposterous – compared to the serfs of
medieval Europe, for example, the Jews had had it far better legally, socially and economically. On the other
side of the equation, he conceded, the emancipation of the Jews had not come scot-free – the Jews were

compelled to give up their rights as an autonomous community in gentile society in favour of the untested
and uncertain “individual rights” of a new sort of citizenship.

Over the decades that ensued, Baron’s model of Jewish history took hold in the academy – not only in the
United States but also in Western Europe and, to a certain extent, in Israel as well: tellingly, when the
prosecution at the Adolf Eichmann trial wanted to have a historian set the context for the Holocaust by

describing the history of the Jewish communities of the diaspora, they called on Baron. The irony was that
he had no way to square his anti-lachrymose historiography with the reality of the Holocaust, during which

his own parents and family were murdered. Whatever his private thoughts, the most he would say in public
was that the Nazi adoption of symbols of anti-Jewish repression – the yellow armband, the ghetto – were
“calumnies against the Middle Ages”, which, he insisted, were periods marked by law and order, rather than

the Nazis’ essential lawlessness.

SUB SCRI BE TO THE WEEKLY T L S N EWSLET TER

First name

Last name

Email address
Your information will be used in accordance with our privacy policy

Sign up

The challenge to professional Jewish historians remains: how to amend Baron’s near- dismissal of
persecution, pogrom and ultimately the Holocaust as central to the history of the Jews without falling prey
to Bialik’s warning of the dangers of reducing the Jews to victimhood, attempting to sell their suffering in the

marketplace of gentile sympathy? The simultaneous appearance of four new books on pogroms and anti-
Jewish violence in Eastern Europe provide four radically different responses to this challenge.

The first and most modest work is The Plunder, Daniel Unowsky’s study of a wave of anti-Jewish violence in
Galicia, then in the Habsburg empire, in 1898. Unowsky deliberately avoids the use of the term “pogrom”

since, in the popular mind – though, he acknowledges, not in scholarly usage – pogroms were believed to

have been ordered and orchestrated by the government. This wave of violence was quite definitely not

ordered by the Austrian state: on the contrary, these attacks on Jews and especially their property were
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-daily-life-of-genocide/ Page 3 of 8
The daily life of genocide - History, Twentieth-century history & later - TLS 02.08.2021, 23:38

ordered by the Austrian state: on the contrary, these attacks on Jews and especially their property were

carried out in a spontaneous and disorganized manner by Polish peasants over many weeks and in
hundreds of communities in rural western and central Galicia. They primarily consisted of the looting of

Jewish stores, taverns and homes, with no Jewish loss of life. Indeed, the only deaths caused by these riots
were those of eighteen rioters shot by the gendarmes and soldiers sent in to quell the violence. Alongside
them were 5,170 Polish peasants arrested for their participation, of whom 2,328 were sentenced to prison.

Nonetheless, as Unowsky amply documents, the state prosecutors often blamed the Jews for the violence
against them, castigating the community for oppressing the peasants who rose up in retaliation. In a
fascinating aside, Unowsky notes that this wave of riots had no effect on the emigration rates of Galician

Jews in the next decade and a half – in sharp contrast to the firm belief in popular Jewish opinion that the
pogroms caused the massive emigration from Eastern Europe in the decades before the First World War.

Steven J. Zipperstein’s much-heralded book, Pogrom, focuses on the Kishinev pogrom and its global
aftermath. Although (unlike the other three books under review) it is not based on any significant new

archival material about the pogrom, Zipperstein sheds new light on the subject after combing ingeniously
through large troves of published material, detailing the massive violence entailed in the pogrom and,
especially, the effects it had on worldwide public opinion about the plight of the Jews in the Russian empire.

His gripping chapter on the pogrom itself vastly illuminates our understanding of the violence by providing
English translations of the gruelling details from the vast tranche of victim statements collected by Bialik in
1903 but not published (and only in Hebrew) until 1991. Overall, Zipperstein fundamentally concurs with the

scholarly consensus about the pogrom advanced by Edward Judge in Easter in Kishinev (1992) – that there
was no government planning or involvement in this (or any other) pogrom before the First World War,

though the contrary became a matter of faith among Jews and others worldwide. Zipperstein’s list of mis-
statements and misunderstandings about the Kishinev pogrom includes, quite dramatically, Noam
Chomsky’s condemnation of the role of the Israel Defense Forces in the infamous Sabra and Shatilla

massacres in Lebanon in 1982: “The tsar’s army had surrounded this town and allowed for people within it
to rampage, killing Jews for three days . . . . That’s . . . pretty much what happened in Sabra-Shatilla”. None
of that actually happened in Kishinev.

Soon, however, it becomes clear that what most interests Zipperstein are not the details of the pogrom itself,
nor the Jewish responses to it, but rather the responses of the international community, and above all the

link between the Kishinev pogrom and the production of the most important work of anti-Semitic literature
before Hitler’s Mein Kampf – The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Following the linguistic analysis of the

early texts of the protocols by the Italian linguist Cesare G. de Michelis, Zipperstein details the life and work
of the most important anti-Semitic ideologue and newspaper editor in Kishinev and its environs, Pavel
Krushevan, already identified in the scholarship as the chief inciter and defender of the pogromshchiki.

Zipperstein fully embraces de Michelis’s conclusion that Krushevan was the author of the first edition of the
Protocols, rather than the Russian secret police, as previously believed. This convincing link between the
Kishinev pogrom and the Protocols is so crucial to Zipperstein that it accounts for the subtitle of his book,

the tilt of history.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-daily-life-of-genocide/ Page 4 of 8
The daily life of genocide - History, Twentieth-century history & later - TLS 02.08.2021, 23:38

the tilt of history.

William W. Hagen makes no such grand claims for his massively documented and groundbreaking Anti-
Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920. Hagen has ferreted out every act of violence – he, like Unowsky,
eschews the word “pogroms” for similar reasons – on Polish territory from the First World War to 1920. So
thick is his description of this violence that readers may sometimes lose their way; town after town, city
after city from western Poland to eastern Ukraine is summoned and its Jewish population documented,

before we are given the excruciating details of violence perpetrated against them by villagers, townspeople
and above all the soldiers of the various armies and makeshift militias that controlled these territories in
those years. We are reminded of Isaac Babel’s famous short story “Gedali”, in which the old Jewish

shopkeeper “straight out of Dickens” is confused about whom to support – the Red Army, the White Army,
the Polish Army, or the Ukrainian forces, all of which claim to be bringing revolution and salvation to his
town. They all look the same, rob his store with the same venom, and commit the same atrocities in the

name of their cause. The point of Hagen’s massive documentation, however, is not the details of the
violence but the theoretical underpinnings underlying the scholarly analysis of mass violence anywhere. In

some measure returning to the debates about top-down versus bottom-up history that marked the
revolution of social history from the 1960s to the 80s, with a significant dose of social anthropology, Hagen
insists, in his preface, introduction and eight-page “theoretical footnote” that the goal of his book is to

dislodge the insistence on ideological anti-Semitism as the driving force of pogroms and other forms of anti-
Jewish violence (and, by extension, violence against other religious or ethnic minorities anywhere). The aim
of this book, rather,

is not to construct would-be authoritative macro-political narratives, whether triumphalist or

debunking, but rather to summon up, in first-person testimony, the dilemmas and delusions
driving perpetrators’ hostile or violent actions, the reactions of those under attack, and
contemporary observers’ minds interpreted. Anti-Jewish violence commonly assumed
symbolical, collectively enacted, theatricalized, form.

By the end of over 500 pages of minutely detailed and analysed attacks, Hagen maintains his theoretical

stance: “In this book’s voluminous documentation, no evidence surfaced of pogroms planned and
unleashed from on high, whether by Christian Polish political parties or state, church, or army . . . . These
were not punishments of antisemitism but of crimes against life and property”, and, for Hagen, they were

imbued with “magical and symbolical thinking” about the Jews’ essential alien character and their putative
wealth.

Unowsky, Zipperstein and even Hagen, then, provide no fundamental challenge to the Baronian paradigm
which holds that, while anti-Jewish violence exists – and often in horrific form – it is not constituitive of

Jewish life and history. Not so the most impressive of the four books under review: Omer Bartov’s Anatomy
of a Genocide: The life and death of a town of Buczacz. Immediately confessing his personal connection to
this town where his mother grew up, Professor Bartov leads his readers through seven meticulously

documented chapters – on life in Buczacz before the First World War; the devastation of the town during the
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-daily-life-of-genocide/ Page 5 of 8
The daily life of genocide - History, Twentieth-century history & later - TLS 02.08.2021, 23:38

documented chapters – on life in Buczacz before the First World War; the devastation of the town during the

war, when bestial antagonism was unleashed among its three national/ethnic/religious groups – the Jews,
Catholic Poles and Greek-Catholic Ukrainians; the manifestation of these hatreds in politics, culture and

statecraft in inter-war independent Poland; the Soviet occupation, with its destruction of all the social
structures of the town; and the German occupation – including not only the genocide of the Jews but also
the vast amount of Polish vs Ukrainian violence; a chilling, brilliantly executed account of “the daily life of

genocide”; and the post-war reckoning. Bartov ends with a brief aftermath about the sad state of post-Soviet
Buczacz in contemporary Ukraine, where it is merely one of hundreds of benighted towns in the former
Galicia, its Jews having been murdered, its Poles deported to the annexed “Western territories” of post-war

Poland, its Ukrainians relocated from the surrounding countryside or other parts of the country.

The strength of the book emerges from its two interdependent focuses: though his primary subject is the

Jewish population and its tragic fate, Bartov spends a great deal of time analysing and explaining the
tortured relationship between the Polish and Ukrainian populations. But what is perhaps even more crucial

is the fact that Buczacz was small enough (with a population of 13,000 in 1921) that during the German
occupation the local gentile killers knew their victims: the Jews of Buczacz were “rounded up and at times
killed by men who had known them as neighbors, colleagues, classmates, or parents of their children’s

friends”. Even the Germans sent to Buczacz to rule over the town and kill its Jews got to know their victims
before they murdered them, aided and abetted – to a shocking extent – by the Jewish police who were
drafted in to do the Germans’ bidding.

In the end, after all the blood had been spilled, each of the three main ethnic groups of Buczacz saw

themselves as the main victims of the Soviet and German occupations, and each perceived the persecution
of the other two groups as at least partly justified: “Each group’s conviction in the uniqueness of its own
victimhood thus went hand in hand with a desire to punish those associated with its suffering”. For Bartov,

acknowledging the horrific suffering of the Poles and Ukrainians during the war does not negate in the least
the uniqueness of the mass murder of the Jews: the Holocaust was not simply the largest and most
devastating pogrom of them all, but the result of externally imposed, state-controlled genocide – and one

that was never fully reckoned with. After chronicling the fates of the Nazis who returned from Buczacz to
Germany after the war, Omer Bartov concludes: “Most of the perpetrators managed to wriggle out of a leaky
judicial system and die peacefully in their beds. As this most thoroughly investigated state-directed mass

crime in history amply illustrates, perpetrators of genocide usually get away with murder.”

Keep reading

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-daily-life-of-genocide/ Page 6 of 8
The daily life of genocide - History, Twentieth-century history & later - TLS 02.08.2021, 23:38

History | Book Review

Mosaic and melting pot

A ‘sweeping yet detailed’ account of a porous, fertile island

By Marina Warner

History | Book Review

Filberds and trinkets

The antiquarian pursuit of ‘non-verbal’ history

By Clare Pettitt

Twentieth-century history & later | Book Review

Hall of mirrors
A Soviet crime long hidden, and its legacy

By Uilleam Blacker

Twentieth-century history & later | Book Review

Margins of the Holocaust

Examining cases of collaboration in Poland

By Stanley Bill

HOME

REGULAR FEATURES

THE ARCHIVE

EXPLORE

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-daily-life-of-genocide/ Page 7 of 8
The daily life of genocide - History, Twentieth-century history & later - TLS 02.08.2021, 23:38

CATEGORIES

ABOUT US

SHOP

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST

Google Products Spotify Apple Podcasts

Terms & Conditions Privacy

Cookie Settings

Copyright © The Times Literary Supplement Limited 2021. The Times Literary Supplement Limited: 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF. Registered in England.

Company registration number: 935240. VAT no: GB 243 8054 69.

Copyright © The Times Literary Supplement Limited 2021. The Times Literary Supplement Limited: 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF. Registered in England.

Company registration number: 935240. VAT no: GB 243 8054 69.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-daily-life-of-genocide/ Page 8 of 8