Language:
English
Year of publication:
2015
Titel der Quelle:
Polin; Studies in Polish Jewry
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2015) 219-255
Keywords:
Pogroms History
;
Jews History 19th century
;
Jews History 20th century
;
Antisemitism History
Abstract:
Rejects traditional explanations of the origins and chronology of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire (including the Kingdom of Poland) in the 19th-early 20th centuries. An examination of the pogroms in the Kingdom of Poland shows that they took place before 1881 (the beginning of the "pogrom wave" in Russia) and stopped in the period from the revolution of 1905-06 to 1914. Their causes were neither religious enmity between Poles and Jews, nor "Jewish economic exploitation" of Poles, although antisemitism and economic grievances were present as secondary motives. Similarly, it was not the authorities, Russian or Polish, who instigated and perpetrated the pogroms; the authorities did their best to suppress the riots. The Siedlce events of September 1906, which ostensibly attest to the opposite, were not a pogrom perpetrated by the Russian Army, but a brutal pacification of an unruly town during the revolution, in which many revolutionaries, most of them Jewish Bundists, were killed. Views the pogroms as mob violence that broke out against the background of the ongoing building of national identity among the Poles and the growing image of the Jews as an alien community to which moral rules and norms of proper behavior did not extend. Notes that the revolution of 1905-06 brought about an anti-tsarist spirit which united Poles and Jews, and the anti-Jewish violence temporarily stopped.
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