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История России: взгляд из Америки
Gerald Surh. Recent Studies of Antisemitism and anti-Jewish Violence in Eastern Europe, 1881–1914
Jonathan Dekel-Chen, et al., eds., Anti-Jewish Violence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (2011).
Faith Hillis, Children of Rus’. Right Bank Ukraine and the Invention of the Russian Nation (2013).
John D. Klier, Russians, Jews, & the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (2011).
Natan Meir, Kiev: Jewish Metropolis. A History 1859–1914 (2009).
R. Nemes & D. Unowsky, Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass politics, 1880–1918 (2014).
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl. A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe (2014).
This review article focuses on two themes in the period before 1914, anti-Jewish violence and antisemitism. The two themes and their mutual reinforcement reached their high point in the 1881–1914 period, influencing not only the most rapid and consequential transformation of the Jewish population but also the unravelling of the Russian Empire in the same period.
Anti-Jewish violence, most dramatically represented by the pogroms concentrated in 1881–2 and 1903–6, was for Russian Jews the most distinctive, dreaded, and priority-setting events of the period. Russian Jews seem almost always to have lived in liminal fear of discrimination and attack, never more so than in the period after 1881. Violence against Jews, its anticipation and aftermath are encountered in all forms of Russian and Jewish writing, fiction and non-fiction, personal and historical, journalistic and epistolary. Pogroms, their foreboding, and their memory gripped and transformed the lives of Russian Jews in late imperial Russia as no other force did or could do.
The violence mounting in that period has been associated and even identified with the intense and widespread antisemitism prevailing in Imperial Russia, among plebeians and patricians alike. The close relationship between antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence has been so obvious that it has become a historiographic code that has often short-circuited broader inquiry. While pogroms can be and have been seen as themselves instances of antisemitism, their close identification has obscured the fact that there were many persons – perhaps the majority – holding antisemitic views but opposed violence against Jews. On the other hand, many of the participants in the violence were not necessarily persuaded antisemites, but simply looters from deprived subaltern groups or passive witnesses unwilling to intervene on the victims’ behalf. The ready explanation of the violence as the product almost exclusively of ethnic prejudice has relegated other circumstances contributing to the violence to secondary status. This has delayed the formation of a balanced and comprehensive view of the many circumstances and the true complexity that gave rise to violence against Jews. Fortunately, however, most of the studies considered here suggest ideas and contribute directly to getting beyond that distorting bias.
The late John Klier’s detailed study of the pogroms of 1881–1882 is the fullest and most significant recent study that both inter-relates and separates the two themes.[190] This is a major, exhaustively researched opus that revises many common views and beliefs about Russia’s first major pogrom wave and its consequences, including the role of ethnic prejudice. Eschewing descriptions of the ground-level gore, the study unveils the extensive reach and impact of the pogroms on the Tsarist government, Jewish leaders, the Jewish press, the Jewish masses, their mutual interaction, and the pogroms’ influence on emigration and on Jewish organizations abroad.[191] In contrast to the usual polarized views of Russian-Jewish relations in the early years of Alexander III’s reign, Klier’s study reveals a great diversity of opinions among the public, government officials, and the Jews themselves. He reveals the actual alarm in governing circles at the riots and the efforts they made to meet the demands of Jewish leaders. At the same time, he shows the disagreements among the Jewish leaders over who spoke for the entire group and how it should respond to the rioting and to prospects for the future of Jews in Russia.
An early chapter faults explanations that rely on socio-economic determinism to explain pogroms as not explaining their occurrence at certain specific times and not at others. Klier argues against the notion that they were motivated principally by religious rivalry, stressing instead that Jews were seen as “ethnic strangers” in their appearance and occupations, their eating taboos and drinking habits, their calendars and holidays, and their separate places of worship and burial. Going beyond the outdated and discredited view that the Tsarist government directly sponsored and organized pogroms, Klier nonetheless faults the government for its well-known discriminatory measures against Jews as communicating to its peasant subjects that Jews were outside the law and fair targets for abuse.[192] Having established the inter-ethnic nature of anti-Jewish enmity, he finds a suggestive parallel between Russia’s pogroms and Donald Horowitz’s “deadly ethnic riot”.[193]
In keeping with that perspective, Klier deepens our understanding of pogroms by drawing attention to their interactive nature. In addition to Jewish resentment of gentile disrespect for Jewish customs, for instance, he also shows that Christians had their own ethnically-based grievances, calling on Jews not to trade during Church services and not work on Christian feast days. Others petitioned the government to stop Jews from calling them “drunkards, scum, and rascals”.[194] On the other hand, he suggests greater complexity in the origins of Jewish-gentile violence: “Every pogrom where there was serious loss of life was marked either by the use of firearms by Jews or by the rumor that they were shooting into crowds… Organized Jewish defense, as occurred at Balta, was viewed by authorities and populace alike as provocative and as likely to raise the level of violence”.[195] Such detail reveals some of the inter-subjectivity of Jewish-gentile relations, the grounds of a mutual enmity that gave rise to occasional violent overreactions, and the background to the mass hysteria that over-swept much of the Pale in 1881–2.
However, the book’s central drama is not enacted on the streets between Jews and gentiles, but in the three-way interaction among the Russian government, leading СКАЧАТЬ
John Doyle Klier,
In this sense it complements and goes beyond the chief English language account of the same events, which focuses on the pogroms’ causes and origins: Michael Aronson,
Klier,
Donald L. Horowitz,
Klier,
Ibid., p. 67.