Measuring Threat and Violence

This chapter describes our data and methods. Our analysis is based on an original dataset of census returns, electoral results, and pogrom location information. We gathered these data at the lowest geographical unit for which they could be merged, yielding observations for over 2,000 localities. We use census data on religion and electoral data on support for Jewish and non-Jewish nationalist parties to measure the degree of perceived political threat prior to the outbreak of war. We establish the characteristics of those localities where pogroms occurred using a variety of methods, including multivariate statistical models and ecological inference.

Why Neighbors Kill Neighbors

What explains the anti-Jewish pogroms of summer 1941 that broke out in the eastern borderlands of Soviet-occupied Poland in the wake of the Nazi invasion? This chapter introduces the competing theories and approaches to the problem. Most scholars highlight either revenge for the Soviet occupation, antisemitic hatred, avarice, or the German extermination effort itself. The authors offer an alternative hypothesis rooted primarily in the logic of competing nationalisms. Where Jews sought national equality with their Polish and Ukrainian neighbors, they were more likely to fall victim to pogrom violence.

Ukrainian Galicia and Volhynia

This chapter examines the summer 1941 pogroms in western Ukraine, in what had been the voivodships of Volhynia, Stanisławów, Lwów, and Tarnopol in pre-1939 Poland. Ukrainians constituted a majority of all inhabitants in the four voivodships, but were politically mobilized differently in Volhynia and the remaining Galician provinces. Similar to chapter 4, a robust predictor of pogroms in Galicia is strong support for Jewish national rights in Poland, except in Galicia the perpetrators were typically Ukrainian rather than Polish. We also find evidence that pogroms were likely to occur in small market towns, where economic inequalities between Jews and non-Jews would have been more apparent. For Volhynia we find that pogroms were rare where there was popular support for communism.

Beyond Jedwabne

This chapter examines the summer 1941 pogroms in what had been the Białystok and Polesie voivodships of Poland before the Soviet annexation. The main ethnic groups inhabiting these areas were Poles, Jews, and Belarusians. Our analysis illustrates that the pogroms were most likely to occur where support for Jewish national equality and the popularity of parties advocating cross-ethnic cooperation were strongest. In these localities Poles seeking a nationally homogeneous state felt most threatened, leading some to commit violence and others less likely to come to the rescue of their Jewish neighbors.

Ethnic Politics in the Borderlands

This chapter explores how the diffuse ethnic divides of the era of nationalist mobilization during the 19th and 20th centuries re-emerged as specific partisan disputes in independent Poland. These political disputes—over economic redistribution, state ownership, and the proper limits of minority autonomy—colored life in virtually every community and provided the context in which the deadly violence of 1941 would ultimately occur. By translating ethnic demography into political weight, democratic politics in interwar Poland heightened ethnic tensions. Where powerful and articulate Jewish nationalist political parties and movements emerged, Poles and Ukrainians came to understand that the region’s Jews would not and could not be part of their respective nation-building projects.

Intimate Violence and Ethnic Diversity

This book concludes with a discussion of the argument’s broader implications, in particular for the relationship between ethnic diversity and violence and how to prevent pogroms. The 1941 pogroms in Poland cannot be reduced to non-Jewish reaction to Jewish cultural difference because they did not occur where visible differences between non-Jews and Jews were greatest. Our recommendations for preventing pogroms focus less on institutional solutions, which can exacerbate rather than diminish such violence, than on increasing solidarity between groups. Potential strategies include multi-ethnic political parties and, in the longer term, redefining the boundaries of “the people” in ways that better incorporate minority groups.

Pogroms outside the Eastern Borderlands

This chapter addresses the extent to which our explanation for pogrom violence against Jews in eastern Poland during the summer of 1941 can account for other instances of popular anti-Jewish violence and inter-communal violence not involving Jews in other times and places. The chapter begins with similar cases: wartime Lithuania, Romania, and Greece. It then addresses post-emancipation anti-Jewish pogroms in Germany and Russia. Finally, we examine intercommunal violence that does not involve Jews: anti-Muslim pogroms in post-independence India and the lynching of blacks in the post-Civil War American South. Political threat does not constitute the only explanation for popular violence against minorities, but its importance has not been appreciated.