archival sources in Ukraine, Russia, and Israel. The appeal of Petrovsky’s rich and locale-specific narrative all but conceals its hyperbole, lending it a kind of poetic truth about life in the shtetl.
Paradoxically, the one element that remains largely un-specific is the shtetl itself. Petrovsky is deliberately vague about defining the focus of his study except as a settlement of Jews and gentiles ranging in size between a small village and what otherwise have usually been considered towns and cities such as Berdichev, Uman, and Zhitomir.[207] Petrovsky’s shtetl is in fact not a particular place at all, but a way of life in which Jewish energy and acquisitiveness expressed itself in many forms and in which a greater ease and freedom existed among the shtetl’s mixed ethnicities and between Jews and the government. The survival of the power of Polish landowners in the region provided an ongoing buffer against the gradual encroachment of the Russian government in taxing and controlling the Jewish population. Jewish privileges thus waned along with those of the Polish grandees, who had functioned as indolent and unwitting protectors of some Jewish rights, such as trading in liquor.
Despite the more repressive means by which the Russian government sought to control the Pale’s Jews, Petrovsky contends that the Russian courts dealt with Jews more fairly and even-handedly in this period than later. The effectiveness of Petrovsky’s many concrete examples in veiling the literal truth of his assertions seems most questionable in this instance. Although its overall truth relies on the assumption that Jews generally received far worse treatment under the last two Tsars, the advent of the 1864 judicial reform alone and the greater participation of Jews in the judicial system suggest the need for verification of that assumption.
In sum, Petrovsky’s idealized image of the Pale’s pre-reform shtetl, in its broader outlines, serves as a counter-image to that later drawn by Aleichem and many Yiddish writers. Its importance lies less with its literal truthfulness than its usefulness in raising questions about Russian Jewry in both halves of the 19th Century. In the first instance, it offers a “new history”, an alternative to the image of the shtetl as a locus of victimization by documenting much of the diversity, assertiveness, and vitality of Jewish endeavors and occupations. It shows us that the Jews of the newly created Russian Pale of Settlement did not take their poverty and forced disabilities sitting down, but took advantage of the weaknesses in Tsarist governance and enforcement, the government’s rivalry with resident Polish landowners, and the venality of local officials to survive and sometimes even flourish in their shtetl enclaves.
Petrovsky’s shtetl image casts light on the character of the post-reform shtetl as well. The energy, vitality, and defiance he describes changed in character, but surely did not disappear after the reforms and after the 1881 pogroms. As the challenges to Jewish existence grew more demanding and more threatening, so did Jewish responses. The study not only modifies our understanding of life in the Jewish Pale in the earlier years of Russian rule, but also suggests greater depth and complexity to Jewish responses in the later period of unprecedented upheavals, heightened antisemitism, and Jewish victimization, both within and without the shtetl. Finally, Petrovsky’s image of the shtetl may be said not to have discredited the truthfulness of the image created by Yiddish writers of the later period, but to have revealed it as marking the immense changes that had invaded and overtaken life in the Pale.
Returning to that later period and to the theme of pogroms, two recent collections of articles treat anti-Jewish violence in Russia and other parts of Europe from 1881 to the eve of the Second World War. Each of them contains a range of topics grouped around the themes of violence and antisemitism.[208] Despite the diversity of topics and approaches, the two collections share common assumptions and may be taken to illustrate the current state of pogrom studies.
The commonest assumption they share is the interchangeability of the terms “antisemitism” and “pogrom”; one is taken to enfold and encompass the other, like two embracing figures, even though many of the articles treat antisemitism as attitude and ideology without a violent outcome. At the same time, most of the articles that treat actual violence against Jews do not question the meaning and role of antisemitism in making for the violence, but regard it as a major, if not the principal, contributor. Thus, antisemitic writings and publicism are joined to anti-Jewish violence as part of the same reality rather than being considered as separate realities, especially in regions of high illiteracy and sharp distinctions between classes and between town and country populations. Although no explicit claim is made, this assumption is what lends unity to an otherwise diverse array of articles treating locales from England to Romania and Eastern Siberia and topics ranging from the scandal and trial of an Austrian Jewess imposter to military pogroms during World War I. The assumption is imbedded in the very structure of these conference-based collections. At the same time, the very diversity of the topics they contain and their lack of connectedness in space and time has compelled them to link violence and Judeophobia with the specific, local, and contextual circumstances applicable to each case. Most of the essays cite the “usual suspects” among explanations: ethnic or religious hostility, alleged economic competition and exploitation, legal discrimination, alleged political disloyalty. And, although their explanations do not yield a single meaning for the term “pogrom”, they also frame questions that look beyond those stock considerations. These essays show that “antisemitism” and the violence often associated with it has a thousand faces, taking on a different character and meaning, depending on its local history and the circumstances of its manifestation.
The one essay that attempts a definition of “pogrom”, giving it a single face, and applying it to all times and cases turns out to be the exception that proves the rule.[209] The definition worked out has the virtue of seeking circumstances beyond antisemitism as the causes of anti-Jewish violence. Yet it is so general as to yield only the palest explanatory potential, so broad as to be applicable not only to all anti-Jewish pogroms, but even beyond the parameters of Jewish experience, to other instances of “inter-communal violence”, as the author admits.[210] Although the impulse to seek wider and more general explanations is endemic to historical inquiry, the worth and creativity in these essays lie in demonstrating the protean nature of antisemitism, its adaptability to many forms of conflict and controversy, public and private, and the diverse, complex shapes that it has taken.
The larger methodological question this raises is the relationship between affect and action, between word and deed, between, in our context, antisemitism as ideology or attitude and pogroms. Those essays that fall in our period but outside Russia are sufficiently distinct to suggest some mid-level generalizations that both contrast with and illuminate the Russian situation. Let us begin with four essays treating anti-Jewish violence in Galicia, Moravia, and Croatia, all parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, plus Romania. In each case they occurred on a smaller scale in their numbers and destructiveness, compared to events in the Russian Pale in the same prewar decades.[211] This was due in part to a more consistent opposition to anti-Jewish violence on the part of both local and central Habsburg authorities. The four studies deal predominantly with disorders among peasants, due perhaps to the relative absence of pogroms in the Empire’s large cities (outside the Polish provinces), where the police exercised a firmer hold on public order. In two cases, the conflicts were not binary, affecting only Jews and the native nationalities, but involved German and/or Hungarian policies and languages. In Moravia and Croatia violence was disproportionately directed at Jews, perceived as partisans or even as agents of the hated nationalities. In Galicia and Romania, the violence was precipitated by a mixture of resentment of Jewish economic exploitation and longstanding antisemitism, reinforced by the proactive role of Catholic clergymen. All these essays present a mixture of attitudinal antisemitism and resentments at the position of Jews in social and political structures during the birthing of new nationalisms. In Moravia, for instance, Jews voted with the German parties which defended Jewish rights, earning the resentment of Czech nationalists.
Three
With population (in 1910) of 65,864, 37,633, and 88,431, respectively. A. I. Riabchenko, ed. & comp.,
David Engel, “What’s in a Pogrom? European Jews in the Age of Violence”,
Ibid., p. 35. The richness and worth of the other essays in this volume lie in the degree to which they go beyond Engel’s formal definition.
Daniel Unowsky, “Local Violence, Regional Politics, and State Crisis: the 1989 Anti-Jewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia”,
