Introduction for The Plunder

Introduction

Hurrah! Hurrah! at the Jews.

Since it is happening all over Galicia, we should be ashamed if we do not also brush away their stinking kaftans, and therefore drive them away, let them then take up the flails, scythe, and skeins and let them work as we do. And still the Jews have not taken enough. You have shed the blood of our Savior, you have shed our blood, you have dishonored our country, you rob our people, you enrich yourselves from our labor, you are everywhere. Go to Palestine already; there your Messiah is looking for you—So away with you scabs, away you infection, we despise you, as God despised you—we will not stop beating and burning you until we can no longer see you. We will blow you up with dynamite and you will fall down from the clouds like frogs. Hurrah brothers, Hurrah at the Jews, Hurrah!! The Holy Father has granted a complete indulgence to those who drive the Jews from among the Catholics. Rally together, and you know when. Do not forget about the fair. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

Translation of a handwritten flyer posted on houses in the village of Szczurowa, a few miles north of Brzesko, end of June 1898¹

IN 1898 ANTI-JEWISH VIOLENCE swept across the western and central districts of Galicia, the Habsburg province acquired in the eighteenth-century Partitions of Poland and today divided between Poland and Ukraine. Bands of peasants broke into shops and taprooms administered by Jews on the outskirts of small villages, bashing in windows and knocking in doors with scythes, hatchets, canes, iron spikes, and rocks. They drank copious quantities of vodka and beer, shattered glasses and destroyed furniture, and ransacked chests of drawers. Attackers beat Jews with sticks and hit them with rocks. They assaulted mothers in front of cowering children. In towns like Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, Frysztak, and Stary Sącz, peasants joined artisans, shopkeepers, and members of town councils to break into and plunder Jewish-owned businesses. Some loaded their spoils—flour, vodka, clothes, kitchen utensils, mattresses, pillows—onto carts driven into town for this purpose.

A few attacks took place in late February, mid-March, and early April. From late May until the end of June when Galician Governor (Statthalter) Leon Count Piniński announced the institution of a state of emergency, anti-Jewish violence erupted in 408 communities (21 in eastern Galicia, the rest in the western and central districts of the province). Scores of Jews were injured. The gendarmes and the army killed at least eighteen people and wounded many others in their efforts to quell the violence.² By January 1899 prosecutors had charged 5,170 people, mostly Polish-speaking peasants, day laborers, miners, and railroad construction workers as well as city council members, village leaders, teachers, and shopkeepers; men in their late teens, but also fathers in their forties, village elders in their sixties and seventies, and women of all ages—with a variety of offenses. Galicia’s courts tried 3,816 people and sentenced 2,328 to prison terms lasting from a few days to three years.³ As attested by the Jewish historian Raphael Mahler in the Sefer Sandz, the post-Shoah Yizkor book of recollections of the life and death of the Jewish communities of the Nowy Sącz area, Galician Jews would remember this outbreak of violence and robbery as “The Plunder.”⁴

Antisemitism and its use as a political weapon did not distinguish the lands of partitioned Poland from the rest of late-nineteenth century Europe. In the decades around 1900, ethnic violence in Galicia and elsewhere in Austria-Hungary paralleled the violence and antisemitism experienced in other parts of Europe.⁵ The Dreyfus Affair in France reminds us that the 1898 Galician riots should not be understood as leftovers from the medieval world that continued to characterize backward eastern Europe while the progressive West had moved past such ancient hatreds. Antisemitic politics and anti-Jewish violence in the decades before the First World War reflected instead a European-wide trend toward mass political mobilization.

According to historian Theodore Weeks, one of the key differences between the Polish lands and the rest of Europe—in addition to higher levels of illiteracy and poverty—was not antisemitic politics as such, but rather “the simple fact that Jews lived in far greater numbers among Poles than among the French, Germans, or even Austrians.”⁶ Weeks and others link antisemitism in the Russian partition to specific political developments in the Russian Empire (such as the assassination of Alexander II and the Revolution of 1905) and to underlying social conflicts exacerbated by increased industrialization. In contrast, until very recently the few studies that made mention of the 1898 Galician riots all but ignored the Habsburg context.⁷ Yet, the outbreak, course, and suppression of the 1898 riots were shaped by the changing political realities of the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy (Cisleithania) in the late nineteenth century: suffrage reform and mass political mobilization, economic transformation, nationalism in the countryside, antisemitism, efforts by entrenched elites to counter and harness popular political movements, and ongoing conflicts concerning the respective roles of central and regional governing authorities.

Scholarly literature continues to grapple with the problem of antisemitism in Europe in the modern period. Much of this work has centered on well-known incidents and the intellectual origins and spread of antisemitic ideas. My main concern here is very different. At the center of interest are the choices made and actions taken on the ground by peasants, townspeople, Jews, and local officials as well as the interpretations imposed on these actions by interested parties farther removed from the scene. This micro-historical study of one wave of antisemitic violence in one “backward” agricultural corner of the Habsburg Monarchy follows David Nirenberg and others by arguing that perceptions of Jewish-Christian difference and long-standing anti-Jewish discourses become powerful influences on behavior only in moments when people find those discourses useful.⁸ Popular and publicized assumptions about Jews posing a collective threat, the asymmetry of power between Christians and Jews, the relatively low level of organization and the episodic nature of the Galician violence largely conformed to the pattern of “exclusionary violence” seen in many parts of Europe in the decades around 1900.⁹

By analyzing the 1898 anti-Jewish riots in Galicia as an example of exclusionary violence, this book offers new insights into the upsurge of the antisemitism that accompanied the emergence of mass politics in Europe in the decades around 1900.¹⁰ This volume looks closely at events on the ground and the ways the new popular media of the day shaped and interpreted those events. The chapters presented here explore how Jewish-Catholic relations functioned; how antisemitic tropes and writings gained traction at local levels even in regions with high rates of illiteracy; how the Habsburg state provided or attempted to provide stability and law and order to its far-flung provinces in the decades before World War I. This book considers the new forms of political organization that contributed to the transformation of confrontations between Catholics and Jews in western Galicia—the kind of local incidents that took place before and after the spring and summer of 1898—into a series of attacks moving from town square to village tavern while drawing ever greater numbers of people as participants in or objects of communal violence.

Scholars studying ethnic violence face many challenges if we seek to do more than narrate drunken disturbances.¹¹ One approach is to recount the social, economic, and ideological background and then assume that the combustible situation described needed only a spark to set it off. Such an approach would inevitably smooth over jumbled and chaotic events, diverse motivations, and choices made that might conflict with the coherent narratives constructed by interested partisans. Still, this book begins with those contexts, not because they are in and of themselves explanations for the outbreak and course of violence, but because they form the backdrop against which the riots took place.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of social, and economic relations in the mostly Polish-speaking small towns and villages where the majority of the 1898 attacks took place. What were the small towns of the region like? Who lived in them? What were the Jewish communities like, and how did Jews and Catholics interact and in what locations and contexts? In this period in Italy, France, and elsewhere, Catholic institutions propagated new and virulent forms of antisemitism. Galicia’s Roman Catholic hierarchy and clergy translated and transferred this Catholic-inflected modern antisemitism into the Galician countryside beginning in the early 1890s. This took place at the very moment when mass politics arrived in Habsburg central Europe. The suffrage reforms of the 1880s, and, more importantly, the 1890s, opened up the political process to millions of potential new voters in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy. New political parties raced to mobilize potential constituencies. The resulting “politics in a new key” as historian Carl Schorske labeled this phenomenon in relation to urban Vienna, brought a strident, aggressive style of political action, rhetoric, and organization.¹²

While a great deal of recent Habsburg scholarship has considered some of these developments in the Bohemian lands, Galicia has drawn much less attention.¹³ In the 1890s in western Galicia, social democratic activists and leaders of new peasant parties, all damned by the conservative establishment as irresponsible demagogues, competed aggressively for the ballots of rural and small-town voters. The new Catholic antisemitism played a central role in this competition as it did in two fiercely fought elections for parliamentary seats that took place in the first half of 1898.¹⁴

Chapter 2 begins the close examination of the violence itself. This chapter traces the course of the 1898 events from the relatively isolated violence in the salt-mining town of Wieliczka and the surrounding area in mid-March to the first major urban anti-Jewish riots in Przemyśl and Kalwaria Zebrzydowska in late May, the numerous raids around Jasło in mid-June, and the most intense violence of the period in and near Nowy Sącz and Stary Sącz, Limanowa, and Brzesko in the last week of June. These attacks convinced the Galician governor and the Vienna cabinet to declare a state of emergency in western and central Galicia. Representative riots and attacks are described in detail to provide the reader with a sense of how incidents related to each other.

Chapter 3 centers on the participants themselves. Who led the riots and why? What motivated people to join the action? The dissemination of outlandish rumors played a pivotal role in the formation of communities of anti-Jewish action during and after the violence as did the constant efforts at mobilization by new political parties. What were the confrontations between Jews and Christians like? Many of the rioters and Jews knew each other. How did this familiarity affect events?

I also look at the defensive actions taken by Jewish individuals, families, small communities, and organizations (political and religious/ethnic/social) in Galicia as well as in the monarchy as a whole. This chapter considers the roles played by various arms of the state, from local administrators and gendarmes to the Galician governor, military commanders and troops, and the ministries as they sought to restore order in the Galician countryside. The final section of the chapter looks at the persistence of anti-Jewish incidents in eastern Galicia in July. The overwhelming majority of perpetrators in the 1898 riots were Polish speakers. Here I briefly consider the relative lack of participation on the part of the Ruthenian/Ukrainian population.

Chapter 4 turns to the search for justice. In the Habsburg Monarchy all citizens were, at least in theory, subject to the rule of law. The Galician courts, closely watched by the Ministry of Justice in Vienna, assessed personal responsibility for individual acts of violence and disturbance of the peace. The first major attacks took place in mid-March; five weeks of sustained violence began in the last week of May and ended only in late June. The first trials opened in the beginning of July; courts issued the last judgments in January 1899. Appeals continued for several more months. Each case was a drama that played out in local courtrooms, on the street, and in the press. What were the claims of the prosecution and the defense? How did defendants and witnesses describe the violence and their own actions? How did newspapers portray the trials and engage in questions of guilt and responsibility?

Chapter 5 explores efforts to inform the events with political meaning. Galicia’s major Polish-speaking political players assigned blame and incorporated explanations for the riots into preexisting narratives about the past, present, and future that bolstered their respective appeals for political support. I consider the debates on the violence that dominated the last sessions of the Vienna parliament held before the celebration of Emperor Franz Joseph’s December 2 Golden Jubilee. This was a dramatic moment. Just a few months before, peasant party deputies and socialists had been elected to parliament under the newly expanded franchise. Now, from the floor of the parliament building on Vienna’s Ringstraße, the symbolic center of power in the monarchy, they put forward their competing interpretations of the genesis and course of the anti-Jewish attacks. This chapter reveals the abyss that lay between the smooth and coherent framing narratives that emerged during and after the riots and the much murkier events, motivations, actions and reactions of participants on the ground described in earlier chapters. The final section considers how the riots altered patterns of Christian-Jewish interaction.

The Galician events have been overshadowed by far more deadly examples in central and eastern Europe. Many books and articles document anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire in the decades surrounding 1900: the waves of pogroms in the 1880s; the bloodshed in Kishinev (Chișinău) in 1903; the anti-Jewish attacks during and after the 1905 revolution.¹⁵ There is an increasing literature on ritual murder charges around 1900.¹⁶ Recent work has turned to the murderous anti-Jewish outbreaks that marked the end of World War I in central and eastern Europe.¹⁷ Scholarly and more popular publications continue to concentrate on the Shoah. Such works focus on the German factories of extermination and the Nazi killing fields located on the lands of interwar Poland as well as the emotionally charged and seemingly endless debates about Polish-Jewish relations under Nazi occupation and in post-World War II Poland.¹⁸ There have been far fewer efforts to look at earlier moments of anti-Jewish violence in the Polish past.¹⁹

Historians of the Habsburg Monarchy have viewed tensions and conflicts in Galicia as marginal to the history of Austria-Hungary in comparison with German-Czech street clashes in Bohemia. Yet the 1898 riots constituted the most extensive anti-Jewish attacks in the Habsburg lands in the post-1867 constitutional era. Antisemitic tropes, toxic Christian-Jewish relations, local contexts, rumors, religiosity, press coverage, and government intervention shaped the outbreak, course, and aftermath of the violence. The 1898 Galician violence challenged the image of Austria-Hungary as a Rechtsstaat, a state governed by the rule of law.

While certainly a contribution to Habsburg historiography, this close study of the 1898 Galician riots and their aftermath is far more than an account of obscure moments of violence in a backward region of Europe or another example of national conflict in Austria-Hungary. This examination of the experience of anti-Jewish violence in this rural corner of the Habsburg Monarchy is a local study of Europe-wide political, economic, social, and cultural transformation.

A Note on Definitions

This volume employs riot and anti-Jewish attacks—not pogrom, the term so often used in relation to anti-Jewish violence in eastern Europe, to describe the events under analysis here. Scholars have made many attempts to define pogrom and to distinguish it from other manifestations of violence against Jews or non-Jews. The term continues to be used to designate the vicious anti-Jewish attacks in the Russian Empire, such as the wave of violence in 1881–1882 as well as the brutal and deadly assaults on Jews in 1903 and 1905–6. Popular understanding of pogrom has long assumed that the attackers had explicit or implicit government support or were even directly spurred on by the authorities. If one accepts this definition, Polish historian Franciszek Bujak was certainly correct when he penned the following about the 1918 anti-Jewish attacks by Polish-speakers in the eastern districts of Habsburg Galicia: “As a matter of fact there were no pogroms in Galicia, that is to say, no systematically organized massacres and robberies carried out with the aid of an indifferent attitude, or even of a co-ordinate action of the police authorities, as was the case in Russia; all that occurred there were comparatively insignificant riots, which would often break out very suddenly.”²⁰ Bujak was trying to convince the participants at the peace treaty discussions in Versailles after World War I not to pressure the new Polish government to grant minority rights to Jews. Russia had pogroms; civilized Poland had “insignificant riots.” Bujak would certainly have written the same about the 1898 events considered here.

In recent decades, research by John Klier and others has transformed how we understand the Russian pogroms. Historians are now mostly united in rejecting the earlier thesis of governmental organization of or backing for the Russian pogroms of the 1880s.²¹ Reflecting this consensus, Jonathan Dekel-Chen and colleagues argue simply that “Although pogroms could affect any targeted group, in normal usage the word has come to denote an anti-Jewish riot.”²² Historian Gerald Suhr has put forward this definition: “Pogroms may be thought of as counterrevolutionary outbursts, the largest number of whose supporters believes that they are defending tsar, country, and sometimes religion by attacking their enemies, most commonly interpreted as Jews, but including others.”²³ If we accept these seemingly straightforward definitions, then the events of 1898 in Galicia do appear to fit the category of pogrom.

In popular memory however, pogrom continues to evoke the deadly anti-Jewish riots of Russian history. In the 1898 Galician case no Jews died—although at least eighteen Christian rioters and bystanders were killed by the authorities in efforts to restore law and order. In light of these complications, I most often utilize riot, the term found in the Polish-language press (rozruchy) and employed by the Habsburg authorities (Ausschreitungen) in 1898. By using riot instead of pogrom the events in Galicia can be viewed in their very specific Habsburg context as well as within the larger history of anti-Jewish violence in Europe while avoiding the specific definitional problems posed by pogrom.²⁴ Of course riot is also a highly contested term. Riot is used in this volume to most closely reflect how contemporaries wrote and spoke about the events of 1898, not as a reflection of a specific theoretical position.

A second definitional problem involves antisemitism. Contemporary government documents and the German- and Polish- language press most often referred to the events at the center of this volume as antisemitic riots, anti-Jewish riots, antisemitic unrest, antisemitic excesses, or excesses of antisemitic origin. Scholars of antisemitism have long perceived a sharp divide between premodern anti-Jewish violence, hatred, and persecution on the one hand and modern antisemitism on the other. The former focused on religion (Jews as Christ-killers; Host defilers; etc.); the latter on perceived economic, social, and racial divisions and categories. Others have questioned this clear division.²⁵ In this book, as was the practice of contemporary observers, I utilize antisemitic and anti-Jewish violence interchangeably. Those implicated had a variety of motivations; observers, journalists, and politicians had their own reasons for characterizing the 1898 violence as they did. My use of both antisemitic and anti-Jewish violence is intended as a reflection of the usage common in 1898, not as an intervention into current scholarly debates. I will return to the question of contemporary usage in the conclusion.

MAP 2. Galicia

Notes to Introduction

1. Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in L’viv (TsDIAL)146/4/3124, 87. Courtesy of the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine.

2. The Galician administration did not produce a list of all those killed by gendarmes and the army. The peasant journal Pszczółka claimed that a total of thirty Catholics had been killed (Pszczółka, Addendum to second Sunday of July, 1898, no. 13). Other publications cited twenty dead. Reports from district captains, the gendarmerie, and the army confirm at least eighteen deaths at the hands of soldiers and gendarmes. Six were killed in Frysztak on June 16 and another six died later due to wounds sustained on that day. At least six others were killed by the authorities in Kalwaria and Tłuste at the end of May, in the Jasło area in mid-June, and in the region around Limanowa in the last days of June.

3. These figures are incomplete. As of January 5, 1899, 531 accused still awaited verdicts. The total number of those accused and tried represents only a fraction of those who took part. To give just one example, in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, the site of a mass anti-Jewish attack in late May, only five out of hundreds of participants were ever brought before the court. With the exception of a handful arrested for anti-Jewish attacks in March in Wieliczka, none of the scores of people who participated in anti-Jewish attacks in late February and March were arrested or tried. The Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw (AGAD), C. K. Ministerstwo Sprawiedliwości (CK MS), box 307, files 106, 93, 135.

4. Rafael Mahler, ed., Sefer Sandz (New York: Sandzer Society, 1970), 237–43. The original Yiddish printing of this book is accessible online through the New York Public Library. Excerpts have been translated into English and are available at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Nowy_sacz/nowy_sacz.html. Mahler was himself born in Nowy Sącz.

5. On antisemitism and mass politics in France, see Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 1982); and Michael Burns, Rural Society and French Politics: Boulangism and the Dreyfus Affair, 1886–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). On Germany, see Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002); and Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds., Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Violence in Modern German History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). In the Habsburg Monarchy, see Hillel Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). For Russian Poland, see Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Among many important general studies of antisemitism, see Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Schoken Books, 1991); Jakob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

6. Theodore Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism: The “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850–1914 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 171.

7. When I began researching this project, only a few articles on the 1898 riots had appeared. Two scholars have since published treatments of these events. Tim Buchen’s Antisemitismus in Galizien: Agitation, Gewalt und Politik gegen Juden in der Habsburgermonarchie um 1900 (Berlin: Metropol, 2012) looks at many of the issues central to my work. He concentrates to a much greater extent on parliamentary inquiries put forward by Galician politicians and devotes less attention to events on the ground, the trials, and the Habsburg context than I do here. Marcin Soboń’s study of antisemitism in Galicia concentrates on Jewish-Polish relations in Galicia from 1868–1914. His book includes a section on the 1898 riots: Polacy wobec Żydów w Galicji doby autonomicznej w latach 1868–1914 (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Verso, 2011). See also Kai Struve, “Gentry, Jews, and Peasants: Jews as Others in the Formation of the Modern Polish Nation in Rural Galicia During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Nancy M. Wingfield, ed., Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003); Frank Golczewski, “Die Westgalizischen Bauernunruhen 1898,” in Golczewski, Polnisch-Jüdische Beziehungen, 1881–1922 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1981), 60–84; and Golczewski, “Rural Anti-Semitism in Galicia before World War I,” in Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk, and Antony Polonsky, eds., The Jews in Poland (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 97–105. General studies of the rise of peasant politics in Galicia take little if any notice of the 1898 violence. See, for example, Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001) Stauter-Halsted did later publish “Jews as Middleman Minorities in Rural Poland: Understanding the Galician Pogroms of 1898,” in Robert Blobaum, Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

8. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 6.

9. For a discussion of “exclusionary violence” and its occurrence in German history, see Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds., Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Violence in Modern German History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

10. These issues are explored in a series of case studies in Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky, eds., Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014).

11. On issues related to scholarly approaches to collective violence, see Roberta Senechal de la Roche, “Collective Violence as Social Control,” Sociological Forum 11:1 (1996); de la Roche, “Why is Collective Violence Collective?” Sociological Theory 19:2 (July 2001), 126–44; Paul R. Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Paul R. Brass, ed., Riots and Pogroms (New York: NYU Press, etc., 1996).

12. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980).

13. The most comprehensive study of formal politics in Galicia is Harald Binder, Galizien in Wien. Parteien, Wahlen, Fraktionen und Abgeordnete im Übergang zur Massenpolitik (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005).

14. See also Kai Struve, Bauern und Nation in Galizien: über Zugehörigkeit und soziale Emanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005).

15. On anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire, see John Doyle Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meier, and Israel Bartal, eds., Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and Robert Weinberg, Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia: The Ritual Murder Trial of Mendel Beilis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).

16. On ritual murder accusations in the Habsburg lands, see Hillel Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2000); and Kieval, “The Importance of Place: Comparative Aspects of the Ritual Murder Trial in Modern Central Europe,” in Todd M. Endelman, ed., Comparing Jewish Societies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 135–65; Robert Nemes, “Hungary’s Antisemitic Provinces: Violence and Ritual Murder in the 1880s,” Slavic Review 66:1 (Spring 2007), 20–44; and Susanna Buttaroni, Stanislaw Musial, Ritualmord: Legenden in der Europäischen Geschichte (Vienna: Böhlau, 2003).

17. Alexander Victor Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); and Piotr J. Wróbel, “Foreshadowing the Holocaust: The Wars of 1914–1921 and Anti-Jewish Violence in Central and Eastern Europe,” in Jochen Böhler, Włodzimierz Brodoziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer, eds., Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe’s First World War (Munich: De Gruyter, 2014).

18. Among many recent examples, see three titles by Jan T. Gross: Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and also Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

19. The June 10–12, 2015, conference and planned publication project sponsored by the Department of History at the University of Warsaw on “Pogroms: Collective Anti-Jewish Violence in the Polish Lands in the 19th and 20th Centuries” represents an attempt to consider anti-Jewish violence in a broader perspective.

20. Franciszek Bujak, The Jewish Question in Poland (Paris: Imprimerie Levé, 1919), 31.

21. For scholarly discussions of the role of the Russian government in anti-Jewish attacks in the Russian Empire, see John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

22. Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meier, and Israel Bartal, eds., Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 4.

23. Gerald D. Suhr, “Duty and Ambivalence: The Russian Army and Pogroms, 1903–1906,” in Nemes and Unowsky, Sites of European Antisemitism, 234.

24. Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

25. Vicki Caron, “Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin de Siècle France: The Case of the Union Nationale,” in The Journal of Modern History 81:2 (June 2009): 294–346; Robert Michael, A History of Catholic Antisemitism: The Dark Side of the Church (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and David I. Kerzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).