The Pogrom of Jews During and After World War I: The Destruction of the Jewish Idea of Galicia

The idea of Galicia was a transnational political concept which represented a multinational coexistence in a situation of irrevocable national divisions and growing nationalist tendencies in the Austrian province called the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. The Jewish variant of this idea was connected with the emergence of a specific Jewish-Galician identity which enabled the Galician Jews to identify with the province, in all its national and religious diversity, and with the Habsburg empire as a whole. The destruction of the Jewish idea of Galicia was connected with the outpouring of anti-Semitism expressed in the form of violence and pogroms after 1914. That tragic phenomenon was described, among others, by Ansky (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport), Abraham Insler, Icchak Grünbaum, and Emil Tenenbaum. The most catastrophic event for the Galician Jews was the pogrom in Lviv in November 1918, which followed the outbreak of the Polish-Ukrainian War, and which was long falsified by Poles, the winners in the said war. The pogrom began an immense growth of anti-Semitism in the Second Polish Republic which signalled the end of the Jewish idea of Galicia.

The pogroms in Ukraine between 1917 and 1921 represent the largest and bloodiest anti-Jewish massacres prior to the Holocaust. The estimated number of Jews murdered in Ukraine in the aftermaths of World War I ranges from 50,000 to 200,000, with many more Jews suffering violence, rape, and loss of property. Altogether 1.6 million Jews were affected by these violent events. Although it is impossible to determine the exact number of victims of these pogroms, there is no doubt that this was the largest outbreak of anti-Jewish violence before the Shoah, the genocide during World War II in which 6 million European Jews, around two-thirds of the Jewish population of the continent, were systematically murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.

in preparation

This essay analyzes statistical and demographic data for Lviv and East Galicia and introduce the collective socio-cultural and economics models for the city and the region. It is in a way an experimental platform to feature and entertain the notions of togetherness and otherness between the Ukrainians, Poles and Jews. We are also attempting to find a matrix to accommodate the ethno-national and social composition that allegedly had been initially formed in the last decades of the 19th century and continued to develop in the given proportions through the interwar period. According to our model there was a structural continuity in the development of the ethno-national, economic, social and cultural stratification of the city and region. The multilateral data from the two official Polish censuses (1921 and 1931) in conjunction with the correlated Polish statistical publications of the time were our main sources. We however have gone further and interpreted the given stratifications vis-à-vis the historical and literary narratives dealing with the inter-communal interactions on personal and political levels.

Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC, 2024

The extensive violence of November 1918 in Lviv, the Eastern Galician capital, left hundreds of Jews injured and dozens of dead. The presented paper is an attempt to understand a critical aspect of the dynamics that drove the violence of the pogrom. It seeks to illustrate the mechanism and role of rumors, shedding light on their influence and significance in driving the violence of the pogrom. Based on rich primary sources, it describes the rumors that were circulated and how people perceived the violence. One of the main goals of this paper is to emphasize the unintentional role of the Jewish militia in creating fear, uncertainty, and paranoia in the minds of Poles. The paper examines the key role of the print media in the process of validating the rumors. The investigation considers the significance of Poles’ knowledge about Jews based on prejudice.

East European Jewish Affairs, 2015

JOURNAL OF SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET POLITICS AND SOCIETY, 2020

MORESHET , 2022

Eastern Galicia and Volhynia were inhabited by Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, for centuries. Although Ukrainians made up the majority of the population in these two regions, they were less present in cities such as Lviv than in villages and small towns. Before World War II, Jews in both regions accounted for about 10 percent of all inhabitants, Poles about 25 percent in eastern Galicia and 15 percent in Volhynia, and Ukrainians 60 percent in eastern Galicia and 70 percent in Volhynia. 2 As a result of the first and second partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772 and 1793, eastern Galicia was incorporated into the Habsburg Empire and Volhynia into the Russian Empire which held also south, central and eastern Ukrainian territories and regarded them as parts of Russia. This geopolitical order changed only after World War I. In November 1917, Ukrainians proclaimed a state in Kiev and in November 1918 in Lviv, but they did not succeed in keeping either of them. In 1921 eastern Galicia and Volhynia were officially incorporated into the Second Polish Republic and almost all other Ukrainian territories constituted the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. 3 During the interwar period, about 20 percent of all Ukrainians lived in the Second Polish Republic and 80 percent in the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. Poland was a multiethnic state which discriminated against Ukrainians and other minorities and treated them as second-class citizens. 4 In order to prolong the fight for a Ukrainian state, Ukrainian veterans of the First World War founded the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO, Ukraїns'ka Viis'kova Orhanizatsiia) in Prague in 1920, and in 1929 the OUN in Vienna. The latter particularly attracted many young Ukrainians in Poland. The OUN ideology combined radical nationalism with racism, antisemitism, fascism, cult of war and violence, antidemocracy, and anti-communism. It collaborated with the Germans and other fascist movements such as the Ustaša and the Italian Fascists, and attempted both to establish a Ukrainian state and to turn it into a fascist dictatorship. 5 In September 1939, eastern Galicia and Volhynia were incorporated into Soviet Ukraine. At that time several hundred OUN members left Ukraine and remained in the General Government, where they were trained by the Nazis and prepared a plan to establish a Ukrainian state after the German attack on the Soviet Union. In 1940 the OUN split into the OUN-B (leader Stepan Bandera)

Continuities and Discontinuities of the Habsburg Legacy in East-Central European Discourses since 1918, Magdalena Baran-Szołtys / Jagoda Wierzejska (eds.), Vienna University Press by V&R unipress, Göttingen, 2020

The paper discusses the ways to conceptualize the idea of multinational and transnational Galicia in the Polish discourse between 1918 and 1939, which originated from the Habsburg political culture. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the idea of Galicia functioned as a transcendent political concept, which opened the possibility of transnational convergence within the heterogeneity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this heterogeneity represented a multinational coexistence in a situation of the irrevocability of national divisions and in the face of growing nationalist tendencies. In the Polish discourse of 1918–1939, the idea of Galicia was a subject of specific transfers: sometimes continuative, but usually deconstructive. This idea was disassembled under conditions of a crisis of democracy, as well as the Second Polish Republic’s anti-Semitism and hostile policy toward national minorities, especially the antagonism between Poles and Ukrainians. Whereas the exclusive Polish viewpoint ideologically used the components of Habsburg political culture by referring to a revised political context to strengthen the representation of reality. The paper is dedicated to the analyses of both phenomena : the overt destruction and tacit continuation of the Habsburg idea of multi- and transnationalism in the former Austrian Galicia. The article examines these phenomena on the basis of interwar Polish literature – among others, by Helena Zakrzewska, Karol Makuszyński, Józef Wittlin – and other forms of discourse like journalism and archival documents pertaining to the Polish-Ukrainian War (1918–1919) and the two following decades.

BOOK FORUM: OMER BARTOV, ANATOMY OF A GENOCIDE: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A TOWN CALLED BUCZACZ (NEW YORK: SIMON AND SHUSTER, 2018), 2018

The persecution and extermination of the Jews in eastern Galicia – as well as in some other parts of Eastern Europe – has remained an under-researched area until today. Although, in the last few decades, ever more historians have started to investigate the Shoah in western Ukraine, we still do not have any detailed studies about such crucial aspects as the Ukrainian police, the role of the Ukrainian administration in the persecution and murder of the eastern Galician Jews, and the interactions and dynamics between Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, and Germans during the Holocaust. Omer Bartov’s study has not closed these huge research gaps, but it shows how some of them can be closed. One of the most remarkable aspects of his book is the micro-historical approach to a typical multiethnic eastern Galician town with a remarkable name.

AI

Scripta Judaica Cracoviensia, 2021

In the areas that became part of the Second Polish Republic, manifestations of antisemitism became more pronounced at the end of World War I and at the beginning of the interwar period. These manifestations often turned into acts of violence against Jews, as became apparent in many towns with Jewish populations. The Lviv pogrom on 22-23 November 1918 was particularly devastating. The Jewish Rescue Committee, established in Lviv at that time, was very active in providing help to the injured, determining the number of casualties and wounded, and in assessing the extent of material damage resulting from the robberies and acts of destruction, including arson. According to the findings of the Jewish Rescue Committee, 73 people died and 443 were wounded as a result of the pogrom. The estimated material damage amounted to 102,986,839 Kr, 1 with a total of 13,375 people affected. The actions taken by the Jewish Rescue Committee to help the victims were extremely important and effective, but they did not fully satisfy the existing social needs. 1 Austro-Hungarian currency known as "korona" or "krone." 2 This subject matter is already covered by many valuable analyses and elaborations. In my current research I present the issue of violence towards the Jews after World War I in the following publications: Wierz

Ian Michals, 2019

Studia Żydowskie. Almanach

The last year of the Great War brought the enhancement of the activities of the political parties, both the Polish and the Jewish ones, as well as deterioration of Polish-Jewish rela-tions. The attitudes reluctant to cooperate with the Poles took hold among the Jews or rather a belief that there were no actual chances for the agreeable fixing of its principles. Another reason for the mutual grievances became forcing the national and cultural autonomy by some of the Jewish parties and the attempts to search for the adherents of such demands in the West. The events in Lvov (Lviv, Lemberg) and the growing Polish-Ukrainian conflict in the Eastern Galicia became yet another inflammatory point in the Polish-Jewish relations. The rumours, which reached the Kingdom of Poland saying that the Jews sympathised with the Ukrainians in Galicia and ‘shoot the Polish soldiers at the back’ added to the traditional accusations addressed at Jews (cooperation with the Germans and Austrians, sympathisin...

Ukraine's Many Faces Land, People, and Culture Revisited, 2023

The 19th century was a period of crucial transformations for Polish Jews. During this century, these communities entered an era of secularization, encountered economic modernization, and appropriated modern ideologies, such as nationalism and socialism. At the end of the 18th century, the Jews of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were divided between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, following of the partitions of Poland, with the majority living in the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire. In 1772, following the first partition, the Habsburg Monarchy established a new province on its northeastern border and named it the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, alluding to the medieval Ruthenian state which had previously existed on those territories. Three main ethnic groupings dominated the population of Galicia: Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, who also constituted the three main religious groups, namely, Greek Catholics, Roman Catholics, and those adherents of the Judaism. The territory also included various smaller minority communities, such as Germans, Armenians, Hungarians, and Romani. According to some estimates the Jewish population in 1772 was between 150.000 and 200.000, constituting 6-7% of the general population. Despite representing the smallest of the main groups, the number of Jews residing in this area of the Habsburg Monarchy was already unprecedented, and continued to grow during the next century. In 1849, the Jewish population of Galicia had more than doubled, rising to approximately 328.000, or 6.7 per cent of the populace. Later in the century, this had reached 11.7 per cent. In both empires, Jews mainly lived in the cities, though there were attempts to promote Jewish agricultural settlements, while smaller Jewish communities continued to perform some essential intermediary functions in the villages. Differences between these two empires made Jewish experiences in each unique. Political participation, opportunities for integration, censorship, and exposure to state and localized violence manifested in different ways.

European Journal of Jewish Studies, 2008

The First World War, and particularly the occupation by the Central States, had a great impact upon the relations of the Jews with the Poles. During this period, Polish-Jewish relations deteriorated. The growing economic problems as well as the rise of the nationalistic mood accompanying the approaching independence supported this tendency. At the same time, the new social and political situation, the relative liberalism of the occupying forces, the free elections, the activities of self-government, and the emergence of the Polish autonomous institutions created new possibilities for Polish-Jewish cooperation. Yet more often they actually multiplied the areas of confl ict. In the autumn of 1918 there had been pogroms in the Kingdom of Poland: Polish-Jewish relations apparently worsened in big cities as well as in the small towns and the countryside, which earlier had been relatively free from anti-Semitism.

2023

This article-length review presents the comprehensive four-volume Polish-language work on pogroms, which took place across the former Polish-Lithuanian (or more narrowly, ‘ethnically Polish’) lands during the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century. The work is titled Pogromy Żydów na ziemiach polskich w XIX i XX wieku [Pogroms of Jews in the Polish Lands During the 19th and 20th Centuries] (2018-2019). Apart from presenting selected pogroms, the sixty contributors probe into various aspects of anti-Jewish and its multifaceted ramifications, including the press coverage of these pogroms locally and broad, and the reflection on this phenomenon as observed in literature and visual arts. The discussion is wrapped up with a look at the history and current state of research on the pogroms themselves and on the phenomenon of anti-Jewish violence in general. Furthermore, the review is enriched with information on relevant literature, if released after the publication of the work under review or authored by its contributors, especially when available in English. Quite a few of such titles mentioned are in Polish though, given that the discussion develops most intensively in present-day Poland (including international scholars with ties to this country), where most historians and social scientists use the medium of Polish for research.

in: Romania and the Holocaust. New Research – Public Discourse – Remembrance, ed. by Simon Geissbühler, Stuttgart: Ibidem 2016, pp. 89-113

Nations and Nationalism, 2009

European History Quarterly, 2024

Pogroms Across the Former Poland-Lithuania: A Historical Overview: Historiographical Review Article. European History Quarterly. Volume 54, Issue 3, July 2024, Pages 510-527. https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914241263746 The two millennia of antisemitism, 2 as explicitly or implicitly encouraged, propagated, or otherwise notoriously condoned by Christians and their ecclesiastical organizations, 3 prepared a fertile ground for generalized and in essence unreflective hatred of Jews and all

2019

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