William W. Hagen. Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920

During World War I and its aftermath, marauding armies and enraged civilians carried out hundreds of pogroms against Jewish civilians on the eastern front and in the borderlands between ethnographic Russia and Poland. These pogroms entailed theft, the destruction of private and communal property, torture, humiliation, rape, and murder. Historians have documented anti-Jewish riots and massacres in Russia and Ukraine. William W. Hagen, in Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920, turns our attention to Poland. The perpetrators he’s interested in were primarily Polish soldiers and ordinary citizens, and the pogroms in question took place in approximately 280 localities in historically Polish lands outside the orbit of the Russian civil war. About half occurred in Galicia. Students of pogroms not only dispute what counts as a pogrom but also disagree on their causes and meaning. Hagen settles on a sensible definition—a violent attack targeting Jewish civilians—and mines a formidable and diverse set of materials—Jewish, Polish, German, Russian, and Ukrainian—to tell us a great deal about the conditions under which these pogroms occurred and how various groups of Jews and Poles understood, explained, and (in the case of Poles) sometimes justified or excused the violence.

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