Comprehensive new history of the anti-Jewish pogrom crisis in the Russian Empire of 1881-2 by a leading authority in the field.

Distinguished scholars of Russian Jewish history reflect on the pogroms in Tsarist and revolutionary Russia.

From the 1880s to the 1940s, an upsurge of explosive pogroms caused much pain and suffering across the eastern borderlands of Europe. Rioters attacked Jewish property and caused physical harm to women and children. During World War I and the Russian Civil War, pogrom violence turned into full-blown military actions. In some cases, pogroms wiped out of existence entire Jewish communities. More generally, they were part of a larger story of destruction, ethnic purification, and coexistence that played out in the region over a span of some six decades. Pogroms: A Documentary History surveys the complex history of anti-Jewish violence by bringing together archival and published sources--many appearing for the first time in English translation. The documents assembled here include eyewitness testimony, oral histories, diary excerpts, literary works, trial records, and press coverage. They also include memos and field reports authored by army officials, investigative commissions, humanitarian organizations, and government officials. This landmark volume and its distinguished roster of scholars provides an unprecedented view of the history of pogroms.

Imperial Odessa: Peoples, Spaces, Identities is a book about a cosmopolitan city written by a cosmopolitan scholar with a literary flair. Evrydiki Sifneos conceives Odessa as more of a fin-de siècle east Mediterranean port-metropolis than as a provincial port-city of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century due to two of its principal characteristics: its function as a hub of international trade and travel, and the multi-ethnic character of its inhabitants. The book unfolds around two interpenetrating axes. The first one introduces a new "peripatetic" approach that discovers the space of the city; and the other, the one that has given it its dynamic, is the socio-economic transformations that germinated within the political changes.

In this pathbreaking study, I. Michael Aronson offers a closely argued and many-faceted reinterpretation of Russian anti-Semitism and tsarist nationalities policy. He examines, and refutes, the widely held belief that the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia in 1881 were a result of a conspiracy supported by the tsarist government or circles close to it, investigating claims and counterclaims about what happened during that fateful year and guiding the reader through a maze of events and decades of subsequent interpretations.Although the pogroms are treated within the context of Russian history, Aronson's analysis has significance for Jewish studies as well. When the Russian government adopted reactionary and repressive policies, Jews began to seek new solutions to the problems that plagued them: massive numbers emigrated to the United States; other turned to revolutionary socialism; still others were attracted to Zionism and supported the creation of the state of Israel.

Seeks to revise the traditional view of Russian Jewish historiographers that religious intolerance, xenophobia, and belief in a Jewish economic threat motivated imperial policy towards the Jews after the partition of Poland. Emphasizes the influence of Western reform tradition on the formation of that policy. Surveys, also, the Jews' legal status in Poland and Polish religious and economic antisemitism.

Although overshadowed in historical memory by the Holocaust, the anti-Jewish pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were at the time unrivaled episodes of ethnic violence. Incorporating newly available primary sources, this collection of groundbreaking essays by researchers from Europe, the United States, and Israel investigates the phenomenon of anti-Jewish violence, the local and transnational responses to pogroms, and instances where violence was averted. Focusing on the period from World War I through Russia's early revolutionary years, the studies include Poland, Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Crimea, and Siberia.