English summary: In May 1926, in Paris, a Jewish emigre watchmaker from Ukraine named Scholem Schwarzbard shot and killed the former president of the Ukrainian National Republic, Symon Petliura. Seventeen months later Schwarzbard was exonerated by a Paris court, even though he confessed to the crime and pleaded no mitigating circumstances. The assassination and trial, in which the murders of many thousands of Jews in Ukraine in 1919 became a central issue, riveted public attention in France and around the world and sent the relations between Jews and Ukrainians, Europe's two largest stateless national minorities, into highly fraught new directions. The volume presents newly-discovered archival documents in eight languages, along with articles from the contemporary French, German, Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and American presses, in order to illuminate this episode from multiple points of view. An extensive introduction and copious explanatory notes place a complicated and multifaceted story in historical perspective, helping readers understand why the events unfolded as they did and what they meant to the different groups that had a vital stake in them. German description: Im Mai 1926 erschoss in Paris ein judischer Emigrant aus der Ukraine, der Uhrmacher Scholem Schwarzbard, den ehemaligen Prasidenten der Ukrainischen Nationalrepublik, Symon Petljura. Siebzehn Monate spater wurde Schwarzbard von einem Pariser Gericht freigesprochen, obwohl er die Tat gestanden und nicht auf mildernde Umstande pladiert hatte. Das Attentat und der Prozess, in dem die tausendfachen Morde an den Juden der Ukraine im Jahr 1919 zur Sprache kamen, erregten offentliche Aufmerksamkeit in Frankreich und der gesamten Welt. Sie schlugen sich wesentlich auf die Beziehungen zwischen Juden und Ukrainern, den zwei grossten staatenlosen nationalen Minderheiten Europas, nieder. Der Band vereint neu entdeckte Archivalien in acht Sprachen sowie journalistische Beitrage aus franzosischen, deutschen, ukrainischen, russischen, hebraischen, jiddischen und amerikanischen Zeitungen und Zeitschriften. Damit wird diese historische Episode aus zahlreichen Perspektiven beleuchtet. Eine ausfuhrliche Einleitung und ein umfassender Anmerkungsapparat setzen diese komplizierte und vielschichtige Geschichte in ihren historischen Kontext und helfen Lesern den Ablauf der Geschehnisse und deren Bedeutung fur die unterschiedlichen Gruppen zu verstehen, die wesentlichen Anteil an ihnen hatten.

Im Mai 1926 erschoss in Paris ein jüdischer Emigrant aus der Ukraine, der Uhrmacher Scholem Schwarzbard, den ehemaligen Präsidenten der Ukrainischen Nationalrepublik, Symon Petljura. Siebzehn Monate später wurde Schwarzbard von einem Pariser Gericht freigesprochen, obwohl er die Tat gestanden und nicht auf mildernde Umstände plädiert hatte. Das Attentat und der Prozess, in dem die tausendfachen Morde an den Juden der Ukraine im Jahr 1919 zur Sprache kamen, erregten öffentliche Aufmerksamkeit in Frankreich und der gesamten Welt. Sie schlugen sich wesentlich auf die Beziehungen zwischen Juden und Ukrainern, den zwei größten staatenlosen nationalen Minderheiten Europas, nieder.Der Band vereint neu entdeckte Archivalien in acht Sprachen sowie journalistische Beiträge aus französischen, deutschen, ukrainischen, russischen, hebräischen, jiddischen und amerikanischen Zeitungen und Zeitschriften. Damit wird diese historische Episode aus zahlreichen Perspektiven beleuchtet. Eine ausführliche Einleitung und ein umfassender Anmerkungsapparat setzen diese komplizierte und vielschichtige Geschichte in ihren historischen Kontext und helfen Lesern den Ablauf der Geschehnisse und deren Bedeutung für die unterschiedlichen Gruppen zu verstehen, die wesentlichen Anteil an ihnen hatten.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD * SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE “The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research, clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book. As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can do.” —Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.

Rethinking the concepts of "witnessing" and "witness" is highly relevant to the study of war crimes, mass murder and genocide. Through multiple readings, the volume shows the meanings and functions of witnessing in a political and historical context marked by the emergence of multiculturalism. The ultimate goal is the exploration of divergent and intersectional positions of the witness and witnessing as both concrete and hermeneutical categories. As a result, the mechanisms of social, political, and psychological oppression, murder and genocide will become tangible and understandable with greater precision and finesse.

The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s—covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder. By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture.

“Masterful...An indispensable warning for our own time.” —Samuel Moyn “Magisterial...Covers this dark history with insight and skill...A major intervention into our understanding of 20th-century Europe and the lessons we ought to take away from its history.” —The Nation For much of the last century, Europe was haunted by a threat of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. The belief that Communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe took hold during the Russian Revolution and quickly spread. During World War II, fears of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy were fanned by the fascists and sparked a genocide. But the myth did not die with the end of Nazi Germany. A Specter Haunting Europe shows that this paranoid fantasy persists today in the toxic politics of revitalized right-wing nationalism. “It is both salutary and depressing to be reminded of how enduring the trope of an exploitative global Jewish conspiracy against pure, humble, and selfless nationalists really is...A century after the end of the first world war, we have, it seems, learned very little.” —Mark Mazower, Financial Times “From the start, the fantasy held that an alien element—the Jews—aimed to subvert the cultural values and national identities of Western societies...The writers, politicians, and shills whose poisonous ideas he exhumes have many contemporary admirers.” —Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs

This book traces the legacies of the two most extreme manifestations of tsarist antisemitism-pogroms and blood libels-in the Soviet Union, from 1917 to the early 1960s. Closely intertwined in history and memory, pogroms and blood libels were and are considered central to the Jewish experience in late Tsarist Russia, the only country on earth with large scale anti-Jewish violence in the early twentieth century. But their persistence and memory under the Bolsheviks-a chapter that is largely overlooked by the existing scholarship-significantly shaped the Soviet Jewish experience. By exploring the phenomenon and the memory of pogroms and blood libels in the Soviet territories of the interwar period as well as, after World War II, in the newly annexed territories, Bemporad studies the social realities of everyday antisemitism through the emergence of communities of violence and memories of violence. The fifty-year-span from the Bolshevik Revolution to the early years of Krushchev included a living generation of Jews, and non-Jews alike, who remembered the Beilis Affair, the pogroms of the civil war and in some cases even the violence of the prerevolutionary years. Bemporad also examines the ways in which Jews reacted to and remembered the unprecedented violence of the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, and how they responded to and which strategies they adopted to confront accusations of ritual murder. By tracing the "afterlife" of pogroms and blood libels in the USSR, Legacy of Blood sheds light on the broader question of the changing position of Jews in Soviet society. And by doing so it tells the story of the solid yet ever changing and at times ambivalent relationship between the Soviet state and the Jewish minority group.