Anti-Jewish Violence and the Emergence of the Polish State: Lwów 1918

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Modern Jewish History

Abstract

While Europe’s empires crumbled in the fall of 1918, the formerly Habsburg city of Lemberg/Lwów/L’viv became the flashpoint of competing Polish and Ukrainians claims which culminated in three weeks of street fighting and months of siege, with Lwów’s Jewish community caught in between. When the dust settled, the city became an important urban center in the new Polish Republic. This paper examines the ways in which perpetration of violence against Jews and the discourse around it at the dawn of Polish statehood in late 1918 served and solidified Polish state and nation making efforts. The focus of the paper is the Lwów pogrom of late November 1918, when Polish army members as well as Lwów civilians assaulted the city’s Jewish population and inaugurated months of its exploitation for resources and labor well into the “first year of freedom” 1919.
On the example of the November pogrom in Lwów, which followed Ukrainian withdrawal from the city and the Polish takeover, I argue in this paper is that the anti-Jewish violence was not a regrettable anomaly in Poland’s state formation but that it played an integral role in the emergence of institutions, attitudes to institutions, and in the process of claiming access to power and privileges of citizenship in the new state. While the occurrence and cultural meaning of anti-Jewish violence has been elucidated recently by William Hagen’s groundbreaking work, its meaning and function in the political life of the interwar Polish Republic is a topic awaiting a more dedicated exploration.
The sources of the paper include records of the Lwów Jewish community, who undertook meticulous work of documenting the excesses, the records of the Polish civilian and military institutions, and contemporary press in Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and German. The crux of the argument is a narrative analysis of available sources reconstructing the mental landscapes of the participants with relation to their perceived place in the new European order of emerging nation states.

Author

• Beata Szymkow, Stanford University