Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust seeks to explain why, during the summer of 1941, anti-Jewish pogroms occurred in some localities in Poland’s eastern borderlands and not in others. This setting is particularly instructive for studying the causes of interethnic violence because, due to war and anarchy, there were no state forces to restrain or punish pogrom instigators. Thus, the number of observed pogroms and the number of intended pogroms should be the same (or close to it). This means that Kopstein and Wittenberg’s results do not capture how government involvement and would-be perpetrator self-censorship affect pogrom onset; instead, they show which community-level factors affect the likelihood that people will attack their neighbors, absent state or legal constraints.
Given the permissive context of state collapse and an ethnically divided population primed for violence, one might expect pogroms in every locality. However, Kopstein and Wittenberg’s original dataset on pogroms shows that 84 percent of the localities they examine (296 of 352 cases) had no pogrom. Why, even in the midst of state collapse, extreme uncertainty, and heightened violent ethnic nationalism, did most localities avoid anti-Jewish pogroms?
According to Kopstein and Wittenberg, the answer lies in power-threat theory, which posits that “where demographically weighty minorities politically mobilize in ways that challenge majority power, the majority will take actions to suppress the minority” (Kopstein and Wittenberg 129). Using their original data on pogroms, the 1928 Polish election results, and short qualitative case studies, the authors demonstrate why the anti-Jewish pogroms covered in this book are not solely—or best—explained by economics, Polish ethnic nationalism, Jewish collaboration with Soviet occupiers (which was largely a myth), Jewish support for communism (which was minimal), or even the perception of Jewish cooperation with the USSR.
Instead, Kopstein and Wittenberg show that the anti-Jewish pogroms they study resulted from how the local non-Jewish population perceived Jewish nationalism. Using mainly quantitative data, they document how, in areas where non-Jews saw Jewish nationalism as a credible threat to Polish or Ukrainian ethnic nationalist aims, a pogrom was likely. In contrast, in areas where non-Jews did not see their own political power as threatened by Jewish nationalism—either because the Jewish population was too small to wield much political power or because the local Jewish population did not support Jewish nationalist political parties—, pogroms were less likely.
The extent to which you find this argument convincing will depend on the extent to which you believe in the quality of Kopstein and Wittenberg’s data and chosen indicators. Although the authors studied a situation well-suited to answering their research question, data limitations imposed by war, record-keeping bias, unreliable memories, and the passage of time require Kopstein and Wittenberg to be creative in measuring and proxying their variables.
This creativity is one of the book’s core strengths, as is the transparency with which Kopstein and Wittenberg discuss their methodological choices. Political scientists constantly grapple with the tension between letting data availability dictate which research questions can be asked and seeking to answer important questions despite data limitations, and while picking the second approach is risky, it can offer great rewards. This is the path that Kopstein and Wittenberg pursue in Intimate Violence.
Understanding that readers might be skeptical of some of their decisions, such as using election results from 1928 to measure exclusionary ethnic nationalist sentiment in 1941, or relying on the 1921 census to estimate ethnic group size in 1941, they thoroughly explain their data, why they selected specific measures, and how they mitigate bias. Equally important is their discussion of how they constructed their dataset, which is truly impressive—translating qualitative sources in multiple languages into quantitative data on pogrom occurrences and non-occurrences is no mean feat. Creating a dataset can be daunting, but Kopstein and Wittenberg offer a roadmap for how to do it, and then they demonstrate how to use that data to study phenomena that are usually studied only qualitatively. Thus, even readers who have qualms about the data in this book can find both merit and a model in the honesty with which Kopstein and Wittenberg present the pros and cons of their data, modeling decisions, coding choices, and the sometimes-unsolvable problems they encountered during this process.
One potential limitation of this book is that its definition of “pogrom” is fairly narrow, encompassing only violent events where civilians, not state forces, were the main actors. This limits the scope of the book’s argument and excludes some violent anti-Jewish attacks from the dataset. Intimate Violence still captures most of the anti-Jewish violence that occurred in the region in 1941, as Kopstein and Wittenberg write that civilians, not Nazis, instigated and committed most such brutalities. Nevertheless, it is worth calling attention to the book’s definition of “pogrom,” because many scholars use the word to include cases where the state prompts or perpetrates the violence.
Similarly, the book’s definition of “antisemitism” is not identical to the common conception of the term. Kopstein and Wittenberg argue that the key factor in anti-Jewish pogrom onset is perceived political threat, not antisemitism, but why would Jewish nationalism seem threatening unless non-Jews were afraid of Jews? If non-Jews were not suspicious of their Jewish neighbors—if, that is, they did not hold antisemitic perceptions of Jews as menacing “others,” as competition in a game where only one ethnic group wins—then non-Jews would not see Jewish nationalism a threat to begin with.
To a certain extent, there is utility in distinguishing perceived political threat from antisemitism, or at least in attempting to do this. Kopstein and Wittenberg write that, because antisemitism existed in localities with pogroms as well as in localities without pogroms, the explanatory power of antisemitism is limited. Antisemitism is a potentially necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. In this sense, it is helpful to distinguish between people reacting violently to their neighbors’ politics and people harming their neighbors because of their neighbors’ ethnicity. However, seeing another ethnic group as a political threat evidences antipathy towards that ethnic group, making it impossible to fully disentangle perceived political threat from antisemitic attitudes. This makes it somewhat jarring to read sentences discarding antisemitism as a leading explanation for pogrom onset, although, in the context of the book, it is possible to follow the logic of this distinction.
Overall, this book is laudable for many reasons, including its willingness to tackle an important question despite the complexity involved, its methodological clarity, its quantitative rigor, and, not least, its novel case selection. Political science has largely shied away from studying the Holocaust and related World War Two atrocities, thereby depriving the discipline of a wealth of knowledge. Intimate Violence is a welcome example of how political scientists can engage in Holocaust scholarship and underscores Charles King’s point that, although the Holocaust is unique, the individual events of the Holocaust and World War Two can yield valuable insights (2012). Ultimately, this book is worth reading for anyone who studies violence, ethnic conflict, nationalism, or racial politics, as well as anyone seeking an example of how to tackle a difficult research question in a logical, transparent way.
