The authors of Intimate Violence, a work by two political scientists on pogroms in Poland on the eve of the Holocaust, have been fruitfully collaborating for many years. In their study from 2003 on communist voting patters in interwar Poland, their carefully collected data calls into question the view that Jews voted for communists in numbers disproportionate to their overall share in the society as a whole. Facts and perceptions, they emphasized, were two very different things, as the two found that “the belief … that even if most Jew were not communists, most communists were probably Jew, was broadly held and deeply felt among Poles” [Kopstein & Wittenberg, “Who Voted Communist? Reconsidering the Social Bases of Radicalism in Interwar Poland,” Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 106].

In their current study, Intimate Violence, Kopstein and Wittenberg discovered that contrary to the widespread perception that alleged Jewish support for communism in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland played a major role in the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in the summer of 1941, other factors were much more consequential. They begin Intimate Violence with the statement that “ethnic violence is never easy to comprehend, but it is especially puzzling when the perpetrators are civilians and the victims are their neighbors. This book investigates the reason for such ‘intimate’ violence” (1).

Intimate Violence seeks, more specifically, to understand “ethnic violence under conditions of state collapse,” pointing out that in the summer of 1941, the area of eastern Poland formerly under Soviet occupation had no government structure until German-established rule in September 1941. After exhaustively collecting data on anti-Jewish violence in six regions of eastern Poland under German occupation, the authors found that “pogroms occurred in 219 locations, making up just 9 percent of all locations in the regions where Jews and non-Jews dwelled together.” Kopstein and Wittenberg thus argue that in eastern Poland “most communities never experienced a pogrom and most ordinary non-Jews never attacked Jews” (2). Unlike the widespread perception of mass anti-Jewish violence, they argue that there was a “relative rarity of the violence” (3).

The central question for the authors is why pogroms broke out in some towns but not in others. Addressing the widely-held argument in Poland that Jews collaborated with the Soviets in 1939–41, Kopstein and Wittenberg demonstrate that “a balanced consideration of the historical record casts significant doubt on the Jewish collaboration hypothesis,” because “Jews were underrepresented in the administration both in absolute and relative terms” in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland (5).

They turn, instead, to the so-called “power-threat theory,” arguing, “pogroms were most likely to break out where non-Jews perceived a Jewish threat to their political dominance” (14). To determine whether a given locality contained a high degree of this perceived Jewish threat, the authors examined three measurable factors: the popularity of Polish parties advocating tolerance vs. those favoring a nationalist programs, the proportion of Jews in a given locality, and the degree to which the local Jewish population advocated for Jewish national equality in their electoral behavior (14). As they demonstrate, even the Polish liberal parties advocating tolerance were unsympathetic to the call for Jewish national rights as opposed to Jewish civil rights: “Localities where Jews supported national equality with the majority group proved particularly vulnerable to pogroms.” They continue: “We show that the greater the proportion of Jews voting for these parties, the more likely a pogrom” (15–16).

The authors’ core contention is that interwar voting and demographic patterns are indicators of the spatial distribution of violence. They discuss in detail Polish political life before 1939, use census data to determine demographic, economic and political variables. Their study of 353 localities in Bialystok and the northeastern region confirms “the broad utility of the power-threat theory and offers more limited support for the anti-Semitism hypothesis” (57).

In the critical chapter comparing pogrom vs. non-pogrom localities, the data collection reveals their important finding. That is, that the towns in which pogroms took place in the northeastern region, where Jedwabne is located, “the perceived Jewish nationalist threat” was high. (66) That is, not only were Jews a high percentage of the general population in these towns, but their support for Jewish national rights was very high as well. As Table 4.1 reveals, “Jedwabne was much more politically polarized than most other places, a fact that might account for that pogrom's exceptional cruelty.” These findings “cast some doubt on the claim that it was the Soviet occupation and the suspected Jewish role in it that turned Poles against Jews in 19141” (65).

The authors’ data also demonstrates that in non-pogrom localities, Jews constituted on average ten times less of the general population than in pogrom localities. In these non-pogrom towns, support for Jewish national parties was significantly lower, while Polish support for nationalist parties was lower as well. As they write, “Jews in localities where pogroms occurred were far more nationalist (51%) than in localities where no pogroms occurred (39%)” (66). Although the difference between 51% and 39% may be not support the authors’ characterization that pogrom towns were “far more nationalist,” the difference is nonetheless significant. Another interesting factor is that in non-pogrom localities, there was a large presence of a second minority: 35% in non-pogrom localities while only 10% in pogrom localities (67).

In the section on Ukrainian Galicia and Volhynia, the authors found a similar pattern between pogrom and non-pogrom localities. The major difference is that the perpetrators in this region were overwhelmingly Ukrainians, not Poles (94). The other factor that increased the likelihood of a pogrom was a large Jewish population with considerable support for Zionist parties. “The most robust predictor of pogroms” in east Galicia, the authors found, “is the strength of Zionist parties” (112).

In the end, Intimate Violence is a warning. The authors argue that “when countries make the transition to mass politics before their populations constitute one people, the implications can be volatile.” When, in the summer of 1941, the Soviet withdrawal was followed by a collapse of law and order, the authors found that the outbreak and spread of pogroms in eastern Poland was “rare,” contrary to what is believed. “The relative rarity of pogroms,” they write, “is inconsistent with widely-held beliefs about the extent and depth of anti-Semitism in interwar Poland.” According to their findings, “the 1941 pogroms … did not affect the vast majority of Jews in Eastern Poland and in fact were not even the most widespread or deadly pogrom wave to have struck the Polish lands. That ‘honor’ belongs to the 1918–1920 wave, which featured eight hundred pogroms and at least fifty thousand deaths” (130).

The number of pogroms that occurred in Poland during the year 1918–20 was, in fact, nowhere near the number cited in Intimate Violence. In the latest study on the topic, William W. Hagen, in his Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920 (2018), found that between 400 and 532 Jews were killed in pogroms in Poland in the years 1918–20 (512). The vast discrepancy between the figures in Intimate Violence and the ones in Hagen can be attributed to the source Kopstein and Wittenberg cite, a study on pogroms specifically in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War on territories that became part of Soviet Russia. [N. Gergel, “The Pogroms in the Ukraine, 1918–1920,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 6 (1951): 237–52]. Admittedly, this comparison between the period 1918–20 and the summer of 1941 was merely an aside by the authors, one that has no bearing whatsoever on the extraordinary value and importance of Intimate Violence. But it is a correction that needs to be made nonetheless.

Refreshingly free of polemical or partisan overtones, Intimate Violence is a uniquely valuable scholarly work that makes a major contribution to our understanding of Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War. The authors demonstrate the central importance of employing a comparative framework for assessing Polish attitudes and behavior so as to avoid distorted conclusions about Poland as a whole.