Taking a very different approach, Cecile Kuznitz looks at the ways Jews around the world have tried to make sense of Hamas’s sadistic massacres and in doing so put them into the context of Jewish memory. It has, for instance, become commonplace to refer to these orgies of rape and murder as pogroms, and, while they share a certain resemblance to those East European outbursts of anti-Semitic violence, the differences are every bit as profound. Yet Kuznitz finds one especially important parallel:
The pogroms of 1881–1882 in the Russian empire constituted the most sustained wave of anti-Jewish riots in the modern period up to that time. Their horrors partly inspired both mass immigration to America and the Zionist movement. Yet their importance as a turning point in Jewish history and their relevance to the Hamas massacre lie less in the violence itself than in the reaction of Russian society. The right-wing press cited Jewish exploitation as the root cause of the disturbances, and the government showed more enthusiasm for prosecuting members of Jewish self-defense groups than the pogrom instigators.
These reactions were, sadly, unsurprising; what was truly demoralizing was the response of the more radical elements in Russian society, whom Jews had considered to be beyond anti-Semitic canards and sympathetic to their plight. Most of the intelligentsia remained silent, while much of the left endorsed the pogroms as a healthy expression of grassroots anger at an oppressive system. The leaders of the revolutionary socialist movement Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) addressed “the peasants who rise up in Elizavetgrad, Kiev, Smela [sites of pogroms] to free themselves from their enemies: ‘You have begun to rebel against the Jews. You have done well.’”
This betrayal by the left has clear echoes today, as liberal and progressive Jews find many of their erstwhile political allies condoning violence against their Israeli counterparts and minimizing evidence of anti-Semitism in the United States.
Looking for historical analogies in times of crisis is inevitable, yet if many of them fall short, it may be a sign that we are truly now in uncharted territory. . . . A year after the Hamas massacre and the ensuing war, we may be standing at an inflection point whose significance we cannot yet grasp.
Read more at Jewish Review of Books
More about: Gaza War 2023, Jewish history, Pogroms