Social communication and the roots of anti‐Jewish violence in the Kingdom of Poland

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• Author: Artur Markowski,Mikołaj Winiewski
• Date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/crq.21415

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Social communication and the roots of

anti-Jewish violence in the Kingdom

of Poland

Artur Markowski

1

| Mikołaj Winiewski

2

1

Faculty of History, University of

Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

2

Faculty of Psychology, University of

Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Correspondence

Artur Markowski, Faculty of History,

University of Warsaw, ul. Krakowskie

Przedmie

scie 26/28 00-927

Warsaw, Poland.

Email: amarkowski@uw.edu.pl

Funding information

NCN, Grant/Award Number: 2017/26/M/

HS6/00114

Abstract

During the late 1800s, the Russian Empire faced two

waves of anti-Jewish violence. This led to an upsurge in

communication both for and against pogroms in the

western area of the Empire, which had formerly been a

part of Poland. Our research has examined two

archives of leaflets and reports on pogrom communica-

tion from 1881 to 82 and 1903 to 06 and revealed that

the pro- and anti-pogrom narratives display structural

similarities across the two decades. Our analysis indi-

cates that the established intergroup relations that led

to the violence were the underlying common factor

behind these narratives. Although their objectives

seemed different, pro- and anti-pogrom communica-

tions ultimately aimed to promote Polish identity.

1|THE PROBLEM

Physical violence against Jews is a social phenomenon recorded since immemorial

(Kopstein, 2021). It assumed significant dimensions in the Polish lands in the second half of the

19th century when the process of peripheral modernization and the reshuffling of social struc-

tures brought the beginnings of the empowerment of broad social masses (Ihnatowicz, 2005).

Aspirations, ambitions, and the transfer to urban terrain of elements of peasant culture, filled

with violence as an element of the language of the masses, became the nucleus of building new

relationships between representatives of Jewish communities and the non-Jewish majority. The

problem addressed in this article refers to the structure and content of communication among

and towards the lower social classes in the context of physical violence directed against Jews in

the Kingdom of Poland in the second half of the 19th century. The issue of the transfer of ideas

and the development and transmission of information on anti-Jewish violence in Galicia or

Received: 28 April 2023 Revised: 8 September 2023 Accepted: 16 October 2023

DOI: 10.1002/crq.21415

Conflict Resolution Quarterly. 2024;41:385–406. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/crq © 2023 Wiley Periodicals LLC. 385

Germany of the day has become the subject of extensive literature, from which we know how

the political empowerment of the masses formed these processes. In the light of studies devoted

to these areas, violence was becoming an argument along the lines of an election slogan; it had

a meaning that consolidated and guided the lower social classes, dependent on learning the

behavior and the attitudes of political and social elites (Buchen, 2012; Sobo

n, 2011;

Unowsky, 2018). We know more about this problem in the Lithuanian provinces of the Russian

Empire, where ethnic discussions were meaningful in the face of the formation of Lithuanian

national identity (Stali

unas, 2015). Little is known about what was taking place in the western

parts of the Tsarist state, in the lands of the Kingdom of Poland. The available works are frag-

mentary and do not allow us to understand the process of social communication, although they

do portray some elements of this communication (Markowski, 2015a,2021; Marzec, 2016).

In the second half of the 19th century, the Kingdom of Poland experienced two waves of

increased exchange of communication about pogroms, binding the lower social classes and for-

ming attitudes and behavior. In the spring of 1881, in over a dozen locations in the

Przywi

sla

nski Country, aggressive leaflets calling for physical aggression against Jews were dis-

tributed. Some ended up in the hands of the Tsarist police and constitute an excellent basis for

studies on communication about pogroms.

1

After a break of several years, after 1903 and the

famous pogrom of Jews in Kishinev (Zipperstein, 2018), the process of creating a strong anti-

pogrom movement began in the lands of the Kingdom of Poland, the peak of which can be

dated to the years of the 1905 revolution (Winiewski, 2016). Although this second phase of com-

munication had a completely different character since it was created from a different perspec-

tive than in the first (pro-pogrom) period, both stages have features in common. An analysis of

them allows us to understand the content and mechanisms of building and transferring infor-

mation, which was crucial for the escalation of violence (pogroms) in the Kingdom of Poland,

as well as—for the state of social imagination a little later—in the face of the Great

War (Hagen, 2018; Prusin, 2016; Veidlinger, 2021). Using the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

(Klimczuk, 2013), we recognize that language and its use, in a sense, created structures of anti-

Jewish violence in the western parts of the Tsars' Empire. Our task is to analyze the structures,

content, and variability of pogrom-related communication and the problem of content transfer

in two seemingly contradictory waves of this communication. The result of this research will be

the discovery of communication patterns, treated as an element of social imagination, responsi-

ble for the escalation of physical anti-Jewish violence in the 20th century.

The choice of the Kingdom of Poland as an area of research is dictated not only by the state

of studies (Galicia and the Prussian Partition have been well examined in this respect) but also

by the specific political and social system of these lands, observed from the perspective of the

entire Russian Empire. Relations between Jews and others were closed in a rectangle of actors

generating informational messages: the Jews, the Tsarist authorities, the Catholic Church, and

the Poles were seen as members of a national community, with its mythology and symbolism,

and the main elements of the narrative wrapped around them, such as connections with

Catholicism, independence aspirations and dreams of an ethnically homogeneous state, built in

opposition to the partitioning powers. In this system, analyzed communication remains.

Explaining the complex aspects of anti-Jewish aggression is justified, not just using argu-

ments about the spread of antisemitism. The relationship between these two factors is clear and

well-known (Kopstein, 2021).

2

Anti-Jewish violence manifests antisemitism in various ideologi-

cal forms, but it does not allow us to understand what drove people to attack Jews fully.

Antisemitic campaigns swept through nineteenth-century Europe with varying degrees of

intensity but did not result in aggression everywhere. On the other hand, anti-Jewish aggression

386 MARKOWSKI and WINIEWSKI