Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets
Elissa Bemporad
(Author)
Description
This book traces the legacies of the two most extreme manifestations of tsarist antisemitism-pogroms and blood libels-in the Soviet Union, from 1917 to the early 1960s. Closely intertwined in history and memory, pogroms and blood libels were and are considered central to the Jewish experience in late Tsarist Russia, the only country on earth with large scale anti-Jewish violence in the early twentieth century. But their persistence and memory under the Bolsheviks-a chapter that is largely overlooked by the existing scholarship-significantly shaped the Soviet Jewish experience. By exploring the phenomenon and the memory of pogroms and blood libels in the Soviet territories of the interwar period as well as, after World War II, in the newly annexed territories, Bemporad studies the social realities of everyday antisemitism through the emergence of communities of violence and memories of violence. The fifty-year-span from the Bolshevik Revolution to the early years of Krushchev included a living generation of Jews, and non-Jews alike, who remembered the Beilis Affair, the pogroms of the civil war and in some cases even the violence of the prerevolutionary years. Bemporad also examines the ways in which Jews reacted to and remembered the unprecedented violence of the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, and how they responded to and which strategies they adopted to confront accusations of ritual murder. By tracing the "afterlife" of pogroms and blood libels in the USSR, Legacy of Blood sheds light on the broader question of the changing position of Jews in Soviet society. And by doing so it tells the story of the solid yet ever changing and at times ambivalent relationship between the Soviet state and the Jewish minority group.
Product Details
Price
$106.95
Publisher
Oxford University Press, USA
Publish Date
December 18, 2019
Pages
252
Dimensions
6.4 X 9.3 X 0.9 inches | 1.1 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780190466459
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
A native of Italy, Elissa Bemporad grew up in Modena. She studied Russian language and History at the University of Bologna and earned her doctoral degree from Stanford University. Bemproad lived in Minsk, Belarus, for a year, where she conducted archival research for her first book, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk. She is also the author of Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators.
Reviews
"The horrific pogroms in 1918-21 that were perpetrated by several armed forces in the multilateral wars in what became Poland and Soviet Ukraine have been overshadowed by the Holocaust that followed just two decades later. This book describes those pogroms in vivid detail, links them to the hoary myth of Jews using Christians' blood for religious rituals, and contends that the myth persisted into the Soviet period, even as late as the 1960s. Bemporad gives us valuable analytical insights into the nature of antisemitism in the USSR. This is a work of highly original and persuasive research on the persistence of blood libels and pogroms and on the sometimes surprising Jewish reactions to it." -- Zvi Gitelman
"In Legacy of Blood, Elissa Bemporad, a leading voice in Soviet Jewish studies, recreates a lost chapter in the history of the Soviet Union's Jewish population. This pioneering study grounds the history of Soviet-Jewish relationsin the horrendous pogroms of the Russian civil war period, when some 150,000 innocent people were slaughtered. As a consequence of this violence, Jewish citizens looked to the Soviet state for protection-and the state mostly did protect Jews until the eve of World War II. Popular antisemitism, in the meantime, never entirely disappeared as medieval accusations and rumors of "blood libels" continued to erupt. This fine study is an essential first chapter in the understanding the Holocaust within the context of Russian and Soviet history." -- Lynne Viola
"Elissa Bemporad combines a harrowing exploration of the legacy of Russian Civil War-era pogroms for both Soviet Jews and Soviet authorities with a startling reconstruction of the ways that ritual murder accusations persisted into the Soviet era. The result is a rich and disturbing reconsideration of the history of Soviet antisemitism. Legacy of Blood is a brilliant achievement." -- Paul Hanebrink
"A deeply researched, original exploration of the resilience of the darkest anti-Jewish beliefs. Elissa Bemporad raises vexing questions about the underbelly of the Soviet Jewish experience even in its best years before the Second World War." -- Steven J. Zipperstein
