An early chapter faults explanations that rely on socio-economic determinism to explain pogroms as not explaining their occurrence at certain specific times and not at others. Klier argues against the notion that they were motivated principally by religious rivalry, stressing instead that Jews were seen as “ethnic strangers” in their appearance and occupations, their eating taboos and drinking habits, their calendars and holidays, and their separate places of worship and burial. Going beyond the outdated and discredited view that the Tsarist government directly sponsored and organized pogroms, Klier nonetheless faults the government for its well-known discriminatory measures against Jews as communicating to its peasant subjects that Jews were outside the law and fair targets for abuse.[192] Having established the inter-ethnic nature of anti-Jewish enmity, he finds a suggestive parallel between Russia’s pogroms and Donald Horowitz’s “deadly ethnic riot”.[193]
In keeping with that perspective, Klier deepens our understanding of pogroms by drawing attention to their interactive nature. In addition to Jewish resentment of gentile disrespect for Jewish customs, for instance, he also shows that Christians had their own ethnically-based grievances, calling on Jews not to trade during Church services and not work on Christian feast days. Others petitioned the government to stop Jews from calling them “drunkards, scum, and rascals”.[194] On the other hand, he suggests greater complexity in the origins of Jewish-gentile violence: “Every pogrom where there was serious loss of life was marked either by the use of firearms by Jews or by the rumor that they were shooting into crowds… Organized Jewish defense, as occurred at Balta, was viewed by authorities and populace alike as provocative and as likely to raise the level of violence”.[195] Such detail reveals some of the inter-subjectivity of Jewish-gentile relations, the grounds of a mutual enmity that gave rise to occasional violent overreactions, and the background to the mass hysteria that over-swept much of the Pale in 1881–2.
However, the book’s central drama is not enacted on the streets between Jews and gentiles, but in the three-way interaction among the Russian government, leading representatives of Jews in the capital, and Jewish spokesmen for separate provincial Jewish communities. Beyond the anti-Jewish enmity of Interior Minister Count N. P. Ignatiev and his supporters, Klier documents and describes the efforts of other upper-level officials to meet with and hear out those representatives. He reveals the close and fruitful relationship between Tsarist dignitaries and the Jewish elite in St. Petersburg, headed by Baron Horace Gintsburg, suggesting that its successes in working with the government to advance the Jewish cause has not received the attention it deserves. The approach of Gintsburg and his Circle relied on the need for Jews to show their loyalty to Russia, the main obstacle to which, besides Ignatiev’s considerable negative influence, was the response to the pogroms that called for Jews to emigrate, voiced by community leaders in the Pale of Settlement, where Jewish vulnerability was most keenly felt.