as well. The energy, vitality, and defiance he describes changed in character, but surely did not disappear after the reforms and after the 1881 pogroms. As the challenges to Jewish existence grew more demanding and more threatening, so did Jewish responses. The study not only modifies our understanding of life in the Jewish Pale in the earlier years of Russian rule, but also suggests greater depth and complexity to Jewish responses in the later period of unprecedented upheavals, heightened antisemitism, and Jewish victimization, both within and without the shtetl. Finally, Petrovsky’s image of the shtetl may be said not to have discredited the truthfulness of the image created by Yiddish writers of the later period, but to have revealed it as marking the immense changes that had invaded and overtaken life in the Pale.

Returning to that later period and to the theme of pogroms, two recent collections of articles treat anti-Jewish violence in Russia and other parts of Europe from 1881 to the eve of the Second World War. Each of them contains a range of topics grouped around the themes of violence and antisemitism.[208] Despite the diversity of topics and approaches, the two collections share common assumptions and may be taken to illustrate the current state of pogrom studies.

The commonest assumption they share is the interchangeability of the terms “antisemitism” and “pogrom”; one is taken to enfold and encompass the other, like two embracing figures, even though many of the articles treat antisemitism as attitude and ideology without a violent outcome. At the same time, most of the articles that treat actual violence against Jews do not question the meaning and role of antisemitism in making for the violence, but regard it as a major, if not the principal, contributor. Thus, antisemitic writings and publicism are joined to anti-Jewish violence as part of the same reality rather than being considered as separate realities, especially in regions of high illiteracy and sharp distinctions between classes and between town and country populations. Although no explicit claim is made, this assumption is what lends unity to an otherwise diverse array of articles treating locales from England to Romania and Eastern Siberia and topics ranging from the scandal and trial of an Austrian Jewess imposter to military pogroms during World War I. The assumption is imbedded in the very structure of these conference-based collections. At the same time, the very diversity of the topics they contain and their lack of connectedness in space and time has compelled them to link violence and Judeophobia with the specific, local, and contextual circumstances applicable to each case. Most of the essays cite the “usual suspects” among explanations: ethnic or religious hostility, alleged economic competition and exploitation, legal discrimination, alleged political disloyalty. And, although their explanations do not yield a single meaning for the term “pogrom”, they also frame questions that look beyond those stock considerations. These essays show that “antisemitism” and the violence often associated with it has a thousand faces, taking on a different character and meaning, depending on its local history and the circumstances of its manifestation.

The one essay that attempts a definition of “pogrom”, giving it a single face, and applying it to all times and cases turns out to be the exception that proves the rule.[209]