The definition worked out has the virtue of seeking circumstances beyond antisemitism as the causes of anti-Jewish violence. Yet it is so general as to yield only the palest explanatory potential, so broad as to be applicable not only to all anti-Jewish pogroms, but even beyond the parameters of Jewish experience, to other instances of “inter-communal violence”, as the author admits.[210] Although the impulse to seek wider and more general explanations is endemic to historical inquiry, the worth and creativity in these essays lie in demonstrating the protean nature of antisemitism, its adaptability to many forms of conflict and controversy, public and private, and the diverse, complex shapes that it has taken.

The larger methodological question this raises is the relationship between affect and action, between word and deed, between, in our context, antisemitism as ideology or attitude and pogroms. Those essays that fall in our period but outside Russia are sufficiently distinct to suggest some mid-level generalizations that both contrast with and illuminate the Russian situation. Let us begin with four essays treating anti-Jewish violence in Galicia, Moravia, and Croatia, all parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, plus Romania. In each case they occurred on a smaller scale in their numbers and destructiveness, compared to events in the Russian Pale in the same prewar decades.[211] This was due in part to a more consistent opposition to anti-Jewish violence on the part of both local and central Habsburg authorities. The four studies deal predominantly with disorders among peasants, due perhaps to the relative absence of pogroms in the Empire’s large cities (outside the Polish provinces), where the police exercised a firmer hold on public order. In two cases, the conflicts were not binary, affecting only Jews and the native nationalities, but involved German and/or Hungarian policies and languages. In Moravia and Croatia violence was disproportionately directed at Jews, perceived as partisans or even as agents of the hated nationalities. In Galicia and Romania, the violence was precipitated by a mixture of resentment of Jewish economic exploitation and longstanding antisemitism, reinforced by the proactive role of Catholic clergymen. All these essays present a mixture of attitudinal antisemitism and resentments at the position of Jews in social and political structures during the birthing of new nationalisms. In Moravia, for instance, Jews voted with the German parties which defended Jewish rights, earning the resentment of Czech nationalists.

Three essays on pogroms in the Russian Northwest find that the great resentment of Russian and/or Polish domination ameliorated Lithuanian and Belorussian relations with Jews in their region.[212] These borderlands of both the Empire and the Pale, if compared to the greater violence of the southern and southwestern Pale, are distinguished by the relative absence of pogroms. In contrast to the Habsburg lands, where Jews were perceived as allied with the resented German or Hungarian overlords, here Jews were seen as allies against Russian and Polish domination. The article by Staliūnas and Sirutavičius explains the outburst of anti-Jewish violence during the Nazi occupation as wholly due neither to Nazi influence nor to a native antisemitism. Lithuanians lived through the Russian imperial and interwar eras in relatively peaceful coexistence with Jews, given the size of the Jewish population and the antisemitism of neighboring regions. It was mostly the trauma of Soviet occupation in 1939 and the divergence of political leanings between Lithuanians and Jews that precipitated mass anti-Jewish violence aimed at Communism considered as a Jewish enterprise.