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Between Food and Religious Riot: Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1918–1919

Authors: Kutílek Jan

Year: 2022

Type of publication: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Page from-to: nestránkováno

Titles:

Language	Name	Abstract	Keywords
eng	Between Food and Religious Riot: Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1918–1919	The aftermath of World War I was cruel and people lacked even the most basic things like food. The Jews, who were seen as chain-merchants (”Kettenhändlers“), were blamed for the high prices of basic commodities. Furthermore, they were regarded as loyal to the Habsburg empire, which was in a common-sense viewed as responsible for the hardship. One of the most horrifying anti-Jewish riots after World War I occurred in Poland. As a result of the fall of the centuries-old empires and the Polish-Ukrainian conflict Polish soldiers and the local population committed atrocities against the Jewish community. The power vacuum created an environment that resulted in unrestricted violence. Before World War, the image of a Jew as a dishonest and insidious element shaped the mind of the members of the Polish ethnic group. However, it cannot be said that violence against Jews had roots only in a foodstuff crisis. In the case of Poland, violence took also the form of religious unrest aimed at desacralizing Jewish holy places. The paper discusses a cultural history of anti-Jewish violence and the impact of the provisioning crisis of the last months of World War I in the Habsburg monarchy and the first months of the reborn Polish and the nascent Czechoslovak Republic, with the focus on Galicia and Bohemia respectively. In the eyes of the attackers, the violence was justifiable and lies in the previous behaviour attributed to the target group.	Anti-Jewish Violence; Moral Economy; Food Riot; Religious Riot