Pogroms, Peasants, Jews Britain and Eastern Europe's 'Jewish Question', 1867-1925

Pogroms, Peasants, Jews explores the British response to the various crises encountered by East European Jewish society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It looks at how British society reacted towards a number of issues, from the Romanian refusal to grant citizenship to its Jews, to the various outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire in the 1880s, 1903 and 1905-06, and the hardships endured by Jews in Eastern Europe during the First World War. This study also considers how Ostjuden were imagined in the British context and investigates the response of Anglo-Jewry to the straitened conditions of their Russian, Polish and Romanian brethren. Using a rich variety of sources, this study considers the multifaceted political and popular response to the Eastern European Jewish question. In particular, it focuses on the extent to which British intellectuals, who forged links with their East European counterparts, facilitated the transmission of continental anti-Jewish attitudes in the British context. Book jacket.

Sam Johnson is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.