New perspectives on anti-Jewish violence and memory

Abstract

This thesis explores the topic of anti-Jewish violence and memory empirically, using three dierent methods of inquiry. The first chapter employs a deductive approach to study how insurgent presence influences survival of genocide targets. I explore the case of the Holocaust in World War Two France using archival collections on Jews’ arrests and La Résistance members’ presence. I employ an instrumental variable method in which I instrument insurgent presence with soldier deaths from World War One. I probe my findings with qualitative analysis of chosen typical cases in order to investigate the mechanisms that govern the relationship. I find that insurgents helped Jews survive by providing them with information, help networks, and sharing the skills they developed to evade their common enemy, the Nazi occupier and collaborating Vichy state. The second chapter employs an exploratory approach and asks whether Wikipedia captures collective memory. Drawing on anthropological and historical literatures, it proposes a way to operationalise collective memory as actor-role associations and measure it with Wikipedia data. Comparing our findings with the qualitative research on Poles’ collective memory of World War Two, we conclude that Wikipedia serves as a unique data source to describe the content of national collective memories. In the third chapter I review literature on anti-Jewish “pogroms” to establish what the term means. I find considerable disagreement about the definition of the term in extant literature and propose to substitute it with other vocabulary from the wider literature on conflict – “mass categorical violence,” “state repression,” and “communal attacks.” I review two recent studies that used the word “pogroms” when seeking to explain their occurrence. I argue that the proposed typology would better capture the main characteristics of the violence typically called “pogroms” and enable better future sample specification and analyses.