Scott Gehlbach: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the 1905 Russian Revolution

10/24/2022 Colloquium Series - Scott Gehlbach

Contact, Threat, and Violence During Political Upheaval: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the 1905 Russian Revolution

What drives violent confrontations between groups in multi-ethnic and multi-confessional societies? Why do some communities in such societies experience conflicts, while others remain peaceful? Does the structure of religious or ethnic diversity matter? These questions have motivated a large social science literature in varied historical and modern contexts. In this paper, we study the drivers of anti-Jewish violence—or pogroms—in late Imperial Russia, a setting characterized by considerable religious diversity and prevalent antisemitism. Drawing on a uniquely rich settlement-level dataset covering the Pale of Settlement and focusing on the wave of pogroms from 1903–6, we show that the incidence of anti-Jewish violence activated by the October Manifesto of 1905 was dampened in more isolated Jewish settlements (where contagion effects were limited) and in those communities where Jews comprised a larger share of the population. We rely on historical evidence to interpret these findings in ways that provide nuance to existing studies of inter-ethnic violence.