When the Habsburg state collapsed in the fall of 1918 and its army was “broken and scattered, divided among the many peoples of [the] vast empire”Footnote 2 as Joseph Roth once observed, Jews were among those who took up arms and in many respects were among those who took on the legacy of that old army. They filled the power and security vacuum, attempted to protect their communities and to maintain some form of order. They mirrored their neighbors and took an active part in the remaking of the region. As one Jewish teenager in Lviv (Lwów, Lemberg) noted in his diary on November 16, 1918: “The Jews in all parts of Austria establish militias and maintain order.”Footnote 3
The collapse of the Habsburg state in Galicia and the ensuing conflict over its succession is commonly read through the dual lens of state building—particularly in its Polish variant—and anti-Jewish violence. Jews appear largely as passive victims. The aim of this article is to shift the focus in regard to the Jewish experience, and, crucially, Jewish agency in this process by centering on the Jewish militias that were established throughout the region from the fall of 1918. Some of them only existed for a few days or weeks, at most months, but not only were they an essential aspect of many Jews’ experiences during this transition, they were also an integral element of a multi-layered process of state building in the region.
To the extent that studies of this period have foregrounded the Jewish experience, they rightly centered on the traumatic pogroms and violence inflicted upon the Jews, not least because it so overshadowed in particular Polish–Jewish relations throughout the interwar period and beyond.Footnote 4 Due to this focus, most of the historical literature, when it mentioned them at all, reiterates the approach to the Jewish militias common at the time, presenting them primarily in the context of overt anti-Jewish violence and pogroms, ascribing to them an almost exclusively reactive role, as (usually failed) forms of self-defense to the organized violence of Gentiles against Jewish communities.Footnote 5 This reading of events is based on contemporary accounts. One of the more prominent ones, to take but one example, is Israel Cohen's 1919 booklet, which has been used extensively by scholars working on anti-Jewish violence in this period.Footnote 6 Cohen, an activist in the Zionist movement in the United Kingdom was dispatched to Poland in late 1918 to document the violence and to make recommendations for the debate over Polish statehood as it pertained to the Jewish minority, at the Paris Peace Conference.Footnote 7 Although he meticulously documented the violence against Jewish communities in the region, the Jewish militias—where mentioned at all—appeared principally in the context of their disarmament, seen as a precursor to the subsequent pogrom.Footnote 8 However, the first thing Cohen noted in his diary after arriving in Kraków in December 1918 was “Jews with guns (militia), even men wearing flat hats and caftan also with guns.”Footnote 9 A close study of the empirical material Cohen used to write his report—especially the letters and testimonies he received from survivors and eyewitnesses in the affected communities—further illustrates that in the experiences of local communities, these Jewish armed forces were more than (failed) attempts to protect oneself against pogroms.Footnote 10 A similarly more complex picture emerges when studying materials in local archives, most importantly in Kraków, which add many additional dimensions to the development of Jewish militias.
Reading the Jewish militias in a reactive frame of failure suggests a top-down relationship between Jews and non-Jews in this period, stripping agency from the Jewish community, and effectively rendering them passive, or at best reactive, victims of the violent state-building process. This article aims to go beyond this understanding and to conceptualize the Jewish militias of this period not exclusively as a means of self-defense, but as mirroring the actions of their neighbors, as armed forces and active participants in the larger process of post-Habsburg state building in Galicia.
These Jewish paramilitary forces are part of a wider regional story. Julia Eichenberg observed that armed groups often considered themselves as para-state or pre-state forces, the act of taking up arms being a core element in the process of state building.Footnote 11 Such armed forces, sometimes already established during World War I and in the days and weeks of transition, often directly transformed into the instruments of violence and coercion of the new states-in-the-making. Robert Gerwarth, Jochen Böhler, Andres Kasekamp, John Horne, Serhy Yekelchyk, John Paul Newman, Tomas Balkelis, and many others have made similar arguments regarding non-state, paramilitary armed forces and their relation to nation and state building. From pre-state and non-state actors, self-defense groups, Freikorps, and warlords, the entire region from the Ottoman Empire to the Baltics, from the Caucasus to Ireland was awash with paramilitary forces involved in the violent re-shaping of these lands.Footnote 12 It seems to make little sense to write the Jews of east central Europe, and their at times considerable armed forces out of this story, and to ascribe to them—and to them alone—a merely reactive, defensive role.Footnote 13
What Jews active in these paramilitary forces envisioned their role would be is to an extent reflected in the names they chose for them. They rarely, if ever, chose the term “self-defense,” but rather names like “citizens’ guard” (as in Kraków) or “Jewish militia” (as in Przemyśl/Peremyshl/Pshemishl). Importantly, this stands in marked contrast to the parallel efforts of Jewish armed forces in Ukraine and to earlier Jewish armed formations, such as during the 1905–06 revolutions and pogroms in the Tsarist empire, where activists in general and very consciously named their units “self-defense” (samooborona/zelbstshuts).Footnote 14 Far from semantic pedantry, this choice of names already suggests that the people participating in the post-World War I formations in Galicia not only sought defense against imminent pogroms, but rather saw themselves as the armed organization of the Jewish community, assuming roles not dissimilar to the armed formations of their non-Jewish neighbors.
The defense against pogroms or the threat of them was nonetheless a central consideration for those who established Jewish militias from the autumn of 1918. However, the problem is broader than that. It was a problem of state building, not least because of the centrality of the state and its role in any understanding of mass anti-Jewish violence. Countering the traditional reading of the pogroms in the Tsarist empire, historians since the 1970s have emphasized that it had not been state authorities that had organized the pogroms.Footnote 15 In fact, in most cases of mass violence against Jews in modern European history, the state at one point intervened to suppress it—not necessarily out of sympathy for the victims but because the modern state could not accept extra-legal, uncontrolled vigilante violence and had to exert its exclusive right to the use of force.Footnote 16 Indeed, at the very heart of the modern state lies its “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” as Max Weber described it.Footnote 17 However, such a monopoly did not exist in Galicia at the time in question. With the demise of the Habsburg empire no state existed that could implement it, hence Jews effectively participated in its creation—if sometimes only for the lack of alternatives. There was obviously no attempt to establish an independent Jewish territorial state in east central Europe, but in many other respects, as will be shown, the hallmarks of state building were present, embodying a project of quasi-state self-organization in dialectical relation with the processes of Polish and Ukrainian state building.
What Comes after the State?
The necessity to establish armed formations stemmed from the collapse of order and state power already in the last months of Habsburg rule. One of the gravest threats to the civilian population was the ever-growing presence of deserters in the countryside, villages, and increasingly even in larger towns and cities. In the summer and autumn of 1918, thousands abandoned their regiments, and often joined together in bands, living largely off robbery and theft. The military command in Przemyśl reported that some garrisons had not been supplied with bread for weeks, leading soldiers to abandon their posts and join with civilians in the ransacking of stores, bakeries, railway freight cars, and warehouses.Footnote 18 State authorities tried to get this “plague of deserters” (Deserteursplage), as a report by the gendarmerie in Wadowice described it, under control but did not have the means to do so.Footnote 19 Whereas everyone was threatened by bands of deserters and marauders, they appear to have often targeted Jewish homes and Jewish-owned businesses in particular.Footnote 20
That in the wake of a collapsing supply situation, rising antisemitism, and a failing state, Jews were subjected to violence and plunder had been observable since 1917 and had intensified throughout the year 1918.Footnote 21 The state was neither capable of supplying the population nor of bringing the violent chaos—a symptom often resulting from the former—under control. The military command in Przemyśl wrote that therefore “the populace increasingly believes that the state is neither in a position nor has the power to maintain order and security; this naturally brings state authority itself into disrepute.”Footnote 22 At the same time, military units were increasingly fracturing along national lines.Footnote 23 Having failed in their core task of protecting the population, there were no longer any positive bonds between the people and the state and its institutions, which were now experienced only in their most oppressive form: arresting relatives who were hiding from military duties, confiscating foodstuffs, arresting black marketeers, and supposedly protecting the rich, the hoarders, and speculators—as whom Jews were very often imagined.Footnote 24 With the state failing, there had been cases of ad hoc organized self-protection throughout the year 1918, principally by Jews responding to attacks on their communities in the absence of state-provided security, but with the disintegration of the state apparatus, this became an almost universal development.Footnote 25 In September 1918 a report to the Polish National Committee in Zurich noted that because of the failure of the state to protect the citizenry, people in small towns as well as in major cities like Kraków considered establishing citizens’ guards to protect their homes.Footnote 26
Within a few days in late October and early November 1918, everything came crushing down. On October 28, Polish nationalists declared the end of Habsburg rule in Galicia and their newly created temporary government—the Komisja Likwidacyjna (Liquidation Commission)—claimed power in the former crownland from its seat in Kraków.Footnote 27 In Lviv, Ukrainian units of the Habsburg army took power in much of the city on the night of October 31, hoisting the Ukrainian flag and proclaiming the West Ukrainian People's Republic.Footnote 28
Whereas these declarations of independent statehood seemed grand, they often had very limited practical impact, especially outside the main urban centers (Lviv and Kraków), where self-declared “national” governments had little reach and even less influence. Despite both sides claiming to be creating states, they were largely incapable of establishing a state's core function, the “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.” In much of the region, locals resorted to physical force and essentially assumed power from below. They did so by storming police and gendarmerie posts, disarming the last uniformed representatives of the old regime, taking weapons from army warehouses, and organizing their own armed units to protect their communities and maintain some semblance of public order. Zygmunt Lasocki, who assumed the role of head of the administration of the Liquidation Commission, explained this dynamic through his nationalist lens, claiming that the gendarmerie (he did not mention the police) were alien-national and therefore hated by the locals.Footnote 29 While unsurprising, given Lasocki's patriotic credentials, this explanation is nonsensical, not least because people also targeted, disarmed, and supplanted police, who had generally been recruited from the local populace.Footnote 30 However, Lasocki made an important observation regarding the motivation and composition of these new armed formations. They were, he wrote, “composed of people living in a given municipality or locality, connected to the local population by ties of kinship and [shared] interests.”Footnote 31 Less the grand national concepts and promises and more local conditions and relations between neighbors determined who was part of this usurpation of power and how these newly established armed forces would treat individuals and communities in their sphere of influence.
While Lasocki's observations related primarily to West Galicia, the war-ravaged east of the former crownland similarly saw a complete collapse of institutional order. In contrast to West Galicia, however, the local forms of usurpation of power largely materialized along national fault lines, continuing and accelerating the national stratifications of previous months.Footnote 32 Within a few days, local military units claiming to represent and defend their nations emerged, fought against each other, and established control, trying to simultaneously establish national rule over claimed neighborhoods and territories, and to provide some semblance of stability and order for “their” populace. In both West and East Galicia, Jews were part of this process. They mirrored the actions of their neighbors, sometimes participating in local militias, and at other times establishing their own. Similarly, the two dimensions of armed organization in Galicia—providing security and building states—were evident in the actions of Jewish communities and activists, making them an active and not merely reactive part of the state-building processes.
East Galicia
Historians have at times described the sectarian, nationalist violence that followed the collapse of the Habsburg state as “inevitable.”Footnote 33 It appears that with the collapse of the multinational state, the peoples of East Galicia—around 64.5 percent Ukrainians, 22 percent Poles, and 12 percent Jews, if we accept the categorizations derived from the 1910 census—were destined to violently turn against each other.Footnote 34 I argue that such interpretations fail on two accounts: 1) they suggest a rather dystopian idea of the region and of diversity in general, implying that different national, ethnic, linguistic, etc. groups would be unable to co-exist peacefully; and 2), they subsume the diverse actions of locals in national meta-narratives that fail to account for the concerns and decisions of individuals and communities that did not necessarily match them. In fact, in several places, while there were armed conflicts, people were often less concerned with implementing ethno-nationalist territorial projects than they were with keeping their communities safe, which left considerable room for local cooperation across ethnic/national/religious/linguistic lines. For the Jewish population, this in turn provided a political space in which they could position themselves as one of many nations, potentially participating in a joint, multinational state-building project.
Przemyśl, the fortress city, today at the border between Ukraine and Poland, where at the time about one third of the population was Jewish, in the wake of imperial collapse saw no immediate “inevitability” of nationalist conflict.Footnote 35 On October 31, local Polish and Ukrainian national committees even briefly established a joint city administration. A committee of Jewish parties, led by different Zionist factions, followed by establishing their own Peoples’ Council, which was recognized by its Gentile counterparts, with one of its representatives co-opted into the trinational city government. This initial local understanding collapsed on November 3, when newly arrived Ukrainian troops took over the city south of the San (Sian) River while Polish forces held the north bank.Footnote 36 This, however, did not immediately affect the Jewish community. The Jewish militia, which had been established a few days earlier, had a clearly defined and mutually agreed-upon area under its control—the Jewish quarter on the south bank—and was recognized, even seen as a partner, by their Polish and Ukrainian counterparts.Footnote 37 On November 4, the Ukrainian National Council declared that only Ukrainian and Jewish soldiers were permitted to carry arms, emphasizing in their newspaper on the following day that since Jews were absolutely loyal and did not aim to establish their own territorial state, they should be fully respected.Footnote 38 That same day, the Polish National Council published a leaflet, stating that “The Jewish People's Council takes the most neutral and correct position towards us […]. The same position is taken by the Jewish militia.”Footnote 39
The principal task of the militia was to protect the Jewish neighborhood, mainly against marauders and plunderers. Tzvi Luft, a twenty-four-year-old Zionist activist and veteran of the Habsburg army, who became one of the commanders of the militia later remembered: “There were no mob outbreaks, which must surely be largely attributed to the militia's actions, however there was certainly no lack of individual attempts at robbery and destruction.”Footnote 40 Despite having considerable arms at their disposal following the plundering of a former K. u. k. arms depot—Luft spoke of 400 rifles as well as handguns, and a few months later the police discovered machine guns—it was more of a police force than a self-defense detachment.Footnote 41 Luft was also dispatched to the Polish-controlled north bank, where with the agreement and support of the Polish command he organized a militia from the smaller Jewish community there, which secured the area around the synagogue in Grunwaldzka Street and dispatched patrols to protect a nearby soap and candle factory against looting.Footnote 42
At the same time, the militia served a decidedly internal purpose. Its very first act had been to depose—according to some reports, to arrest—the old leadership of the Jewish community and to impose the power of the Zionist-led People's Council.Footnote 43 It also secured food supplies and, like other Jewish militias, appears to have recruited members from all walks of Jewish society, including Yeshiva students, workers, former soldiers, and laidik-gaiers (unemployed/idlers) and trained every day.Footnote 44 This tense but relatively stable situation collapsed when newly arrived Polish military forces broke the stalemate, stormed across the railway bridge, and drove the Ukrainians from the city.Footnote 45 The Jewish militia at this point disarmed itself. As much as it may have considered itself a neutral third-party factor in a city in political transition, the outside Polish military forces, whose interest lay not in local relations but in an ethno-nationalist state-building project, turned against the Jewish community, with mass outbreaks of violence that claimed the lives of several Jews, and with the threat of staging a full-scale pogrom.Footnote 46 It must be emphasized, however, that some local Polish nationalists—in the form of the Polish National Council—continued to adhere to the earlier multinational understanding, intervening with the Polish command to prevent, or rather stop, the pogrom.Footnote 47 Israel Cohen even quoted eighty-year-old Leonard Tarnowski, a leader of the Polish National Council, who reportedly declared to the military commander that he would “have to order firing at me and the Poles before you let your soldiers loose against the Jews.”Footnote 48
The dynamics of cooperation with other nationalities and their representatives, the establishment of order and security, and especially the internal role of the militia was evident in many places. “The militia command did not contend itself with maintaining order outside,” remembered Ben-Tsion Fet, a thirty-two-year-old Zionist leader and war veteran, one of the commanders of the Jewish militia in Ternopil (Tarnopol). “It considered its main task—the enforcement of order internally.”Footnote 49 In December 1918, the militia command there even implemented universal conscription for all Jewish men born between 1892 and 1900. Around 800 men were drafted and equipped with arms that were provided by the Ukrainian authorities. They had powers of arrest of both Jews and non-Jews and managed their own jail, effectively becoming the armed force of the Jewish national representation, the National Council, which, like in Przemyśl and many other places, had supplanted the old community leadership.Footnote 50 Similar dynamics unfolded throughout the region. Everywhere, old community boards were replaced by newly created national councils that were for the most part led by Zionist activists, and Jewish militias, assuming similar tasks and following similar patterns were established in places such as Berezhany (Brzeżany), Jarosław (Yaroslav), Tysmenytsia (Tyśmienica), Stanyslaviv (Stanisławów; today Ivano-Frankivsk), Stryi (Stryj), Rozhniativ (Rożniatów), and probably others.Footnote 51
These structures and organizations were integrated into the state-building project of the West Ukrainian People's Republic. In some respects, this built on pre-war traditions of cooperation between Jewish (particularly Zionist) movements and their Ukrainian counterparts in the region; in practice, however, the Ukrainian promise of national autonomy for the minority and the mere reality of their state-in-the-making being in control of the region created the conditions for cooperation.Footnote 52 In some cases, Jewish militias—or a great number of their men—even joined the armed forces of the nascent Ukrainian state.Footnote 53 At the same time, from the Jewish perspective, this was still a matter of self-confident autonomy rather than submission and over time, considerable conflicts arose over control as, despite all assurances, the West Ukrainian authorities would not accept completely independent Jewish forces on their territory. In the wake of this, some Jewish militias were disbanded for allegedly (or potentially) siding with the Poles; there were increasing cases of violence by Ukrainian forces against Jewish civilians, and considerable pressure was exerted on Jews to join the army of the state, which Jewish organizations and representatives resisted and vehemently protested.Footnote 54
The most notable of the Jewish paramilitaries, which has featured most prominently in historiography and memory, was the Jewish militia in Lviv. For the most part, the militia's “role” in these analyses relates to the pogrom that unfolded in the city on November 21–23, to its failure in protecting the community, and especially to the Polish claim over its alleged breach of neutrality as the supposed cause of the mass violence against the Jewish community.Footnote 55 Given the horror of the pogrom and its centrality in shaping Polish–Jewish relations in the following decades, this is understandable. Nonetheless, such readings of the militia's story tend to interpret events and ascribe historical significance backwards (from the pogrom), and thereby risk missing important other dimensions of its story.
The Jewish militia in Lviv was established on November 1, 1918 by a joint committee of Jewish parties, in the wake of the disintegration of the local garrison along national lines and the ensuing Ukrainian–Polish conflict over the city.Footnote 56 Similar to the situation in Przemyśl, an initial agreement was reached with the Polish and Ukrainian sides, clearly delineating the areas under its control; an area where the majority of the city's Jews, about a quarter of the population, lived.Footnote 57 In the highly precarious situation of the ongoing Polish–Ukrainian conflict, the release of prisoners from the city's jail, and overall chaos, the Jewish militia aimed to establish security and control on the part of the Jewish population of the city. Max Reimer, an eyewitness, reported: “The Jewish population wanted to guarantee the security in the ‘ghetto’ itself. Following a proclamation, several hundred Jewish soldiers volunteered for the Jewish militia, who were identified with a stamped white band and served only in the Jewish quarter. They were primarily tasked with maintaining public order and preventing plunder and robbery.”Footnote 58 It appears that most of the militiamen were former soldiers of the Habsburg army with reported numbers varying from 302 soldiers and forty-five officers to 600 or even 800 militiamen.Footnote 59 Yedidyah Shoham, the teenager from whose diary I quoted at the beginning of this article, wrote on November 16 that he wanted to enlist in the militia or with the paramedics but both refused him because they already had sufficient personnel.Footnote 60
As in other cases, the Jewish militia ought to be conceptualized as more than “merely” a means to defend oneself against the threat of a pogrom. Fischel Waschitz, who had unsuccessfully attempted to raise a Jewish Legion in Lviv in August 1914 and was now one of the commanders of the militia, described its role as suppressing price-gouging and the hoarding of foodstuffs, arresting thieves and speculators—Jewish and non-Jewish—and providing general security in the areas under its control.Footnote 61 Similarly, Yosef Tenenbaum, a Zionist leader and army doctor, wrote in his account that “the Jewish militia did its duty, providing food for the starving, bringing wounded to the hospitals, burying bodies, protecting the municipal gasworks, organizing the provision of the Jewish quarter, easing the hardships of the situation.”Footnote 62 The report by a delegation of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in December 1918 similarly noted that the Jewish militia had controlled and secured the proper functioning of municipal gas and water works and had set and controlled prices in local shops that were mandatory for both Christian and Jewish merchants.Footnote 63 All this indicates that the militia did not “only” center on the Jewish community but took responsibility for the wider city. Furthermore, Tenenbaum stated that due to its neutrality in the Polish–Ukrainian conflict, “[t]he Jewish militia soon became the most popular institution in Lemberg, whose services were not only used by Jews, but even non-Jews entrusted the Jewish militia with the protection of their property. Many Christian merchants let their shops be protected by the militia. But the two fighting parties also needed a neutral, mediating factor and for this reason the militia could establish itself as an equally fruitful factor for both sides.”Footnote 64 It may be an overstatement to describe it as “the most popular institution” but Tenenbaum's account, corroborated by others, highlights how the Jewish paramilitary organization assumed responsibility for the wider city and community, beyond immediate self-defense of the Jewish population. In fact, from their perspective, the two factors conditioned one another.
The problem of Jewish neutrality in this conflict has been central to contemporary and historiographic analysis of the events. Polish (incorrect) claims that the Jewish militia breached its pledge of neutrality and sided with the Ukrainians in the fight over the city were used as a rationale for the pogrom that unfolded in the Jewish quarter from November 21 to 23 after Polish forces had taken the city and the Jewish militia surrendered its weapons. This in turn informed responses and historiographic assessments of events.Footnote 65 To a certain extent, this reads history backwards—from the pogrom or its aftermath—thereby situating the militia primarily in the context of all-out anti-Jewish violence. As in other places, however, the militia and its neutrality were an essential part not only of an attempt to organize day-to-day security and survival in a highly precarious situation, but the armed expression of a vision of equality between the national communities of a newly forming multinational state. Not least, this is expressed in the conclusions that many Jewish activists, some of them members of the militia, drew from the pogrom—that only national autonomy would prevent future violence and allow for a peaceful coexistence of the many nations of the new state.Footnote 66
West Galicia
Less affected by immediate nationalist warfare and with less pressure to position itself as a neutral “third” nation, efforts in West Galicia, where about 10 percent of the population were Jewish, related even more directly to the Polish state-building project. In the last days of October and early days of November, local militias sprung up everywhere in the region. As in other places, they were mainly a response to the power vacuum and crisis of security in the region, as the state had collapsed and former soldiers and deserters roamed the countryside—both a challenge to security and a source of local militiamen for months to come.Footnote 67 As the earlier quote by Lasocki indicated, they related to local conditions, meaning that the implications for Jewish communities differed from place to place. In some towns, such as in Chrzanów, Jews were, at least initially, integrated into the rank and file of the local citizens’ guard.Footnote 68 In Wiśnicz, it appears that the citizens’ guard was even exclusively composed of Jews.Footnote 69 In Dąbrowa (Dąbrowa Tarnowska) nationally minded Jews pushed aside the traditional leadership of the community and held negotiations with Christian-Polish representatives for the establishment of a joint citizens’ guard.Footnote 70 In most places, however, these local armed forces reflected communitarian structures and interests, and were sometimes initiated or led by local Polish-nationalist organizations and were exclusively recruited from the Christian-Polish population. Mirroring this, Jews in many places formed their own militias.
The creation of these Jewish militias appears to have been a simultaneous response to their exclusion from the “regular” citizens’ guards, the general sense of insecurity, and the expectation of imminent organized violence against the community. In many places, mistrust of the “general” (non-Jewish) town militia was warranted. In Mielec, locals and deserters stormed the gendarmerie post on November 1, beat its commander to death, and stole the weapons to establish a militia.Footnote 71 Despite repeated requests, Jews were not admitted into its ranks. Initially, it nonetheless maintained order and prevented peasants from the surrounding villages from plundering of Jewish shops. Three days later, however, it stood idly by as people attacked Jews and looted shops, because the militiamen, according to one official, “did not want to get in danger for the Jews.”Footnote 72 In Trzebinia, Jews obtained permission from the head of the district to establish a militia but were forced to accept a notoriously antisemitic local politician as its commander.Footnote 73 Similarly, fearing pogroms and due to “the influence of the proclamation of the [Polish Liquidation Commission]” an exclusively Jewish militia was established in Rozwadów.Footnote 74 In Szczakowa, Jews formed an independent militia which was soon disarmed by the order of its Christian-Polish counterpart.Footnote 75 Despite initial understandings, the Jewish militiamen in Chrzanów were eventually disarmed and two men who refused were executed. This was followed by plunder and violence against Jewish residents and Jewish-owned shops.Footnote 76
In Oświęcim, following a series of violent robberies and attacks against Jews—the perpetrators were described as bandits or deserters—and after open threats against the community by some Christian-Polish notables of the town, Jews decided to arm themselves.Footnote 77 Young Jewish men and women took over the old imperial and royal arms depot, took rifles and machine guns, and swore to defend their community:Footnote 78 “Let us not stretch forth our throats to the slaughter! As long as we are able to maintain our honor and our right to human existence, we can hope that we will eventually achieve independence as they [the Poles] have. We must demonstrate by our stance both our strength and our determined decision: We will defend our families’ lives and our honor, we will defend ourselves by force!”Footnote 79 Indeed, a few days later the Jewish militia there successfully fought off an organized attack by peasants from the surrounding villages.Footnote 80
The most significant of the Jewish militias was established in Kraków. In late October/early November, when the Liquidation Commission took charge, and some attacks against Jews occurred in the city (albeit minor, in regional comparison), activists of various Jewish parties and movements—most of them Zionists, Poalei Tsion, or socialists—convened to establish a militia, replicating the actions of their Christian-Polish neighbors, and establishing order and security in the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz. As in other places, this went hand-in-hand with the establishment of a Jewish National Council that claimed to represent the Jewish people of the city and was recognized as such by the new Polish leadership.Footnote 81 A joint leaflet, signed by the Jewish Military Committee, the Jewish National Council, and representatives of the Polish Liquidation Commission called on Jewish soldiers, officers, and civilian volunteers to enlist.Footnote 82 This unit was explicitly “for the purpose of supporting the Polish militia” and the Liquidation Commission even assigned them a local school for barracks and reportedly provided arms and ammunition.Footnote 83 There was no shortage of weapons though, following the disintegration of the Habsburg army. Yaakov Billig, a former officer of the Habsburg army and one of the commanders of the Jewish militia, noted that acquiring arms and ammunition was “a question of money and nothing else. It was possible to get small arms of any kind for bread and cigarettes, and in the large arms depot, you could obtain cheap machine guns and even artillery.”Footnote 84 Hand grenades, he wrote, went for the price of eggs and they purchased 250.Footnote 85
Aside from securing the Jewish neighborhoods in Kraków, the militia was also to have mobile detachments, to intervene where Jewish communities elsewhere were under threat. The Liquidation Commission explicitly agreed to this, despite somewhat different understandings of what this meant. Lasocki decreed them to be a reserve force for the “Christian guards”—all under Christian-Polish command—that was only to be called up when local forces were insufficient to suppress riots.Footnote 86 Created in the spirit of autonomy, the Jewish militia naturally saw matters differently and on several occasions dispatched troops to communities threatened by violence. This is documented for Mielec, Podgórze, and Brzesko, and was probably also the case in Chrzanów and Oświęcim.Footnote 87 This last case, mentioned earlier, the most “traditional” form of what is considered self-defense, became a matter of contention, with the Polish Military Command prohibiting any future dispatching of Kraków Jewish units to other places.Footnote 88
From the perspective of the Liquidation Commission, the Jewish militia was part of the general process of the establishment of local guards and militias that went in parallel and sometimes in contradiction to its centralizing state-building efforts. The Liquidation Commission's primary task was the establishment of a monopoly of violence, and it tried to do so by two means: 1) it made concessions and tried to co-opt local armed initiatives, either by “legalizing” already existing forces or by even calling for their establishment as a means to assume control over them.Footnote 89 2) Where local militias seemed unreliable or too independent, it either tried to merge them with other forces, such as the remnants of the gendarmerie, or ordered their disarmament and suppression.Footnote 90 The Kraków Jewish guard experienced both approaches. Having proven itself—in the eyes of the Liquidation Commission—to be somewhat uncontrollable, the militia was officially dissolved on November 13. It was ordered to surrender its weapons and some of its commanders, including Yaakov Billig, were briefly detained. The Jewish militia was only the first to experience this. One week later all residents of Kraków were ordered to surrender their arms.Footnote 91 With this came the other approach, the rebuilding of a Jewish militia under the control of the Liquidation Commission, which continued to consider it—as many other local armed forces—as a necessary means in their state-building project.
Reorganizing the armed forces of the city, the Liquidation Commission established a centralized citizens’ guard (Straż Obywatelska), divided by districts and with a central command subordinate to the magistrate and financed and supplied by the municipality.Footnote 92 The city's VII and VIII districts, Kazimierz and Stradom, formed one division of the guard. As these were the neighborhoods where the majority of the city's Jews lived (they were about 25 percent of the city's overall population), a new Jewish guard was created by default, though not by accident.Footnote 93 At the same time, a less controlled, better armed organization of the Jewish militia continued to exist underground—the boundaries between the two were more than fluid.Footnote 94
The most notable new factor was the introduction of universal conscription to the guard. This appears to have been done autonomously, as universal conscription throughout the city was only introduced in full in June 1919.Footnote 95 The Jewish citizens’ guard established a draft board and examined all eligible male residents of the area under its control.Footnote 96 By early 1919, a total of 3,497 men—about the size of a full infantry regiment—had been drafted into the guard.Footnote 97 It appears that 1,164 men were examined and dismissed due to them being unfit for service.Footnote 98 Being the first to introduce conscription, the Jewish guard was by far the most potent of the divisions in the city, not least because local Jews appeared to have been highly motivated to join. At a meeting of central command in late November 1918, Zygmunt Ehrenpreis, the representative of the Kazimierz-Stradom division, reported that 70–80 percent of the 2,830 men called up at this point had reported for duty. No other division had called up even half that number and some reported no-shows of over 80 percent.Footnote 99 British army captain Peter Wright, traveling with Stuart Samuel in 1919 to investigate anti-Jewish violence in Poland, commented: “The Jews, remembering Lemberg, armed themselves and rather terrified everyone else.”Footnote 100
The guard established a permanent, professional core of about 200–250 experienced soldiers and officers. Everyone else was assigned reserve duty and was called up every ten days for patrol duty and drills.Footnote 101 On any given day, between 200 and 400 guardsmen were on patrol throughout the day in changing two-hour shifts and between 60 and 100 would serve on stationary checkpoints or were on call for emergencies.Footnote 102 Discipline was very strict—both internally and externally. Failing to report, sleeping while on guard duty, abuse of power, and other forms of misconduct were punished harshly. Between November 1918 and March 1919, 133 guardsmen were punished, most of them with fines of up to 300 crowns.Footnote 103 Notably, however, this was treated as an internal matter. A book documenting misconduct and punishment of guardsmen throughout the city shows that only very few cases were reported from the VII and VIII districts.Footnote 104 In respect to the residents of Kazimierz and Stradom, the guard rigorously enforced market prices, suppressed hoarding and black-market trading, and intervened against public drunkenness and disorder. It had the right to impose punishments without legal proceedings and operated its own jail.Footnote 105
Despite the integration of the Jewish guard in the wider project, relations with the central command and Polish leadership in general remained tense. This may be attributed in part to antisemitism among some Christian-Polish leaders, but certainly reflected the Liquidation Commission's ongoing efforts of centralized state building, which gradually did away with the autonomy of local guards—Jewish or otherwise. In the countryside and in smaller communities, the Liquidation Commission gradually moved to integrate local grassroots militias with the remnants of the old gendarmerie or to replace them entirely.Footnote 106 In the Jewish case, this appears to have been done especially where they had successfully fought against attackers and sustained themselves as independent organizations. Most notably, this was the case in Oświęcim, where authorities insisted on the disbandment of all armed forces, their replacement by regular police or gendarmerie forces, and the confiscation of all weapons.Footnote 107 In this context, from late December 1918, the meetings of the central command in Kraków became gradually more tense, especially when the reduction of the force—supposedly due to financial concerns—and the matter of the autonomy of the various divisions were discussed.Footnote 108
In March 1919, the city planned major celebrations to mark the 125th anniversary of Tadeusz Kościuszko's proclamation of the general uprising, his oath to the Polish nation.Footnote 109 As part of this, the district guards were to march in grand procession through the city center. Very symbolically, in the list of participants, the guards from the VII and VIII districts, while initially part of the plan, were crossed out.Footnote 110 Despite these local tensions, violence escalated only when outside forces arrived in the city—as could be observed in other localities. In early June 1919, Józef Haller's troops passed through the city from East Galicia on the way to Upper Silesia.Footnote 111 Immediately, soldiers began to attack Jews in the streets, cut off beards and plundered Jewish-owned shops. While the other district guards did not intervene and the Jewish guard remained in its district, the entrances were barricaded, and reserves were called up. When the rampaging soldiers gathered and attacked the Jewish quarter, they were met with organized and disciplined military resistance with rifles, machine guns, and grenades. The guard successfully defended the Jewish neighborhood.Footnote 112
The citizens’ guard in Kraków like those in some other places appears to have existed until the summer of 1919 when they were then replaced by regular police and gendarmerie forces. This mirrored the general trend in the region, signifying the Polish authorities’ increasing control over the situation, their eventual success in forming their state with its functions and institutions. For the new Polish rulers, the overall violence as well as the establishment of Jewish militias—and especially their deployment—had always represented a dilemma. On the one hand, they wished to establish law and order (primarily the latter) and beyond that were fully aware of how damaging the news of the pogroms were for Poland in the realm of international public opinion. On the other hand, theirs was a national state-building project that could not accept the self-armament and vigilante violence of local groups, especially if they were from a minority community.
Conclusion
I am going to the flower garden.
You are my friend. […]
Before me is a bright nice room,
behind me a cold, dark night.Footnote 113
We do not know the author of these short lines, scribbled in a notebook that found its way into the files of the straż obywatelska in Kraków. They were written in English and the author, a student at Jagiellonian University, appears to have been serving in the Kraków citizens’ guard, in its Kazimierz-Stradom division. Among seemingly endless bureaucratic files, detailing patrol duties, ammunition supplies, rationing, salaries, and so on, the notebook stands out as a glimpse into the personal story of someone who, after years of war and carnage, served in the guard and attended language classes, probably hoping this would help him get a better life. “I am one of the most diligent pupils at the university,” he noted, “but although the most diligent, not the best.”Footnote 114
The story of this unknown guardsman is probably one of thousands. It is impossible to calculate exactly how many enlisted in the dozens of Jewish militias in Galicia, but the number is probably somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000. For the most part, they were young men who had previously served in the Habsburg army. They sometimes even continued to wear their old Austro-Hungarian uniforms and were led by men who had served as officers in the World War—much like their Polish and Ukrainian counterparts. Their story has so far been largely overlooked or subsumed into the apparently more powerful, certainly more traumatic, story of the pogroms that shaped Jews’ experiences at the beginning of the new era of self-declared nation-states. However, as I have argued throughout this article, the motivations of those joining the guards extended beyond the aim to defend oneself against impending pogroms. Or rather, the aim to protect oneself was part of a much wider project of state building. Given the centrality of the “monopoly of the use of physical force” in the creation of states, David Engel has situated the pogrom in the context of the formation of the modern state and its attempt to implement not only its power but also trust in the Rechtsstaat itself and the ensuing clashes between peoples’ traditional notions of justice and the new legal order.Footnote 115 Neither the Polish nor the Ukrainian states-in-the-making had any previous credentials, apart from old myths, that would elicit trust in their abilities to establish a universally accepted Rechtsstaat. This, however, did not mean that Jews were not perfectly willing to participate in such a creation—even if their willingness was only a result of the dearth of available alternatives.
Essential, however, was the form in which Jews organized themselves and participated in this process. While some enlisted in Polish or Ukrainian formations, the majority of those involved, those who are the subjects of this article, did so independently in decidedly Jewish forms. Crucially, this was not seen as a contradiction. The creation of independent Jewish armed units was intended to strengthen and not to sever the bonds between Jews and their neighbors. The decidedly Jewish paramilitary units were not considered in opposition to the Polish and Ukrainian state-building efforts but as a part of them. Ignacy Korngut, a resident of Wadowice, wrote in a letter that he as well believed that “any guard as an organ to maintain order and public safety must be territorial (state run) [państwowa] and not confessional [wyznaniowa]. […] I believe that the performance of service in the citizens’ guard in the interest of public safety by Jews does in no way make [the guard] confessional in nature.”Footnote 116 In this reading the efforts of Jews in the guards were efforts for the sake of everyone; it was part of a non-sectarian, multinational state-building effort. The point was that if Jews wanted to participate in organizing, building, and shaping this new state, they had to do so in their own form and in their own organizations. For example, in late 1918, the Christian-Polish commander of the citizens guard in Podgórze, Kraków's XXII district, which had a considerable Jewish population, complained that no Jews were reporting for service.Footnote 117 In Kazimierz and Stradom, they enlisted in great numbers. Integration into the new states and their instruments of violence was only possible on independent terms.Footnote 118 This did not mean that they were accepted as such by their Polish and Ukrainian neighbors. In fact, both the Ukrainian and the Polish nation-state projects at best tolerated them under the specific circumstances of chaos and transition when state structures had still not been fully established. This does not, however, change the underlying strategic orientation of state building and integration through separation of the Jewish militias.
In organizing independently, the militias also had a decidedly internal Jewish dimension. In many places, they were part of the process of removing the traditional leadership of the Jewish community and replacing it with new (supposedly more democratic) national bodies, a dynamic that also mirrored the efforts of their non-Jewish neighbors. This built on developments during the war when younger activists, primarily Zionists, but also socialists, actively challenged traditional integrationist or Orthodox leaderships in their communities by presenting themselves as the real leaders of the people. During the war the main area of challenge and competition had been that of relief and care for the destitute and starving.Footnote 119 While these efforts remained vital, it was now the problem of organizing society, of defense, security, and the question of what role Jews would play in the newly-minted nation-states that was most pressing and that shaped Jewish society. For the Jewish nationalist activists who led these efforts, the struggle was over their people's place—as a nation—in these new states. As nationalists, they regarded Jews as equal to their neighboring nations and as these nations built their states, so did they. While never declaring or intending to declare a territorial state of their own, in many other respects they created the instruments of state authority and power, forces of coercion, protection, and control that in all societies are at the heart of any state's responsibilities. In doing so, they acted not dissimilarly to those who formed armed units throughout the vast European post-imperial space. Most notable in this context is the process of universal conscription, implemented in Kraków, Ternopil, and possibly other places. From the French revolutionary levée en masse to, indeed, the Great War that had just ravaged the continent, universal conscription was a means of state- and nation-building.Footnote 120 The mobilization and self-militarization of the Jewish community in these places should be read in a similar context. It was a means of state building—as Jews. It was not a territorial state but an autonomous structure, part of the future states of many nations that activists envisioned for their region.
Jan Rybak is the Alfred Landecker Lectuer at Central European university’s Jewish Studies Program (Quellenstrasse 51, 1100 Vienna, Austria, rybakj@ceu.edu). He is the author of ‘Everyday Zionism in East-Central Europe: Nation-Building in War and Revolution, 1914–1920' (Oxford University Press, 2021). He is currently working on a research project, funded by the Alfred Landecker Foundation, on Jewish armed self-organization and self-defense in East-Central Europe from the Second Partition of Poland to the Holocaust.
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