In this talk, Tova Benjamin takes as its starting point an unusual incident of crowd-led violence in the late nineteenth century: an attack led by a group of Jews in the Russian imperial south against a migrating caravan of Austrian Roma. The attack resembled those instances of mob violence against Jews in the same period known as ‘pogroms.’ This Jewish ‘pogrom’ against a group of Roma quickly became an imperial scandal, raising questions about Jews and their capacity for violence at a time when they were becoming the most well-known victims of pogroms themselves.
Using an array of new sources, Tova Benjamin will uncover this previously unknown event. In so doing, she will consider the place of ‘ethnicity’ in new forms of late nineteenth century popular violence and ask whether we can develop a shared understanding of Roma and Jewish histories of marginalization in the East European borderlands.
Tova Benjamin is the Assistant Professor of History and Russian Studies at Davidson College. Her current book project documents the growth of the Black Sea grain trade and export and the simultaneous emergence of new and novel forms of rioting, popular justice, and social unrest in fast commercializing regions of the Russian Empire. Her research has been supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Jordan Center for Russian Studies, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.