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>>IOW, you’re an apologist for Stalin and Soviet Communism, blaming Poland for Russian anti-semitism, and (in your last sentence) ISRAEL for Stalin’s anti-Jewish actions. Why are you even on FR?<<

Why have you said this?

First, I’m not blaming Poland but a few bad people in Poland who actually started with pogroms. Were they Russians who did it mostly in Poland and Ukraine?
Second I’m neither apologies for Stalin nor blame Israel and never said a thing like that. Israel did a right choice. I just said Stalin didn’t like it and it leaded him to start an antisemitic purges in Russia and Eastern Europe but it doesn’t make Israel’s choice wrong.

SC, I think CF is just trying to recount some of the deep history of eastern European Polish/Ukrainian anti-semitism. It’s not familiar to even most educated Americans and western Europeans, whose knowledge of anti-semitism tends to skip from medieval Crusade pogroms to Spanish Inquisition to Dreyfuss to Hitler.

But the vast majority of European Jews lived in eastern Europe, particularly in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, as mentioned. The entire eastern part of this empire was for several centuries inhabited by recently re-enslaved or re-enserfed Ruthenian (Ukrainian) peasants and Cossacks who were harshly oppressed by their Polish overlords.

The overlords generally didn’t want to do the icky work of actually forcing the serfs to work themselves, so they hired Jewish (mostly) managers to run their estates, known as arendators. These guys operated on a fixed price to the landlord, getting to keep whatever they could squeeze or cheat from the peasants above this amount. The landlords obviously had an incentive to keep raising the “rent” to the arendator, who had to squeeze harder to keep afloat himself. The landlord lived elsewhere and didn’t have to see the consequences of his decisions.

This was basically the same system as the tax farming by the Romans in Judea, and it is a recipe for oppression and hatred to develop. See how well tax collectors were viewed by the Jews in the Gospels.

Similar mechanisms played out in Ukraine and eventually led to a massive revolt in 1648 that targeted Jews and Poles, with massive loss of life. The revolutionaries were understandably, though not rightly, uninterested in drawing fine distinctions between those Jews and Poles who had personally oppressed them and Jews and Poles in general.

As CF says, pretty much this whole area was eventually taken over by Russia, which by doing so acquired huge populations of Jews, and imbibed in the process the attitudes of the local Christians towards those Jews.

IOW, it’s not as simple as innocent Jews like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof just trying to mind their own business. It’s a tangled mess of oppression, revolution and revenge created by an oppressive system that desperately needed to be overthrown. In this country we never had anything remotely similar except for slavery, and we are still dealing with the aftershocks of that system and its destruction over 150 years later.