In this first-rate study, Darius Staliūnas examines the dynamics of antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in tsarist-ruled Lithuania (equivalent to the imperial provinces of Vil΄na, Kovno, and Suvalki). Firmly rooted in social history but drawing on social scientific methods and, in some sense, social psychology, the book, written in workmanlike prose, draws on a vast array of sources in many languages, including hundreds of documents from Lithuanian archives as well as Russian, Polish, Israeli, and American archives. Staliūnas seeks to understand why there were relatively few incidents of anti-Jewish violence in Lithuania in the long nineteenth century; the clear comparator are the southern provinces of the Pale of Settlement, where there were several “waves” of pogroms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Another point of contrast, one that goes unmentioned by Staliūnas but which many readers will be aware of, is the genocidal violence committed by members of Lithuanian ultra-nationalist organizations during the Nazi occupation.) In some ways the author's approach is akin to “the argument from silence,” since there were relatively few pogroms in Lithuania. In fact, this makes the author's task even more arduous: he must identify circumstances of interethnic and/or religious tension, and then attempt to explain why large-scale violence did not break out.
The fundamental building block of Enemies for a Day, and where Staliūnas truly excels, is the microhistorical analysis: a blow-by-blow unpacking of all the steps involved in the development—sometimes gradual, other times lightning-quick—of an incident of interethnic strife. The wealth of such cases that he has unearthed in the archives and the press allows him to understand the various phases of such an incident from the initial interaction to subsequent accusations and rumors to the intervention of the authorities. One recurring conclusion is that religious feelings (and clerical incitement) consistently played a central role in anti-Jewish violence; another is the idea of pogrom as “self-help”: a response to putative Jewish offenses against Christians which the latter perceived the authorities would not rectify. But the microhistorical approach also has its disadvantages. At times the reader may feel lost in the many details, grasping for a larger pattern to provide clarity. If such patterns are lacking, it is not necessarily the author's fault: there are so many intersecting forces and motivations at work that it can be maddeningly difficult to make sense of them all.
The first two chapters of the book take a general approach to assessing the place and role of anti-Judaism and antisemitism in Lithuania. Staliūnas devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 1) to the blood libel, which played a key role in Lithuanian Judeophobia, and another to modern Lithuanian nationalism's perception of Jews. An important conclusion of the first chapter is the pattern that emerges through the nineteenth century of local authorities' supporting the blood libel accusation; when, in the regime's last decades, they did not do so in several key cases, mob violence broke out. Chapter 2 argues that Lithuanian antisemitism was not, for the most part, political or racial, and that Lithuanian nationalism was too focused on Russians and Poles as political enemies to set its sights on the Jews (who were even seen as potential allies).
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 investigate, respectively, specific outbreaks of violence: possible parallels to the pogroms of the early 1880s; a rash of religiously motivated clashes in 1900; and pogroms around 1905 and in 1915. Much of Chapter 3 is devoted to Judeophobic agitation that was inspired by events taking place elsewhere in the empire, since there was little actual violence. (It includes a fascinating analysis of a Lithuanian-language song that, while making no reference to violence against Jews, could have been interpreted by Jews as such.) If Staliūnas never provides a clear answer to the underlying question here—why don't we see the deadly ethnic violence in Lithuania that we expect to?—it is because, as he freely admits, the evidence yields no clear conclusion. Chapter 4 examines “brawls” that were very different from the deadly pogrom that occurred elsewhere; this was violence as a response to perceived economic and religious offenses against Christians, meant to remind Jews of their rightful place in the social hierarchy. In Chapter 5, Staliūnas measures an elevated level of ethnic tension but, again, the plethora of detail does not yield any clear conclusion about why that tension did not give rise to more violence. Staliūnas saves the best for last: a chapter on comparative perspectives that provides more satisfying answers than anything preceding it. His inquiry into pogroms in Belarus concludes that Russian nationalism and imperial loyalty, neither of which was present among most ethnic Lithuanians, played a crucial role in facilitating the move to mob violence. Contrarily, Habsburg Galicia, like Lithuania, featured a hierarchy of ethno-political rivals as well as “an agrarian economy and slow modernization which … created fewer preconditions for anti-Jewish violence” (240).
