Chapter 12.2: "Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence"

Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence is an award-winning book that explores the relationship between two of Ukraine’s most historically significant peoples over the centuries.

In its second edition, the book tells the story of Ukrainians and Jews in twelve thematic chapters. Among the themes discussed are geography, history, economic life, traditional culture, religion, language and publications, literature and theater, architecture and art, music, the diaspora, and contemporary Ukraine before Russia’s criminal invasion of the country in 2022.

The book addresses many of the distorted stereotypes, misperceptions, and biases that Ukrainians and Jews have had of each other and sheds new light on highly controversial moments of Ukrainian-Jewish relations. It argues that the historical experience in Ukraine not only divided ethnic Ukrainians and Jews but also brought them together.

The narrative is enhanced by 335 full-color illustrations, 29 maps, and several text inserts that explain specific phenomena or address controversial issues.

The volume is co-authored by Paul Robert Magocsi, Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto, and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University. The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter sponsored the publication with the support of the Government of Canada.

In keeping with a long literary tradition, UJE will serialize Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence over the next several months. Each week, we will present a segment from the book, hoping that readers will learn more about the fascinating land of Ukraine and how ethnic Ukrainians co-existed with their Jewish neighbors. We believe this knowledge will help counter false narratives about Ukraine, fueled by Russian propaganda, that are still too prevalent globally today.

Chapter 12.2

Toward a shared narrative

At first glance, it may seem that Ukrainians and Jews, at least those who trace their ancestry to Ukrainian lands, have much in common. Their forebears lived for centuries alongside each other in territory now within the borders of Ukraine, and even in the diaspora a certain proportion of Ukrainians and Jews tended to settle in the same towns and cities.

Despite such physical proximity and interaction in the economic sphere that was particularly common among diasporan Jews and Ukrainians during the decades before World War II, both groups since that time have generally functioned with little awareness or interest in how the other lives. When, on occasion, diasporan Jewish and Ukrainian organizations have interacted, or when their respective media have taken note of each other, the experience has often been marked by tension, acrimony, or simply deafening silence. Some informed observers have borrowed the Canadian metaphor of "two solitudes" to describe the gulf that exists between the two peoples.

History and memory

Undoubtedly, it is events in Ukraine during the twentieth century and the manner in which they are written about and remembered that have created ongoing estrangement between the two peoples. Diaspora Jews and Ukrainians in North America and elsewhere may share a common ancestral land and a common history, but it is a history that is often understood in radically different and even contradictory ways. In short, the heroes and glorious events for one group are the villains and disasters for the other. Was Symon Petlyura at the end of World War I a valiant statesman struggling at tremendous odds to create an independent Ukraine, or was he just another pogromshchik in the long line of Ukrainians who, at least since the seventeenth-century Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, have participated in killing Jews? Is it possible to equate as genocide the murder of millions of Ukrainian Jews during the World War II Holocaust with the millions of ethnic Ukrainians forcibly starved to death a decade earlier during the Great Famine/Holodomor of the 1930s? And if Ukrainian police and military units are to be held responsible for participating in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust, should not Jews who functioned at several levels of the Soviet system be accountable for engineering the 1933 artificial famine and death by starvation of Ukrainians? As simplistic, ethnocentric, and biased as these equations may seem, they are representative of the perceptions that many Jews and Ukrainians have of their common past.

It is certainly true that both in Ukraine and the diaspora many (perhaps most) Jews and Ukrainians, especially among the younger generations, know little or even care about the past. The past has been kept alive, however, through school texts, television programs, movies, and novels in which World War II and Holocaust have been — and continue to be — among the most acute, painful, and widely discussed subjects.

Politicization of the past

World War II and the Holocaust have been enhanced in yet another way, in what one might call the politicization of the past. In response to demands by Jewish and non-Jewish human-rights groups that alleged war criminals must be found and brought to justice, the United States and Canadian governments decided to act. In the 1970s, the U.S. Department of Justice established a Special Investigation Commission to locate and initiate through the courts the denaturalization (rescinding citizenship) and deportation of American citizens. For this to occur, it had to be proven that the person responded falsely on his or her entry documents by not mentioning membership in Nazi-related organizations and that there was persuasive evidence of direct involvement in commiting crimes against humanity during World War II. Beginning in 1977, several "denaturalization" trials took place, which were followed closely by Ukrainian diaspora organizations and media; of particular concern was the court's review of evidence provided by the Soviet Union as part of an agreement (1979) reached with U.S. authorities.

Although the investigatory commission was not specifically directed at Ukrainians, it turns out that the most infamous case involved the Ukrainian-American John Demyanyuk, a post-war refugee and naturalized U.S. citizen living in Cleveland, Ohio. He was alleged to be the concentration camp guard remembered by Holocaust survivors as the notorious "Ivan the Terrible." Demyanyuk was stripped of his U.S. citizenship, extradited to Israel, put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment. After several years of incarceration, his sentence was overturned on appeal by the Supreme Court of Israel, and he was allowed to return to the United States. But after a few years, he was extradited to Germany, put on trial, and again sentenced to life in prison where he died a few years later.

The bizarre saga of Demyanyuk — regardless of guilt or innocence — forced many diasporan Jews and Ukrainian of all ages to confront their shared past. The Demyanyuk and other U.S. denaturalization trials, as well as the Deschênes investigatory commission set up in Canada in 1985, were motivated by the legitimate goal to seek justice. In the end, and however inadvertently, these publically high-profile legal proceedings tended to reinforce the already existing reciprocal negative stereotypes that diasporan Jews and Ukrainians had of each other. Further, third-and fourth-generation diasporan Jews and Ukrainians came to feel directly (or more likely vicariously through tales from their parents and grandparents) that their forebears were victimized, whether by the Nazi or Soviet regimes in the past, and that they themselves were being victimized by their own American and Canadian governments in the present.

And what is the source of that victimization? All participants in the search for what they consider the ultimate historic truth — whether school teachers, movie producers, journalists, novelists, or courtroom prosecutors and defense lawyers — base their beliefs on facts gathered by scholars. Initially, it seemed that there was a simple dichotomy, with Ukrainian and Jewish scholars aligned against each other in defense of their respective versions of the past. For example, the scholarly journal Jewish Social Studies (1969) featured a debate by Ukrainian and Jewish diasporan scholars on the role of Petlyura in the 1919 pogroms, while the Jewish scholar Lucy Davidowicz initiated in the New York Times Magazine (1981) a polemic about whether the Babyn Yar ravine outside Kyiv was used as a World War II killing site of Jews alone or of Ukrainians and others as well.

More measured efforts by researchers in Jewish and Ukrainian studies to analyze these and other historical problems were undertaken at scholarly conferences, beginning with the ground-breaking effort at McMaster University in Canada (1983), as well as subsequent gatherings at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel (1998) and, most recently, in Austria, England, Israel, and Germany under the auspices of a Toronto-based NGO, the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter. The new political and intellectual atmosphere in post-Communist independent Ukraine also made possible a revival of Jewish studies at several universities and research centers in Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Lviv, where scholars of Jewish, ethnic Ukrainian, and other backgrounds are engaged in historical research on the Jewish experience. These and other scholars from Europe (especially Germany and Poland) and North America are not reluctant to take on some of the most difficult questions, such as the allegations of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis in the Holocaust. In effect, the Jews of Ukraine and Jewish-Ukrainian relations are subjects that are no longer the preserve of researchers whose sympathies are expected to lie with the group of which they are a part.

Opposed viewpoints of the past

New developments in independent Ukraine have both liberalized and simultaneously politicized discussions about the past. Speaking history has come to signify speaking politics. Whether the Khazar domination of early East Slavic tribes, the Khmelnytskyi-era massacres and the Civil War pogroms, Jews in the service of Polish landlords and the Bolsheviks, or the role of ethnic Ukrainians in the Holocaust and the antisemitism of the post-World War II Soviet regime — all these and many more historical issues have become a source of charged debates, mutual accusations, and often vicious attacks between influential groups within Ukrainian society. Quite a number of intellectually limited yet vociferous and ambitious representatives of the Ukrainian and Jewish elites decided unilaterally that they should speak out on behalf of their own people — ethnic Ukrainians or the Jews — and essentially accuse the other side of being the cause of past calamities. You, Ukrainians, facilitated the Holocaust, decimated the early modern Jewish communities, and organized the 1919 pogroms; you, Jews, locked up our churches, brought Bolshevik rule down on our heads, and facilitated the genocidal Great Famine/Holodomor. The list goes on, but the idea is clear. The old myths are allowed to prevail, and behind the scenes there are powerful players who are interested in preserving and manipulating these myths for their own purposes. Hence, the Ukrainian media explodes when Dmytro Tabachnyk, of Jewish origin and Ukraine's former minister of education under President Yanukovych, releases yet another Ukrainophobic regulation; or when Ihor Myroshnychenko, a Ukrainian nationalist and xenophobic member of the Svoboda party, publicly insults a Holywood actress of Jewish origin (Mila Kunis). The scandal-thirsty media relishes these old myths: Ukrainians curse the Jews; Jews hate the Ukrainians. Recent events in Ukraine demonstrate with amazing clarity that this vicious cycle is far from ending. But there is a way out. There are certain ideas that both sides should absorb in order to come to grips with their respective historical pasts. To a great extent, reconciliation between Ukrainians and Jews depends on making the following guidelines mandatory in any future debates, conversations, dialogues, exchanges, or other forums.

The first, perhaps, is the most obvious. There are no Ukrainians in general or Jews in general. Put another way, there is no quintessential Ukrainian or quintessential Jew. The very concept of a mass of people with a similar behavioral pattern, an essentially homogeneous mindset, and similar reactions is little more than a worthless myth. This myth, however, served the Soviet Communists and the Nazis quite well, since both were interested in manipulating peoples and states. The myth is useless as a tool for serious social analysis. This is because ethnic Ukrainians are as complex a people as are Jews, with thousands of viewpoints, patterns of behavior, and modes of thinking. Considering the plurality of political allegiances, cultural attachments, economic pursuits, and linguistic preferences, there can be no typical Jew or typical Ukrainian. By their very nature, such generalizations result in convenient yet utterly false reductionism. Hence, to understand the past, we must leave this mode of thinking behind.

Secondly, in addition to many moments in the past shared by both peoples, there are other important characteristics that are common to ethnic Ukrainians and Jews. Both peoples include very few individuals who can talk to one another intelligently, while both include many more who do not want to speak or hear the other side. Soviet propaganda and its post-1991 reincarnations have done and continue to do their best to shape the minds of millions who prefer easy-to-absorb myths. Functioning as blinders, Soviet ideology had as decisive — and derisive — an impact on ethnic Ukrainians as it did on Jews in Ukraine. The commonality among both peoples is precisely this: many on both sides simply assume automatically that either Ukrainians are antisemites or that Jews are Ukrainophobes. In other words, the commonality in Ukrainian and Jewish circles, both in Ukraine and in the diaspora, is the predominance of their gullible and poorly informed media, their false myths, and their vociferous fools.

To address this problem, it would be helpful to approach the past with a critical eye. Documents and historical evidence should be examined from multiple perspectives. Of each document, one must ask: Who produced it? Also, when, why, by whom, for whom, and with what purpose in mind was it produced? One must question the circumstances shaping the role of this or that past political or cultural figure, but at the same time avoid imposing a present-day perspective on the situations of the past. Questions such as these point to the complexities and nuances of history, and it is the complex nuances that both sides, ethnic Ukrainians and Jews, need to keep in mind when trying to understand and learn about one another.

One might take, for example, Lazar Kaganovich, who some consider an odious Bolshevik minion of Stalin. It was Kaganovich who was instrumental in bringing about the cultural revival connected with Ukrainianization that was initiated 1924–1925 (people often forget about this episode), yet it was the same Kaganovich who in 1932, together with other top-ranking Kremlin leaders, fostered the man-made famine in Ukraine. To claim that Kaganovich did what he did as a Ukraine-hating Jew is absurd. How can one, then, explain his positive role in the Ukrainianization program? And what was "Jewish" about his tireless efforts and success in overseeing the construction of the Moscow subway system, which he supervised in the 1930s? A more plausible approach would be to reject ethnicity as an explanatory solution to any historical or moral problem. Kaganovich's Jewishness as a point of reference to understand the 1932–1933 events in Ukraine explains as little as does the Georgian ethnicity of Stalin.

This is because there was no Jewish electoral body that voted for Kaganovich, who in any case did not represent any Jewish constituency. He was a Communist and a government functionary, and he should be judged for what he did as a leading representative of the Soviet regime. The Jewish ethnicity of his parents means as much or as little for our understanding of the Great Famine/Holodomor of 1933 as does the Polish roots of Stanislav Kosior, the Russian roots of Pavel Postyshev, the Ukrainian roots of Vlas Chubar, or the ethnic roots of any other party leader implicated in that event. Their loyalty was to the regime and its system of social engineering and not to the Polish, Georgian, Jewish, or Ukrainian nationality from which they derive. This logic should be taken as a basis for discussions of any contentious historical, political, or social issue concerning Jewish-Ukrainian matters.

It is context that allows for a proper understanding of historical processes. Scholars should seek to create a context for the historical record that properly reveals individual or group responsibility for specific events. Context, moreover, needs to be considered by both sides. Take, for example, the many writings of Ukrainian literati who use the word zhyd, which is offensive to any Russian-speaking Jew (see the text insert, page 2). Intolerant racists in Ukraine, such as those associated with MAUP, deliberately published materials that stress what they believe exemplifies the hostility of great Ukrainian intellectuals toward Jews. This purposefully non-contextualized approach obliterates an important socio-cultural and geographic understanding of the nuances of the Ukrainian perception of Jews. The point is that only an accurate context can explain why cultural phenomena that such ideologues present as Ukrainian and antisemitic actually mean something very different, if not the opposite.

The past, present, and future

Despite all the research, publications, and efforts at coming to grips with the Jewish past in Ukraine, the gulf of two solitudes seems to remain firmly in place. Some scholars working on Jewish and Ukrainian topics themselves seem to be part of the problem, since, like most human beings, they are for the most part drawn to the tragic, destructive, and sensational aspects of the past, which, to be sure, are much more exciting than periods of normality.

Let us apply some simple arithmetic to the past. Jews have lived on Ukrainian lands for about a millennium, that is, the thousand years stretching from medieval Kievan Rus' to the present. As a significant proportion of the country's population, their presence is even shorter, dating from about 1550, in other words, about 450 years. During those five or ten centuries, the periods of conflict and destruction that Jews experienced were limited to six short time frames: 1648–1649, 1768, 1881–1883, 1903–1906, 1919–1920, and 1941–1944. Together, the total number of years encompassed by those time frames is at most sixteen to twenty. Yet it is these periods that have received — and continue to receive — the most attention. What about the other 430 years (if we begin in 1550) or 880 years (if we begin in 1000)? Do they not count for something? Cannot these years of (perhaps boring) normality tell us something about Jewish life in Ukraine as being something other than unmitigated tragedy?

Granted, most individuals are likely to feel more comfortable with knowledge they already have, regardless whether or not it may be based on impressions, stereotypes, or simply what they call, self-servingly, feelings. Moreover, is not the relationship of diasporan Jews and Ukrainians similar to the relationship — or lack thereof — between other groups? As one American of Jewish background (Michael Greenberg) raised on a street adjacent to a predominantly Irish neighborhood recently observed in a piece written for the New York Review of Books: "We mostly ignored each other, as the grown-ups had taught us to do. Between Us and Them there was a mutual air of condescension and hostility. We had little understanding of one another and made it our business that it stayed that way."

Some of the discussion in this book has been about the past and how that past is governed by individual perception, belief, and conviction. These phenomena, while related, differ by degree. The first stage, perception, is an awareness on the part of an individual of the elements of his or her environment through physical sensation or feelings. The second stage, belief, is the mental acceptance or agreement of something presented as true, with or without certainty. The third stage, conviction, is the act of convincing a person, or the state of being convinced, that something is absolutely true. For those Jews and Ukrainians who, like the above-mentioned proverbial Irish American and Jewish American, have little understanding of one another and are determined to keep it that way, this book has not much relevance. It may, however, have some relevance for those who are willing to shed themselves of their existing convictions and beliefs, and to realize that what they know about the past is more than likely merely a perception — an awareness based on a physical sensation or feeling. Feelings, of course, are fine, but they should not be allowed to evolve into beliefs and convictions in the absence of knowledge.

This book alone is unlikely to change perceptions deeply embedded in the minds of many Jews and Ukrainians, whether in Ukraine or in the diaspora. One may hope, however, that the reader who has made it this far into the text will agree that, for a proper appreciation of Jewish-Ukrainian relations, Jews need to know as much about Ukrainians as Ukrainians need to know about Jews.

Click here for a pdf of the entire book.