Introduction: Violence, Authority, and the Problem of Knowing
The Lviv pogrom of November 22–24, 1918, which erupted immediately after the Polish military takeover of the city during the Polish-Ukrainian War, became one of the most scrutinized episodes of anti-Jewish violence in the Second Polish Republic.Footnote 1 Historiography on this subject can be grouped into three broad analytical approaches. First, several studies have focused on reconstructing the course and character of events, as well as mapping the institutional, political, and social conditions under which the pogrom unfolded.Footnote 2 Second, other works have examined the deeper causal dynamics of the violence, interpreting it as an expression of ethnic hostility, the wartime collapse of state authority, moral economies of revenge, or performative enactments of emerging national identity.Footnote 3 Third, a smaller but growing body of scholarship has turned to discourse analysis, examining how pogroms were represented in public narratives, institutional reports, and collective memory, and how such representations shaped political legitimacy.Footnote 4 Each of these approaches offers crucial insights into the dynamics of aggression, responsibility, and remembrance.
Building on these perspectives, this article introduces an additional analytical dimension: pogroms as sites of epistemological contestation—arenas in which competing truth claims about violence were formulated, circulated, and hierarchized. Rather than focusing on the motives of perpetrators or the structural causes of violence, it examines the processes by which particular narratives acquired epistemic authority while others were suppressed, delegitimized, or rendered unintelligible. Drawing on recent work in political epistemology and the praxeology of truth, I argue that Polish and Jewish interpretations of the Lviv pogrom functioned as asymmetrical regimes of knowledge.Footnote 5 Each regime relied on distinct “figures of truth” (socially legitimized actors), “scenes of truth” (discursive platforms), and mechanisms of validation.Footnote 6 While the epistemic imbalance observed in Lviv recalled earlier patterns—such as the wartime trope of Jewish betrayal or the habitual attribution of blame to Jewish victims—what distinguished this case was the incorporation of such claims into the logic of nation-state legitimation amid imperial collapse and societal upheaval.Footnote 7 Polish state institutions and nationalist media framed the pogrom as a spontaneous and justified reaction to alleged Jewish disloyalty, embedding it within the heroic narrative of the “defense of Lwów,” which soon crystallized into a foundational myth of the Second Polish Republic.Footnote 8 Jewish actors—including local lawyers, journalists, and international advocates—mobilized legal and documentary tools not only to challenge prevailing accounts, but also to assert their rights within a reconstituted polity in which they were positioned as a contested minority. Yet this counter-discourse—however methodical and principled in its evidentiary effort—was structurally excluded from official frameworks of recognition and from the sanctioned memory regime of the Polish state.Footnote 9
This article shifts attention from interpretations that situate the pogroms of 1918–21 within the broader context of wartime upheaval and interethnic tensions accompanying the collapse of empires.Footnote 10 Instead, it places the Lviv pogrom within the framework of postimperial state formation and the long interwar aftermath. It suggests that the events of November 1918 are best understood by attending to the epistemic and symbolic labor involved in legitimizing a nascent political order. Although centered on Lviv, the analysis follows how local struggles over truth and legitimacy resonated across regional and national arenas, revealing the multilevel mechanisms through which epistemic violence was enacted and institutionalized. In this framework, “postimperial” denotes the volatile transitional context following the collapse of empire, in which emergent states sought not only to consolidate territorial sovereignty but also to define the epistemic parameters of national identity. Amid contested borders, competing ethnic claims, and pluralist social fabrics, the production of knowledge about violence became a key site of political struggle.Footnote 11 Within this setting, the pogrom in Lviv was not simply tolerated or denied; it was retrospectively rearticulated by dominant actors. Acts committed by soldiers, civilians, and paramilitaries were endowed with symbolic value, displaced onto externalized others, and woven into a redemptive narrative of national rebirth—reframing a moment of brutality as a catalyst for political integration.
This perspective invites a broader conceptualization of pogroms; not merely as eruptions of ethnic aggression, but as struggles over the production and governance of knowledge. It shifts analytical focus from questions of causality to the symbolic, institutional, and political infrastructures that shaped how atrocities were narrated, remembered, and contested. Accordingly, this study treats the Lviv pogrom not simply as an isolated episode of anti-Jewish violence, but as a contested node within a wider epistemic field; one that retools tropes of Jewish betrayal and justified reprisal into the symbolic grammar of postimperial nation-making and reveals the entangled dynamics of state-building, collective memory, and minority justice in modern east central Europe. It thereby positions the Lviv case as a conceptual model for interpreting pogroms of the 1918–21 period as politically structured acts of meaning-making, where violence, denial, and knowledge coalesced in the service of state-building.
November 22–24, 1918: Anatomy of a Pogrom
The outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Lviv on November 22, 1918, must be situated within the political volatility and rhetorical instability that accompanied the disintegration of imperial order and the emergence of the Second Polish Republic. Far from being a spontaneous eruption, the pogrom was prefigured by discursive and military developments that cast Jewish neutrality as betrayal and laid the groundwork for the perception of violence as retaliation.
In late October 1918, shortly before the outbreak of fighting between Polish and Ukrainian forces for control of Lviv (November 1–21), the city’s Jewish leadership declared a stance of neutrality—largely shaped by Zionist voices who feared that any open support for the Poles could provoke Ukrainian reprisals in the countryside.Footnote 12 This position, though grounded in pragmatic efforts to protect the community, quickly became a discursive tool within Polish propaganda. The military newspaper Pobudka soon alleged that Jews were aiding Ukrainian forces, accused Jewish militiamen of attacking Polish civilians, and warned that such behavior might provoke “spontaneous antisemitism.”Footnote 13 Amplified in military newspapers and internal army communications, these unsubstantiated claims turned the Jewish community’s defensive neutrality into a narrative of active hostility.
On November 22, in the immediate aftermath of Polish military success, these rumors crystallized into brutal action. Polish soldiers and civilians entered Jewish neighborhoods, burning synagogues, looting homes and businesses, and killing or injuring hundreds.Footnote 14 Czesław Mączyński, the Chief Commander of Polish forces in Lviv, issued a public proclamation on November 23, that effectively authorized further aggression. The statement accused Jews of “pouring boiling water,” “throwing axes,” and “shooting Polish soldiers in the back”—thus portraying the pogrom as a natural and defensive response to supposed Jewish treachery.Footnote 15 In doing so, Mączyński turned an official military storyline into a vehicle for symbolic and epistemic legitimation—namely, the power to define what counts as truth and whose discourse would prevail. This rhetorical maneuver—representing the assault as reactive rather than premeditated—must be understood as part of what Pierre Bourdieu would call symbolic violence: the naturalization of asymmetrical power relations through language.Footnote 16 In this instance, state and military institutions deployed epistemic authority to frame Jewish victims as the agents of their own fate.Footnote 17
Emergency courts were established shortly after the violence, signaling a formal response to the unrest.Footnote 18 Yet from the outset, the legal process appeared ill-equipped to address the scope and nature of the events—a shortcoming that became increasingly apparent over time. Although a vigorous debate unfolded in the press and pamphlet literature, it failed to produce a credible public reckoning. The lack of institutional accountability and narrative coherence would have enduring consequences. Internationally, reactions varied. Foreign Jewish newspapers reported death tolls in the thousands, often based on rumor rather than documentation.Footnote 19 Yet such exaggerations, while problematic, also underscore the deep credibility crisis facing Polish authorities. Their failure to respond promptly and transparently to the pogrom reinforced perceptions of state complicity and undermined Poland’s image at the Paris Peace Conference.
What this episode demonstrates is both the anatomy of a pogrom and the anatomy of denial. Denial here was not a silence but a strategy—an effort to control meaning, obscure responsibility, and shape a politically serviceable memory of the past.Footnote 20 From the manipulation of military communication to the selective activation of judicial mechanisms, the events of November 22–24 illuminate how acts of violence are framed, justified, and eventually forgotten within the dominant national discourse. The Lviv pogrom thus exemplifies more than a local tragedy; it reveals a broader pattern visible across the pogroms of 1918–21, where emerging states not only failed to prevent anti-Jewish violence, but actively repackaged it as politically intelligible or morally defensible. This anatomy of denial—discursive, institutional, and symbolic—helps illuminate how national narratives, like the Polish one, absorbed pogroms into the symbolic architecture of postimperial state-building.
Polish Narrative: From Denial to Institutionalization
Strategic Framing and Initial Denial
In the immediate aftermath of the Lviv pogrom, Polish civil and military authorities moved quickly to reshape the meaning of the violence—not by denying that it occurred, but by redefining what it was. Within days, the pogrom was narratively transformed from an act of ethnic violence into a temporary outbreak of criminal disorder, allegedly provoked by wartime chaos and enemy subversion. This strategy of reinterpretation was not ad hoc, but structured; anchored in official statements, legal deflection, and coordinated media framing. It formed the basis of a political-epistemic agenda that would shape how the events of November 1918 were understood, remembered, and ultimately institutionalized.
The City Council of Lviv and the Provisional Governing Committee were among the first bodies to respond. In public resolutions passed on November 26 and 28, these institutions condemned the violence but attributed it not to the Polish army or civilian population, but to criminal elements allegedly released by Ukrainian forces fighting for the city.Footnote 21 Władysław Stesłowicz, a legal scholar and member of the Polish National Committee, reinforced this interpretation in a public statement, attributing the disorder to Ukrainian instigators and downplaying any suggestion of systematic anti-Jewish violence.Footnote 22 This recasting of responsibility served a dual purpose: it distanced the Polish state from complicity and reclassified Jewish suffering as politically irrelevant.
Military actors were also central to shaping public perception of the pogrom, though not all acted in the same register. While Mączyński used his authority to portray the violence as a defensible act of national retribution, Bolesław Roja, commander of the Polish relief force sent to Lviv, responded differently. At the urging of Jewish representatives, he ordered the creation of emergency courts to reassert legal order and curb further attacks.Footnote 23 These divergent responses occurred in parallel but had unequal impact. Mączyński’s proclamation channeled public rage and legitimated rumor as patriotic expression, while Roja’s appeal to judicial accountability remained peripheral. His initiative opened a legal framework for addressing the violence, but its long-term consequences would prove limited: Mączyński deliberately delayed the publication of Roja’s orders, and the emergency courts themselves, hampered by procedural delays and a lack of political will, failed to deliver meaningful justice. The contrast between the two highlights the asymmetry between legality and interpretive authority, and the extent to which discursive control—rather than institutional action—shaped both immediate perception and long-term memory of the pogrom.
While the public narrative emphasized the spontaneity of the violence and the supposed provocation by Jews, some internal assessments offered a more complex picture. In late 1918 and early 1919, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice commissioned inquiries into the events. Reports prepared by diplomat Leon Chrzanowski and Izraelita former editor Józef Wasserzug in December, and by Supreme Court judge Zygmunt Rymowicz in February, suggested that Polish soldiers had participated in the violence and questioned the validity of widespread accusations against the Jewish population. However, these findings remained confined to bureaucratic circulation and were not publicly debated at the time, diminishing their potential to challenge the dominant reading of the pogrom.Footnote 24 Their marginalization reflected the broader asymmetry between institutional knowledge and political narrative.
Taken together, these early responses to the Lviv pogrom illustrate how postimperial states often prioritized symbolic coherence over historical transparency. Violence was not simply hidden; it was actively redefined as an episode of urban disorder and patriotic defense. The result was a politically useful narrative, one that could be embedded in national memory with minimal epistemic disturbance. The press would soon emerge as a central medium for circulating and stabilizing this version of events.
Epistemic Role of the Press
The Polish press did not simply report the Lviv pogrom; it helped to shape the epistemic environment under which the assault was interpreted, rationalized, and ultimately minimized. Rather than investigating the causes or scale of the events, mainstream outlets sought to contain and redefine its significance; crafting an interpretive frame in which the pogrom appeared as an unfortunate but understandable result of urban chaos, not as state failure or targeted anti-Jewish violence. Through selective reporting, strategic omissions, and rhetorical realignment, the press helped recast mass atrocities as marginal disorder.
While the foreign press reported extensively on the pogrom, domestic newspapers addressed it only briefly, and often obliquely. The point was not to deny that something had happened, but to diminish its gravity and deflect blame. In the immediate aftermath, Lviv-based outlets attributed the attacks to criminal elements allegedly released from prison by Ukrainian forces and focused primarily on looting and arson. The language downplayed the organized nature of the attacks and omitted references to killings or military involvement.Footnote 25
At the national level, the pattern persisted. Papers like Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny in Krakow cited unnamed but supposedly authoritative sources to support a version of events that aligned with official narratives. One article, attributed to “one of the most eminent and respected citizens of Lviv,” dismissed allegations of anti-Jewish violence as exaggerated or fabricated.Footnote 26 A similar tone appeared in Warsaw’s Kurjer Polski, which on December 9 downplayed the “alleged pogrom” as foreign rumor, describing Jewish losses as the result of combat and looting as the work of criminals swiftly pacified by the army.Footnote 27 These rhetorical moves lent legitimacy to disinformation while shielding the Polish state from responsibility.
In parallel, earlier rumors—initially spread during the fighting in Lviv and reiterated in Mączyński’s November 23 proclamation—were repackaged in the national press as facts. Chief among these was the accusation that Jews had collaborated with Ukrainian forces. This storyline, which began as battlefield gossip, escalated into a moral panic—an emotionally charged narrative that portrayed Jews as a hidden collective threat. Głos Narodu, a Krakow-based newspaper, expanded on it in successive reports, eventually publishing an entirely fabricated story that Jews and Ukrainians had planned a coordinated assault on Polish troops: Jews attacking from inside the city while Ukrainians approached from outside. The article alleged that Jewish residents had provided large sums of money to fund the Ukrainian army and had stockpiled weapons in Jewish districts—supposedly uncovered by Polish authorities just in time.Footnote 28
No military or municipal source corroborated these claims. In fact, neither Lviv officials nor the Second Department of the Polish Supreme Command (military intelligence) reported any such conspiracy. A classified intelligence report from December 30, 1918, warned instead of growing anti-Jewish hysteria. It noted that in various parts of the country, this had already led to “riots against Jews of an alarming scale and barbarity.”Footnote 29 This internal assessment sharply contrasted with the public storyline shaped by silence and distortion.Footnote 30
The disjuncture between state intelligence and public representation reveals how the press functioned less as an investigative body than as an extension of symbolic power. Polish newspapers did not merely fail to report the pogrom accurately; they actively shaped a discursive environment in which the violence was legitimized or erased. Structures of credibility were tightly controlled: Polish voices were presumed authoritative, Jewish perspectives were ignored or framed as suspect, and official silence became an interpretive cue. A rare dissenting voice appeared in Warsaw’s socialist press.Footnote 31
This selective visibility influenced what was reported and shaped how the pogrom was integrated into collective memory. Through repetition, omission, and rhetorical deflection, the press stabilized a storyline in which the Lviv pogrom became a regrettable incident within the broader process of national rebirth, rather than a rupture or a crime. By recasting the assault so consistently and swiftly, the press effectively embedded it within the emerging mythology of postimperial resilience, thereby contributing to the symbolic consolidation of the new state order.
Memory and Institutionalization
In the years following the Lviv pogrom, the Polish public sphere did not repress memory through silence, but rather through reinterpretation and narrative consolidation. One of the most influential vectors of this process were memoirs and quasi-historical accounts published by military officers, politicians, and intellectuals who had participated in or supported the Polish struggle for Lviv. These texts did not merely reflect memory—they produced it. They codified the claim of Jewish betrayal, inscribed it in institutional language, and elevated it to the status of historical truth.
The earliest and most widely circulated publication in this genre was a memoir with documentary ambitions by Jan Gella, a young poet and journalist from Lviv. Published shortly after the pogrom, Gella’s book presented itself as a documentary record, complete with photographs, maps, and official communiqués. Its credibility was bolstered by the inclusion of military orders and press excerpts, as well as by Gella’s status as a firsthand observer. Yet despite the book’s documentary format, Gella’s interpretive agenda became unmistakable in his account of the pogrom: it was reduced to “regrettable incidents,” and the Jewish militia was portrayed as actively hostile toward Polish forces.Footnote 32 The key moment cited was a skirmish on November 17, which Gella presented as evidence of collaboration between Jews and Ukrainians.Footnote 33 In fact, the clash had been between Jewish militia members and looters attacking Jewish property, and it was the Jewish militiamen who were subsequently brought to trial. The court proceedings ultimately confirmed their version of events, resulting in full acquittals before the end of 1919.Footnote 34 By that time, however, Gella’s version had already entered wide circulation, shaping the Polish interpretive framework and providing a template for future accounts.Footnote 35 Many subsequent publications followed this model.
The November 17 incident was retroactively elevated as symbolic proof of Jewish disloyalty: a pretext for reclassifying the pogrom not as mass violence, but as retribution. This reinterpretation reached its apex in the writings of Mączyński. He published a monumental two-volume memoir in 1921, presenting himself as both military leader and historian. His authority rested not only on personal involvement, but on his public role as “liberator” of Lviv.
Mączyński’s account pushed the limits of narrative reconstruction. He extended the official timeline of the battle to the morning of November 24—two days beyond the surrender of Ukrainian forces—reframing the final phase of violence as a continuation of military operations. But this time, the enemies were not the Ukrainians; it was the Jews. According to Mączyński, Jewish militias had attacked Polish soldiers and secured the Ukrainian retreat, necessitating a “bloody, real battle” in the Jewish quarters. He attributed this alleged combat to Lieutenant Roman Abraham, who notably never confirmed such an encounter in his own reports.Footnote 36 Despite these inconsistencies, Mączyński’s framing remained dominant throughout the interwar period, not least because of his institutional backing and prolific publications.
Mączyński’s narrative was reinforced by other military memoirists, such as Antoni Jakubski, second chief of staff during the battle for Lviv and later a professor at Poznań University. In a 1933 publication, Jakubski described Jewish resistance as a “fact,” claiming that Polish units had come under coordinated fire and had been forced to “pacify” the entire Jewish district. He blamed the victims not just for hostility, but for “dullness and thoughtlessness.”Footnote 37 The language of his account echoed the earlier rationalizations offered in the press, but now bore the weight of official remembrance.
Even those who had initially resisted such claims eventually conformed to the dominant perspective. Aleksander Czołowski, director of the Lviv Historical Archive and a respected chronicler of the city’s history, kept a diary in November 1918 in which he documented urban life in detail. While critical of Lviv’s Jews, he made no accusations of disloyalty. Yet in memoirs compiled a few years later, Czołowski included a long anti-Jewish diatribe that repeated many of Mączyński’s claims.Footnote 38 There is little reason to believe that these revisions emerged from recollection. Far more likely is that Czołowski, like many others, adapted his memory to fit the hegemonic discourse, one increasingly stabilized by the authority of print, reputation, and national myth.
This process of memory consolidation did not occur in a vacuum. It was part of a broader postimperial project of redefining civic belonging and national allegiance in the wake of imperial collapse. The pogrom, reimagined as a form of justified Polish self-defense, was woven into the symbolic purification of the national community. Memoirs played a central role in this process as instruments of epistemic authority, shaping what counted as legitimate knowledge about the past. They intervened in historical understanding by organizing ambiguous events into a coherent, state-affirming storyline.Footnote 39
Because this version endured, it shaped institutions: educational curricula, public commemorations, and official historiography all drew on its framework, incorporating the pogrom within a broader story of national triumph.Footnote 40 Meanwhile, alternative voices—especially Jewish accounts of the violence—were excluded, untranslated, or dismissed as biased. In this way, the memory of the pogrom was rewritten: from a trauma into a tale of vindication.
Structured Ignorance and Legal Silences
The gradual erasure of the Lviv pogrom from institutional memory was not the result of simple denial or imposed silence. Instead, it unfolded through a series of procedural gestures—courts convened, reports drafted, commissions received—that created the appearance of accountability while carefully forestalling its realization. This performative acknowledgment, devoid of lasting consequences, produced a state of epistemic latency: knowledge recognized in form but suspended in function.
This latency was especially visible in the domain of legal response. Once judicial proceedings commenced, approximately 1,000 soldiers and civilians were temporarily arrested, though formal charges were brought against only 79 individuals.Footnote 41 Three were executed for looting.Footnote 42 Of those tried, only three were convicted of murder and sentenced to death; forty-four were found guilty of looting and received relatively light prison terms.Footnote 43 The legal process moved swiftly but narrowly, avoiding broader institutional or military culpability. It signaled institutional engagement without effecting substantive change. Though it might be argued that these proceedings established a procedural template for addressing mass violence, they ultimately failed to generate a normative standard for justice. The courts did not impose sentences commensurate with the scale and brutality of the crimes, nor did they articulate principles that could guide future adjudication of collective violence. The absence of meaningful jurisprudence—both in terms of legal reasoning and punitive proportionality—meant that the trials functioned less as instruments of accountability than as symbolic concessions to due process.
As previously noted, reports authored by Leon Chrzanowski, Józef Wasserzug, and Supreme Court judge Zygmunt Rymowicz—each of them commissioned by central ministries—circulated within the administrative apparatus but were never made public. Their institutional origin lent them credibility; however, because their conclusions contradicted prevailing narratives, they were consigned to archives and remained politically dormant. In this configuration, legal silence was not the absence of response, but the production of silence through formality.
This logic echoes what Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms a “sociology of absences”: the process by which certain forms of knowledge are not merely excluded but actively constituted as nonexistent or irrelevant within dominant epistemic frameworks.Footnote 44 In the case of the Lviv pogrom, knowledge was not denied but strategically defused; processed just enough to appear acknowledged to bureaucratic observers or external actors, while structurally prevented from unsettling official truths.
A similar logic shaped the reception of foreign observation. Among the few external voices to raise concerns was the mission led by British MP Stuart M. Samuel, whose report, though cautious in tone, highlighted inconsistencies in Polish accounts and noted the absence of clear punitive measures. In contrast, the American mission headed by Henry Morgenthau produced two assessments: Morgenthau’s own, somewhat critical in tone, and a second—authored by the other members of the delegation, Edwin Jadwin and Homer Johnson—that portrayed the pogrom as an unfortunate but isolated episode. Their report notably minimized the scale of physical violence and reframed antisemitism as an economic grievance, emphasizing perceived Jewish dominance in commerce over ethnic persecution. Peter Wright, a captain attached to the Samuel mission, issued the most favorable evaluation from the Polish perspective, expressing open skepticism toward Jewish testimonies.Footnote 45
These findings, while varied, were generally interpreted in Poland through the prism of geopolitical exigency. The Polish state, seeking international recognition and legitimacy, had itself requested the presence of investigative missions not out of openness to critique, but as a diplomatic strategy to defuse external pressure.Footnote 46 Their conclusions were then selectively quoted or sidelined depending on their political utility. Internally, they had little impact: no policies were altered, no inquiries reopened, and no commemorative practices revised.
This was not simply a failure of follow-up. It was a mode of governance. In avoiding the term pogrom—preferring terms like disturbance, riot, or excess—and in curating the fate of inconvenient knowledge, Polish institutions sustained a version of events that preserved national cohesion at the cost of minority recognition.Footnote 47 Silence, in this context, was not passive. It was produced through the careful activation and deactivation of legal, diplomatic, and historiographic forms.
The case of Lviv illustrates how state institutions can deploy legal and procedural forms to signal accountability while shielding themselves from its consequences. Investigations may be launched, commissions convened, and reports compiled, yet these actions often generate no substantive change. Instead, they produce an architecture of symbolic compliance, where the appearance of engagement masks the preservation of epistemic control. Historical narratives are shaped not only by what is remembered, but by what is allowed to circulate. In this context, selective visibility becomes a mode of governance: certain accounts are elevated, others relegated to bureaucratic obscurity. What results is not a lack of memory, but what Robert Proctor has termed agnotology: the deliberate production of ignorance for strategic purposes.Footnote 48
The Polish rendition of the Lviv pogrom was not a monolith, but a layered discursive configuration that evolved through overlapping mechanisms of reinterpretation, containment, and legitimation. From initial responses by civil and military authorities, through strategic silences in the press, to the institutionalization of selective memory via memoirs and legal procedure, the pogrom was made legible and politically admissible within the emerging national order. This was more than historical revisionism: it was a strategic attempt to impose symbolic, moral, and legal coherence in the face of disruptive violence. The consolidation of this storyline reveals the extent to which knowledge production and state-building were co-constitutive in postimperial Poland. It also underscores how asymmetries of narrative authority—not just political power—shaped which voices would be remembered, which discredited, and which never heard. The long-term effects of this discursive architecture reverberated beyond the interwar period.Footnote 49 Yet already in its immediate aftermath, an alternative response was taking shape. The following section turns to the Jewish narrative, which—excluded from official memory—constructed its own counter-epistemology grounded in testimony, advocacy, and historical claim-making.
Jewish Narrative: From Testimony to Counter-Epistemology
Epistemic Resistance: Testimony, Law, and the Jewish Rescue Committee
In the immediate aftermath of the pogrom, the Jewish community in Lviv responded with both humanitarian aid and epistemic urgency. On November 29, 1918, Jewish leaders established the Jewish Rescue Committee, an institution that quickly became central to the community’s efforts to document and interpret the violence. Its very name—“rescue”—suggested not only the alleviation of suffering but the preservation of truth in the face of denial.
The Committee was composed of fifty prominent representatives from across the Jewish political spectrum in Lviv, with a presidium made up largely of lawyers, many of them holding doctoral degrees. Its internal structure included the Damage Registration Unit, which, between early December 1918 and late January 1919, collected 3,620 standardized questionnaires documenting assaults, murders, rapes, arson, and property loss. By the end of March, this number had risen to 4,820, supplemented by 315 formal protocols. The collection process engaged 105 individuals and reflected a highly organized, methodologically coordinated effort to assert Jewish epistemic authority.Footnote 50
Based on this material, the Committee compiled a comprehensive dossier titled Dokumenty chwili (Documents of the Moment).Footnote 51 Several typewritten copies are known to have circulated, although no official printed version was released.Footnote 52 The Committee summarized its findings in articles that appeared in Chwila, a Polish-language Zionist newspaper published in Lviv, and later in Nowy Dziennik, a Polish-language Jewish daily based in Krakow.Footnote 53 By late 1919, it had also prepared a formal report on its activities.Footnote 54 The scale, structure, and professional organization of this documentation effort reflected a deliberate attempt to meet the epistemic expectations of state and legal institutions.
Crucially, these testimonies were not merely descriptive. They were legally coded, institutionally organized, and presented in formats familiar to state bureaucracy. The questionnaires followed consistent categories; the protocols were authenticated through signatures and attribution; many featured corroborating details, such as addresses, time markers, and witness cross-referencing.Footnote 55 This formatting mirrored juridical norms and was intended to grant the Jewish voice institutional legitimacy. The implicit claim was clear: Jewish suffering was not anecdotal; it was recorded, substantiated, and systematically archived. By encoding trauma in the language of official procedure, the Jewish community rendered its suffering as verifiable fact, demanding recognition within the epistemic logic of the state.
The political dimension of this evidentiary strategy did not go unnoticed. Even Mączyński, whose November 23 proclamation had helped to cast the pogrom as defensive retaliation, felt compelled to respond. In his later writings, he acknowledged the Committee’s work—but with biting sarcasm, dismissing its members as “mere attorneys and advocates” and placing these words in quotation marks to emphasize his disdain.Footnote 56 The scorn was strategic. Mączyński sought to delegitimize the very infrastructure of Jewish truth-making, aware that the struggle over credibility—including his own standing as a “figure of truth”—had become the central battleground.
The Jewish effort extended beyond the collection of facts to a broader contestation of interpretive frameworks. While the Polish narrative emphasized provocation, spontaneity, and criminal chaos, the Jewish response recontextualized the pogrom as systemic, structured, and ideologically charged. In this way, the Lviv Jewish community asserted itself as an informed historical agent: capable of articulating its experience through methods aligned with state logic, yet critically directed against state-sanctioned narratives.
The result was both a counter-narrative and an institutional intervention—anchored in the work of the Jewish Rescue Committee—that sought to occupy the terrain of documentary legitimacy. In a context where Jewish voices were typically marginalized, this strategic initiative represented more than a defensive reaction. It was a proactive intervention in the politics of knowledge that contested the terms of official memory.
Law Without Effect: Legal Appeals and the Limits of Redress
Efforts to secure justice through institutional channels intensified in the months following the pogrom. Between December 1918 and early 1919, the Jewish Rescue Committee—joined by other Jewish organizations, including the Zionist Organization—submitted memoranda and appeals to local and national authorities.Footnote 57 These interventions were grounded in legal documentation and articulated through the epistemic language of judicial accountability. Yet they consistently failed to elicit a meaningful response.
One of the most active and articulate figures in this effort was Tobiasz Aszkenaze, a lawyer and president of the Lviv Bar Association, and a proponent of Jewish assimilation into Polish civic life. His assimilationist outlook informed his approach to legal advocacy, presenting Jewish claims not as particularist grievances but as universal demands for equal rights within the Polish legal and political order. His interventions demonstrate both the possibilities and limits of legal advocacy.
In late November 1918, the Rescue Committee wrote to Colonel Władysław Sikorski, Quartermaster of the Polish Army’s Supreme Command in Lviv, demanding prosecution of those responsible for the violence. Sikorski’s reply echoed the rhetoric of Mączyński’s proclamation and the military press, reiterating claims of Jewish provocation. The Committee then forwarded the correspondence to the city president, demanding a full retraction of Sikorski’s accusations. This letter, almost certainly authored by Aszkenaze, rejected the assertions as unfounded and harmful. While this pressure led Sikorski to temper his tone in later correspondence, it had no bearing on broader judicial or political outcomes.Footnote 58 The episode illustrates the limits of legal engagement: rhetorical concessions could be won, but they did not translate into structural redress. Instead, law functioned as a symbolic resource: capable of producing gestures of responsiveness while preserving the deeper architecture of impunity. Aszkenaze also addressed a municipal commission on Polish-Jewish relations in January 1919. Composed of local elites, the commission was ostensibly a venue for civic dialogue. Aszkenaze used the occasion to call for the full exoneration of Lviv’s Jews and the public withdrawal of false allegations. Yet his appeal was omitted from the published report of the commission’s proceedings, and the issue of the pogrom was deliberately excluded from official discussion.Footnote 59
In parallel, Aszkenaze compiled a memorandum titled Memoryał, submitted to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs envoys Leon Chrzanowski and Józef Wasserzug in December 1918. The document reconstructed the pogrom’s background and detailed its events using excerpts from collected testimonies.Footnote 60 A follow-up memorandum was sent to Chief of State Józef Piłsudski and Prime Minister Ignacy Paderewski in January 1919, urging them to repudiate the official narrative that portrayed Jews as aggressors.Footnote 61 This appeal, too, went unanswered.
The one institutional setting where Jewish engagement received tentative acknowledgment from state authorities was the presence of Supreme Court judge Zygmunt Rymowicz, who led an investigative commission in Lviv from early January through early February 1919. The Rescue Committee prepared extensively. The newspaper Chwila called upon victims and witnesses to testify, presenting the judge as a credible figure whose authority could break the cycle of impunity.Footnote 62 This appeal mobilized nearly 1,000 Jewish witnesses, reflecting both the depth of communal trauma and the hope that formal testimony might secure recognition and redress.
The Polish public, however, responded differently. The Municipal Citizens’ Guard issued appeals implicitly encouraging Polish witnesses to come forward, framing it as an opportunity to defend the city’s reputation by clarifying the causes and character of the violence, yet very few responded, and those who did remained marginal to the proceedings.Footnote 63 This asymmetry was striking. While Jews approached the commission as a legal body, their Polish counterparts largely treated it as irrelevant. The courtroom, typically construed as a spatial site imbued with epistemic authority—a “truth spot” in the sense developed by Thomas F. Gieryn—was in this instance treated not as a space for verification, but as a domain of selective participation.Footnote 64 Jewish leaders and victims turned to the court as an institution capable of adjudicating truth, while Polish actors chose to sustain their narrative through non-accountable platforms such as the press. This divergence in institutional investment underscored not only the fragility of legal legitimacy in a transitional state, but also the broader dilemma of contested authority in ideologically polarized polities, where judicial venues are not universally perceived as valid sites of truth production.Footnote 65
In the end, the commission’s findings were never published, and the extensive documentation it amassed—including the testimonies of nearly a thousand Jewish witnesses—remained confined to archival storage.Footnote 66 The act of collecting testimony did not lead to legal reckoning, but to administrative containment. The state formally registered participation, only to dissolve its political force. More broadly, these dynamics exemplify how institutional non-response can operate not as failure, but as a strategic ploy; one that sustains ignorance through procedural performance.Footnote 67 Despite abundant documentation, detailed legal appeals, and consistent cooperation with judicial procedures, Jewish actors encountered a system that acknowledged their claims procedurally while neutralizing them politically. Knowledge was collected, archived, and sealed—circulated just enough to simulate institutional responsiveness, but never to trigger structural accountability.
Print as Protest: Jewish Counter-Narratives in the Public Sphere
In the aftermath of the Lviv pogrom, Jewish print culture emerged as a vital forum for producing and circulating alternative accounts. Amid the silence or distortion of official channels, newspapers and periodicals offered one of the few arenas where Jewish voices could publicly respond to the dominant portrayal of events. These publications did more than report; they analyzed, contested, and reinterpreted the meaning of the violence within a broader struggle over epistemic authority.
Among the key outlets advancing the Jewish counter-narrative was Chwila, the Polish-language Zionist daily from Lviv, edited at the time by Gerszon Zipper. Although operating under the constraints of press censorship in the newly established Polish state, Chwila nonetheless played a significant role in shaping public understanding of the pogrom. While it could not directly accuse Polish authorities or challenge official institutions, the newspaper employed a careful strategy of implication and critique. It published reports on the activities of the Jewish Rescue Committee, the experiences of pogrom victims, and selected developments in legal proceedings.Footnote 68 Within these constrains, it also sought to question the official storyline that framed the pogrom as a justified response to alleged Jewish provocation. Through editorials, legal commentaries, and pointed analyses, Chwila exposed contradictions in official claims and highlighted their rhetorical inconsistencies; often relying on irony, quotation, and comparative argumentation to signal dissent without breaching the limits of permissible commentary.
An important component of this strategy was the recurring column “Z krainy legend” (From the Land of Legends), which served as a platform for systematic deconstruction of the dominant Polish portrayal of the pogrom, one that, as the very title suggested, belonged more to the realm of fiction than to credible documentary reporting.Footnote 69 Through close reading of press coverage, political statements, and military proclamations, the column performed what might be called textual excavation: unearthing the layered fictions that undergirded the official account. While maintaining a tone of decorum, Chwila consistently destabilized the logic of state-sanctioned explanations, offering a sustained, if constrained, intellectual resistance.
This press-based counter-narrative extended beyond Lviv. In Warsaw, the Zionist weekly Opinia provided another important platform for Jewish responses to the pogrom. Abraham Insler—a lawyer, legal commentator, and later editor of the Lviv-based Nasza Opinia—published a series of articles analyzing the events of November 22–24, drawing from official documents, press coverage, and personal testimonies. These essays initially appeared in Opinia and were later continued in Nasza Opinia. Through his work, Insler not only refuted specific falsehoods but also illuminated the mechanisms by which fabricated accounts gained documentary authority—showing how systematic misrepresentation could become embedded in the structure of public memory.
In the 1930s, Insler developed these articles into two extended works: Dokumenty fałszu. Prawda o tragedji Żydostwa lwowskiego w listopadzie 1918 roku (Documents of Falsehood: The Truth About the Tragedy of Lviv Jewry in November 1918) (1933) and Legendy i fakty (Legends and Facts) (1937).Footnote 70 As their titles suggest, both books offered not only a reconstruction of events but a meta-analysis of historiography itself. Insler exposed how particular documents had been selectively cited, how unverified reports were elevated to the status of “evidence and facts,” and how Polish memoirs reconfigured memory to align with national narratives, especially the myth of Lviv’s heroic defense. Rather than offering a standard historical account, Insler mounted an epistemological challenge to the way knowledge about the pogrom was constructed. He approached the printed word not merely as a vehicle of protest, but as a battleground over the criteria of historical truth.
The reception of these works underscored both their power and their precarity. Dokumenty fałszu was subject to censorship, released by court decision, and then re-censored following a prosecutor’s appeal.Footnote 71 Whether Legendy i fakty faced similar legal obstacles is unclear, but Insler’s interventions clearly circulated beyond Jewish readership. The most striking evidence of their impact was a sharply critical review published in a nationalist veterans’ yearbook dedicated to the Polish defense of Lviv, which accused Insler of selective use of sources but offered little substantive rebuttal.Footnote 72 The attack, paradoxically, confirmed the disruptive force of his intervention: it breached the discursive boundary that had long segregated Jewish and Polish frameworks of historical legitimacy. Insler’s dual role—as editor and author, legal analyst and cultural critic—thus embodied a broader documentary epistemology emerging from Jewish responses to the pogrom. He treated the act of writing not merely as testimony but as a form of juridical intervention: a means of recording what the courts refused to prosecute and preserving what the state attempted to forget. In this framework, print became both a substitute for legal redress and a form of civic participation. The newspaper, the memoir, and the printed rebuttal were instruments through which Jewish actors sought to reclaim discursive standing.
Ultimately, this alternative historiographic effort did not aim to achieve narrative parity. Jewish publications operated within a structurally asymmetrical landscape: without access to state media, institutional backing, or archival power, they relied instead on sustained critical inquiry, grounded in evidence and analytical precision. Their protest was not rooted in rhetorical confrontation, but in the patient dismantling of official myths through detailed documentation, pointed annotation, and comparative analysis. In a public sphere where sanctioned narratives risked becoming uncontested truth, Jewish print culture became a surrogate for legal recognition—a space where resistance was articulated through rigorous prose rather than declarative slogans.
The International Arena: Transnational Advocacy and the Limits of Visibility
Alongside efforts to document and contest the pogrom within Polish institutional and legal frameworks, Jewish actors also turned to international diplomacy as a site of potential redress. For Jewish leaders in Lviv, transnational engagement offered an alternative channel of legitimacy, especially as domestic mechanisms proved ineffective or evasive. Yet despite extensive efforts to communicate Jewish experiences to Allied authorities, these interventions generated more visibility than influence.
In late 1918 and early 1919, Lviv’s Jewish representatives anticipated that international attention—particularly at the Paris Peace Conference—might pressure Polish authorities to respond more decisively to anti-Jewish violence. They approached this diplomatic moment not as passive victims, but as political actors equipped with documentation, legal arguments, and appeals to shared liberal values. A key legal voice in this effort was Tobiasz Aszkenaze, who sought to provide a competent and authoritative account of the pogrom, while also affirming the compatibility of Jewish civil belonging with the future Polish state.
With the backing of the Jewish Rescue Committee and in coordination with local Polish authorities, Aszkenaze prepared the Memoryał: a previously mentioned memorandum written in Polish and supplemented with a shortened French version for diplomatic use.Footnote 73 Submitted to envoys from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on December 16, 1918, the report’s French-language edition was subsequently conveyed to the French military mission in Lviv, led by General Joseph Barthélemy, following a request by Colonel Władysław Sikorski that the mission be provided with all relevant information.Footnote 74 Beyond documenting the violence, the Memoryał strategically positioned Lviv’s Jewish community as committed to the emerging Polish polity, while making clear that the durability of this commitment depended on the effective safeguarding of minority rights.
This dual register—critical but conciliatory—was meant to convey civic responsibility. Yet Polish authorities interpreted the initiative as an act of disloyalty. They requested that Aszkenaze provide names and detailed witness information, a demand that revealed a tension between formal skepticism and a deeper strategic impulse to defend Poland’s reputation.Footnote 75 Rather than respond privately, Aszkenaze opted for a public articulation. His published reply appeared in Chwila, where he defended not only the accuracy of his documentation but also the civic propriety of raising such concerns.Footnote 76 By appealing to legal reason and shared moral standards, he positioned himself—and, by extension, the Jewish counter-narrative—as a legitimate and principled participant in the public sphere.
Nevertheless, the episode underscored the paradox of transnational advocacy: while Jewish testimony reached international actors, it also intensified domestic hostility and failed to shift the underlying dynamics of institutional neglect within the emerging Polish state. The Memoryał did not alter military or judicial policy, nor did it initiate broader public debate. Rather, it entered what might be termed a space of “visible irrelevance,” a condition in which evidence is formally acknowledged but stripped of political consequence, neither suppressed nor allowed to effect structural change.Footnote 77
Another example of this dynamic was the mission of Israel Cohen, who visited Lviv in January 1919 as secretary of the World Zionist Organization. With support from the Jewish Rescue Committee, Cohen collected extensive testimonies and published them in his Report on the Pogroms in Poland (April 1919).Footnote 78 His account, more forceful than the later Morgenthau Report, highlighted the systemic nature of antisemitism and implicated state actors.Footnote 79 Although largely based on documentation prepared in Lviv, the report did not influence Polish policy discourse. Instead, it functioned as a gesture of transnational solidarity; amplifying Jewish voices internationally without shifting domestic structures of impunity.
These international interventions reveal a deeper epistemic dilemma: the gap between symbolic exposure and transformative impact. While the Jewish account of the pogrom gained traction abroad—through diplomatic channels, foreign press, and transnational advocacy—it remained marginalized within Polish political and administrative arenas. Its prominence did not lead to structural reckoning or policy change. Instead, it encountered what might be described as “recognition without traction”: a paradoxical situation in which injustice is rhetorically acknowledged yet subsumed by prevailing interpretive frameworks, preventing any disruption of established hierarchies.Footnote 80 Although Jewish international advocacy contributed to broader minority protections, such as the minority clauses of the Versailles Treaty, these legal instruments remained largely detached from specific acts of violence like the Lviv pogrom and failed to generate accountability on the ground.Footnote 81
As a figure of counter-epistemology, this condition exemplifies the limits of Jewish advocacy within postimperial Europe. Jewish leaders pursued legal channels, engaged with foreign missions, and produced systematic documentation of the violence. Yet these acts of democratic participation were met with polite dismissal or strategic absorption. In the broader economy of political knowledge, their visibility did not generate authority but merely reinforced their position as secondary narrators of their own suffering.
The Jewish response to the Lviv pogrom revealed not only a struggle over historical interpretation, but also the structural conditions that defined minority truth-claims in the postimperial order. Jewish actors mobilized documentation, legal advocacy, and public discourse to contest official representations, yet their interventions were systematically displaced from institutions of authoritative knowledge. The collection of testimonies, engagement with judicial commissions, and deployment of evidentiary strategies in print did not merely seek justice for a local atrocity; they also articulated a broader challenge to emergent forms of nationalist epistemology that conflated sovereignty with discursive control. Despite meticulous efforts to document violence and seek transnational advocacy, Jewish counter-narratives faced a dual bind: they were exposed yet politically irrelevant, recognized yet deprived of institutional traction within national frameworks. This dynamic underscores a deeper pattern not confined to Lviv alone. Across east central Europe in the aftermath of World War I, minority communities who sought to inscribe their suffering into political memory encountered mechanisms of selective acknowledgment and epistemic containment.Footnote 82 The Jewish counter-response to the Lviv pogrom thus illuminates a central paradox of the 1918–21 pogroms: visibility without transformation, documentation without redress. In the new national orders, violence could be both deniable and enduring.
Conclusion: Denial, Memory, and the Epistemology of Pogroms
This article has examined the competing frameworks through which the Lviv pogrom of 1918 was interpreted and integrated—or excluded—from institutional narratives. It has argued that epistemological struggles over the meaning of violence shed light on how state authority was consolidated and minority perspectives marginalized in the postimperial landscape of east central Europe. The case of Lviv reveals not only the contested nature of political violence in the early Second Polish Republic, but also the broader structures of meaning-making through which pogroms were anchored in the state’s canon of collective memory. In Lviv, the dynamics of denial and containment operated with unusual sophistication. Yet the patterns observed here—notably the rapid stabilization of an exculpatory version and the sidelining of Jewish counter-claims—resonated far beyond the city itself.
Comparable dynamics surfaced in multiple locations across east central Europe during 1918–21, including Kielce, Pinsk, Lida, and Vilnius; each of them illustrating how anti-Jewish violence was swiftly reframed as spontaneous unrest, justified retaliation, or incidental disorder.Footnote 83 These reinterpretations often drew on legalistic rhetoric, selective press narratives, and constrained judicial proceedings. Although the scale and visibility of the Lviv pogrom brought particular intensity to these mechanisms, the underlying logic—a fusion of state-building imperatives and discursive control—proved emblematic of the region’s broader postimperial transformations. Among these cases, Lviv stands out not because it was unique in form, but because it offers a particularly vivid and well-documented instance of how violence and denial were fused into a state-sanctioned discourse. What distinguished this case was the consolidation of that discourse into the powerful idiom of the “defense of the city,” a mythologized account that would become foundational to the symbolic architecture of the Second Polish Republic.
The Jewish response complicates conventional narratives of victimhood and silence. Communal leaders and institutions engaged actively with judicial systems, civil administration, and foreign observers. Their strategies ranged from systematic documentation and legal appeals to incisive interventions in public debate and international diplomacy. Yet despite the rigor and clarity of these efforts, Jewish initiatives were structurally subordinated within the new political regime. Their presence in the public sphere—even when nominally permitted—was rendered inert through procedural delay, selective uptake, and symbolic containment.
This condition—conceptualized here as “visible irrelevance” and “recognition without traction”—was not incidental but endemic to postimperial statecraft. In the contest to define political legitimacy, competing accounts of violence became tools for redrawing the boundaries of citizenship, loyalty, and historical memory. Polish authorities—whether operating institutionally or via informal publics—persistently framed Jewish testimony as partisan, unreliable, or extraneous, thereby reinforcing national epistemic primacy despite evidence to the contrary.
By foregrounding the epistemic stakes of the Lviv pogrom, this study advances an alternative analytical register, one that shifts attention from the motives of perpetrators to the infrastructures through which knowledge was produced, authorized, and withheld. The collapse of imperial structures, volatile borders, and fragile regimes not only created the conditions for physical assault but also necessitated discursive stabilization. In this context, pogroms became both crises of governance and instruments of symbolic state formation. The Jewish struggle for recognition and justice—though largely ineffective politically—remains a critical archive of resistance to epistemic exclusion. Ultimately, the Lviv pogrom should be understood not only as an episode of ethnic violence, but as a paradigmatic instance of epistemic subjugation; a moment in which state legitimacy was secured not just through force, but through the regulation of knowledge: control over what could be known, remembered, or believed.
Jagoda Wierzejska is a literary and cultural historian specializing in central and eastern Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies, University of Warsaw, and the author of two monographs, including an award-winning study on interwar eastern Galicia. Her research explores national discourses, memory politics, and mechanisms of domination and violence. She has recently held fellowships at the Herder Institute and the University of Vienna.
Open access
