The Life and Death of Jews in Volhynia
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Volhynia was for many centuries one of the centres of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Under the rule of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish Commonwealth, the Russian Empire and the Polish state of the interwar period, a with and against one another developed in the multi-confessional and polyethnic region of Catholic Polish landholders, Orthodox Ukrainian peasants and Jewish merchants. Religion, social stratification, language, and ethnic self-identification were interwoven in a complex way. Stereotypes about the relationship to Soviet rule (Jewish Bolshevism) and the role of Ukrainians and Poles in the annihilation of the region’s Jews between 1941 and 1943 misrepresent reality.
(Osteuropa 4/2007, pp. 123–142)