Taro
Tsurumi
July 12-13 (Sat-Sun)
The University of Tokyo, Komaba
21 KOMCEE East K211
(in person only; no online distribution)
Deadline for the workshop: 5pm, July 11; for the reception: June 29
The violent conflict in Palestine that evolved into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began in the 1920s. Palestine in the 1920s faced several types of movements and transitions simultaneously. These included Zionism, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, modernization, and Arab nationalism. The first violent conflict between Zionists and the indigenous Palestinian population took place in 1920. In the same year, the British Mandate for Palestine began (officially effective in 1923). Equally important, but often forgotten, many Zionist immigrants came from Eastern Europe, including Russia, which had experienced a series of pogroms and the decline of the Jewish economy. From the late nineteenth century until the end of World War II, there were many forced migrations, not exclusively for Jews, in the post-imperial spaces dominated by the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires. British officials discussed much about partition and population transfer in areas other than Palestine before discussing its partition. Although the Ottoman Empire was not structured in national terms, Zionism, British policies, and emerging Arab nationalism were transforming the post-Ottoman space. This workshop will explore the roots of the transnational complex that emerged in Palestine in the 1920s and discuss how such a complex could lead to the conflict that later intensified. In particular, the workshop will focus on the connection between European, especially Eastern European, history and the history of the Middle East, especially Palestine, and attempt to renew our perspective on what happened in Palestine/Israel.
12th (Sat) The Backgrounds
13:30-14:30 Introduction
14:40-15:30 Polly Zavadivker – Forced Migration and Practical Nationalism among Russia’s Jews in World War I
15:40-16:30 Atsuto Anzai – Ethnic Reorganization of Jewish Agricultural Management in Interwar Eastern Galicia: the JCA's and Zionist Financial Supports to Galician Jewish Farmers
16:40-17:30 Yu Amano – Between Iraq and Palestine: The Role and Representation of Palestine in the Writings of Jewish Intellectuals in 1920s Iraq
18:00-20:00 Reception (registration required for non-panelists by June 29)
13th (Sun) In-Between / Roundtable
9:30-10:20 Taro Tsurumi – Helplessness among Barbarians: Zionist Perceptions of Pogroms in Eastern Europe and Violent Conflicts in Mandate Palestine
10:30-11:20 Gur Alroey – Sexual Violence and the Rape of Jewish Women during the Ukrainian Civil War and the Bloody Events of the 1920s in Mandatory Palestine: A Comparative Perspective
11:30-12:20 Dmitry Shumsky – Vladimir Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” and the Question of Independence for Palestinian Arabs: A Reexamination
Lunch break
13:40-14:30 Abigail Jacobson – Living Together, Living Apart: Oriental Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine
14:40-15:30 Comments: Akiyo Yamamoto (East Central European history and forced migration) / Tomohito Baji (History of international thought, the British Empire)
15:45-17:30 Roundtable
Profile (A-Z - Affiliation, specialty, related books and articles)
Gur Alroey President of the University of Haifa, professor at the Faculty of Humanities. Jewish migration and Zionism. Author of An Unpromising Land: Jewish Migration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century (Stanford University Press, 2014), Zionism without Zion: The Jewish Territorialial Organization (JTO) and Its Conflict with the Zionist Organization (Wayne State University Press, 2016), Land of Refuge: Immigration to Palestine, 1919-1927 (Indiana University Press, 2024).
Yu Amano Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences (JSPS), affiliated with the University of Tokyo. History of Jewish intellectuals in Iraq and Zionism among Iraqi Jews. Ph.D. (Doshisha University). Author of "'Zionists' in the Iraq of the 1920s: WIth Emphasis on Their Relationship to the Land of Israel," Yudaya Israel Kenkyu 35, 2021, "Early 20th century Iraqi Jewish intellectuals and their literary activities," Isshinkyo Sekai 10, 2019.
Atsuto Anzai Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Jewish history of East-Central Europe, with a particular focus on Galicia in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now writing a dissertation on Jewish agricultural business in Eastern Galicia during the interwar period. Author of A Concise History of Galicia (Publib, 2024, in Japanese).
Tomohito Baji Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. History of political thougt, intersection of intellectual history and international relations. Author of The International Thought of Alfred Zimmern: Classicism, Zionism and the Shadow of Commonwealth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), "Colonial Policy Studies in Japan: Racial Visions of Nan'yo, or the Early Creation of a Global South," International Affairs 98(1), 2022.
Abigail Jacobson The Eliahu Eilath Chair in the History of the Muslim Peoples at the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the academic head of the MA honors student program at the Mandel School for Advanced Studies at the Humanities. Social and urban history of late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean. The history of Oriental and Mizrahi Jews in Israel. Author of From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse University Press, 2011), Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine (co-authored with Moshe Naor, Brandeis/New England University Press, 2016), Bnei Ha’aretz Vehamizrach: Yehudim Ve’Aravim Bitkufat Hamandat Habriti (Magness Press, 2021, in Hebrew).
Dmitry Shumsky Israel Goldstein Chair in the History of Zionism and the New Yishuv at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, and Director of the Bernard Cherrick Center for the study of Zionism, the Yishuv, and the State of Israel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Intellectual and political history of Zionism and modern Jewish nationalism, esp. of Central and Eastern Europe. Author of Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion (Yale University Press, 2018), Between Prague and Jerusalem: Prague Zionists and the Origins of the Idea of Binational State in Palestine (Shazar Center & Leo Baeck, 2010, in Hebrew)
Taro Tsurumi (Organizer), Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Historical sociology, Russian Jewish History, Zionism. Author of: "How Hybrid? Inter-Ethnic Relationships within the Self of Jewish Liberals in Tsarist Russia," Nations and Nationalism 28(3), 2022: 877-893; "Jewish Liberal, Russian Conservative: Daniel Pasmanik between Zionism and the Anti-Bolshevik White Movement," Jewish Social Studies 21(1), 2015. Co-edited with Benjamin Nathans and Kenneth Moss: From Europe's East to the Middle East: Israel's Russian and Polish Lineages, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Akiyo Yamamoto, Professor at Nagoya City University, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Social history of East-Central Europe and America, Migration history, Forced migration history, Author of Mechanisms of forced displacements in East-Central Europe during World War II (Tousui Shobou, 2024, in Japanese), “The Social movement of refugee students after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution,” edited by Hikaru Tanaka, The Global diffusion of social movement (Ronsousha, 2023, in Japanese), “American Racism from the perspective of European Immigrants,” Rekishi Hyoron (Historical Review) 869, 2022.
Polly Zavadivker Associate Professor of History, Jewish Studies Director, Jewish Studies Program, at the University of Delaware. Russian and Soviet Jewish history. Author of A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I (Oxford University Press, 2024), S. An-sky, 1915 Diary ( Indiana University Press, 2016, as a translator and editor), “Fighting ‘On Our Own Territory’: The Rescue and Representation of Jews in Russia during World War I,” in Russia’s Great War and Revolution: The Centennial Reappraisal, vol. 1, eds. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, Peter Waldron (Slavica Publishers, 2016)
Day 1 (July 12)
Forced Migration and Practical Nationalism among Russia’s Jews in World War I
Polly Zavadivker, University of Delaware
The transformation of the Jewish national movement in the Russian Empire during World War I is an understudied topic in modern Jewish history. This paper seeks to explain the contradictory forces of victimization and agency that shaped Jewish experience Eastern Europe from 1914-1918. Jews fell victim to the Russian Army’s use of nationalizing state violence against suspect ethnic groups, including policies of forced migration, hostage-taking, and unsanctioned military violence. These experiences profoundly disrupted Jews’ residence patterns, economic profiles, education, gender roles, and occupational structure. Yet while the military identified Jews as an ethnic-national group to be removed as a security threat, Russian civilian authorities structured government relief for war victims to be distributed along ethnic-national lines, prompting the growth of Polish, Muslim, Armenian, Jewish, and other national aid organizations. Drawing on public organizations of pre-war Jewish civil society, Russia’s Jews built a semi-autonomous and empire-wide aid campaign that fused practical nationalism to the service of Jewish war victims. The local and transnational Jewish aid organizations that emerged from the wartime nexus of ethnic violence and ethnic nationalism in imperial Russia endured and outlasted the years of war and revolution, with direct and indirect links to the growth of the Yishuv.
Ethnic reorganization of Jewish agricultural management in interwar Eastern Galicia: the JCA’s and Zionist financial supports to Galician Jewish farmers
Atsuto Anzai, Ph.D candidate, the University of Tokyo
This paper examines Jewish agricultural management in interwar Eastern Galicia (Lviv, Stanislaviv, Ternopil voivodeship) from the perspective of international Jewish financial support. Eastern Galicia was an exceptional case of Jewish agriculture in East-Central Europe from the late 19th to the middle of the 20th century. Galicia had a dense Jewish population in its local areas, which had no longer legal restrictions against them after 1867 under Austrian rule, and Galician Jews were able to own lands and engage in agriculture. Their activities continued in the interwar period under the rule of the Second Polish Republic. However, Galician Jewish farmers faced difficulties in obtaining loans from Jewish merchants due to the Great Depression of 1929, and Polish and Ukrainian cooperative banks did not provide support because they competed with the Jewish farmers. Only international Jewish organizations such as the JCA and Zionist organizations were able to support them through the Jewish agricultural cooperatives established in 1932. This paper analyzes how the Jewish agricultural cooperatives tried to sustain Jewish agricultural managements by receiving financial support from their co-ethnic groups abroad and by having contacts with Jewish consumer markets.
Between Iraq and Palestine: The Role and Representation of Palestine in the Writings of Jewish Intellectuals in 1920s Iraq
Yu Amano, JSPS Research Fellow / the University of Tokyo
Known as one of the most deeply rooted diaspora communities, Iraq’s Jewish community maintained a continuous presence within the predominantly Muslim society for centuries. At the dawn of the 20th century, with the fall of the Ottoman empire and the rise of British Imperial influence, the Jewish community began to undergo a new phase of change, marked by increasing political, economic, and social engagement. This shift, along with the emergence of a secular public sphere in Iraqi society, encouraged young Jews to express themselves in Arabic-language periodicals. The rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism also played a key role in shaping their evolving national consciousness. Given the historical background outlined above, this paper focuses on the complex and often nuanced attitudes of Jewish intellectuals in 1920s Iraq towards the evolving landscape of Palestine. In particular, it analyzes articles published in an Arabic-language newspaper owned by a Jewish editor, showing how Zionism and Palestine were represented through the prism of their multi-layered identities. By analyzing a range of writings—from news coverage to personal accounts of visits to Palestine—this paper offers insight into how they negotiated their positions amid broader regional transformations.
Day 2 (July 13)
Helplessness among Barbarians: Zionist Perceptions of Pogroms in Eastern Europe and Violent Conflicts in Mandate Palestine
Taro Tsurumi, the University of Tokyo
In the period between World War I and the establishment of the Soviet Union (1922), Jews in the (former) Russian Empire suffered a series of pogroms on an unprecedented scale. In the period that followed, Zionist immigrants were confronted with violence between Jews and the native Palestinian population ("Arabs," as the Zionists called them) in 1920, 1921, and 1929, before the even larger confrontation began in 1936. The background of the events in each country was different. Unlike in Eastern Europe, most Jews in Palestine were first- and second-generation immigrants. Moreover, unlike other immigrants, they, or at least their leaders, were politically motivated, and the native population was naturally fearful of Zionist infiltration or invasion of their land. However, Zionist newspapers described these events in Palestine as "pogroms," sometimes with direct reference to pogroms in Eastern Europe. This paper will focus in particular on their emphasis on the barbaric nature of the "pogromists" as Easterners, as well as on the lack of interference from the government (Russian or British), which left the Jews helpless during and after the events. Objective reality aside, this would suggest a source of Zionist distrust of both the native population and the British government.
Sexual Violence and the Rape of Jewish Women during the Ukrainian Civil War and the Bloody Events of the 1920s in Mandatory Palestine: A Comparative Perspective.
Gur Alroey, the University of Haifa
At the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish women found themselves exposed to particular dangers—caught between the violence of warring national, ethnic, and religious groups. In this lecture, I will trace how sexual violence and rape became tragically common features of the pogroms in Ukraine and the anti-Jewish riots in Mandatory Palestine during the 1920s. I will examine how these acts were not only assaults on individuals but also carried broader symbolic meanings within Christian and Muslim societies. By comparing the responses of Jewish society in Eastern Europe and Palestine, I will explore how victims and their societies grappled with trauma, stigma, and the search for justice. Finally, I will highlight the similarities—and crucial differences—in the ways Christian Ukrainians and Palestinian Arabs perceived and reacted to sexual violence against Jewish women, offering a comparative lens on gendered violence in times of upheaval.
Vladimir Jabotinsky’s “On the Iron Wall” and the Question of Independence for Palestinian Arabs: A Re-examination
Dmitry Shumsky, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
As a proponent of the territorial integrity of the Land of Israel on both sides of the Jordan, within the original boundaries of Mandatory Palestine, Vladimir Jabotinsky is commonly believed to have rejected any possibility of national independence for the Arabs of Palestine. In truth, however, Jabotinsky was the first Zionist leader to openly present the option of national political independence for the Palestinian Arabs. He raised this idea in his very first ideological text—the well-known article “On the Iron Wall (We and the Arabs)” (1923). In my presentation, I will re-examine this text and indicate the place and context in which the concept of “national independence” appears there with regard to the future of Palestinian Arabs. I will also seek to explain how and why Jabotinsky’s reference, in this text, to the possibility of Palestinian Arab independence has thus far escaped the attention of scholars. I will then demonstrate how Jabotinsky’s premise regarding the feasibility of future independence for Palestinian Arabs accords with his fundamental belief in the idea of the territorial integrity of the land within the framework of a Jewish state.
Living Together, Living Apart: Oriental Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine
Abigail Jacobson, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
In this paper I will examine the relations between Jews and Arabs in the early years of the British Mandate over Palestine through the perspective of Sephardi and Oriental Jews. My main argument is that their unique position sheds new light not only on the complexities and nuances of the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine, but also on the Zionist perspective towards it. I will argue that the Sephardi and Oriental Jewish communities are central in providing a more comprehensive and complex picture of the history of relations between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, and the way the Zionist movement perceived what was often called “the Arab Question”. The narrative and perspective offered by Sephardi and Oriental Jews reveal, on the one hand, patterns of close connections, coexistence and cooperation between Jews and Arabs, and at the same time also sheds light on the many points of tension and friction between the two people. In fact, in many instances it was these close connections, based on geographical, linguistic and cultural proximity and similarities, which contributed to the enhancement of the tensions.
Papers (Participant only, will be available two weeks before the WS)
Enter from here (passcode required)
To the University of Tokyo, Komaba I
Get off at Komaba Todaimae Station (IN03) on the Keio Inokashira Line (IN), which is two stops away from Shibuya Station. Only local trains (各駅停車) stop at this station (don't take express).
Exit at the Todai Exit, and you will find the university's main gate.
Access map of UTokyo campuses (PDF)
In the Komaba I Campus (K211 at 21 KOMCEE East)
When you enter the main gate and see the clock tower ahead of you, go to the right of the clock tower building, and turn left beside it until yhou reach the tree-lined street. Turn right and you will soon see the building with the large roof on your left, as shown in the picture below. (If you keep walking, you will see university shops and cafeterias.) Walk up to the second floor, and the first room is K211.
