Legacy of Blood

Bemporad has written an engaging, albeit depressing, history of Jews, pogroms, and antisemitic charges of ritual murder. In spite of antisemitism at the social level, the central Soviet state prevailed against antisemitism at least until World War II. * David Shneer, AJS Review *
Legacy of Blood is an absorbing and meticulously researched and argued study of the continuities and discontinuities of antisemitic ideas and actions in the Soviet Russia and, later, the USSR. * H-Judaic *
Bemporad's book... reminds us that if we are ever to dismantle and be free of the racist worlds we have made, we need to understand where these ideas come from, how they get reinforced, and what gives them their power. * Eileen Kane, Public Books *
...as Elissa Bemporad teaches us in her concise and compelling book, blood libel and ritual murder had an afterlife in the Soviet Union and the "bloodlands" of the Holocaust. * David Biale, University of California, Davis, Jewish Review of Books *
What [Bemporad] has done is to discharge masterfully the most important task of the historian: analyzing the past to help us understand how we got where we are today. It is our task as their readers to imagine how to chart a better future. * David N. Myers, UCLA, LA Review of Books *
Legacy of Blood... is the product of great research acumen and an important scholarly achievement. * Mikhail Krutikov, Forverts *
Bemporad's book makes a significant contribution to the study of the Jewish question in the USSR... it also provides... a comprehensive study of the history of interethnic relations through the prism of political, social and cultural processes. * Ab Imperio *
The Soviet state consciously suppressed pogroms and the anti-Semitic myths underlying them, but as Bemporad (Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY) shows in this important, well-researched book, these beliefs simply fled underground... Summing Up: Highly recommended * CHOICE *
This book allows for a uniquely dynamic approach to antisemitism in Eastern Europe, as well as a suggestive entry point into the history of Soviet Jews. * Thomas Chopard, Revue Alarmer: Recherches et enseignements sur l'antisemitisme et les racismes [translated] *
It provides an unflinching examination of the political, governmental and social dynamics that led to the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the late 19thand early 20th centuries. * Shelley S. Hebert, The Times of Israel *
Perhaps the most essential new book on old conspiracies * Tablet *
Elissa Bemporad tackles the long-term trauma of early pogroms and their impact on Soviet society up to the 1950s. Examining ritual murder accusations and the official and popular responses to them... * Jan Burzlaff, Journal of Contemporary History *
The horrific pogroms in 1918-21 that were perpetrated by several armed forces in the multilateral wars in what became Poland and Soviet Ukraine have been overshadowed by the Holocaust that followed just two decades later. This book describes those pogroms in vivid detail, links them to the hoary myth of Jews using Christians' blood for religious rituals, and contends that the myth persisted into the Soviet period, even as late as the 1960s. Bemporad gives us valuable analytical insights into the nature of antisemitism in the USSR. This is a work of highly original and persuasive research on the persistence of blood libels and pogroms and on the sometimes surprising Jewish reactions to it. * Zvi Gitelman *
In Legacy of Blood, Elissa Bemporad, a leading voice in Soviet Jewish studies, recreates a lost chapter in the history of the Soviet Union's Jewish population. This pioneering study grounds the history of Soviet-Jewish relationsin the horrendous pogroms of the Russian civil war period, when some 150,000 innocent people were slaughtered. As a consequence of this violence, Jewish citizens looked to the Soviet state for protection-and the state mostly did protect Jews until the eve of World War II. Popular antisemitism, in the meantime, never entirely disappeared as medieval accusations and rumors of "blood libels" continued to erupt. This fine study is an essential first chapter in the understanding the Holocaust within the context of Russian and Soviet history. * Lynne Viola *
Elissa Bemporad combines a harrowing exploration of the legacy of Russian Civil War-era pogroms for both Soviet Jews and Soviet authorities with a startling reconstruction of the ways that ritual murder accusations persisted into the Soviet era. The result is a rich and disturbing reconsideration of the history of Soviet antisemitism. Legacy of Blood is a brilliant achievement. * Paul Hanebrink *
A deeply researched, original exploration of the resilience of the darkest anti-Jewish beliefs. Elissa Bemporad raises vexing questions about the underbelly of the Soviet Jewish experience even in its best years before the Second World War. * Steven J. Zipperstein *
It is a compelling book not only because of the insightful conclusions it draws about antisemitism in the Soviet Union, but also because the case studies Bemporad weaves together make for a gripping, engaging-and, often, gruesome in ways appropriate to the subject matter-reading. * Sasha Senderovich, Russian Review *