• 1 P. Levi, 1996, p. 10. The author wishes to thank Boris Adjemian, Anna Hajkova, Lisa Moses Leff, Tho (...)
• 2 On the persistent skepticism toward atrocity narratives from the Great War and its influence on the (...)

1“It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented.”1 With this remark, Primo Levi concluded the “Author’s Preface” to If This is a Man, Levi’s memoir written shortly after the war about his time in Auschwitz. Upon first reading, it seems a straightforward enough statement, even a rhetorical flourish. But upon reflection, the meaning of and intentions behind Levi’s remark become increasingly opaque. Why did Levi feel the need to make such a point? Contrary to his assertion, mustn’t he have felt that it was indeed necessary to insist on the truthfulness of his account at the conclusion of his Preface? To what real or imagined skepticism was Levi responding?2 Levi’s concern – or his desire to appear unconcerned – about the reader’s reception of his narrative about Auschwitz is a clue.

• 3 P. Levi, 1996, p. 9.
• 4 In Holocaust studies, “testimony” has become a catch-all for a wide range of written texts, as well (...)

2What is darkly visible through the crack/opening of Levi’s preface are the concepts and documentation practices pertaining to mass violence that circulated widely in the era of the two World Wars. Tellingly, Levi referred to If This is a Man as an “account of atrocities,” signaling the connection that Levi implied existed between what he had written and a body of literature that predated and may even have informed his act of writing.3 Indeed, while Levi’s memoir has come to be considered the ne plus ultra of what we now refer to as “Holocaust testimony,”4 Levi’s and other Jews’ accounts of their experiences under the Nazis could also be read in relation to earlier atrocity literature. Scholars have tended to treat Holocaust testimony and the atrocity literature of the First World War and interwar years as distinct from one another and have traced their genealogies separately. By contrast, this article brings them into the same frame, despite the incongruous mixture of genres that they represent, to explore what assumptions and practices appear to have guided and undergirded the production of accounts about atrocities in the era preceding the Holocaust. Furthermore, it raises the question of their legacy, of their possible influence on testimonies composed subsequently, including Holocaust testimonies. Through such an exploration, we may arrive at a new understanding of and appreciation for why Levi felt the need to insist (without insisting) on the truthfulness of his account of Auschwitz.

• 5 The work of Samuel Kassow, 2007, Joshua Karlip, 2013, and Cecile Kuznitz, 2014, lend additional sup (...)
• 6 This is the concluding sentence of Jockusch’s aptly-titled article, “Chroniclers of Catastrophe: Hi (...)
• 7 “Catastrophe research” is a translation of khurbn forshung, the Yiddish term that was coined in the (...)
• 8 For opposing arguments on the role of public opinion and the press in states’ decisions to effect h (...)

3The present article takes as its point of focus one particular genre of publications about mass violence: the document volume. Analyzing the composition of this genre rather than focusing on the documentary responses in general to a single genocide or instance of mass violence permits commonalities that cut across testimonial projects from the years of the Great War and the 1920s to come into view, with two primary historiographical implications. First and foremost, it enkindles further discussion about whether and in what respects Jewish testimonial responses to the Holocaust were a historically distinct phenomenon that grew out of specifically Jewish cultural practices that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such is the argument set forth by Laura Jockusch in her outstanding work on the wartime and postwar historical commissions established across Europe by European Jews of east European origin.5 In one of the most forceful articulations of this argument, she concludes: “Evidently therefore, the concept of documentation as a response to catastrophe was not just a Jewish phenomenon but a specifically eastern European Jewish cultural tradition which, even though it had developed before the Holocaust, came to full momentum in the work of the early postwar Jewish documentation initiatives in Europe.”6 Yet the fact that Armenian intellectuals and elites, as well as west Europeans sympathetic to Armenians’ plight under the Young Turk regime, also engaged in “catastrophe research” suggests that the “concept of documentation as a response to catastrophe” did not necessarily reflect concepts and practices that were Jewish in origin.7 Jewish testimonial responses to catastrophe prior to and during the Holocaust may have come from a much broader tradition. Armenian and Jewish victims and their advocates having recourse to the compilation and publication of document volumes, in particular, displayed a range of similar meanings. They connected an individual’s experience of mass violence to the fate of the group, perceiving both as having significance for contemporary society as a whole; they looked to the educated public as a force for moral action with the power to effect political change; and they affirmed the possibility that the law and political institutions would promote justice despite the fact that political powers and the legal frameworks they had created and upheld had also revealed themselves to be self-interested and amoral.8 Far from standing outside of such practices and concepts and molding their own tradition, Jews in Europe sought to document their suffering in forms that would gain broad sympathy and result in the acknowledgement that Jews’ suffering had significance not just for Jews but for humanity as a whole.

• 9 J. M. Read, 1941; D. Welch, 2003, p. 24.

4Placing the genre of document volumes at the center of inquiry also has the potential to reorient the historiographical conversation about atrocity literature. “Atrocity literature” is generally regarded as inseparable from “atrocity propaganda,” a term that emerged after the First World War to refer to wartime journalists’ accounts, as well as pamphlets, reports, document volumes, and related literature, detailing the large-scale abuse and killing of non-combatants.9 Historians generally consider such publications as part and parcel of the wartime propaganda produced at the behest of government authorities, or by journalists or individuals affiliated with organizations with strong ties to the state. Indeed, in the context of the First World War, the revelation of atrocities committed on a large scale by Germany and its allies, in particular – revelations that were accompanied by expressions of humanitarian sympathy and moral outrage – lent explicit support to the Entente Powers’ war effort and to related political causes. As a result of their transparent utility, such accounts of atrocities were cast in doubt at the time of their publication.

• 10 A. Sarafian, 2000, p. vii.
• 11 J. Silvester and J.-B. Gewald, 2003; J. Horne and A. Kramer, 2001. See also Committee on Alleged Ge (...)
• 12 Notable exceptions include N. Gullace, 1997; M. Tusan, 2014.

5Ironically, the question that has continued to preoccupy historians is the same question that preoccupied the original authors, editors, and readers of atrocity literature: that of its trustworthiness as evidence. The preponderance of historical studies examining such literature have sought to determine, once and for all, if such literature ought to be dismissed as mere propaganda or if the atrocity stories they purported to document really happened. Because of the nature of the events being depicted, the importance of “setting the record straight” has extended well beyond historians’ standard commitment to determining what happened in the past. Nowhere is this more acutely in evidence than in the case of the Armenian genocide. Turkey’s refusal to admit of the extermination of Armenians – its denial that Armenians suffered a genocide and the Turkish state’s purposeful and nefarious actions extending over decades to repress to the greatest extent possible the outside world’s recognition of the Armenian genocide as such – has created a moral and political imperative for historians of the Armenian genocide to establish the truth of what was done to Armenians and what losses they incurred at the behest of the Turkish state. Ara Sarafian has shown how supporters of the Turkish state engaged in writing “denialist historiography” have sought to discredit the document volume about the extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire produced by Arnold Toynbee and Viscount James Bryce (1916) by making it out to be a mere product of the British wartime propaganda service that targeted the Ottoman Empire as well as Germany. Those attempting to discredit the volume, according to Sarafian, have claimed “that the work was based on forged documents and had no scholarly merit.” But of greater pertinence for the present discussion of the status of victim testimony in document volumes is the allegation that the reports were ‘biased, written with Armenian fanaticism,’ or even more spuriously that the Armenian provenance of sources meant they were not valid, and then they tried to extend this argument to non-Armenian, third-party sources and even to Toynbee himself, calling into question Toynbee’s tone, as if he put himself in the place of victims and in so doing undermined his objectivity. Sarafian’s research has disproved such allegations. Nevertheless and of crucial importance is the fact that the suspicion cast on victim testimony did not originate with such “denialist historiography” and was a factor at the time of the publication of Bryce and Toynbee’s volume to such an extent that it surfaces repeatedly in each of the several prefaces to the volume.10 At the same time, the historiographical focus on sifting through atrocity literature to separate the true from the false is not restricted to Armenian genocide historians. Two other examples in which historians’ main concern has been to investigate whether World War One-era documentation projects had integrity are the British government report about German atrocities in German South West Africa (1918) and the British government report on German atrocities in Belgium produced by a commission also headed by James Bryce (1915).11 With only a couple of notable exceptions, then, it is the question of veracity that has attracted scholarly attention.12

• 13 P. Novick, 1988.
• 14 A. Assmann, 2006, p. 263.

6Thanks to the careful research undertaken by scholars proving that these volumes cannot be dismissed as the mere manufacture of war propagandists, we can now turn our attention to other issues. Peter Novick long ago made historians aware that “objectivity” has a history in the historical profession.13 In that spirit, this article analyzes documentation practices and the truth claims in atrocity literature. In particular, I focus on how those who played a role in producing document volumes about atrocities committed during the First World War and in its aftermath framed victim testimonies. Drawing from cultural historical approaches to texts that consider how an event was experienced and remembered as part and parcel of the history of what happened, I regard these volumes as events unto themselves, not merely as texts that describe events occurring “outside.”14 This article seeks to contribute to the history of mass violence in the twentieth century, exploring by what means knowledge about mass violence was established.

• 15 On atrocity literature, humanitarianism and British geopolitical interests, in particular, in addit (...)

8Here under consideration are two such volumes: James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee’s The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-1916 and the Comité des Délégations Juives’ Les Pogromes en Ukraine sous les gouvernements ukrainiens (1917-1920). Both volumes appeared in English and French versions. Both publications presented arguments linking a universal commitment to humanitarianism to specific geopolitical causes.15 In addition to their geopolitical implications, these collections of redacted documents also represented the efforts of individuals whose lives had been upended by an experience of mass violence to try to find an appropriate means of responding to their own or others’ victimization. Yet in the very document volumes that sought to raise public awareness about incidences of mass violence through the redaction and publication of eyewitness accounts, victim testimony was singled out as a particular category of eyewitness testimony whose status remained most uncertain. The discussion that follows is divided into two main sections that take up, in turn, the status of victim testimony in the Bryce and Toynbee volume and in the Comité des Délégations Juives volume. What emerges in both volumes is a central paradox. On the one hand, incorporating victim testimony in the composition of these two document volumes proved essential in order to inform, convince, and awaken sympathy among readers. On the other hand, the editors assumed that they would be unable to overcome their readers’ doubt and mistrust, their refusal even, to accept this type of source as valid and believable documentation. Ultimately, an analysis of this genre and the status of victim testimony brings to light the connections that existed in the conceptions and production of documentation about mass violence among Armenians, Britons, Jews, and others. – and their specific legacy for those documenting Jewish experiences during the Holocaust.

• 16 M. Tusan, 2014, p. 53 n. 29, 54-56; I. St. John, 2010, p. 171-173.
• 17 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “Arnold Toynbee,” accessed 26 February 2015, http://academic. (...)
• 18 M. Tusan, 2014, p. 57.
• 19 This statement is based on my own study of the clippings files of articles about all topics relatin (...)

9Bryce and Toynbee’s The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was originally commissioned by the British government. A well-respected Liberal politician and member of the House of Lords, as well as former British ambassador to the United States, Oxford professor and author of numerous scholarly works on history, government and jurisprudence, James Bryce (1838-1922) carried William Gladstone’s torch: Bryce’s advocacy of Armenian rights and his deep sympathy for the plight of Ottoman Armenians made him the preeminent Anglophone champion of Christian minority rights in the early twentieth century, a cause once associated with Gladstone thanks to his pamphlet, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (1876), which had sold hundreds of thousands of copies.16 In the compilation and authorship of this document volume, Bryce played producer to Toynbee’s director. At the time, Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) was a freshly minted Oxford historian of ancient history who had taken a position after the start of the war in the British Foreign Office.17 Together, they drew from the deep well of Bryce’s contacts in diplomatic circles, social welfare organizations, missionary networks, and, significantly, the Armenian diaspora community to procure eyewitness testimonies about the ensuing extermination of Armenians. The volume they produced was colossal. The English-language edition contains 150 documents, organized into twenty sections, accompanied by two prefaces and several letters addressed to Bryce relating to the volume’s production. Wrapping up the volume is Toynbee’s fifty-five-page account of Armenian history, which contains a synthesis of the events of 1915-1916, and a set of appendices. The twenty sections of documents are divided along geographical and roughly chronological lines. The order of the sections attempts by and large to follow the chronology of affected regions, with the very first group of documents offering depictions of events of a more general nature. First printed as a Parliamentary Blue Book in October 1916, it was subsequently published that same year by private publishers in London, Toronto, and New York, as well as in Paris in an abridged French translation. Michelle Tusan has argued that Bryce and Toynbee’s volume “set the tone and established the terms by which the international community understood the Armenian Genocide” and even played a major role in the understanding and legal definition of the crime of genocide developed by Raphael Lemkin in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe and in the Genocide Convention of 1948.18 It is certainly no exaggeration to say that the report had a far-reaching influence. It was cited, quoted, and excerpted far and wide, in major dailies and small regional newspapers across North America, Great Britain, France, and Switzerland.19

• 20 Letters from B. Nubar to J. Bryce are archived at The Bodleian Library, Oxford, Special Collections (...)
• 21 Letter from B. Nubar to J. Bryce, 11 July 1916, 2 ff., in MS. Bryce 203, A.5.1 Correspondence, 1876 (...)
• 22 In the French translation, Nubar did not faithfully reproduce the English volume. He moved Toynbee’ (...)

10The lack of attribution or acknowledgement in the volume of one of Bryce and Toynbee’s Armenian colleagues brings us straightaway to the question of the status of victim testimony and the prevailing concepts of objectivity. For it was the case that working behind the scenes and central to the volume’s compilation was the well-respected Armenian elder statesman, Boghos Nubar (1851-1930), who founded and presided over the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) and served as the chief representative of the Armenian National Delegation. Based in Paris during the years of the First World War, Nubar was one of Bryce’s most regular correspondents, keeping him apprised of any news he received about Armenians’ fate in the Ottoman Empire.20 He also corresponded with Toynbee about the volume and even received a set of page proofs from Toynbee for any “modifications or corrections” he might want to make.21 Nubar then went on to edit and translate the volume into French.22 Yet Nubar received no formal attribution for his work. The copy of the French edition of the volume, Le Traitement des Arméniens dans l’Empire Ottoman, 1915-1916, in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nubar in Paris has a handwritten note on the title page, “Traduit en français par Boghos Nubar Pacha”, indicating the pride that Nubar must have taken in his work and reinforcing the impression that Bryce, Toynbee, and Nubar intentionally kept Nubar’s contributions out of the public eye. Though Bryce and Toynbee’s volume was produced at the behest of the British government, therefore, Nubar’s close involvement renders more complex the issue of Armenian initiative, and thus the role of the victim group, in the volume’s compilation.

• 23 It is interesting to note that over time Toynbee downplayed the extent to which he had collaborated (...)
• 24 See A. Toynbee, “Memorandum,” 1916, p. xxxv-xli.

11With the exception of Nubar, Toynbee’s “Memorandum” at the front of the volume was entirely open about his contacts among Armenians and non-Armenians, his selection of sources and their provenance.23 Most of all, he discussed the issue of censorship at length, for he and Bryce felt it necessary to suppress the place names and names of individuals when they feared that publishing that information might place those individuals or their relatives in harm’s way. It appears that they were quite concerned, however, that the unattributed sources might jeopardize the integrity of the volume, degrading it in their readers’ eyes to the level of mere government propaganda that had been produced with blatantly instrumental political purposes in mind. To lay such suspicions to rest, Toynbee prepared a Key to the Names of Persons and Places Withheld from Publication in the Original Edition of “The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916,” which, he explained to readers, could only be distributed confidentially at the present time. He assured readers that this key would be made public when it became safe to do so.24

• 26 H. Greenspan et al., 2014, p. 191.

13In elevating the evidence issuing from witnesses “who belong to neutral or belligerent countries,” i.e., witnesses of primarily American, German, and Swiss national origin, Bryce implied that the Armenian victims were not the primary “moral witnesses” or “bearers of testimony”.26 The fact that they had experienced violence directly did not qualify them to be the privileged communicators of their experiences. On the contrary, their personal experiences rendered their testimony suspect because it made them more likely to fabricate stories in order to advance their political, emotional, or financial interests.

• 27 “Letter from Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, Vice Chancellor of Sheffield University, to Viscount Bryce,” in J (...)
• 28 “Letter from Professor Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, to Vi (...)

14Bryce’s appraisal of the differing value of testimony, depending on the identity of the witnesses, found echoes elsewhere in the volume. H. A. L. Fisher, a historian whom Bryce and Toynbee enlisted to be an expert reader prior to the volume’s publication, wrote one of the letters reprinted in the preface to the document collection. In the process of validating the quality of the volume as a whole, Fisher gave voice to the general mistrust of victim testimony without lending his own endorsement to that view: “It is true that some of the witnesses are Armenians, whose testimony, if otherwise unconfirmed, might be regarded as liable to be over-colored or distorted, but the Armenian evidence does not stand alone. It is corroborated by reports received from Americans, Danes, Swiss, Germans, Italians and other foreigners.”27 Another of the expert readers for the volume whose letter was also included in the prefatory documents likewise distanced himself from Armenian victims’ testimony while lending his support to the volume as a whole. Mixing racism with empathy, Gilbert Murray, professor of Greek at Oxford, acknowledged: “I realize that in times of persecution passions run high, that oriental races tend to use hyperbolical language, and that the victims of oppression cannot be expected to speak with strict fairness of their oppressors.” Nevertheless, Murray insisted, “But the evidence of these letters and reports will bear any scrutiny and overpower any skepticism.” Murray arrived independently at the same judgment as Fisher, that the victim testimony was in fact “genuine,” not simply because it was corroborated, but because it was corroborated by non-Armenians: “The statements of the Armenian refugees themselves are fully confirmed by residents of American, Scandinavian and even of German nationality; and the undesigned agreement between so many credible witnesses from widely separate districts puts all the main lines of the story beyond the possibility of doubt.”28

• 29 “Doc. 134. Ourfa: Extract from a Letter by Mr. Tovmas K. Muggerdichian; published in the Armenian J (...)
• 30 The torture of being helpless in the face of others’ suffering was captured in an extraordinary sho (...)
• 31 For but two examples among many, see: Doc. 15, “The American Mission at Van: Narrative Printed Priv (...)

15Bryce, Fisher, and Murray differentiated between Armenian accounts and the accounts of “foreigners,” or Europeans and Americans who came from outside the Ottoman Empire. While prejudice was a factor, the lack of confidence conferred upon Armenian accounts appeared to derive in the main from Armenians’ identity qua victims and not just as Armenians. Indeed, it is possible to find such views expressed also among Armenians living in the diaspora. A letter written by Mr. Tovmas K. Muggerdichian, the former British vice-consul in Diyarbekir, that was published in the New York Armenian newspaper, Gotchnag, made a reference to “trustworthy sources”, by which Muggerdichian meant “the missionaries, European prisoners and American consuls.”29 Such declarations in sum expose broader attitudes in British, French, and American society about Armenians, in particular, and about victims of mass violence, in general. Victims were regarded as unreliable witnesses because they lacked both the equivalent “character and standing” of foreigners and the emotional equilibrium that was the alleged attainment of those eyewitnesses who were not the targets of persecution and extermination. Yet the confidence conferred by Europeans, Americans, and Armenians in the reliability of non-Armenian voices betrays a perplexing inattentiveness to the entanglements of “foreign” witnesses. Over and over again in their accounts of Armenian atrocities, missionaries, doctors, nurses, teachers, even consuls, describe the dangers they faced and the vulnerability they felt in their dealings with Turkish officials. Their compounds, in which they were prisoners for all intents and purposes, were bombarded by Turkish troops; they were exposed to deadly epidemics of typhus and dysentery; they lost all their belongings in flight. While it is true that the majority of them escaped Ottoman territory and reached safety, some among them also suffered the loss of members of their parties, including close friends, spouses, and siblings. And perhaps most agonizing of all, they witnessed the deportations and deaths of Armenians who were their students, patients, colleagues, and friends – Armenian men, women, and children to whom they had become close and whose fate they were helpless to alter.30 In their eyewitness accounts, they detail their feelings of terror, sorrow, helplessness, and anger, including avowals of their disgust for Turks and for Muslims in general.31 Yet, no acknowledgement exists in Toynbee and Bryce’s editorial framing of this document collection of the suffering and emotional investments of so-called “neutral” eyewitnesses. It is as if their individual experiences had no bearing and only their political/national/ethnic/religious group belonging informed the writing and the reading of their testimonies.

• 32 A. Toynbee, “Memorandum,” 1916, p. xxxvii.

16Privileging the collective identity of eyewitnesses over individual experience also bore imagined international legal implications. Toynbee’s “Memorandum” to The Treatment of Armenians offered readers a classification schema of witnesses that reflected the evidentiary standards that he believed would be acceptable in an eventual international legal proceeding, in which wartime diplomatic relations among the belligerent and neutral nations would necessarily be taken into consideration. Toynbee proposed that the documents with the most “probative value” were those that had been published in Germany and suppressed by the German government, whereas the documents authored by Armenians and Nestorians had the least “probative value.” On an emotional level as well, Toynbee could conceive that “personal suffering” shaped victims’ perceptions rendering them potentially more susceptible to writing biased accounts: “the witnesses have suffered personally from the horrors they describe, and are open to stronger influences of prejudice and emotion than foreign observers. Errors of detail are more likely to occur here, especially as regards estimates of numbers.” But in the end, Toynbee, like the others, refuted those who would cast aspersions on “native witnesses”. He asserted that, after poring through the documents, he was “convinced of the substantial accuracy of all the evidence, of whatever class, that is presented in this volume.”32

• 33 See the article in this special issue by B. Adjemian and R. Kévorkian discussing three contexts in (...)
• 34 L. Miliakova et al., “Introduction,” 2010, p. 20-22.

17As such statements indicate, the mistrust of victim testimony was neither universal nor absolute. Indeed, victims of mass violence in several different settings in this period, including Armenian, Ukrainian Jewish, and Herero and Nama in British-occupied German South West Africa, were being encouraged by their own communal leaders as well as by representatives of social welfare organizations and western powers to record their experiences, suggesting paradoxically that alongside mistrust existed a consensus of sorts about the importance of victim testimony.33 What is more, not only were victims encouraged to give testimony, but the fact is that they did come forward in large numbers to share their stories, despite the degree of risk entailed in so doing. The pogroms targeting Jews in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War constituted another significant episode of mass violence in which the collection of witness statements and other forms of documentation constituted a central dimension of the responses of the victims and their advocates. Between 1918 and 1922, Jews in Ukraine were targeted en masse, becoming the victims of massacres, mass rapes, and other acts of torture, as well as suffering the destruction and plunder of their property on a large scale. In the midst of the pogrom waves, prominent members of the Jewish intelligentsia in Ukraine joined forces with representatives of Jewish political parties and civil society to form a committee to coordinate relief efforts for pogrom victims. From its inception, the relief work carried out by the Central Committee of Kiev depended upon the collection of materials about the pogroms, including conducting and recording interviews with victims and other eyewitnesses. The importance they attributed to their documentation work soon inspired the creation of an “Editorial Board for Gathering and Researching Materials regarding the Pogroms in the Ukraine,” comprised of preeminent journalists, writers, and researchers from Kiev whose task it was to interview survivors of the pogroms as well as to collect and compile all manner of evidence about the pogroms stemming from Jewish, Ukrainian, and Russian sources. They also planned to publish selections of those documents and works of historical scholarship.34

• 35 The two editions were Comité des Délégations Juives, 1927a and 1927b.
• 36 D. Engel, 2006, p. 83-84.
• 37 The Comité des Délégations Juives was established in 1919 to represent the interests of the Jewish (...)
• 38 J. Karlip, 2013, p. 165-168.
• 39 In the preface to the posthumously printed bibliography of Tcherikower’s writings, Max Weinreich ch (...)

18The editorial board’s work wedded research to activism. One offshoot was the volume Les Pogromes en Ukraine sous les gouvernements ukrainiens (1917-1920), published in French and English editions.35 It is this volume most of all that relates to the Bryce and Toynbee volume documenting the extermination of Armenians. It, too, was meant to reach a broad European and American readership and to elicit sympathy for the suffering of a minority group on the periphery of Europe. In this case, however, the volume appeared half a decade after the end of the atrocities being depicted therein, although the context of its publication elicited skepticism anew about its evidentiary value versus propaganda uses. The volume formed part of the response to the assassination in Paris of the Ukrainian nationalist leader, Semon Petliura, by a Jewish anarchist turned watchmaker-poet, Sholem Schwarzbard. The assassination was a vengeful act intended to render justice, for it was conventional wisdom that Petliura bore responsibility for the worst of the pogroms.36 In light of the upcoming trial, the volume’s authors hoped it would educate the French and English-speaking publics about the pogroms, in general, and Petliura’s role, in particular. Formally attributed to the Comité des Délégations Juives, it was the product of the Schwarzbard Defense Committee that the Comité des Délégations Juives had pulled together in order to assist Schwarzbard’s French legal counsel.37 And central to the Defense Committee’s work was none other than Elias Tcherikower (1881-1943), the Russian-educated historian and regular contributor to the Yiddish language press who had played a leading role on the editorial board and had managed, with his wife Riva, to smuggle the pogrom archive to Berlin after the Bolsheviks stabilized their rule in Kiev.38 Tcherikower lent his expertise to the Schwarzbard Defense Committee, giving new meaning for a brief period to the activist potential of research.39

• 40 David Engel discusses the goals of the Comité des Délégations Juives vis-à-vis the Schwarzbard tria (...)
• 41 Letter to Lucien Wolf, dated 6 June 1924, signed S. Dubnow, E. Tscherikower, M. Kreinin, in: Invent (...)

19The Comité des Délégations Juives’ French- and English-language volume was not merely designed to secure Schwarzbard’s acquittal.40 On the contrary, the Schwarzbard affair brought renewed attention to the history of the pogroms, which translated into new funding sources for the editorial board to carry on with their floundering archival and historical work. Just two years earlier, in 1924, the editorial board had issued a desperate appeal to the Jewish press and also to prominent Jewish leaders for contributions to support the continuation of their work since they had no comparable support to that provided by the British government in 1915-1916 to the document volume on the extermination of Armenians. As a result, the editorial board had encapsulated their goals in terms of seeking “to rear a monument for our killed brethren in Ukraina,” efforts that were “in danger of perishing, unless the public organisations and private people interested in our work come to its help.”41 They pleaded:

• 43 Les Pogromes en Ukraine, 1927, p. 1. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

20In dire financial straits, the editorial board had desperately sought to continue their work and extend their publications in west European languages but lacked the means to do so. The Schwarzbard affair afforded them the opportunity they had been seeking. Indeed, the preface of Les Pogromes en Ukraine sous les gouvernements ukrainiens (1917-1920) described the book as having been largely prepared several years before but as only now seeing the light of day “at a moment when interest in the suffering of the Jews of Ukraine is reawakening.”43

• 44 “Par la sûreté de l’information, le souci de la vérité historique, le scrupule rigoureux du comment (...)

21Interestingly, in two texts prepared by the Comité des Délégations Juives to accompany the mailing of the pogrom document volume, they articulated two different but related hopes for what knowledge of the pogroms would accomplish. The narrower hope was that the volume would inform the French, British, and American publics about the particular suffering of East European Jews, for whom the threat of future pogroms remained a present and future danger. Schechtmann expressed the hope that knowledge of Jewish suffering would inspire action, and he implied that the type of action he was envisioning was of a political or legal sort.44 But he articulated a broader hope, as well. In an open-ended manner, he indicated that reading about atrocities had the potential to inspire readers to respond ethically to future incidences of mass violence: “All those who are attuned to human suffering cannot read this collection of documents without being deeply shattered by it and feeling the need to attempt to take steps so that such acts of cruelty against innocent people do not recur.” In a sweeping gesture, Schechtmann related knowledge of the Ukrainian pogroms to the prevention in general of such acts of cruelty in the future and to a universalist notion of humanity:

• 46 Les Pogromes en Ukraine, 1927, p. 2-3.
• 47 The six documents are Annexes no. 30, 31, 44, 48, 50, and 51.

23In several crucial respects, including its format and framing devices, Les Pogromes en Ukraine sous les gouvernements ukrainiens (1917-1920) resembled The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The volume consisted of a ninety-page “historical summary” followed by a section of appendices that were considerably longer than the initial text, consisting of fifty-nine documents and eleven photographs. Moreover, the reception of evidence and particularly its believability proved to be central framing devices. The Preface of the Ukrainian pogrom document volume commences with an analysis of the obstacles to those in western Europe and the United States absorbing the news about the pogroms in 1919. The authors speculated that not only had “the world” been focused on the Peace Conference and on dressing its own war wounds, but also the news that reached people outside Ukraine had not been entirely trustworthy and people had responded accordingly: “The first information that Jews, in their panic, shared about the violence of which they were the victims or that threatened them, was often exaggerated; furthermore, the reality, however dreadful, was denied by many.” They described how this state of affairs did not change overnight after the Civil War ended. News about the Ukrainian pogroms escaped in dribs and drabs, and it was only “little by little” that people came to realize that the “overall picture of tens of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands of other victims was not the product of an overactive imagination.”46 The evidence presented in the document volume, by implication, was not susceptible to exaggeration as the panic-stricken early accounts by victims had been. The editors refrained from drawing an explicit distinction between victims and other kinds of eyewitnesses, as Bryce and Toynbee had done in their own appraisal of trustworthy evidence. Nevertheless, the selection of documents in the pogrom volume speaks for itself in that, out of fifty-nine documents, only six were accounts written by “escapees” or “witnesses” serving in no official capacity.47

• 49 “Les Pogromes en Ukraine,” undated, accompanying list of names and addresses of recipients of the v (...)

25Seeking justice, not vengeance, the editors wanted to expose the parties responsible for the pogroms without doing unnecessary harm to Jewish-Ukrainian relations. As a result, they had taken care to exclude all documents that were not worthy of inclusion based on the criteria they specified of accuracy and unwarranted polemics. A second letter they composed to announce the publication of this volume reiterated the veracity of the documents and tried to mitigate the potentially damning fact that almost all of the accounts of the pogroms were of Jewish provenance by asserting that they stood “outside all political consideration.”49

• 50 The volume was edited by the Comité des Délégations Juives and published in Paris, in 1934.
• 51 J. Apenszlak, 1943; I. Ehrenburg and V. Grossman, 2009; M. Carp, 1946. The history of Ilya Ehrenbur (...)
• 52 For a broader discussion of First World War influences on Second World War cultural practices, see (...)

29In the 1930s and 1940s, Jewish writers and journalists, as well as political and communal activists, compiled a new crop of document volumes to bring the plight of Jews under the Nazis to public attention. The “Black Books” of the 1930s and 1940s tried to lay claim to the established authority of the document volumes of the preceding generation. The new black books were indeed prolific. As early as 1934, the Comité des Délégations Juives printed Das Schwarzbuch: Tatsache und Dokumente: Die Lage der Juden in Deutschland, 1933.50 During the Second World War and in the immediate postwar period, different black books were produced by different sets of editors relating the suffering of Polish Jews, Soviet Jews, and Romanian Jews.51 Both the documentation practices and the rhetorical strategies that Jews employed in response to Nazi persecution framed the extermination of European Jews as a new incidence of “atrocities”. Even as the editors and authors of the black books sought to impress upon readers that the details of the Nazis’ “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” were unfamiliar and the genocide underway was unprecedented, they drew upon recognizable formats and tropes for trying to make sense of senseless violence. Their manner of presenting the facts and their very investment in documentation and history writing were legacies of the strategies of this previous era.52 Indeed, they were the legacy of efforts to document mass violence perpetrated in different regions of the world and against different victim groups including Armenians, Belgians, Herero and Nama, and of course East European Jews. Even Primo Levi, whose memoir constituted a different kind of text than the genre examined in this article, appears to have framed his act of bearing witness with an awareness of both the assumptions that underpinned atrocity literature and the reception of such literature by a skeptical reading public. Considering Levi’s If This Is a Man in the context of an analysis of document volumes opens up a reading of Levi’s work and other Holocaust-era testimonies as having ties to a related genre of literature, one that circulated widely in the years of the First World War and interwar decades.