Beyond Antisemitism: Rethinking Stalin’s Anti-Jewish Campaign, 1948–1953*

This article focuses on a single major affair within modern Jewish history whose antisemitic context is unequivocally recognized by most historical scholarship, namely, the murderous persecution of Soviet Jews during the final years of Joseph Stalin’s rule (1948–53). I argue that alongside events and actions on the part of the regime that appear obviously antisemitic in nature, one can point to a certain distinct trend in Stalin’s “Jewish” policy at the time that the concept “antisemitism” does not help to unravel or understand. Historians were unaware of this trend until the Soviet archives were opened following the collapse of the Soviet Union. I address it here for the first time after perusing relevant archival material that has yet to be assessed by scholarship. After presenting and analyzing this unknown stratum of Stalin’s policy toward Soviet Jewry during the time of the persecutions, I argue that both this element, which is unassociated with the phenomenon of antisemitism, and the familiar murderous components of Stalin’s ostensibly antisemitic policy should from now on be analyzed and interpreted against a phenomenological and theoretical backdrop other than the paradigm of antisemitism.