Why did the Ukrainians hate the Jews so much?

Answer 1

Answer 1

See, Ukrainians, as a nation, do not hate Jews. To say that all Ukrainians are antisemitic is stereotyping, anti Ukrainian, and just plain offensive. Before you go to such bold conclusions, please understand the TRUE history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations and read the book in the Related Link; it might open your eyes to a few things.

Answer 2

I agree with the previous post. The Ukrainians and Jewish people both share a tragic history filled with persecution and outside domination. In World War II, half of the Jews in the world were killed, 6 million out of 12 million, and the Ukrainians suffered 8 million out of 21 million.

Before WWII, the Ukraine had a population of 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews, this was one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe and there was never a problem with rampant antisemitism.... The same cannot be said of many, many others who were exceptionally brutal.

Verdict: Ukrainians and Jews are Friends.

Answer 3

Ukrainians did not have any unique reasons for the Anti-Semitism that they historically expressed. It was based in the same economic, religious, and ethnic overtones that were imported from Germany and Russia. Ukrainians were not especially Anti-Semitic either. They went through bouts of Anti-Semitic massacres, which Jews see as grievances, and then long periods of Ukrainian ambivalence when the Jewish communities flowered. Since the Ukrainians never pushed for liberalization of laws concerning Jews or liberal benefits towards Jews, there was never any positive sentiment in the Jewish community to counter the negative sentiment from the grievances. (This could contrast with Germany in the early 1900s where liberal Germans helped offset the grievances that Jews had with Germany.)

The most important set of grievances that Jews have concerning Ukraine come from the period of the Polish Deluge, referring to the period between the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648 and the Truce of Andrusovo in 1667. Ukrainian Cossacks butchered a minimum of 40,000 Jews, but many scholars report numbers increased by factors of 5 or 7. Regardless, over half of the Jews in Ukraine were killed during this period in successive massacres of Jewish towns and villages. This is probably the most tragic event in Jewish memory. Unfortunately, the leaders of these brutal assaults are the first Ukrainian patriots which lead to Ukrainian veneration (to this day) of people who prided themselves on murdering Jews. This sent a negative message to the Jewish communtiy, regardless of whether Ukrainians actually bore animosity to Jews as such.

There were a number of Anti-Jewish riots in Odessa in 1821 and the first modern pogroms began in Ukraine. The period 1881-1884 was a peak period, with over 200 anti-Jewish events occurred in the Russian Empire, with those taking place in Ukraine carrying the bulk of that number. In the period during and directly following the Russian Revolution of 1917, there were 887 mass pogroms in Ukraine (and numerous sideshows and after-pogroms), with the majority being led by the Ukrainian People's Republic Army, the Ukrainian Green Party, and Ukranian Nationalist Gangs.

Both Answers 1 & 2 center on the issues during World War II. The Ukrainians were caught in an awkward position during the war. Even though Christian religious leaders in Ukraine opposed the Holocaust, they supported the advance of the German soldiers through Ukraine as a method to fight the Soviet Russians. The reason that the Ukrainian leadership supported the Nazi German advance was in hopes of preventing another Holodomor. The Holodomor was an intentional famine in Ukraine perpetrated by the Soviet Russians in 1932-1933. It is an intentional famine because Ukraine actually produced enough to feed itself, but the Russians absconded with the grain and used it to feed themselves while starving the Ukrainians. In the Ukrainian view, Nazi Occupation could not be worse than Soviet genocide. Unfortunately, for the Ukrainian Jewish population, the Nazi Occupation was significantly worse than the Soviet genocide. Jews pile Ukrainian support for the Nazi German invasion onto the list of grievances posted above, but do not consider it as problematic as many of the earlier grievances.

Please see the Related Links to learn more about Jewish grievances in Ukraine.