In the Russian and Ukrainian nationalist narratives of history (e.g. Gogol) when the Poles ruled Ukraine in the 1700s they used Jewish intermediaries to extort money from the population. Actually AFAIK there is some historical basis for this belief in that the Polish lords used Jews in some unpleasant capacities because they knew that public ire would be displaced from targeting them into targeting the Jews. From their POV it was better to have an anti-Jewish pogrom than an anti-Polish rebellion. It would have been a very small proportion of the Jewish population engaged in such activities, but you know how such things fester in the popular imagination over time. The peasant has to hand his harvest over to the non-Christian and all that, he passes that down to his children and etc.
The most obvious example of this belief is in Taras Bulba (Gogol again), in which the Jews are the lackeys of the evil Polish overlords. It's in Dostoevsky too, I think.
For a convinced 18th- or 19th-century Orthodox Christian believer, at any rate, exceptions like the Judeophile Potemkin notwithstanding, Judaism and Catholicism were both Satanic and in league with each other.
--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> It would be ironic if Russians hated Jews in part
> because they were "Poles," something which the Poles
> would have passionately rejected. The old country,
> feh. On the other hand my Hungarian grandmother had
> a
> real attachment to her old country, but the Magyars
> weren't Slavs and had far less prejudice. (The Nazis
> had to actually overthrow the fascist Arrow Cross
> regime to enforce the deportation of the Hungarian
> Jews.) My understanding is that her own grandfather
> was the mayor of their little town, and it wasn't a
> shtetl, just a town with a majority Catholic
> population.
>
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