“The Jews are Coming”: Vengeance and Revenge in post-Nazi Europe

Abstract

This paper explores two different modes of revenge practiced by Jewish soldiers and partisans in post-Nazi Europe. The first, revenge proper, involved the targeting and killing of individual war criminals. The second, vengeance, sought in its most extreme form, to repay the German people as a whole. The paper questions the common understanding of these events as spontaneous acts of violence emerging from a universal wish for justice. Vengeance and revenge are better understood as planned and historically bound attempts of modern-national Jews not only to achieve justice but more importantly to form a new Jewish identity based on active resistance rather than passive suffering. The paper concludes by suggesting some broader implications of this history, and offers to see vengeance and revenge as a vantage point from which Zionism and more generally the liberal nationstate and its promise for justice can be assessed.