“Burning Villages”: Leo Katz’s Novels on the 1907 Romanian Peasants’ Revolt and the Question of Antisemitism

This article explores the Jewish question in the context of the 1907 Romanian Peasants’ Revolt through the novels of the Austrian Jewish communist Leo Katz. Katz witnessed the uprising as a youth from his native village situated on the border between the Habsburg Empire, Romania, and Tsarist Russia. He wrote two novels about the revolt: one in 1940 and the other in 1946. The present study examines the violent clashes that unfolded at the border and how the writer approached the concept of antisemitism in the context of the revolt. Relying mainly on Katz’s personal papers, the article shows that Katz’s understanding of antisemitism was related to his communist beliefs. This changed following debates on antisemitism that he and other German-speaking communists had while in exile in Mexico, where Katz spent most of World War Il. Although Katz includes more details on antisemitism in his second novel, he does not address the anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by the rural masses, which is an aspect otherwise well documented by the Austro-Hungarian border authorities. Katz’s novels are the most comprehensive Jewish narratives on the 1907 Romanian Peasants’ Revolt and represent a Jewish intellectual’s struggle to make sense of the rising antisemitism in that tri-border area at the turn of the twentieth century.


Introduction
"A look at the historical development," wrote Leo Katz in 1944, "shows that antisemitism always takes root when society goes through a crisis." 1 After reflecting on antisemitism for years, Katz (1892Katz ( -1954, an Austrian Jewish intellectual, reached the conclusion that antisemitism was a constant in history. A historian by training, in the 1920s Katz researched Jewish persecution in the Middle Ages and, later, was also among the first to publish a novel on the atrocities committed by the Nazis. 2 Originally from a village located on the border between the Habsburg Empire, Romania, and Tsarist Russia, Katz's interest in antisemitism was triggered by the 1907 Romanian Peasants' Revolt. The clashes from spring 1907 between Romanian peasants and soldiers led to a wave of antisemitic violence-one among many the experienced in the tri-border area by the turn of the century. Katz processed his experiences in two autobiographical novels: Brennende Dörfer (hereafter Burning Villages), his very first novel, written in 1940 and published posthumously in Austria in 1993; and Saatgut (hereafter Seedtime), an extended version of Burning Villages, written in 1946 and published in America the following year. 3 His novels represent a unique account of antisemitic violence, and they also offer profound insights into Jewish experiences during the 1907 Revolt. Understanding the way in which Katz explained the revolt, the role he attributed to the Jews, and revealing why he "tied" antisemitism "into narratives" 4 the way he did are the main concerns of this article.
In the spring of 1907, Romania erupted in the biggest peasant uprising the state had ever experienced. It was a conflict that significantly affected the relations between the rural population and the state, and it also left deep scars upon the country's Jewish communities. What started as a local protest against big landowners and high leasing prices in northern Moldova (the country's northeastern region), the protests soon spread to the south, gaining supporters in the form of peasants dissatisfied with the land tenure system. As many leaseholders were Jewish, particularly in Moldova, the revolt transformed into antisemitic riots, which led to thousands of Jews fleeing the country. 5 After almost two months of violent protests, the army brutally crushed the revolt. Estimates of the death toll vary between 2,000 and 11,000 people.
Historians have attributed the uprising to the country's exploitative leasehold system. Romania was an agricultural country with big landowners and an economy that relied heavily on grain exports. After gaining independence exile. The novel, translated into Yiddish and Spanish, was among the first to deal with the extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe. See Anson Rabinach "Man on Ice: The Persecution and Assassination of Otto Katz," in Staging the Third Reich: Essays in Cultural and Intellectual History, ed. Anson Rabinach, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Dagmar Herzog (London, 2020), 263-92, at 278. 3 Leo Katz wrote both in Yiddish, his mother tongue, and in German. His novels on the peasant revolt are both in German. Burning Villages was published in Austria in 1993 at his son's initiative, while Seedtime appeared only in English translation; see Leo Katz, Seedtime (New York, 1947); Leo Katz, Brennende Dörfer (Vienna, 1993 CO, 1996), 150-52. from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, Romania's industry developed slowly, and its economy remained vulnerable to changes in the international cereal market. Although an 1864 reform granted peasants land, the peasantry's situation scarcely improved owing to lack of further support from the state and to population growth. 6 In addition, a variety of short-term factors fueled the uprising, and antisemitism was one of them. 7 This article builds on several studies, including Karl Scheerer's, who outlined that, at the beginning, the peasants' mobs "were directed against Jews." 8 Studying the ideology of the revolt, Philip Eidelberg noticed that newspapers aligned with Vasile Kogȃlniceanu-a revolt instigator with a conservative populistic ideology-contained antisemitic discourse. 9 More recently, Irina Marin, referring to Jehiel Michael S ' orer's study on the history of the Jewish communities in Romania at the beginning of the twentieth century, explained that the landed elites used antisemitism "as part of their strategy of retaining power." 10 The series of antisemitic riots related to the 1907 uprising were, by far, the most extensive anti-Jewish attacks in Romania before World War I. 11 However, many details concerning these riots are still unknown. Besides a broad consensus that this revolt was characterized by antisemitism, particularly in the early phase of the uprising, there is little information on who the antisemitic agitators were and how their discourse translated into violence. Moreover, it is not clear in which specific places antisemitism played a role during the uprising. Hence, the levels of violence against Jews still constitutes a gap in the research. Filling that gap requires extensive study as an increasing amount of research reveals that in Romania, as in other European countries, political antisemitism found widespread support by the late 6  nineteenth century. 12 This was reflected in the top-down implementation of antisemitism, the variety of the antisemitic organizations, and the numerous antisemitic publications in circulation. In Romania too, with nationalist mass politics on the rise, political parties propagated antisemitism and created tension between the Christian and Jewish populations. 13 Accordingly, the degree to which the revolt was provoked by the antisemitic movement demands inquiry.
This article approaches the topic of antisemitism in the 1907 Romanian Peasants' Revolt from a perspective different to that of the Romanian government and its apparatus as well as the perpetrators. By examining Katz's novels, the article sheds light on the Jewish reaction to the violent clashes.
Scarcely known today, Katz 20 Katz wrote his novels on the revolt with two different audiences in mind. Written right after he left Europe and a year after WWII broke out, Burning Villages reproduces the Marxist view on revolution. The novel tells the story of a Jewish boy from an Austro-Hungarian border town who solidarized with the Romanian peasants and found his way to socialism. When Katz rewrote Burning Villages at the end of WWII, he decided to deemphasize the class war narrative. In Seedtime, published by Knopf (a prestigious American publishing house), the uprising is instead depicted from the perspectives of the Jewish communities on both sides of the border. Therefore, Katz remembered the revolt from the position of a communist, for whom antisemitism was "an expression of backwardness that would be brought to its downfall by economic development," which was the tone among Central European communists. 21 However, he also wrote about the revolt as a representative of the Jewish people. Therefore, the focus of his second novel is on Jewish and non-Jewish relations as well as the relationship between Jews and state institutions. The two novels share the same topic, characters who are almost the same, and similar narratives. The different perspectives led to significant differences in the depiction of the revolt. What does this say about Katz's view on antisemitism? How were his self-perceptions as a Jewish communist and later as a communist Jew reflected in his understanding of the uprising?
The way individuals remember and incorporate events in their writing depends very much on the social context in which they are active. 22 Researchers refer to memory "as an open system" and distinguish between various forms, such as individual or collective, and dimensions that "overlap and intersect within the individual." 23 The distinction "looks like a structure but it works more as a dynamic, creating tension and transition between the various poles." 24 When comparing Katz's novels, uncertainty arises as to whether the uprising had an antisemitic character or not. While Katz downplays the role of antisemitism in Burning Villages, in Seedtime, he addresses the issue of antisemitic violence but still has difficulties in describing the gradual development of antisemitism in 1907. This paper argues that this tension is related to the context in which Katz remembered the course of the uprising as well as the way German-speaking communists perceived antisemitism before and during WWII. Katz rewriting his first novel on the revolt mainly to include more details on antisemitism is the result of his individual memory conflicting with his experiences as well as the controversies of WWII and the Holocaust discussed by the communist exiles in Mexico.
The approach here resembles that of social psychologists "who look at individuals in specific historical situations and investigate how memories are established." 25 The analysis draws on various sources, starting with reports of Austro-Hungarian border authorities that provide insight into the historical context, followed by Katz's personal papers, including manuscripts, articles, and correspondence in the Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library. Friedrich Katz (1927Katz ( -2010 the University of Chicago Library (where he was professor of Latin American history), are also relevant for this study.
The first section focuses on the border between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Romania in the spring of 1907. Habsburg authorities' reports document the antisemitic character of the clashes in the border area and reveal the concern in Katz's home village that antisemitic violence from Romania would spill over to them. In Burning Villages, examined in the second section, Katz only mentions rumors about antisemitism. This general underestimation of antisemitism is explained by Katz's clumsy and extensive application of communist ideology in this work. Katz's writings from the 1940s, analyzed in the third section, reveal that he looked outside the classic Marxist concept of antisemitism. In Seedtime, the topic of the fourth and last section, Katz resolves the abovementioned tension by demonstrating that antisemitism during the 1907 Romanian Peasants' Revolt was spread by the elites. This finding further supports Marin's statement that the elites weaponized antisemitism during the 1907 uprising for their own purposes. Katz had the opportunity to publish his work for various audiences and ultimately delivered two stories that attribute different roles to antisemitism. Considered together, his novels complement each other and present the most comprehensive narrative on the Jewish experience during the 1907 Romanian Peasants' Revolt.

The Uprising and the Border
Jews comprised 4.5 percent of the Romanian population, and of the 266,652 Jews that lived there in 1899, 196,752 of them lived in Moldova. 26 In Mihȃileni and Burdujeni-border towns in which violence was rampant in the spring of 1907-almost half the inhabitants were Jews. Jews constituted 10.88 percent of the population in Moldova and made up large parts of the urban population, in contrast to the Romanians, who were mostly peasants. The anti-Jewish component in the Romanian national movement exploited the economic and social divisions between Romanians and Jews by blaming the latter for the country's impeding modernization. 27 As the country was consolidating its institutions, the efforts of the elites to reinforce economic development "were accompanied by a battle against the Jews." 28 A series of laws issued between 1879 and 1914 made the full emancipation of the Jewish population difficult. Only a handful of Jews were naturalized after Romania gained independence, with the majority being denied citizenship. 29 As noted in the Introduction, the unfolding of the antisemitic violence still constitutes a gap in the research. In terms of the situations in border towns, Austro-Hungarian officials' reports offer particularly profound insights. Their reports were not meant to document antisemitism; the officials inspected the border towns and crossed the border into Romania to gather information to justify to their superiors the deployment of troops to the border and the provision of shelter to refugees. Contributions by journalists who traveled from Chernivtsi to the border and wrote about the uprising enhanced the official reports.
"It is hard to describe in words what I saw," wrote an Austro-Hungarian official to his superiors after he went to a Jewish town on the Romanian side of the border that was destroyed by the peasants. "All the stores, all the doors and the windows were broken, and the goods were thrown on the street. The peasants looted the shops and destroyed everything that came into their hands." 30 The town being described was Burdujeni, and its inhabitantsaround 2,000 Jews-fled to Austria-Hungary. According to a list made by the Romanian authorities, Burdujeni was one of the towns that suffered the worst damage in the spring of 1907. 31 The report revealed that the uprising rapidly spread beyond the countryside. Officials noted that, without any intervention from the Romanian authorities, the "rage of the bitter crowds" against the Jewish leaseholders spilled over to ordinary Jews. 32 Therefore, the situation in Burdujeni was not an exception. Apart "from the city of Ias ' i, not a single locality in the Ias ' i, Botos ' ani and in the Dorohoi district remained intact" stated the Austro-Hungarian consul in Ias ' i. 33 "Jews suffered particularly" in twenty-seven localities, and forty-seven Jews were killed or wounded, according to the historian Carol Iancu. 34 To escape what Austro-Hungarian officials called an "agrarian-antisemitic movement," Jews fled to larger cities in the south of the country. Many more sought the protection 29 Iordachi, Liberalism, 352-62; Onac, "In der rumänischen Antisemiten-Citadelle," 94-101; Aly, Europa, 100-110; Iancu, Jews in Romania, 110- of the Austro-Hungarian authorities and fled to Bukovina, Transylvania, and Banat. 35 By the end of March, as protests were moving throughout the rural areas in the south, the Austro-Hungarian diplomats noticed that the movement was "losing more and more its one-sided antisemitic character" and was turning against leaseholders in general. 36

Bukovinian-Romanian border 1907 and border localities affected by the 1907 Romanian Peasants' Revolt
The Kingdom of Romania shared a hundreds-of-kilometers long border with the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. After Romania gained independence, the two countries continued to strengthen their economic relations. As Romania was trying to recover from its dependency on grain exports, it was interested in exporting meat and animals, while Austria-Hungary was looking to export more finished goods. Apart from businesses owned by Austro-Hungarians that were active in the agricultural sector and lumber fields in Romania, there were also seasonal workers from Galicia and Bukovina who were employed by large Romanian estates. 37  that many Jewish shop owners who fled to Bukovina were Austro-Hungarian citizens. Austria-Hungary was probably the neighbor that was the most wellinformed on the agrarian situation in Romania, as the two countries were set to renew an important trade contract in 1907. Since Romania, as Austro-Hungarian officials put it, "even before the outbreak of the peasant unrest, was in a disadvantaged position vis-à-vis our monarchy in terms of trade negotiations, [and] now finds itself in a state of economic depression in light of the worst possible harvest prospects," the two countries postponed the ratification of the trade contract to 1910. 38 Bukovina, like other parts of the Habsburg Monarchy, faced increasing antisemitism at the end of the nineteenth century, but violence remained rare. Historians identify two factors for this, both related to the policy towards Jews and to Bukovina's demographic structure and political landscape. Throughout the nineteenth century many states adopted policies to integrate Jews into their societies. 39 The Habsburg Monarchy emancipated the Jews in 1867 (Romania implemented this only after WWI) and was committed to ensuring Jews protection and equal treatment. Even if in practice this often looked different for Jews, it "did not shake their underlying faith, allied to a belief, or expectation, that the state was well disposed towards them as a corollary of it constitutional foundations." 40 The absence of antisemitic excesses in Bukovina also was connected to the exceptional Jewish political strength there. 41 Bukovina was populated by Ukrainians, Romanians, Germans, and Poles, without any demographically dominant national group. A large part of the Jewish population came there from Galicia in the nineteenth century. In a unique step during the Monarchy, Jews were allowed to build their own curia in the Bukovinian Landtag in 1909, a measure that recognized them as a nation. Even earlier, Jews scored electoral successes on all levels in Bukovina and constituted an influential political group. As David Rechter has put it, in order to "achieve power in Bukovina it was necessary to strike alliances, and the Jews were too valuable a potential ally to ignore or marginalize permanently." 42 National tensions too in Bukovina were vented through antisemitism, foremost from the side of the Romanians and the Germans, but there was still a large consensus for political collaboration.
The uprising did not catch the authorities in Bukovina off guard. The province bordered the Russian Empire in the east, which was still recovering from the 1905 Revolution. Bukovinian officials dealt with refugees, mostly Jewish, from Tsarist Bessarabia in 1905 and also prevented violence from crossing the border. 43 The region was well aware of antisemitic violence and the danger of it rapidly spreading due to the anti-Jewish violence that erupted in hundreds of communities in Galicia-Bukovina's western neighboring region-in the first half of 1898. 44 Hence, in March 1907, reminiscent of two years before, when Jews-first, barely clothed women with children and, later, men-appeared at the border, everyone was let in. Local officials organized sanitation checks and converted public buildings into accommodations. 45 The authorities reacted immediately without being overprotective towards Jews. For example, Erast Tarangul, a Romanian-speaking official, was in charge of a large section of the border, and he showed no particular sympathy towards Jews; his main concern was preventing any disorder. Pressure on the border or, even worse, direct clashes between Jews and peasants in that area would have had an unpredictable outcome for Bukovina. There was, at first, no concern about the accommodation of Jews because, as in 1905, officials thought that the Jews might emigrate to America. 46 On March 18, 1907, residents of Unter-Synoutz-Leo Katz's home village-woke to smoke and screams coming from Romania. 47 Unter-Synoutz was a small community of Jewish traders and Ukrainian and Romanian peasants. Katz shops, sold tobacco, or offered their services as blacksmiths and shoemakers. 48 The smoke came from Mihȃileni, the small town across the border that had about one thousand Jewish inhabitants. Even though Romanian troops had been deployed to protect the bordering towns at the insistence of Austro-Hungarian officials and had arrived before the peasants entered the town, the Mihȃileni Jews fled to Unter-Synoutz as the presence of soldiers did not ensure their safety. 49 What was seen in Mihȃileni from Katz's village was worrisome. Peasants burned down four large estates, and after reaching the outskirts of Mihȃileni, around 2,000 peasants fought with the soldiers. At least four peasants died and many more were wounded. The Romanian army was able to maintain control over Mihȃileni, and the peasants moved towards the country's center. 50 Austro-Hungarian officials and Jewish community leaders were concerned about possible chain reactions. They maintained that, without an increased state presence, peasants from Bukovina would likely join the revolt, and rumors were spreading that people were crossing the border to steal, with four peasants being caught with goods they had stolen from Jews in Burdujeni. 51 Officials also expected the peasants to cross over to Mihȃileni to "plunder the abandoned houses" there. To prevent any escalation and theft, all the available district gendarmes were deployed to Unter-Synoutz. 52 Similar measures were taken in other border towns. In Unter-Synoutz, gendarmes also supervised the taverns and prevented anyone from approaching the border. 53 Nonetheless, many peasants managed to gather at the border and tried to cross over into Romania. Newspapers reported how, in Unter-Synoutz, gendarmes, "drove the peasants back to the villages" and dispersed any gatherings immediately. 54 There were also increasing concerns over the growing numbers of refugees. Overnight, the small border towns hosted over 4,000 newcomers. Even after the situations in Mihȃileni and Burdujeni had eased, Jewish refugees preferred to stay in Bukovina. The refugees not only deeply mistrusted the Romanian authorities, but they also were afraid of the peasants. Some Jews went back to save their belongings and were attacked by the peasants. Austro-Hungarian officials saw how "peasants chase [d] the Israelites all the way to the border." 55 The longer the refugees stayed, the more difficult it was to provide for them. As border trade was nonexistent, the local communities were struggling with rising food prices and scarcity of resources. The support that the regional and central authorities had sent and were sending only slightly eased the tension. 56 Added to this were concerns over antisemitic outbursts in the villages on the Austro-Hungarian side of the border. In many places, officials reported that the peasants were "in a very irritable mood and, from time to time, threats can be heard that the time will soon come when the Jews [in the Habsburg Monarchy] will be treated in the same way as in Romania." 57 The pressure locals put on the central authorities to send the refugees back was high, but their repeated interventions were in vain. After meeting with an Austro-Hungarian official, Romania's Interior Minister, the liberal Ion I. C. Brȃtianu, pointed out that the Interior Ministry could not guarantee the safety of the returning Jews. The country's troops were concentrated in the south, where districts were being ravaged. Moreover, Brȃtianu and other Romanian officials requested that the return of any refugees be postponed, as this "could spark again the movement in Moldova, just when there was a relative improvement." 58 Some returned in the following months, and some never went back. In Romania, the revolt sped up the migration of the Jewish population: between 1900 and 1914, one out of every four Jews left the country. 59 The two sides of the border provide multiple perspectives on the uprising. Antisemitism did not target only Jewish leaseholders and wealthy Jews; it targeted all Jews. The plundering, violence, and following of Jews to the border in addition to physical violence all indicate that the peasants were 55 Report by Botuszanski, Grenzpolizeikomissariat von Itzkany, March 20, 1907 determined to force the Jews to leave the country. The assertions by Romanian officials that a return of the Jewish communities would again unleash violence proved the widespread antisemitic character of the uprising in the northern areas. Unter-Synoutz, like other border localities, was at the forefront of the events. The prompt reaction of Austro-Hungarian officials was aimed towards protecting the population and defending the border. A single case of antisemitism had been reported in Bukovina around the time of the revolt. As Easter was approaching, peasants of Putyla and the surrounding areas in the northwest of Bukovina began planning "violent actions" against the Jewish population. The authorities timely intervened and arrested the agitators to prevent any outbreaks. 60 In the spring of 1907, there were enough state representatives to guarantee the safety to the Jewish refugees. By letting Jews cross the border the authorities prevented a further escalation, and increased presence of the security forces in places where tensions were rising maintained stability on the Bukovinian side.
Localities along the Romanian side of border lacked troops but, as was often reported, even if there were forces, the Jews could not "rely on [them]," as they were not always prepared to protect the Jews. 61 Jewish refugees also described the passivity of the Romanian security forces. According to some refugees and investigations by Austro-Hungarian officials, the looting in Burdujeni and other towns was only possible because gendarmes and soldiers had joined the peasants in their plundering. 62 The Austro-Hungarian authorities indicated that the Jewish youth organized a relief committee for refugees. Katz left no memoir explicitly discussing his experiences of the revolt. 63 According to Friedrich Katz, his father closely witnessed the peasants' suffering, as Leo Katz was often in contact with Romanian peasants in his lumber business. Katz  to witness the events for himself and speak with the peasants, and he was shocked by the brutality they suffered at the hands of the Romanian troops. 64 Although this account is impressive and plausible, it raises some concerns as it is identical to the protagonist's story in Burning Villages. It is certain that the Jews of Unter-Synoutz were not passive observers of the uprising and understood more of the violence than those communities that were further from the border.
Directly after the uprising, Katz, deeply moved by the events, became preoccupied with the history of Jewish-Gentile relations. The revolt made him determined to forego rabbinical studies (as his father had wished) but instead to study history and embrace socialism. 65 Nine years later, living in Vienna, Katz wrote his doctoral thesis on the persecution of Jews during the Black Death in Germany in the fourteenth century. His study already included a strong Marxist underpinning and a genuine passion for Jewish history. His supervisors did not consider the study suitable for publication and commented that Katz was victimizing the Jews too much. 66 Katz did not pursue a scientific career and became a journalist. Years later, while in exile, with plenty of time and space to reflect, he returned to the topics he most cared about: Jewish history, socialism, and antisemitism. Unlike other Austro-Hungarian Jewish writers who were forced into exile and who often referred to the Habsburg Monarchy with a certain nostalgiasuch as Stefan Zweig 69 -in Burning Villages, a feeling of dissociation from the Jewish community prevails. 70 The protagonist, a Jewish boy, observes the uprising and is disappointed by his community's reactions as most of its members show no understanding of the peasants' suffering, and the boy only looks forward to leaving the town. Moreover, in Burning Villages, Jewish refugees have no reason to flee from Romania; Austro-Hungarian officials exploit the uprising for political purposes, and Jewish community leaders mostly pursue financial gain. Poor Jews are portrayed in a positive or neutral manner, whereas wealthy Jews largely play a negative role. The latter were "usurers" (Wucherer) whose business was the "exploitation" (Ausbeutung) of the peasants. 71 The contrast between Katz's depiction of the uprising and the version presented by officials' and newspaper reports is striking.

Burning Villages: Class War, Not Antisemitism
In another scene that is the same in both novels, Katz clearly expresses a class struggle between the Jewish capitalists and the peasantry. Austro-Hungarian officials and newspapers reported that peasants were inebriated during the looting, which contributed to a further escalation of violence. In Burdujeni, for example, peasants emptied taverns of their alcohol. 72 In Katz's novels, however, the peasants collect the alcohol and, while figuring out what to do with it, a group of wealthy Jews from Bukovina offer to buy it from them. The two groups negotiate, but the peasants refuse to sell the alcohol and then dispose of it. 73 The topic of Jewish tavern keepers and their peasant consumers shaped the debates of nationalist politicians for decades in Galicia, Bukovina, and Moldova. 74 Katz's story played into their discourse as it follows a clear pattern in which the peasants are morally superior, while the Jewish capitalists try to do business under these challenging circumstances. There were different Marxist approaches in the 1930s to the Jewish question and antisemitism, as Tom Navon emphasized. 75 These varied from anti-Jewish allusions and neutrality between antisemitism and philosemitism to a fervent anti-antisemitism. Katz referring to wealthy Jews as "usurers," and the ways in which he approached the relation between capitalism and the Jews in Burning Villages indicate that the writer belonged to the group of communists characterized by slight antisemitism when he wrote this novel. Katz's inclination towards such a position can be explained by his socialization in Berlin. There is not much known about Katz's career with the Die Rote Fahne-for which he worked in the early 1930s-but this phase certainly influenced his writing and thinking. Recent research shows that this newspaper consistently used expressions with antisemitic overtones. 76 To complete the class-war narrative, in the novel, workers and craftsmen from Bukovina-often Jews and social democrats-joined the rebelling peasants in Romania. Unlike the official reports that claimed that people from Bukovina were more likely to join the looting and had done so, Katz characters were driven by higher goals. The extent to which this was wishful thinking is shown by left-wing newspapers from Bukovina that were appalled by the violence against the Jewish population in Romania and showed no evidence of such solidarity and cooperation. 77 The writer was making a retrojection as the social democratic movement was almost nonexistent in Bukovina around 1907. 78 It is secondary characters who address antisemitism in Burning Villages. They are panicked because, learning about the pogroms in Tsarist Bessarabia from relatives who live there, they are convinced that similar violence is taking place in Romania, and they wonder who can guarantee that they will not be next. 79 The influential Jews in the community take advantage of the panic and use the resources sent by the central authorities for the accommodation of the refugees for their own interests. 80  during the course of the uprising in this book. Katz's lack of awareness was very much in line with the Marxist view: the waning of antisemitism is a phenomenon connected with the natural evolution of society. 81 For communists, antisemitism was only a "tool of the capitalist classes for confusing, dividing and weakening the working class, not as an ideology with a history and an impact independent of the history of capitalism." 82 Merely mentioning the existence of antisemitism would have deflected from the topic and message. As Navon explained, in German communist literature, "the orthodox concept of antisemitism as a deceptive instrument was still intact during the 1930s, at least until the pogrom of November 1938." 83 This further suggests Katz's loyalty to orthodox Marxist conventions by the time he arrived in Mexico in exile.
Katz sent Burning Villages to Knopf in 1942, and the publisher rejected it without explanation. 84 Toward the end of WWII, Katz made adjustments to the manuscript and submitted it to the communist publishing house Globus in 1948. The publishing house suggested some changes but generally was not impressed by the story. 85 Katz was not an established writer and, with a novel about an uprising in Romania, did not conform with any prevailing literary trend. Postwar German communist literature was dominated by two main genres: "on the one hand, literature dealing with the Nazi period in Germany, and on the other, so-called Aufbauliteratur about the construction of socialism." 86 Burning Villages might have fallen in the second category, but unlike Aufbauliteratur that usually portrays workers, in Katz's case the focus was on the peasantry. Besides, Globus criticized Katz's "heroes" speaking an "elevated language" and complained about the many "improbabilities," referring to the religious aspects. Katz addressed this topic broadly, especially in describing the religiosity of the Jews who fled Romania. All in all, according to Globus, the "central idea" was lost due to the many "side episodes," which included digressions into Jewish history and religion, the political history of the Habsburg Monarchy and, to a smaller degree, the issue of antisemitism. 87 81  Katz, however, made no revisions to the manuscript and did not insist that Globus accept his version. His reluctance to publish Burning Villages likely related to the growing antisemitism in communist parties in the 1950s. The antisemitic campaign started in the Soviet Union in March 1949, when the press began to attack "cosmopolitans without a fatherland." In East Germany, central to the suppression of the Jewish question was the case against the non-Jewish German Communist Party member Paul Merker-a high-ranking member of the German Communist Party who, like Katz, spent WWII in Mexico in exile. The two knew each other well, having met when the Merker arrived in Mexico in 1940. After 1945, Merker engaged foremost in the issue of restitution payments for Jewish survivors, supported measures against antisemitism, and sought for Jews to be legally treated as victims of fascism. In the 1950s, he was accused of disloyalty towards the Soviet Union and of having Zionist attitudes. The event and the context of the trial are both well researched. 88 The testimony of Katz and five other communists against Merker was "a depressing account of how a totalitarian regime destroyed human solidarity as individuals tried to save themselves," as Jeffrey Herf puts it. In a report sent to the Austrian Communist Party in 1953, Katz accused Merker of being a Zionist and of not doing "any pro-Soviet work" in exile. Furthermore, Katz raised suspicions based on Merker's "connections to the rich Jews of America." 89 Merker was dismissed from the party, losing all his party functions. Katz also expressed concerns over Leo Zuckermann and his wife. 90 Zuckermann was a high-ranking Socialist Unity Party of Germany functionary who was close to Merker. The Austrian Communist Party forwarded Katz's report to East Germany, and Zuckermann fled the country in 1952. 91 One can only speculate on Katz's motivations. 92 In Mexico, Katz belonged to Merker's group and, after 1945, Katz and Zuckermann worked together to publish his novels in East Germany. 93 Many of the accusations against Merker were true of Katz himself. The writer spent WWII not in the Soviet Union but in Mexico, so he immigrated to the West, which was considered highly suspicious compared to those who spent the war in Moscow; and there was plenty of evidence for Katz's support of Zionism. For example, during WWII, Katz worked for Tribuna Israelita, a magazine that his wife, Bronia Katz, described as "Zionist," and the family moved to Israel in 1949. The available information indicates that Katz was not pursuing a political career and that this move was intended to protect his interests as a journalist and writer. However, this gesture of loyalty did not get him far, as he did not manage to publish any of his novels. In the years before his death in 1954, he wrote children's books for various East German publishing houses and collaborated with mostly communist Austrian newspapers. In his articlesoften in the nature of travelogues-he did not mention that he was in exile and did not explain why he was making these trips. 94

Antisemitism: "The Flag of Anti-Civilization"
The Merker trial marked the end of the chapter in Katz's intellectual journey in which he openly reflected on Jewish topics. Before Katz's return to Austria, during the interwar period and the years after 1950, the writer experienced a number of years with fewer ideological constraints. Between 1940 and 1950, Katz wrote Totenjäger, Seedtime, and a series of articles on antisemitism. The following analysis is based on his two essays on the history of antisemitism written in 1944 and 1945, respectively, as these are his most detailed expositions on this subject. 95 Having highly accurate information about the war and the fate of the Jews in Europe, the German-speaking communists in exile in Mexico developed a growing interest in antisemitism and Jewish history. 96 For the first and only time in the history of German communism in the twentieth century, the Jewish question became the focus of debates. 97 Horrified by the news coming from Europe, Katz wanted to use his essays to demonstrate the long history of antisemitism. His intention was also to define antisemitism since he noticed many people were still using "antisemitic slogans without realizing it." 94 Leo Katz, "Erste Begegnung mit den Volksdemokratie," in Salzburger Tagblatt 31, December 1949, 15; Leo Katz, "Das waren Zeiten!," in Österreichische Volksstime, July 23, 1950, 9; Leo Katz, "Die guten alten Zeiten," in Österreichische Volksstime, March 12, 1950, 11. 95 Herf, Divided Memory, 148. 96 Graf, "Twice Exiled", 771-72; Herf, Divided Memory, 39. 97 Herf, Divided Memory, 63.
As the end of WWII was in sight, Katz wanted to send a clear message: Europe would continue to exist, and a reconstruction would only be possible if antisemitism, "the flag of anti-civilization," completely disappeared. 98 The writer drew on considerations and results from his doctoral thesis, but he was also inspired by Otto Heller's book Der Untergang des Judentums (The Decline of Judaism; 1931)-a popular book among communists that addressed the Jewish question and antisemitism in the 1930s. A journalist from Vienna who lived in Berlin in the 1920s, Heller wrote an exposition of the proletarian revolutionary view of the Jewish question. 99 Like Heller, Katz believed that the Jews were predominantly a trading people and that all "conflicts between the Jews and wider society sprang from their social function. Therein lay the essence of antisemitism and the persecutions of the Jews in all times. In detail, the role of the Jews had changed, but their social function remained the same." 100 Katz's analysis focuses on emerging industrialization and increased antisemitism in the nineteeth century. From Germany, modern antisemitism spread to France, then to Russia and Eastern Europe. Katz does not address the specific situation of the Jews in Russia or Romania and only mentions that the majority of Jews in those areas were living in poor conditions. "The antisemitic agitator at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century takes the Jewish banker and industrialist as his subject." 101 Katz recognizes here that the nineteenth century brought a significant change in the nature of antisemitism-a position not often found among German-speaking communists. According to Traverso, "German and Austrian Marxists failed to grasp the important change that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century: the transition from religious hostility to Jews to modern racist antisemitism." 102 Katz went beyond Heller's interpretation, taking a more positive stance on Zionism. He also recognized that the Nazis brought antisemitism to a new level. This also distinguished Katz from his fellows. Herf explains that "Communists who argued that Nazis and antisemitism had an autonomous political significance were exceptional." 103 It was late in his exile that the writer began to question his earlier position on antisemitism and the narrative of Burning Villages. For a long time, Katz's articles on antisemitism were in line with the Communist Party. 104 His transition from the one-sided depiction of a class-struggle narrative was a result of his confrontation with national socialism, the role of antisemitism, and a debate on the responsibility of the Germans in the war. Phillipp Graf, who closely studied the tensions inside the Katz group, noticed that, while the group "both in the question of guilt and in the explanation of National Socialism on a strictly materialistic level [were] more or less immune to the news of the Holocaust, in the case of [Bruno] Frei and Katz it can be observed a steady departure from traditional patterns of explanations." As Graf further asserts, Katz was able to recognize the horrors of the Holocaust and to understand the pogroms based on his experiences in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His encounters with antisemitism "may have enabled him in the first place to recognize the qualitative newness of Germany's policy toward the Jews. In the deliberate and comprehensive attempt to exterminate European Jews by the Germans, Katz recognized not so much the similarities as the differences with Eastern European antisemitism." 105 This transition was clearly reflected in the novels Katz wrote in these years.

Seedtime: An Incomplete Depiction of Antisemitism
Katz's cooperation with Knopf represented his greatest literary success. This came after the publishing house rejected both Burning Villages and Totenjäger. 106 But faced with accusations of promoting antisemitism, Knopf was interested in publishing books on Jewish history. Therefore, Seedtime, as a "touching prose poem on the long history of the Jewish race"-as Katz's translator Wilson Follett promoted it-perfectly fit this strategy. 107 Reviewers of Seedtime praised Katz for doing "a skillful job of integrating his broadly liberal political insights with a crucial event in the life of a border town." 108 Another reviewer depicted Seedtime as a novel about "Jewish people: the first scapegoats in the class struggle." 109 Others saw it as a book about pogroms "and the slow disintegration of the Dual Monarchy." 110 On a negative note, one reviewer misunderstood the author's intentions, believing that Katz addressed too many topics: Seedtime was a novel about the political life in Bukovina but was also an "account of the Romanian peasant revolt" and a portrayal of "Jewish life in the region." 111 His novel had something of a documentary purpose, and there was a "compulsion rather than an inner creativity" in his writing. 112 All these reactions indicate that Katz distanced himself from the one-sided narrative and the Marxist view of antisemitism in Burning Villages.
In Seedtime Katz retained the narrative of Burning Villages while expanding on topics related to Jewish history, the Habsburg Monarchy, the revolt, and Romania's reaction to it. The novel features the same influential Jews who seek to profit from the Jewish refugees, but these are a minority as the rest of the community takes antisemitism seriously. 113 Jews seek and obtain the support of the Habsburg officials and they also take initiative to protect themselves. 114 By including this, Katz demonstrates the solidarity, selfconfidence, and mobilization inside the Jewish communities. The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy is perceived more as a protective entity, and its contrast to the Romanian state representatives is even greater than in Burning Villages. Katz pointedly writes that to "any inhabitant of Romania, and very particularly any Jewish inhabitant, that notion of government taking thought on his behalf was no source of gladness." 115 The writer introduces the topic of antisemitism very early in Seedtime, leaving no room for speculation as to whether the uprising had an antisemitic character or not. The questions that then arise include: Who propagated the antisemitism, and what were the consequences? The leading antisemite in the novel is a German landowner conducting business in Romania. Together with other Romanian landowners, he plans pogroms to incite the peasants against Jews to create "a pretext for military intervention" by the Habsburg Monarchy. Military representatives and other landowners join the plot to "divert the revolt into a pogrom against the Jews." They are then acquainted with antisemitic methods from Russia, where the Tsar rages "with his pogroms" against Jews.
Portraying a German as an antisemitic leader after WWII is understandable. However, German businessmen had no interest in a revolt as Katz suggests. As the revolt broke out, their first reaction was to urge the authorities to help them save their businesses in Romania. 116 Katz's intimation of Tsarist Bessarabia influence is plausible, but it demands further research, as there are no studies on connections between Romanian and Russian antisemites. The author's characterization of major Romanian landowners as leading antisemites during the 1907 uprising requires further explanation as well. When the Romanian government announced reforms aimed at limiting the power of leaseholders-by forming village councils as a reaction to the uprising-the big landowners were the first to oppose such a measure. As Austro-Hungarian diplomats demonstrated, the big landowners preferred to work further with leaseholders than with village committees, with whom they would have to negotiate laboriously. 117 Katz's essays, like his articles on Romania and his novel Totenjäger, reveal that he had no insights on Romania's antisemitic movement. 118 Despite the fact that Romanian antisemites were active before 1918 in Bukovina and that Moldova was a center of antisemitism, Katz only had vague information about the state of antisemitism there, and this information was largely related to the fascist Legionary movement. 119 The main differences between Burning Villages and Seedtime are not only the latter being richer in detail on antisemitism. By including antisemitic characters who plot pogroms, Katz shows how the ideology was enacted. Still, Katz's depiction is limited as he does not explain how antisemitic violence unfolded. As a reviewer remarked, Katz's "peasants don't react to antisemitism. . . . Had Mr. Katz explored the more difficult problem of the indigenous subterranean antisemitism of the masses, in addition to viewing it as a mere provocation of reactionary politicians, he would have had a more vital and dramatically tense subject." 120 This allowed Katz to keep elements of the class-war ideology, including peasants being victims of the capitalist elites, intact. In Totenjäger, as Graf notes: antisemitism is an elementary need of the German occupiers who will not rest until their obsession is fulfilled and the Jews of Bukovina are actually murdered. Their murder is not primarily for the personal enrichment of the perpetrators-according to the classic communist image, which is also sufficiently represented in Mexico-but the extermination of the Jews is based on the antisemitic world view of the murderers. 121 Katz wrote Totenjäger from the perspective of a communist who was beginning to take a different stance on antisemitism. In Seedtime-published two years after Totenjäger-the break with the communist version is not that clear. This oscillation is not surprising as, a short time later, Katz reverted to old vocabulary and old explanatory patterns in his writing. 122

Conclusion
While the uprising was still unfolding in Romania, the Society for Countering Antisemitism-an organization based in the second Viennese districtpleaded with the Interior Ministry to halt the antisemitic propaganda in the Habsburg Monarchy, and they particularly drew attention to the activities of the Christian Social Party led by the notorious Viennese mayor Karl Lueger (1844-1910). Without strictly controlling antisemitism, the Habsburg Monarchy ran the risk that "as in Russia and Romania, there will be violence and destruction of property." 123 Although the complaint had no effect, it says a lot about how the unrest in Romania was perceived. Two months into the uprising, almost nothing distinguished the violence in Romania from that in Tsarist Russia. In her essay "From The Dreyfus Affair to France Today," Hannah Arendt observed that the pogroms of Russia and Romania were not reminiscences from the Middle Ages but a "reality of modern politics." 124 The revolt was also the result of the antisemitic propaganda in Romania that for years had been blaming Jews for the peasants' misery. Besides suffering damage to their property, Jews were injured, killed, and forced to flee the country. The widespread reaction to the revolt was to blame the Jewish leaseholders for the peasantry's violence: the leaseholders created unbearable working conditions, forcing the peasants to rebel. 125 While studies published in interwar Romania mention the antisemitic aspect of the revolt, 121 Graf, "Habsburger Residuen," 376. 122  the first book on the revolt written in Romania after 1990 fails "to address forthrightly the controversial role of antisemitism," and Jews are barely mentioned. 126 The fact that the role of Jews in the uprising was and is a debated issue underlines the necessity for future studies that take antisemitism as a starting point. 127 Leo Katz's novels provide a basis for studying the nature and dynamics of the revolt. They also offer an insight into the response of Bukovinian Jewry to the crisis unfolding at the Romanian border in the spring of 1907. Katz's community closely witnessed the uprising. The violent clashes in Romania endangered the social balance in Austro-Hungarian border towns as it led to tension among the peasantry and the fear in Jewish communities that antisemitic violence might spill over the border. Katz's account is complemented and corroborated by reports of the authorities, the press, and Jewish organizations. Jewish responses included the organization of local self-defense groups and the massive support offered to the refugees. Bukovina was for many Jewish refugees a temporary shelter, but some remained, and in the long run they influenced the Yiddish culture there. 128 These responses reveal an increased awareness among Jews in Bukovina that antisemitism was a widespread component of mass politics in the surrounding areas and of Romania's intentions of further prohibiting the emancipation of its Jewish population. The violence to which the Jews were exposed in the spring of 1907 also prompted the Israelitische Allianz zu Wien, at that time the most important Jewish organization in the Habsburg Monarchy, to get involved to ensure safe migration for the Jews in Romania. 129 It took Katz many years to describe what happened. Witnessing violence did not automatically mean that he was able to document it extensively. And, still, his novels do not offer a full picture. Katz's incomplete depictions were influenced by discourse on antisemitism in communist circles during the interwar years. Even so, Burning Villages differs from other novels on the revolt published in Romania. Compared to Panait Istrati's Les chardons du Baragan (The Thistles of the Bȃrȃgan; 1928) and Liviu Rebreanu's Rȃscoala (The Revolt; 1932)-two of the most renowned books on the uprising written during the interwar period-Katz's Burning Villages stands out as it demonstrates that the 1907 revolt affected Jewish communities too. While Katz's novels are not the only texts to discuss the antisemitism (there are numerous stateproduced documents in this regard), his novels are the sole extensive Jewish account on the revolt.
Seedtime was influenced by debates Katz had with other Germanspeaking communists over Nazi rule and the role of antisemitism. The writer's experiences of antisemitism were a source for his interpretation and understanding of the Holocaust. Conversely, the Holocaust made him rethink the course of the revolt, and the debates led to him to apply a different interpretative framework to the revolt. Thereafter, he looked more closely at the history of Jews in Eastern Europe, at the relation between Jews and non-Jews, and the role of the state in promoting antisemitism. Learning about the fate of the Bukovinian Jewry and Romania's collaboration with the Nazis, Katz searched for answers in history. In Seedtime, a historic novel that he worked on during and after the war, Katz showed that at the eastern borderland of the Empire, by the turn of the century antisemitism had a rhetorical, political, and transnational component that brought together antisemites and constituted a destructive force.
There is no doubt that Katz preferred Seedtime over Burning Villages. As Friedrich Katz explained, his father was not pleased with the earlier work, as it was a too much of a "personal testimony"; Burning Villages was "only a first draft that he never intended to publish." 130 Seedtime is not simply an English version of Burning Villages, as often believed, 131 but what Katz regarded as his main contribution to the history of the revolt. This is why, when it came to publishing his book in German, Katz first sent Seedtime to Steinberg, a Swiss publishing house best known for publishing Ilia Ehrenburg and Aldous Huxley. Although Steinberg "highly valued the novel," it rejected it in 1947 due to the scarce "paper conditions." 132 Only then, in 1948, did Katz turn to Globus (discussed above), which rejected the novel most likely on ideological grounds. Aware of Leo Katz's differences in the depiction of antisemitism, this article has shown the degree to which Katz tried to offer a broad understanding of the events that affected the Jewish communities in Romania in the spring of 1907 so severely.
Funding Note Open access funding provided by University of Vienna.

Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests.