Patterns of violence: the local population and the mass murder of Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, July-Augustt 1941

Among historians there has been growing interest in the question of popular participation in the Holocaust of European Jews, particularly in the territories to the east of the Soviet Union's western border. Although scholars research events that occurred in different places and under different circumstances, they address a number of problems that are similar, among them the role of traditional antisemitism. This chapter seeks to establish patterns of popular antisemitic violence in the two eastern provinces of Romania, Bessarabia and Bukovina, in July and August 1941