[ Chapter 1 ] Odessa: Pogroms in a Cosmopolitan City CAROLINE HUMPHREY How can we explain the case of a city famed for its cosmopolitanism, where nevertheless pogroms have taken place? In the early twentieth century, when Odessa was renowned for its enlightened multinational mercantile elite, its magniicent opera house, its irreverence and street humour, it was also the city where Russia’s most violent pogroms against the Jews took place. It can- not be convincingly argued that they were only a matter of externally-incited passions unleashed in the city, for attacks on Jews had taken place in Odessa many times in previous decades (notably in 1821, 1849, 1859, 1871, 1881 and 1900, as well as countless minor raids). So although the most devastat- ing pogroms were related to great political events in Russia, speciically to the assassination of the Tsar in 1881 and the revolution of 1905, there is still something to be explained about the city itself that so regularly produced these spurts of hatred. his chapter does not aim to provide a causal account of the pogroms, on which there is already a distinguished literature; 1 nor is it a study of the sufering inlicted and the subjectivities of those involved. Rather, focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is an attempt to explain how the pogroms happened and to characterise the com- plex – disjointed yet mutually aware – make-up of a city undergoing radical change in which such events could take place. he destructive energies of violent mobs vented against people seen as alien (pogroms) were the reverse of cosmopolitanism, if by this we mean generous and appreciative interactions between those who recognise one another as diferent. his incompatibility, the diiculty of thinking them adjacently, is relected in the literature on Odessa, which tends to focus either on its complex cosmopolitan culture or on pogroms, but not on their co-presence (see, however, Gerasimov 2003). But perhaps there is a way of conceptualising such a situation when it is seen that in some respects these undoubted opposites – pogroms and cosmopolitan interactions – were