Quoting Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo‐Bolshevism, pages 58–9:
Rumors of armed Jewish collaboration with the Bolsheviks fueled violence against Jews in other places where Polish forces clashed with the Red Army. A few weeks later, Polish troops fought a pitched battle in Lida, some 250 kilometers north of Pinsk. On their first foray into the town, Polish troops searched the synagogue and the Jewish hospital for insurgents. After a brief reversal, they entered the town again, this time amid rumors that Jews had shot at Polish troops from windows and had even mutilated the bodies of dead Poles.
Enraged Polish soldiers looted Jewish shops and homes, arrested dozens of Jews on suspicion of collaboration with the enemy, and then impressed local Jews into forced labor. Thirty‐eight Jews were killed. Similar accusations accompanied the Polish soldiers’ entry into the city of Vilnius (Polish: Wilno; Yiddish: Vilna).
According to a report compiled by the local Jewish Committee and presented to Polish authorities, Jewish victims of reprisals were identified as Bolsheviks by strangers, sometimes even by children, according to their physical appearance. At least sixty Jews were killed.
The authors of the report noted that Polish forces made little effort to learn much about what Jews had done or not done under Bolshevik rule before they imprisoned them. The fate of Leib Jaffe, poet and president of the Lithuanian Zionist Association, was typical. Polish authorities held him in prison on suspicion of being a Bolshevik sympathizer even though his newspaper had been suppressed by the Bolsheviks as counterrevolutionary propaganda.¹⁶
These attacks on Jewish civilians reflected the persistence of violence in a region where the First World War evolved into a series of interlocking regional wars that unfolded against the backdrop of revolution. As the war evolved, so too did wartime fears about Jewish spies and saboteurs. These were reframed and linked to a new threat: the Jewish partisan.
Elusive enemies, partisans (or francs‐tireurs) were imagined in military cultures across Europe as savage warriors who attacked their victims without any consideration for the rules of civilized warfare.¹⁷ They were generally understood to be cowards who attacked from behind and then hid among civilians. They were even thought to recruit women and children to fight for them, further blurring the lines between combatants and innocents. Obsessions like these made partisans into enemies whose treachery justified both harsh repression and preventive action.
As war in Eastern Europe was replaced by a state of revolution and civil war, fears of partisan treachery often fixed on the supposed menace of Jews believed to be taking up arms on behalf of their Soviet masters.
(Emphasis added.)