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Pogrom
Kishinev and the
Tilt of History
STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
A Division of W. W. Norton & Company
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York London
For Hans Rogger, my teacher
CONTENTS
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION, DATES, TERMS, AND PLACE-NAMES
PREFACE
1. Age of Pogroms
2. Town and Countryside
3. “Squalid Brawl in a Distant City”
4. Burdens of Truth
5. Sages of Zion, Pavel Krushevan, and the Shadow of Kishinev
6. Remains of the Day
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION, DATES, TERMS, AND PLACE-NAMES
In transliterating Hebrew and Russian I have followed the Library of Congress rules except that I have eliminated most diacritical marks and have presented the names of those known in the Western world (e.g., Alexander Pushkin or Hayyim Nahman Bialik) in their most familiar form. Yiddish transliteration is based on the system devised by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Personal names appear in different versions depending on the geographic or cultural context in which the individual was most active. Place-names are identified with the spelling used at the time (e.g., “Vilna,” not “Vilnius,” and “the river Byk,” not “Bîc”).
The Julian, or Old Style, calendar was until the turn of the twentieth century twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar—and thirteen days behind it at the outbreak of the Kishinev pogrom.
PREFACE
“God is in the details,” wrote the art historian Aby M. Warburg.1 How is it that a particular detail looms or recedes? How can we chart the interplay between the trivial and the essential, the idiosyncratic and the historical? How should we understand those slices of the past that are far less momentous—on their surface, at least—than others, yet are able to imprint themselves onto history, to define their time and place?
This book explores a dreadful moment—albeit by no means worse than many others at more or less the same time—that would define for many Jews and others, too, the contour of Jewish fate in the half century before the Holocaust. Prior to Buchenwald and Auschwitz, no place-name evoked Jewish suffering more starkly than Kishinev (Chişinău since the emergence in 1991 of an independent Moldova). Israeli textbooks of the 1950s and ’60s often dated the start of the Nazi campaign against the Jews from the Kishinev pogrom. In the early 1940s it was commonplace for Jews to insist that Kishinev had in its day garnered more attention than Hitler’s war against the Jews. The historian Ben-Zion Dinur, Israeli minister of education in the 1950s, would declare that every aspect of the Holocaust had been anticipated by the Kishinev pogrom.2
Still today, with the city’s massacre having receded into obscurity, the lessons learned from it remain among the most deeply ingrained in Jewish life. It would leave an indelible imprint on how Jews and non-Jews, too, viewed life and death in Russia, which was at the time the largest Jewish community in the world.
Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History sets out to de-familiarize a familiar story. Even those who know nothing of Kishinev are nonetheless likely to have encountered some of its fallout—a belief in the complicity of the Russian government in anti-Jewish violence, for instance. Kishinev was that rare event of the time embraced by all in a singularly fractious Jewish community, racked by debate over emigration, Zionism, Jewish socialism, and the like. The lessons that spilled from the pogrom’s rubble would enter squarely into the day-to-day beliefs of contemporary Jews, with echoes, still time and again, in the speeches of Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many others. Kishinev, barely known beyond its immediate region before the pogrom, would quickly become the inspiration for some of the most powerful—and resilient—metaphors in Jewish life, ones that have seen little diminution in their timeliness or ferocity.
The reasons for Kishinev’s lingering residue may at first seem unsurprising. Forty-nine Jews died in the pogrom, many were raped, and much of the city overrun. The massacre occurred at the dawn of a new century and was inspired by the darkest of medieval-like accusations—the so-called blood libel, which charged Jews with the use of Christian blood for ritual purposes. And most troubling of all was the evidence that surfaced after the riot ended that officials at the highest level were themselves culpable. Kishinev—little more than its name was now needed to evoke horror—would be seen as among the world’s bleakest locations.
Yet little if anything regarding Kishinev’s riot would be either clear-cut or simple. Meticulously documented then and later, it would inspire a veritable thicket of myths extending well beyond the confines of Jewish communal or political life, its impact—surprisingly enough—felt on endeavors as varied as the prestate Haganah, or nascent Israeli army, the NAACP, and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Simple this story would not be—even in terms of its most obvious details—from the moment it occurred. Hence the pertinence of the account of Sergei Urussov, appointed governor general of the Bessarabia province—Kishinev was its capital—to replace his disgraced successor soon after the pogrom. He relates in his memoirs how at the time of his appointment he knew as little about the region as he might have about faraway New Zealand, and felt fortunate that a guidebook to the area had just been published. He pored over the book during his journey from St. Petersburg and carried it with him on his first few days in the provincial capital. He had the volume in hand as he made his way into one of the worst of the city’s neighborhoods, known as Lower Kishinev, or Old Town, the epicenter of the April anti-Jewish massacre. There, he writes, he sought the river that was reportedly nearby:
Nearing the end of town, I vainly tried to see the river mentioned. . . . For a long time I could not bring myself to identify it with the little, ill-smelling pool, in places not wider than a yard, without current, and with no green on its banks. Thus, the first statement I gained from the experience of others—that Kishinev is located on the river Byk—proved to be incorrect. There is no river . . . or even a brook in Kishinev.3
The river Byk does indeed exist. A modest extension of the Dniester River, in the hot months of summer when Urussov first saw it, it would in fact have been reduced to little more than a swamp. Still, the passage haunts because the object of Urussov’s frustration is a guide to Bessarabia, published in Moscow in 1903, written by one Pavel Krushevan, who was soon also to publish—and likely write or cowrite—the first version of the most infamous forgery in modern history, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The image of Urussov, a well-intentioned Russian official quite sympathetic to Jews, hunting on a sweltering summer day for a river described in a book written by one of the world’s most notorious fantasists, provides a bracing entry point for our tour of Kishinev, too.
Photograph of the Byk taken by the author in September 2016.
I construct this book in a series of essay-like chapters. The first chapter explores how Kishinev’s riot would come to serve as the bedrock for so much subsequent knowledge—accurate and inaccurate—about pogroms and their origins and significance. I explore how the term, soon among the best-known Russian words in the world, would garner a new, chilling infamy in Kishinev’s wake. “Pogrom” was now embraced as the most relevant of ways to understand the condition of Russian Jewry.4
I then examine Bessarabia, which was annexed by Russia in the first years of the nineteenth century and still coveted a century later by Romania, whose borders were only a few dozen miles west of Kishinev. It was a poor, mostly illiterate region, rich in agricultural resources but inadequately farmed, where Jews played a visible
role as shop owners and artisans in the cities and towns and as middlemen in the countryside. I also look closely at Kishinev and the place of Jews in its communal and cultural life, and I explain why its Jews were truly shocked by the severity of the 1903 pogrom. Little in the daily rhythms of life there would have predicted that an outbreak of this sort was in the offing.
The next section looks at the pogrom itself through many different eyes. Likely the best-documented event in Russian Jewish history, the sources on it are vast. These include transcripts of victim testimonies, court records of those accused of crimes during the riot, and journalism in Western languages as well as Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. This material offers the opportunity for an hour-by-hour exploration of the pogrom. Kishinev was the first instance where the inner life of Russia’s Jews was laid bare for Western audiences; books about the pogrom were written and published within a few short months of its eruption.
This is followed by a description based on material in Israel and in Ireland, revealing how the pogrom was captured in the two most influential works on it. The first is the Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik’s “In the City of Killing,” which is widely considered the most influential poetic work written in a Jewish language since the Middle Ages. Its laceration of the cowardice of Jewish males during the massacre remains a flashpoint in Israel for politicians, educators, and others. Alongside Bialik, whose five-week investigation of the pogrom yielded what remain the most detailed descriptions of its impact, I examine Michael Davitt, whose book, based on his newspaper reports titled Within the Pale: The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecutions in Russia, set the standard for Western descriptions of Russian Jewish life for the decade to come.
I then analyze the connection between the Kishinev pogrom and the writing of the first version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was published—under another title—by Krushevan shortly afterward, in September 1903. This chapter is based largely on archival material previously in private hands. I explore how this event—understood by Jews and their sympathizers as laying bare the reality of Jewish powerlessness—was seen by Krushevan and those close to him as proof of just the opposite. As they viewed it—and captured in The Protocols, which remains, of course, the most widely cited antisemitic tract in the world—the unprecedented attention lavished on Jews in the pogrom’s aftermath revealed more transparently than ever before their dangerous capacity to manipulate and control. Kishinev, as they saw it, was an ideal launching pad for Jewish designs on world domination, with the city’s local Zionists little less than the Svengalis of such efforts.
Finally I explore the pervasive impact of the pogrom in the United States, which was the epicenter of pro-Kishinev relief campaigns and demonstrations. My focus is on how the pogrom shifted the politics of Jews on the Left, like Emma Goldman—whose rise to prominence was buttressed by her work as the promoter of a highly successful Kishinev-themed play—as well as others who would set in motion the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. The NAACP’s start was energized by efforts to align the Russian pogroms against Jews and the American lynching of blacks as tragedies of comparable importance. This campaign was pioneered by a remarkable now-little-known couple, William English Walling and Anna Strunsky. Both were intimately familiar with Russia: Walling’s book, Russia’s Message, would be the most widely read English-language account about Russian radicalism before the appearance of John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World. Returning from a two-year stint in Russia in 1908, just in time to cover as journalists the Springfield, Illinois, race riot, the Wallings were the first to champion the cause of treating black lynching no less seriously than Russia’s anti-Jewish pogroms. The founding meeting for what would soon emerge as the NAACP took place in January 1909 in their New York City apartment.
Based on research in Tel Aviv, Dublin, Chişinău, Moscow, New York, and elsewhere, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History explores the extraordinary shadow cast by a riot lasting scarcely longer than a day and a half. Indeed, the worst of its violence transpired over some three or four hours on a cluster of intersecting streets that were little more than alleyways. More would soon be known about these streets than about anywhere else in Russia where Jews lived.
Not examined in this book is Kishinev’s impact on the politics of the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund, then the largest Marxist group in Russia. This influence, while undoubtedly significant, proved too difficult to substantiate, given that the Bund’s keen preoccupation with the pogrom was silenced by its insistence on its internationalism. The lingering impact of Kishinev on the formation of the Haganah is also left unexamined; this would be a fascinating story worthy of another book. The various ways in which Kishinev inspired the activity of the Territorialist movement, launched in the pogrom’s wake and breaking from Zionism with its relentless search for anywhere on the globe in which to establish a Jewish national home, has recently received attention in several superb works. The impact of visual evidence—the photographs of the dead, of torn Torah scrolls, and of devastated city streets—on knowledge of Kishinev’s pogrom is a theme discussed, but no doubt deserving greater attention. A brilliant analysis of Kishinev’s impact on the politics of New York City’s Lower East Side left-wing Jews can be found in Jonathan Frankel’s study Prophecy and Politics.5
I dedicate this book to the memory of my UCLA teacher Hans Rogger. His scholarship on the Russian right and late imperial Russia’s preoccupation with Jews remains crucial. All that has been done on these subjects since his death in 2002, including this book, is built on its shoulders. Hans was a man of rare sensitivity and wisdom, a teacher who treated his students as peers, and a historian who understood how achingly difficult it is to try to tell the truth. I sorely miss him.
Pogrom
Alexandrovskaia Street, 1889.
1
Age of Pogroms
The sheer surprise of the Lindbergh nomination had activated an atavistic sense of being undefended that had more to do with Kishinev and the pogroms of 1903 than with New Jersey thirty-seven years later, and as a consequence, they had forgotten about Roosevelt’s appointment to the Supreme Court of Felix Frankfurter and his selection as Treasury secretary of Henry Morgenthau, and about the close presidential adviser, Bernard Baruch.
—PHILIP ROTH, The Plot Against America
“Pogrom”: The word’s origins can be traced to the Russian for “thunder” or “storm.” A dark remnant of the Old World, it retains the capacity to feel as immediate as yesterday’s outrage on morning services in Jerusalem: “The sight of Jews lying dead in a Jerusalem synagogue, their prayer-shawls and holy books drenched in pools of blood, might be drawn from the age of pogroms in Europe.”1
When a bird flies into a Lower East Side apartment in Bernard Malamud’s 1963 short story “The Jewbird,” its first words are, “Gevalt, a pogrom!” Mary McCarthy described the explosive response to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem as a pogrom. In Annie Hall, Woody Allen has Alvy Singer insist that his grandmother would never have had time to knit anything like the tie worn by Annie (Diane Keaton), his non-Jewish lover, because “she was too busy being raped by Cossacks.” The quip is at once alert to its own crudeness and to its capacity to sum up an astonishingly sparse historical repertoire. Explaining why art impresario Bernard Berenson’s family abandoned Vilna (Vilnius today) for Boston in 1865, the author of a recently edited edition of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper’s letters to Berenson writes that it was because they “were fugitives from anti-semitic pogroms”—despite the fact that the first pogrom wave erupted more than fifteen years later and even then, with rare exceptions, far away from Berenson’s native city. Irving Berlin recalled how in 1893 in his birthplace in Mogilev Province—“suddenly one day, the Cossacks rampaged in a pogrom . . . they simply burned it to the ground.” His family fled, smuggling themselves “creepingly from town to town . . . from sea to shining sea, until finally they reached their star: the Statue of Liberty.” Here as els
ewhere, pogroms are shorthand for cataclysm, misery in a dark, abandoned place.2
For a readily accessible way to comprehend the diverse grab bag of such references, see Franz Kafka’s letters in the 1920s to Milena Jesenská; they speak of unease on Prague’s streets as a precursor to pogroms. The 1929 Hebron riot, Kristallnacht in 1938, and the anti-Jewish riots in 1941 Baghdad were similarly described. Arthur Koestler, in his novel of the late 1940s, Thieves in the Night, compares British Mandate officials in prestate Israel to pogromists: “I am a sincere admirer of Jews,” says one of them. “They are the most admirable salesmen of the world, regardless of whether they sell carpets, Marxism, psychoanalysis, or their own pogromed infants.” Pogroms were how Arab attacks against Jews in prestate Israel (and later) were often depicted; curiously enough, this was a source of solace, since such violence could thus be dismissed as artificial—the concoction of manipulative, reactionary Arab authorities.3
Pogroms continued to weigh heavily decades later in the deliberations of the Kahan Commission, which was chaired by the president of the Israeli Supreme Court. In those discussions, Israel’s behavior in 1982 during the Sabra-Shatila massacre in Lebanon was likened to that of malevolent Russian and Polish authorities during pogroms. In 1993 the New York mayoral candidate Rudolph Giuliani would accuse the city’s incumbent mayor, David Dinkins, of the same sins with regard to the Crown Heights riots: “One definition of a pogrom,” declared Giuliani, “is where the state doesn’t do enough to prevent it.” In the sixth season of Showtime’s Homeland, airing in 2017, the Israeli ambassador to the United States fears an Iranian nuclear bomb and asks pointedly, “Should we go back to the ghettos of Asia and Europe and wait for the next pogrom?”4