Pogrom Read online

  Sturdily portable, the term “pogrom,” like none other in the twentieth century, was believed to capture accurately centuries of Jewish vulnerability, the deep well of Jewish misery. And in stark contrast to the Holocaust, pogroms would never—despite their Russian origins—be tethered to a particular time, place, or dictator. In Malamud’s “The Jewbird,” once the bird opens its mouth and utters the word “pogrom,” the response from those in the Lower East Side apartment is, “It’s a talking bird. . . . In Jewish.”5 What else would a talking Jewish bird say if it were able to speak?

  The word’s imprint was a by-product of the widespread, ever-escalating anti-Jewish violence in the last years of the Russian empire and the mayhem following the empire’s collapse. It was then that pogrom entered the world’s lexicon as one of the tiny cluster of Russian words—alongside tsar or vodka—no longer considered foreign. This trend solidified as anti-Jewish attacks crisscrossed Russia amid the 1905–6 constitutional crisis, in which eight hundred were killed (six hundred in Odessa alone). Such massacres were frequently the work of roving bands of Jew-haters, the so-called Black Hundreds, whose commitment to saving Russia from constitutional rule was translated into anti-Jewish brutality. The Yiddish author Lamed Shapiro described a son witnessing his mother’s rape: “Wildly disheveled gray hair. . . . Her teeth tightly clamped together and shut. They had thrown her onto the bed, across from me.”6

  Once the empire finally crumbled in 1917, such attacks spiked amid the anarchy, banditry, famine, and ideological fervor of new, raw Bolshevik Russia. The dimensions of this savagery, involving Ukrainians and White Army Poles as well as Bolsheviks, have yet to be comprehensively calculated, since so much of the slaughter was registered only sporadically. Attacks on Jews now reached fever pitch, with Russia’s Bolshevik leaders seen by their foes as part of a Jewish conspiracy. It seems clear that no fewer than one hundred thousand Jews were murdered in these offhandedly brutal horrors, and at least that many girls and women raped and countless maimed between 1918 and 1920.7

  Although pogroms would come to be seen as no less a fixture of the region than impassable winters or promiscuous drunkenness, until the early twentieth century the term was just one of several used for attacks of all sorts without specific linkage to violence against Jews. “Southern storms” would be how the riots of the early 1880s (largely in Russia’s southern regions) were spoken about; besporiaki, a generic word for “atrocities,” was still more commonplace. In the copiously detailed Correspondence Respecting the Treatment of Jews in Russia, issued in 1882 by the British Parliament on the massacres of the 1880s, atrocities are spoken of as “serious riots” or “disturbances,” with no mention at all of pogroms. (Responsibility for the riots, as described in that document, was placed entirely on the shoulders of Jews because of their allegedly oppressive commercial practices, their control over liquor, their usury, and their habitual radicalism.) When “pogrom” first appeared in newspapers in Europe or the United States—in the early years of the twentieth century—it was typically either defined or placed in italics. Jews were already familiar with it, of course, but it did not yet carry the incomparable burden it would soon take on. In Harold Frederic’s fierce exposé The New Exodus: A Study of Israel in Russia, published in 1892 and based on articles written by the New York Times London correspondent, the word “pogrom” never appears.8

  This would soon change, something that occurred at the very moment when the wider world first took serious notice of the huge Russian Jewish community, then accounting for half the world’s Jewish population. Their migration westward since the 1880s or earlier, their concentration into dense, increasingly squalid urban clusters in New York, London, and elsewhere, their resultant poor hygiene, and their propensity for crime—all these, exaggerated or not, had been noted before, of course. But now, for the first time, the world’s attention turned resolutely to Russian Jewry and the discovery that there was no better way to understand the rhythms of that community than through the prism of pogroms. Synagogue prayer in the United States would begin to introduce hymns honoring a pogrom-ridden Russian Jewry, the first best-selling books about it in Western languages would be devoted to pogroms, and plays depicting the effects of such massacres would inundate the Yiddish- and English-language stages as far away as Australia.9

  True, sympathy gave way in many quarters to mounting concerns in the wake of an unprecedented escalation in immigration, ever-shriller calls for restrictions, literacy tests, or other strategies to stem this deluge. The political radicalism increasingly associated with Jews struck fear or contempt in the hearts of many. This extraordinary visibility, however, was very recent. Until the first years of the twentieth century, Russia’s Jews were seen, if at all, in the West as mostly a dark, unfamiliar continent. “We are amazed,” wrote the literary historian Benjamin Harshav in 1993 in Language at a Time of Revolution, “at how wretched, degenerate, illiterate, or ugly our ancestors looked—only three or four generations ago.” Baedeker guides of the region as late as the first decade of the twentieth century offered no details regarding Jews in cities like Brody, just beyond Russia’s western border, where the vast majority was Jewish, except to say that they were loathed by the gentiles.10

  Jews were clustered mostly in Russia’s western provinces, known in the English-speaking world as the Pale of Settlement and historic Poland, an area that stretched from a few hundred miles west of Moscow to the borders of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Romania. When they were thought of at all in Russia or abroad, it was mostly in terms of their economic proclivities—petty commerce, the making of cheap clothing, trade in liquor or grains—and their distinctive religious practices, which were considered mostly arcane, sometimes suspect. Their diet, language, and clothing, their secrecy despite their obvious volubility, and their many mysteries—perhaps, above all, their purported capacity to resist liquor’s allure—set them apart. They were often thought of as wealthy despite their ubiquitous poverty; they were seen as unnaturally adept at making money while excoriated as unnaturally susceptible to political radicalism. They were loathed for their unwillingness to be absorbed into the fabric of Russian life, though conversion did not necessarily rid them of the taint of Jewish origin. It was often assumed that public figures sympathetic to them had been bribed or otherwise strong-armed. It was commonplace for those so attacked—such as Prime Minister Sergei Witte, and later Rasputin—to be the target of accusations that they were paid off or were engaged in other nefarious activities.11

  Since the mid-nineteenth century, Jews in large numbers had acquired a formal education, with Russia’s cities within the Pale of Settlement and elsewhere packed with university-trained Jewish doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, and notaries. Leon Pinsker, long the head of the Palestinophile movement, based in Odessa, was a beloved doctor and a cholera specialist who was eulogized at his 1891 funeral by more non-Jewish colleagues than by the Jewish nationalists whose organization he ran for nearly a decade. Russian-language books, not those in Yiddish or in Hebrew, were the ones most sought after in the many dozens of small-town libraries set up by Jews in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It was only once Hayyim Nahman Bialik’s brilliant Hebrew poem on the Kishinev pogrom, “In the City of Killing,” was translated into Russian—by Vladimir Jabotinsky, later the founder of right-wing revisionist Zionism—that it captured a widespread devoted following. Jews then emerged among the masters of Russian prose, with Isaac Babel and so many others beginning illustrious literary careers amid the twilight of imperial Russia.12

  A startling example of Jewish integration can be seen in the infamous Mendel Beilis affair, in which a Kiev brick-factory manager was jailed despite no credible evidence, tortured, and eventually put on trial in 1913, charged with having killed a Christian boy for Jewish ritual purposes. The prelude to the trial—Beilis was first jailed in 1911—pitted many of the regime’s most vocal antisemites (who insisted that the whole endeavor was a farce) against a motley crew of fanatics who fa
iled, in the end, to convict Beilis. The accused himself was absurdly miscast: Largely indifferent to Jewish ritual, he had served without complaint in the Russian army, befriended Russian neighbors who testified on his behalf at the trial, and made good friends of gentile prisoners he met in jail. Once declared not guilty (though the jury insisted that a ritual murder had taken place but not at Beilis’s hands), he became something of a local celebrity, his fame so great after his exoneration that tram conductors would as a matter of course call out, “Take number 16 to Beilis.”13

  Nonetheless, even on the cusp of the twentieth century, Jews would continue to be widely viewed as they had been many decades before. Little less resonant than earlier were images comparable to those aired in the privately printed traveler’s book by the Englishman John Moore, A Journey from London to Odessa. In the summer of 1823, on an unnamed diplomatic mission, Moore kept a record of his trip through East Galicia with its “dirty, busy” towns “full of plunderers”—which was his description of Brody. “On looking over my journal, I find the following memorandum: . . . first litter, Jew, or Devil, fleas, etc. etc.” Here and elsewhere: “Their costume, features—movements—all produce a singular effect . . . as I walked out amongst them . . . and observed their grave, yet anxious countenances.” Time and again, he was struck by the uncanny energy of these dark figures: “Several lank Jews, in their black gowns . . . flitting about, making divers energetic appeals to me, and jarring with each other—enforcing their arguments by almost frantic gestures.” Still, no matter how much money Moore offered his wagon driver, the latter refused to travel on the Sabbath. The wagoner’s devotion to family life was no less admirable. His leave-taking outside his “mean habitation” was done without “parade—not acting. The marks of mutual affection were unequivocal.”14 Moore took in synagogue services, which he found hauntingly moving. Still, most Jews were intolerable:

  No sooner had I arrived at [an inn] than a host of Jews entered my apartment, with all sorts of goods for sale. The weather was exceedingly sultry, and the odour of the exhalations from the filthy persons . . . was almost insupportable. I was obliged to call in the aid of the facteur [porter] of my hotel who by persuasions, threats and something approaching to blows succeeded at length in clearing the room.15

  Against this complex backdrop, pogroms would come to be seen as the most transparent of ways in which to describe the condition of Russian Jewry. Proof of the term’s relative obscurity soon before it became commonplace may be seen in a London Times column appearing in December 1903. The piece opens by acknowledging that confusion probably exists as to what “pogrom” means, thus requiring a definition that distinguishes pogroms from mere massacres. It is then explained that pogroms come with the following features—these “well-established and characteristic rules.”16 They begin with rumors, hints that Jews soon will be punished with authorities looking the other way. Such rumors will surface a few months before Easter, with anti-Jewish propaganda circulated in taverns or cheap restaurants. Nearly always stoking the fire are accusations of deplorable Jewish economic practices or their dreadful killing of Christian children for ritual purposes.

  Easter arrives amid this ever-toxic atmosphere, in which the smallest mishap can readily precipitate an explosion. This could be a fistfight between a Jewish carousel owner and a customer, which might lead at first to seemingly aimless mischief, perhaps boys tossing stones at Jewish buildings. Police then arrest a few of them but show little initiative to do much more. Now rioters have the signal they have been waiting for, prompting them to roam freely and go on the attack. Jewish houses are broken into, furniture is smashed, belongings are carried away, and plundered streets are strewn with feathers: “The Jews are very great consumers of poultry, and they carefully keep their feathers.”17 Once the authorities finally intervene, only on the morning of the third day, fear of any reprisal has evaporated, and rape and murder are now commonplace. All this, “from the very first pebble thrown by a small boy to the last murder committed, . . . is absolutely under the control of the Government.” These details—the fight with the carousel owner, the riot starting with the pelting of rocks by children, the feather-strewn streets, the rumors of ritual murder—were all drawn from newspaper reports of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. It was this tragedy that, as the Times column put it, ushered in the start of pogroms as “a national institution—not a massacre in the ordinary sense of the term.”18

  “Before Kristallnacht there was Kishinev,” as the journalist Peter Steinfels observed in 1998 in the New York Times. “A finger of God” is how contemporaries would refer to it; “an earthquake,” in the words of the Israeli historian Anita Shapira. “Kishinev” almost instantly became shorthand for barbarism, for behavior akin to the worst medieval atrocities.19

  No Jewish event of the time would be as extensively documented. None in Russian Jewish life would leave a comparable imprint. The young Joseph Hayyim Brenner, the closest counterpart in Hebrew literature to Fyodor Dostoevsky, wrote in a letter of September 1903: “In the world there is certainly news. Kishinev! If we were to stand and scream all our days and our nights, it would not suffice.” Kishinev managed to push the Dreyfus Affair to the margins, and it dominated the headlines of American newspapers for weeks. The Jewish press would lead with it for months: “We write and write about Kishinev,” opened an editorial in Forverts (the Yiddish Daily Forward) in early May, “we talk and talk about it.”20

  Moreover, it would become the only significant event embraced by all political sectors of the severely fractured Russian Jewish scene. And yet, like so many politicized lessons, these were as often as not the products of half-truths and untruths, of mythologies morphed into certainties, and of forgeries stitched together in the pogrom’s wake. And more than a century later many of these continue still, as we will see, to instruct generations of Jews and others regarding the essential condition of Jewish life in the past and present.

  Pogroms would thus enter the lexicon of Jewish life as little less than a contemporary analogue to Egypt’s biblical plagues, the dark before the most momentous of modern-day Jewish exoduses. This occurred against the backdrop of the certainty—long suspected and finally buttressed with what now appeared to be incontrovertible proof—of government complicity. The knowledge that Russia’s officials fomented these attacks would prove decisive in consolidating long-standing Jewish political inclinations—most pronouncedly the marriage of Jews and the Left. Much else would, to be sure, cement this relationship, including the allure of revolutionary Russia, worldwide depression, and the rise of fascism, but no ingredient proved more formative than the commonplace that Europe’s most conservative empire unleashed hoodlums to beat, rape, and kill Jews.

  Pogroms would provide the stuffing for lessons as diverse as distrust of conservatism, the urgency of radicalism (eventually liberalism, too), the return to Zion, territorialism, and, arguably, the fight for black civil rights. Kishinev would also be built squarely into the history of prestate Israel’s defense forces, and it would inspire the call for assimilation into the democracies of the world so different from autocratic Russia. This was foregrounded most resolutely in Israel Zangwill’s much-celebrated 1908 play, The Melting Pot, which its Anglo-Jewish author insisted was “the biggest Broadway hit—ever.” Its protagonist, a brilliant, tortured violinist unable to rid himself of recollections of Kishinev’s brutality, struggles with whether the best response to these demons is the use of a gun or a violin. Choosing the latter at the play’s end, he muses, “I must get a new string.” Indeed, so must all Jews, as Zangwill’s play teaches, with the New World beckoning and Russia forever damned.21

  Amid a cacophony of outrage, instant relief projects, and protest meetings in more than a dozen countries (with some two hundred such gatherings in the United States), Kishinev’s pogrom became a stand-in for evil, a jarring glimpse of what the new century might well hold in store. “I have never in my experience known of a more immediate or a deeper expression of sympathy,
” President Theodore Roosevelt declared at the time.22

  Chronology explains some of its resonance, the shock that such “medieval-like butchery”—these terms were repeatedly recycled at the time—had intruded on the dawn of the new century. The explosion in worldwide communications networks—in particular, the proliferation in the United States of the William Randolph Hearst press empire, which embraced Kishinev as a cause célèbre while highlighting it with the lavish use of photography—further contributed toward setting it apart. That all the slaughtered could be captured in a single widely reprinted photograph—with the forty-five shrouded Jewish dead stretched out on the floor of the local Jewish hospital—went a considerable distance toward consolidating this as a tragedy unlike any other.23

  And then there was the role of ideology: The pogrom occurred at a moment of singular coherence, of overall popularity for Jewish political movements, including the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund, the Zionists, and many others. Kishinev was the rare—perhaps the only—item on the Jewish communal agenda embraced by all. An indication of how strikingly unusual such a consensus was is the Bund’s first response: that only poor Jews figured among the pogrom’s victims, with the wealthy fleeing the violence by hiding in local hotels or leaving by train for Odessa or Kiev. Crucial to Kishinev’s continued impact was Bialik’s famous pogrom poem, which emerged as a clarion call for Jewish activists of all stripes, Zionist as well as socialist. It would be built squarely into the repertoire of Jewish self-defense in Russia and was no less an inspiration for Jewish socialists than it would be in Palestine for the Haganah, which even today traces its start to the poem’s explosive impact.24

  Kishinev’s impact was felt deeply at the time even in settings where it was left unmentioned. Its influence on the deliberations of the Social Democratic Party’s Second Party Congress, held in July and August 1903 in Brussels and London—the meeting that first consolidated Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevism and its commitment to the rule of a centralized party—was decisive, despite the fact that the pogrom was barely touched on. In Kishinev’s wake, with the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund all the more intent on being recognized by the party as “the sole representative of the Jewish proletariat,” such preoccupations helped Lenin paint it as hopelessly ethnocentric. The charge rendered the Bund in this internationalist setting all but tongue-tied, vigorous in its (ultimately unsuccessful) resistance to Lenin and his allies but hopelessly vulnerable when confronted with such invectives at a moment when Jewish tragedy weighed so heavily. The Bund’s exit from the congress provided Lenin, much as he had hoped, with the majority he sought—and with Kishinev’s pogrom the dark cloud hanging over the single most formative gathering in the history of Russian Marxism.25