Zipperstein - Pogrom : Kishinev and the tilt of history

Pogrom

Kishinev and the
Tilt of History

STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

Independent Publishers Since 1923

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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 Roosevelts 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

P ogrom: The words 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 yesterdays 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.

When a bird flies into a Lower East Side apartment in

For a readily accessible way to comprehend the diverse grab bag of such references, see Franz Kafkas letters in the 1920s to Milena Jesensk; they speak of unease on Pragues 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.

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, Israels 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 citys 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 doesnt do enough to prevent it. In the sixth season of Showtimes 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?

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 neverdespite their Russian originsbe tethered to a particular time, place, or dictator. In Malamuds The Jewbird, once the bird opens its mouth and utters the word pogrom, the response from those in the Lower East Side apartment is, Its a talking bird.... In Jewish.

The words 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 empires collapse. It was then that pogrom entered the worlds lexicon as one of the tiny cluster of Russian wordsalongside tsar or vodkano longer considered foreign. This trend solidified as anti-Jewish attacks crisscrossed Russia amid the 19056 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 mothers rape: Wildly disheveled gray hair.... Her teeth tightly clamped together and shut. They had thrown her onto the bed, across from me.

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 Russias 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.

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

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 worlds 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 crimeall these, exaggerated or not, had been noted before, of course. But now, for the first time, the worlds 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

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, Russias 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 lookedonly 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 Russias western border, where the vast majority was Jewish, except to say that they were loathed by the gentiles.

Jews were clustered mostly in Russias 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 proclivitiespetty commerce, the making of cheap clothing, trade in liquor or grainsand 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 mysteriesperhaps, above all,