(Author: Milton Shain, Vol. 73, No. 3, Chanukah 2018)
Israel’s national poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik captured it in poetry; the Irish republican Michael Davitt drew on reports about it for a book; political activist Emma Goldman professionally engaged with it, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) emerged as a by-product. The ‘it’ referred to is the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 – a seminal event in modern Jewish history and the subject of a new book by Stanford historian, Steven J Zipperstein.
The events of Kishinev were horrific. Yet by the standards of slaughter in later decades of the 20th Century, the number of deaths was minimal: Forty-nine Jews were killed. But the impact was huge. One way or another, the Kishinev pogrom penetrated political agendas across the world. Its horror was employed in political battles in the United States and appropriated to advance ideological initiatives. ‘Pogrom’ entered the lexicon of everyday usage, while Kishinev became a metaphor for barbarism.
On 19 and 20 April 1903 (6 and 7 April on the Julian calendar), this small Bessarabian town was torn apart following an accusation that Jews had killed a Christian child for ritual purposes. Long-standing hatreds had patently existed below the surface as mobs took to the streets exacting revenge on an imaginary foe. Six hundred women were raped, and more than a thousand Jewish-owned houses and stores ransacked or destroyed in an orgy of hatred. Most of the violence was conducted in a mere four hours. Kishinev – hitherto an unknown sleepy backwater in the Russian empire – replaced ‘Dreyfus’ in the headlines of the world’s press. Michael Davitt reported on the senseless and brutal carnage for the Hearst Newspapers, and his brilliant accounts set an acclaimed journalistic standard. Details of the eruption were also collected by Bialik, whose poem ‘In the City of Killing’ retains a contemporary relevance for Jews and Israelis and maintains ‘an authority akin to that of an amalgam of Samuel Coleridge with Walt Whitman and the Book of Job’ (p129).
Zipperstein traces these events, adding new facts and dismissing older inaccuracies. For example, the infamous letter from the Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav Konstantinovich Plehve, pointing to the involvement of the Russian government was a forgery. Instead, Zipperstein places substantial blame on the writings of Pavel Krushevan, arguably the coauthor of the fabricated and infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and certainly the first to publish the original version of the Protocols in his newspaper, Bessarabets. He maintains that without the antisemitic hatred that spewed from that newspaper’s columns, the events of Kishinev would have been unlikely. As an icon of the Russian right, Krushevan therefore bears considerable responsibility.
Zipperstein also explores with great sophistication ways in which the Kishinev pogrom impacted on both representations of the Jew and on Zionist identity. The pogrom had immediate echoes in the United States: Israel Zangwill referred to it in his play, The Melting Pot; activists wishing to end lynching and improve the lot of African-Americans appropriated the tragedy to further their own struggles, which in turn facilitated the creation of NAACP in 1909. Further afield, in Palestine, the Haganah owed its origins to the pogrom. ‘The massacre’, writes Zipperstein, ‘would provide so many Jews as well as non-Jews with a conclusive sense of past and present. It would constitute for many the final nail in the coffin for prospect of Russian Jewish integration, the ultimate verdict on the necessity for emigration to the United States or Palestine, the clearest of all clarion calls for revolution, and the starkest of all proof regarding Jewry’s uncanny worldwide influence. It would be invoked as the grimmest of all modern Jewish humiliations, as evidence of the necessity for Jews to fight resolutely against their foes, and as evidence of a Jewish cunning so supremely manipulative that the benefits accrued from violence far outweighed its harm’ (p.206-07).
Pogrom. Kishinev and the Tilt of History is a carefully researched, richly illustrated and thoughtful contribution to Jewish and general historiography. It demonstrates how an event that shook the Jewish world first and foremost had reverberations far beyond. The Kishinev pogrom not only prefigured the Holocaust but also shaped a global Jewish consciousness.
Milton Shain is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at UCT
