געדענק די בושה: געדענק דער 22טן ניסן

Monty Noam Penkower
THE KISHINEV POGROM OF 1903:
A TURNING POINT IN JEWISH HISTORY

As the church bells of Kishinev pealed on April 19, 1903 (April 6 on the
Julian calendar), marking the noon hour of Easter Sunday, the first
pogrom of the twentieth century began. Initially, young people began
hounding Jews to leave Chuflinskii Square, their cause gradually taken
up by adults in an increasing state of holiday drunkenness. Late that
afternoon, some twenty-five bands, averaging thirty–fifty each, simultaneously
fanned out across the Jewish quarter of Bessarabia’s capital,
teenage boys taking the lead in smashing the windows of houses and
stores. Students and seminarists from the Royal School and the city’s religious
colleges, iron bars and axes in hand, followed the hooligans; aided
by looters, they plundered and demolished property. The local police
made no attempt to interfere, Chief of Secret Police Levendal even
exhorting the gangs on. A few rioters who were taken into custody were
quickly released. Christian homes, differentiated earlier that morning by
large chalked crosses, went unscathed. Passing through the streets in his
carriage, Orthodox bishop Iakov blessed the mostly Moldavian attackers.
The rampaging mobs of laborers and artisans, finding Governor
von Raaben not employing the more than 5,000-man military garrison
against them and seeing many police taking part in the robbery, passed
to murder and massacre during the night. Having just celebrated the
seventh day of Passover, the city’s 50,000 Jews (a third of the population)
now fell prey to barbarism. Four who tried to defend 13 Asia St. on
Monday were killed; a boy’s tongue was cut out while the two year old
was still alive. A group of 150 Jews in the New Bazaar succeeded in driving
away their aggressors until a police officer arrested some of these
defenders and broke up the remaining body. Meyer Weissman, blinded
in one eye from youth, begged for his life with the offer of sixty rubles;
taking this money, the leader of the crowd destroying his small grocery
store gouged out Weissman’s other eye, saying: “You will never again
look upon a Christian child.” Nails were driven through heads; bodies,
hacked in half; bellies, split open and filled with feathers. Women and
girls were raped, and some had their breasts cut off.
188 Monty Noam Penkower
Several policemen and a Jewish member of the fire brigade did
drive off attackers, and some civilians gave Jews shelter, but these
responses proved rare. No Russian or Moldavian clergymen, with one
solitary exception, performed a similar Christian duty. The better
class of the public, the semiofficial St. Petersburgskiye Vedomosti subsequently
reported, “walked calmly along and gazed at these horrible
spectacles with the utmost indifference.” The savagery of the 1,500–
2,000 rioters went on unimpeded until, at 7p.m. on April 20, the
governor received a telegram from Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav
von Plehve to disperse the mob. Within an hour, a large detachment
of troops implemented the order. This, in turn, drove crowds to the
Bender Rogatka, Skulanska Rogatka, and other suburbs, where they
continued their slaughter and violation of Jews until the morning of
April 21, when full martial law came into effect.1
The results were devastating. According to a memorial album
published by Kishinev Jewry that year, the recorded names consisted
of thirty-four males (two babies among them) and seven females
(including a twelve year old) who died during the pogrom itself, followed
by another eight who succumbed to their wounds. This number
surpassed the total killed in all of the pogroms of 1881. The volume
also gave the figure of 495 wounded, ninety-five of them seriously.
The number of homeless reached 2,000, with 2.5 million rubles in
personal property damage. And even after the pogrom was quashed,
a visiting journalist who arrived soon thereafter was particularly
impressed that there appeared to be “neither regret nor remorse”
among the Gentile citizenry. Almost each evening during his stay, large
numbers gathered in the Royal Gardens to enjoy the music of the
Dragoon Band, which performed Polish polkas, as well as the Hungarian
Chardash and Russian marches, in faultless fashion.2
Yet, until a few years earlier, no clouds foreshadowing such carnage
darkened Kishinev’s horizon. Coming under Russian rule in
1818, the city had developed as a commercial and industrial center,
attracting Jews from other parts of the vast Romanov Empire. Most
of the factories, along with large commercial houses and printing
presses, were owned by Jews, and the growing number of Jewish poor
received support from a united charitable organization founded by
their coreligionists in 1898. The fertile countryside witnessed good
relations between Jews and their neighbors (primarily Moldavian) to
the extent that when pogroms swept across the whole of southern
Russia during 1881–1883, so frequent and furious that the London
Times called them “a scandal to civilization,” the Bessarabian peasants
refused to take part. In the early 1890s, a prominent police officer
harassed the Jews by blackmail, closed the Great Synagogue, and
rigorously applied the government’s anti-Semitic May Laws of 1882,
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 189
but the Jewish kehilla succeeded in having him removed to another
district.3
The arrival of Moldavian nationalist Pavolachi Krushevan on the
scene in 1894 dramatically altered this harmonious tableau. Taking
control of the region’s only daily newspaper, Bessarbets, he began inciting
the population through a relentless stream of articles bearing titles
like “Death to the Jews!”, “Down with the Disseminators of Socialism!”,
and “Crusade against the Hated Race!” Vice-Governor Ustrugov, in his
capacity as official press censor, and Levendal encouraged Krushevan’s
campaign against Jews, especially those holding municipal office. In
1902, Plehve offered Krushevan a substantial subsidy to run a similar
newspaper in St. Petersburg named Znamya, which he began publishing
in the czarist capital. That same year, Krushevan attempted
during Easter time to link Jews to the death of a Christian youth,
resorting to the charge of ritual murder. He failed at this libel, an
accusation dating from the Middle Ages stating that Jews killed Christians
to take blood for ritual ceremonies, only because the guilty individual
was quickly identified.4
The following year, the murder of a Christian boy in early February
at Dubossary, south of Kishinev, coupled with the death of a girl in a
Kishinev hospital, enabled Krushevan to renew his effort. Shortly
after government emissaries met secretly with Krushevan and provincial
officials, a broadside printed on the Bessarbets press informed the
city’s inhabitants that a recent imperial ukase permitted Christians “to
execute bloody justice [krawawaja rasprawa] on the Jews during the
three holy days of Easter.” Most novel, the crusading anti-Semitic editor
had his confederates distribute copies of “The Rabbis’ Speech,” a
pamphlet first published in St. Petersburg in 1872, in which twelve
Jewish elders were depicted meeting once a year in a Prague cemetery
in their resolve to conquer the world. Although later evidence would
prove that an uncle had murdered the boy and that the girl had committed
suicide, Bessarbets rushed to call for vengeance against the Jews
of Kishinev. A few days before April 19, 1903, a sizable group of
armed Albanians and some Moldavians arrived there by train.5
With open discussion in the city of an approaching pogrom, the
chief rabbi implored Bishop Iakov to announce that the Church had
long opposed the blood libel charge. The metropolitan replied that he
thought some Jews did practice ritual murder, and he refused to
intervene. On April 17, a delegation of Jewish leaders warned Raaben
that Krushevan’s incitement would lead to murder. The governor
assured his visitors that all necessary steps had been taken to maintain
order. In fact, he did nothing. Chief of Police Tchemzenkov, asked to
curb Bessarbets’s activities, replied that it would “serve the Jews right.”6
And the pogrom came.
190 Monty Noam Penkower
Jewish community elders, led by Jacob Bernstein-Kohan, managed
to send cables abroad about the slaughter, requested succor, and
pressed for an official investigation. The Yiddish press of New York
City’s Lower East Side, home to 500,000 East European Jews, carried
full accounts every day starting April 27. Two days later, the executive
boards of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the
Independent Order of B’nai Brith informed U.S. Secretary of State
John Hay of their wish to send supplies and ascertain the facts.
St. Petersburg at first denied the massacre but, in the face of overwhelming
evidence from the London Standard and other reports, had
its ambassador in Washington, D.C., blame the victims by announcing
that “the Jews ruin the peasants, with the result that conflicts occur.”7
On May 18, the London Times published a letter that Plehve wrote
to the governor twelve days before the pogrom began, advising that
he take no strong action. The Russian government declared the document
a forgery; Plehve publicly asserted that the trouble had begun
after a Jewish carousel owner hit a Christian woman: the Jews countered
with weapons and killed one Gentile, sparking popular passion
against the Jews. (A later pretrial examination revealed the interior
minister’s explanation to be bogus.) Although no conclusive proof
surfaced as to the letter’s authenticity, Plehve’s past record of encouraging
anti-Semitic activity and his slow response to the escalating
pogrom presented, as one historian has concluded, “a strong case for
negligent homicide.”8
Some of Russia’s intelligentsia denounced what Tolstoi, who had
been silent about the pogroms of 1881–1883, termed the “horrible
events in Kishinev.” While condemning the criminals responsible and
the government that, with its clergy and “bandit horde” of officials,
“keeps the people in a state of ignorance and fanaticism,” he advised
the Jews to adopt “virtuous living.” A collection of essays, Sbornik, as a
fund-raiser for the victims was edited by Maxim Gorki, who railed
against the killers and instigators and called on men of conscience to
help Russia’s Jews. Vladimir Korolenko, the liberal author who had
already protested his countrymen’s anti-Semitism since the 1880s,
described in harrowing detail what he saw and heard in the city two
months after the butchery in “House No. 13” on Asia St., which could
not yet hide “a huge crimson patch mixed with bits of glass, mortar,
bricks, and feathers.” These responses circulated widely underground
in Russia, as well as abroad.9
Far more worrisome to the Romanov government was the outcry
that swelled in major Western countries. Large protest meetings were
held in Paris and London; Denmark, Italy, and Belgium sponsored
relief campaigns. The dispatches for William Randolph Hearst’s New
York American of the famous Irish nationalist Michael Davitt, who
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 191
reached Kishinev in mid-May, had a marked effect on molding public
opinion. Responding to a call from the Alliance Israelite Universelle,
German-born Jewish magnates Oscar Straus, Jacob Schiff, and Cyrus
L. Sulzberger in New York raised a relief fund of $100,000 by June, a
quarter of the total sum collected worldwide. Across the United States,
seventy-seven public meetings were held, with ex-president Grover
Cleveland addressing a Carnegie Hall rally against the “wholesale
murder” of defenseless human beings “who have been tacitly, if not
expressly, assured of safety, under the protection of a professedly civilized
government.”10
On May 23, Plehve categorically refused a Jewish delegation’s
request that he condemn the pogrom and seriously revise the government’s
anti-Jewish legislation, but the West’s indignation fueled some
change. The Russian autocracy replaced Raaban at the month’s end
with the fair-minded Prince Serge D. Urussov. The vice-governor
found himself shifted to Tiflis (which would witness a massacre against
Armenians a half year later), whereas the police chief was dismissed
outright. An attempt to renew disorder near Kishinev’s marketplace
was promptly scotched by the military garrison, which arrested forty
instigators. The interior minister also sent the director of the police
department to investigate the pogrom. And, in announcing that trials
of the rioters would commence, Minister Murawyev declared that
“justice will take its course.”11
These steps did not halt a B’nai Brith delegation from meeting
with Secretary Hay and President Theodore Roosevelt on June 15,
armed with a protest for dispatch to Czar Nicholas II. Taking note
that “race and religious prejudice” had stirred riots that the local
Kishinev authorities failed to suppress, exciting “horror and reprobation
throughout the world,” the petitioners advised that “millions of
Russian subjects” were in “constant dread of fresh outbreaks.” Hay
deplored the “cruel outrages” inflicted against the Bessarabian Jews but
urged caution. Roosevelt, on the other hand, announced for the record
that he had never known of “a more immediate or a deeper expression
of sympathy for the victims of horror over the appalling calamity
that has occurred.” Also eager to reprimand Russia because of her
machinations in Manchuria, the chief executive suggested in mid-July
that the petition be sent to the American chargé at St. Petersburg, who
would ask whether the document would be accepted. Two days later,
Hay heard that Russia would neither receive nor consider the petition.
The original was then circulated throughout the United States, garnering
nearly 13,000 signatures, and ultimately ended up as a bound
volume in the archives of the State Department.12
Theodor Herzl, leader of the World Zionist Organization, could
not do with petitions. Having wired the Kishinev Jewish community of
192 Monty Noam Penkower
his shock at this “great national tragedy,” the movement’s herald felt
compelled to seek an answer to Kishinev with a significant overture
from Plehve. Personal efforts to secure a charter from the Ottoman
Empire’s sultan for mass Jewish settlement in Palestine had achieved
nothing, and Great Britain just retreated from an offer for large
refuge in the Sinai Peninsula’s El-Arish. One month after the pogrom,
Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain repeated to Herzl’s representative
the proposal of a colony in East Africa holding at least one million
Jews, citing celebrated author Israel Zangwill’s public embrace of this
center as “an admirable beginning” in light of Russian Jewry’s calamity.
But as Plehve held the key to any wide-scale exit, Herzl sought a
meeting by conveying to him that “despair is beginning to take hold of
the Jews of Russia,” with the youth “drawn to the ranks of revolution.”
Indeed, on June 24, fearing that Zionism had directed itself toward
“strengthening the Jewish national idea” and urging “the organization
of Jews in closed societies,” the interior minister ordered all its meetings
and collections prohibited. Then, hearing from an intimate contact
that Herzl had “a plan for organized emigration without re-entry,”
Plehve finally agreed to accord the Zionist an interview.13
Fully conscious, as he had earlier written an American statesman,
of the “seven million outlawed human beings who have again begun
to tremble!” Herzl prepared at the beginning of August 1903 for perhaps
his most decisive journey.14 Physically ailing and anxious over
the mounting restrictions that confronted his acolytes in Russia, the
forty-three-year-old lawyer departed Vienna for his first trip to the
heartland of world Jewry. Perhaps the czarist regime, if persuaded
that the Zionist objective of mass migration could aid in checking radicalism’s
advance, might help convince Constantinople to grant the
elusive charter. Ahead was an arduous trip to St. Petersburg and a
bureaucracy rife with Judeophobes, none more influential than Plehve
himself.
II
For the majority of Russia’s Jews, Kishinev represented yet another
episode in their people’s historic misfortune. Yiddish poet Shimon
Frug’s very popular “Hut Rahmones,” printed on the front page of
St. Petersburg’s daily Fraynd in April, reflected the common perception
about “streams of blood and rivers of tears” shed across the ages and concluded:
“Have pity! Give shrouds for the dead and for the living—
bread.” Other poets recalled past martyrologies, such as David Frishman’s
“Daniel in the Lion’s Den,” with its last Hebrew lines: “Should you leap
on me, tear me / content would I die / Knowing that at least / They
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 193
were the beasts of the forest that did it.” A miscellany entitled Hilf
(Help) by Warsaw’s Yidishe Folkstaytung, seeking funds and support
within Russian society, carried stories by Shalom Aleichem (Shalom
Rabinovitz) and Mendele Moher Seforim (Shalom Yankov Abrahmovitz)
that offered slight comfort to readers. Three parables by Tolstoi and
a Korolenko sentimental offering for this collection contributed in
like vein.15
Not so the Jewish Socialist Bund of Russia and Poland, an anti-
Zionist and anti-Orthodox organization first created in 1897, which
asserted that only the overthrow of capitalism, a system fostering class
conflict and ethnic hostility, would end dictatorial czardom. The hated
regime, it averred, employed anti-Semitism as a tool against the revolutionary
spirit that was sweeping the empire. The Bund’s April manifesto
decried the consolational response of fellow Jewish writers,
particularly Frug’s standard lines: “How weak is our hand to do battle,
how great and heavy is our woe.” It called for answering “violence
with violence,” rather than submissively awaiting salvation from God,
friends, government, or other quarters. Ignoring the fact that workers
and the educated class had supported the pogrom, the Bund concluded
with a cry for “international proletarian solidarity.”16
Some non-Marxist Jewish youngsters, assuming, as did the Bund,
that the Kishinev Jews had meekly reacted to the mob, also rushed to
call for self-defense against future attack. Socialist-Zionist ideologue
Nahum Syrkin wrote an article in Yiddish urging fellow Jews to go out
to the street with weapons in hand. Poalei Zion activist Michael Helpern,
under the rallying cry “Remember the shame!”, organized Jewish fighting
groups in Vilna and other towns. In Kiev, nineteen-year-old Pinhas
Dashevsky, with two other left-wing Zionist student friends, authored
a letter calling for resistance. Not long thereafter, Dashevsky traveled
to St. Petersburg with the intention of killing Krushevan in revenge
for the pogrom. The stab wound on the instigator’s neck was so minor
that Krushevan returned home, refusing to receive treatment from a
Jewish pharmacy nearby. In his trial, Dashevsky claimed that his people’s
national honor was at stake. Behind closed doors, the court handed
down a sentence of hard labor in prison. Of the five-year term,
Dashevsky served two for an act that electrified his contemporaries.17
When the first news of the pogrom reached Odessa, Vladimir
Jabotinsky, then a precocious journalist, was delivering a lecture on
Leo Pinsker’s Autoemancipation! (1882) before the local Jewish literary
society. Earlier, hearing rumors of an impending pogrom in Kishinev,
Jabotinsky and some other youngsters had gathered pistols and
printed forms declaring the legality of self-defense. The report to the
club now by several survivors dramatically corroborated his reassertion
of that classic treatise’s response to the pogroms of twenty years earlier,
194 Monty Noam Penkower
Pinsker having called for an immediate territorial solution to aid the
powerless Jewish people. While Jabotinsky would set out to distribute
funds and clothing in Kishinev, the society’s senior members agreed on
the date for a meeting to formulate their own response to the tragedy.18
None of the shocked group appeared as agitated as Ahad Ha’am
(Asher Ginsberg), whose advocacy of cultural Zionism had long found
him at sharp odds with Herzl’s emphasis on political statehood. “The
killing in Kishinev has completely filled my heart and I cannot think
of anything else,” he wrote to Joseph Klausner, a protégé and his successor
as editor of haShiloah in Warsaw. The Jewish delegations seeking
help from St. Petersburg were “slaves,” Ahad Ha’am informed
another correspondent, “defiled by persecution that reinforces their
self-contempt.” If there were still “men among us,” he went on, “they
must come together and raise a new flag, the flag of inner freedom,
the flag of personal honor.”19 Understandably, the distinguished circle
asked this gifted essayist to draft a public manifesto in Hebrew that
each would endorse.
Although Ahad Ha’am’s proclamation began by recalling the
deadly pogroms carried out under Ukrainian leaders Chmielnicki
(1648) and Gonta (1768), it stressed that the current oppressive government
laws convince “the rabble that a Jew is not human . . . and his
blood is unaccounted for.” Local officials side with their countrymen;
judges are not immune from “the hatred and contempt that they feel
toward Jews.” Then came the crux of his indictment: “It is a disgrace
for five million human souls to unload themselves on others, to stretch
their necks to slaughter and cry for help, without as much as attempting
to defend their own property, honor and lives.” Rather than take
the traditional recourse to tears and supplications, Jews had to realize
that “only the one who can defend his honor is honored by others.” A
permanent organization in all communities was needed to stand
guard against the enemy, and shouldn’t the regime permit us “the
natural right of every living creature to defend itself inasmuch as it is
able?” A general assembly must be convened to have the main Jewish
communities in the land consider other weighty issues, such as giving
order to an emigration that inevitably would increase more than ever in
the foreseeable future. Thus wrote Ahad Ha’am, whose name was joined
by historian Simon Dubnow, writer Ben-Ami (Hayim Rabinovich, who
had organized a Jewish student self-defense unit in that city in 1881),
editor Yehoshua Ravnitski, and the young poet Hayim Nahman Bialik.20
As it turned out, the proclamation was issued two weeks later
under the auspices of a nonexistent Agudat Sofrim Ivrim (Hebrew
Writers’ League). The decision, made while Ahad Ha’am was on a
business trip for the Wissotsky tea firm, infuriated him. As he wrote to
Ravnitski from Rostov-on-the-Don in June, the group had no right to
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 195
do so without consulting him first. In his view, the anonymity of the
composers destroyed whatever value the circular might have had. His
less uncompromising colleagues, fearing that a signed call for selfdefense
would provoke the regime further against the empire’s Jews,
opted to send the manifesto that same month to about 100 communities
in the (unlikely) hope that it would elude police surveillance.21
For his part, Dubnow penned an essay the following month, later
to appear as the ninth letter of his Essays on Old and New Judaism. In “A
Historic Moment: The Question of Emigration,” the generation’s preeminent
Jewish historian noted that the new pogroms had engraved
the watchword of self-help in flaming letters on the Jewish nation. The
partial transfer of Jewry’s greatest center from Eastern Europe to
North America he realized to be a “living and permanent fact”—
indeed, “the most important event in contemporary Jewish history.”
Accordingly, Dubnow called for a central committee to oversee the
shift in dense masses of this Russian diaspora to uncrowded population
areas, even while Jewry sought to improve economic conditions
and civic rights in the old centers of Europe. To these ends, he argued,
a general Jewish congress had to be convened in the near future. He
concluded with the prayer that all who strove for the preservation and
revival of the Jewish people would unite “over the fresh blood of our
new national martyrs!”22
Dubnow’s Odessa colleagues had also decided to gather as much
data as possible about the pogrom, to be brought both as evidence in the
Russian trials of the killers and before the bar of history. Disseminated
abroad, this information might exert pressure on St. Petersburg to
check its anti-Semitic legislation and could also raise relief funds in the
West. Certainly aware that Rav Elhanan Spektor of Kovno had undertaken
a pioneering effort in similar vein to alert the world successfully to
the pogroms of 1881, Dubnow pressed for a thorough collection of facts.
Photographs had to be taken, and statistics, amassed; the eyewitness testimony
of survivors and of Gentiles, written down in detail. A series of
topics had to be addressed, including the extent of help received from
non-Jews, the exact damage done, if Jews had defended themselves,
and the identity of those responsible. To undertake this mission on
behalf of the Kishinev Historical Commission, which he headed,
Dubnow suggested the most junior of their circle, Bialik.23
It was an inspired choice, indeed. Bialik was hailed by Klausner as
“the poet of the national renaissance” when his inaugural volume of
Hebrew poems appeared in 1901, and his first published poem, “El
haTsipor” (1892), had contrasted the tears and sighs of Exile with the
hope and joy of Zion. He was deeply influenced by Ahad Ha’am’s effort
to replace Jewry’s fading religious loyalties with a philosophically
oriented humanist rationale for its existence, and Bialik’s “Al Saf Bet
196 Monty Noam Penkower
haMedrash” and “haMatmid” reflected the ex-Volozhin yeshiva student’s
anguished sense that only a spark remained of the sacred Torah
fire of old. With traditionalist society personally deemed melancholy
and moribund, he metamorphosed the builders of Eretz Israel into
priests and Temple builders (“Birkat Am”) and angrily reproached
Jewish apathy to the rising Zionist movement (“Akhen Hatsir haAm”)
in his first self-styled “Poem of Wrath.” Despairing of contemporary
Jewish life (“Al Levavkhem haShamem”), Bialik recalled the legend
(“Metei Midbar”) that the generation of the exodus from Egypt awakens
periodically to utter defiance against the Divine decree consigning
them to a state of living death and suggested the urgent need to fight
for a people’s redemption.24 Not surprisingly, the thirty year old
accepted Dubnow’s summons without hesitation.
On the eve of his departure for Kishinev, Bialik penned an initial
reaction to the pogrom, “Al haShehita.” The original title of “Upon the
Slaughter,” later changed to “A Plea for Mercy” (“Bakashat Rahamim”)
in order to pass state censorship for publication in haShiloah, implied
that the defenseless victim pronounced on himself the traditional
blessing uttered by the ritual slaughterer before slitting an animal’s
throat. Boldly assuming the prophetic voice, the poet’s raging twentyeight
lines expect nothing from Divine justice. Mercy’s availability in
heaven is doubtful, and retribution on earth, futile: “Vengeance for
the blood of little children / The devil has not framed.” Rather, the
author ends his second Poem of Wrath with a curse that “to the gloomy
depths the blood will worm its way / Devour in darkness and grow upon
the earth’s foundations.”25
What Bialik saw in Kishinev, he told Bernstein-Kohan years later,
almost drove him mad. Aided by a local Hebrew teacher, Pesah
Auerbakh, he investigated the pogrom in painstaking detail. For more
than a month, he collected documents, took photographs of the dead
and of desecrated Torah scrolls, and got people who suffered to talk
to him. Working in a state of mounting internal tension, as recalled by
Yisrael Berman, a youth who escorted him about, the poet filled up
four large notebooks of almost 200 pages. Certain that the volume
projected by the Historical Commission would greatly help the victims,
Bialik then retired to his father-in-law’s home in the Kiev District
to prepare the manuscript. According to Dubnow’s exacting instructions
that July, he was to draw a picture of the entire event up to the
present and send the documents as pieces justificatives for subsequent
publication by the commission. A committee centered in St. Petersburg
would prepare the final book, along with an introduction to place the
massacre in historical context.26
Instead, Bialik sat down to compose the long narrative poem for
which he is best remembered today, “b’Ir haHareiga” (“In the City of
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 197
Slaughter”). Mastering the Hebrew language in all its layers, from the
biblical, to the Talmudic, to the modern, this anti-epic surveyed the
ruins in gruesome scene after scene. The indifference of nature pains
the prophet-author’s soul first: “And calmly like today and yesterday, /
The sun will rise tomorrow in the East / Its splendor not diminish in
the least.” Far more arresting is his acerbic description of the cowardly
descendants of the Maccabees (“It was the flight of mice they fled, /
The scurrying of roaches was their flight; / They died like dogs, and
they were dead!”), who viewed from hiding the agonies of their loved
ones and did not resist, commit suicide, or go insane from anguish.
Husbands rushed off to the rabbi to ask whether they could sleep with
ravaged wives. Displaying their wounds, survivors begged for charity,
as of old, instead of rebelling against their fate.
Astonishingly, it becomes clear that God Himself is the speaker of
the poem. Confessing that “I have fallen from My high estate,” the
Almighty intones: “Your dead were vainly dead; and neither I nor you /
Know why you died or wherefore, for whom, nor by what laws; / Your
deaths are without reason; your lives are without cause.” The terrible
question arises: “For great is the anguish, great the shame on the brow; /
But which of these is greater?—son of man, say thou!” Ultimately, He
calls on the prophet to “demand the retribution for the shamed / of all
the centuries and every age! / Let fists be flung like stone / against the
heavens and the heavenly Throne!” Devoid of the hope and comfort
offered hitherto by Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and other predecessors, the contemporary
prophet can only end his scroll of agony by fleeing into the
wilderness, stormy winds swallowing up his cry of rage.27
This anti-epic transformed Kishinev, to use David Roskies’s
phrase, “into a crucible of heaven and earth.” God has abdicated His
throne, and His Chosen People remain equally passive and powerless.
The enemy consigned here almost to oblivion, Bialik chose, as well, to
make no mention of the evidence about the sporadic Jewish self-defense
that his own notebooks documented. For the sake of a “higher truth,”
the poet’s deliberate effort to shock informed Kishinev with iconographic
import, implying to his readers that the Jewish archetypal
responses of mourning and awaiting Divine retribution had to be
radically altered in the face of recurrent violence. A censor’s cut of
imagined subversive lines and a change of title to “The Oracle at
Nemirov,” allowing for publication in St. Petersburg’s haZeman at the
year’s end, hardly fooled readers. If anything, the new title resonated
strongly, linking the pogrom with the Chmielnicki massacre in June
1648 of some 6,000 Jews in Nemirov and, in particular, with the perfidy
of Gentile rulers who, then as now, conspired with the killers.28
“In the City of Slaughter” drew immediate praise. “You have
attained the uppermost peak of Hebrew poetry,” a greatly agitated
198 Monty Noam Penkower
Klausner wrote Bialik, “and perhaps of poetry in general.” Yaakov
Mazeh, the state-appointed rabbi of Moscow, promptly announced
that this “vision” should replace the traditional lamentations said in
synagogues on the anniversary of the Nemirov pogrom. Jabotinsky
observed that a poem of such quality provided the best reason to learn
Hebrew, which he followed up with lessons from his former teacher
Ravnitski while writing a preface in poem form to his own Russian
translation, an incitement to armed rebellion. To Joseph Hayim
Brenner, soon to be the honest, skeptical voice of the Second Aliya to
Palestine (1904–1914), this and Bialik’s two earlier Poems of Wrath
signaled an encouraging “sign of renaissance.”29
The Hebrew press did not pay the poem much attention at first,
perhaps out of fear of censorship or preoccupation with other events
soon to crowd the newspaper columns. Not so Russian Jewish youngsters,
whose grasp of its pathbreaking significance was eloquently
remembered by Yisrael Berman: “Each and every word was like a
skewer of white hot iron, each and every line a consuming fire. . . .
The chisel of his language had broken open the Jew’s closed, sorrowing
heart, injecting it with an ancient spirit of heroism and energy.”
Jabotinsky declaiming the poem in Russian to Zionist gatherings,
recalled a future president of Israel, engraved the “awful words” on
hearts forever. “B’Ir haHareiga,” especially after the author himself
provided a Yiddish translation to reach the masses, became a new
generation’s rallying cry for action.30 Before long, Kishinev as modern
symbol of national shame—created pitilessly by Bialik—would be
countered with mounting agitation for Jewish self-defense.
III
While Bialik was drafting his singular elegy, Herzl brought his own
case for reasoned diplomacy to Plehve. In their first meeting, on
August 8, this included a request for intervention with the sultan in
order to secure a charter for colonization in Palestine; financial aid for
large emigration, with money raised from Jewish funds and taxes; and
facilitation of Russian Zionist organizational work. Agreeing to all
three points without hesitation, the Russian minister asked for a
summary and an outline of what his guest intended to say at the forthcoming
Zionist Congress. On August 14, Plehve gave Herzl a letter,
approved by Nicholas II, stating that the Zionists could count on the
government’s “moral and material assistance with respect to the measures
taken by the movement which would lead to the diminution of
the Jewish population in Russia.” This pledge, as well as intervention
with Constantinople and a possible audience for Herzl with the czar,
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 199
came with a barely veiled warning: all rested on what happened at the
congress. “Thus everything depends upon our people committing no
stupidities,” confided the Zionist chief to his diary.31
“We must give an answer to Kishineff,” Herzl had written associate
Max Nordau in July, and the offer of Uganda in East Africa “is the
only one. . . . We must, in a word, play the politics of the hour.” Great
Britain’s official proposal and Plehve’s formal communication, the
latter given apparent value by the tumultuous reception that “sorely
oppressed” Jews in Vilna accorded Herzl as he traveled westward
from St. Petersburg, he brought before the Sixth Zionist Congress on
August 22. His opening speech, consequently, included this hortatory
appeal: “Kishinev exists wherever Jews undergo bodily or spiritual
torture, wherever their self-respect is injured and their property
despoiled because they are Jews. Let us save those who can still be
saved!” The East Africa project (actually a district east of the Mau Mau
escarpment in what is today Kenya) Herzl presented as “only an auxiliary
colonization—but, be it noted, on a national and state foundation.”
Palestine, he declared, remained the unchanged goal.32
The 596 delegates gathered in Basle converted the congress
debate into a question of principle—Palestine or Uganda? Nordau
defended the British offer as “ein Nachtasyl,” a temporary night shelter
in which hundreds of thousands of hard-pressed Jews would educate
themselves and the world to the idea that “we Jews are a people
capable, willing and ready to take upon ourselves all those tasks which
characterize an honorable and independent people.” Various federations
(led by the German), supported by a majority of the Mizrahi
religious Zionists, Socialists like Syrkin, and individual Russians close
to Herzl, endorsed his request for a commission to investigate
Uganda’s settlement potential. The Russian representatives, however,
among them those from Kishinev, were furious that he had met the
hated Plehve and remained unalterably opposed to any negotiation
other than for Palestine. Following the 295–177 vote in favor of the
commission, the “negatives” walked out of the hall, some weeping on
the floor as if in the mourning rites of Tisha b’Av. A temporary
compromise was reached with these self-styled “Zionists of Zion,” but
Herzl had gained a Pyrrhic victory. On August 31, physically and spiritually
exhausted, and keenly aware of the decisive split in the movement,
he informed friends Nordau, Zangwill, and Joseph Cowen that
by the Seventh Zionist Congress, “if I am still alive,” “I shall have
Palestine, or else I shall have recognized the complete futility of all
further effort in that direction.”33
Even as the despairing man spoke, his anxiety about the ongoing
threat to Russian Jewry’s existence received immediate corroboration
in Gomel (Homel), the scene of the next major pogrom. The familiar
200 Monty Noam Penkower
opening signal “Beat the Yids!” (“Bei zhidov!”) was heard on August
29; looting and pogrom ensued for four days against the city’s 20,000
Jews, then half of the population. This time, however, lightly armed
Bundists and left-wing Poalei Zion groups organized to meet the
assaults. Police and troops punished the defenders, whose robust
effort greatly minimized property losses and kept the number of
Jewish victims down to a dozen (alongside eight Christian rioters).
Aware of this activist shift in mood, the governor of Mogilev Province
lost little time in publicly blaming the Jews. Thirty-six were brought to
trial, together with some pogromists, and the czar received an official
report about the Jews’ “aggressive and insubordinate behavior.”34
The Kishinev and Gomel pogroms, with others in Smiela, Rovno,
and Sosnowiec that same year, increasingly reinforced Jewish alienation
from the Russian state—and justifiably so. The autocracy, which
did not discourage such assaults and blamed the victims, implicitly
abandoned its old distinction between “useful” and “useless” Jews.
The unequivocally anti-Semitic Nicholas II turned down any cabinet
recommendation for abolishing Jewish disabilities, including higher
education and living in the restrictive Pale of Settlement, and
informed his minister of war that the Jews (vulgarly referred to invariably
as zhidy) deserved the “lesson” of Kishinev because of their revolutionary
activities. Urussov’s candid memoirs speak of “a malevolent
attitude toward the Jews” that was manifested in the highest court
circles after Kishinev. No longer limited to the governor-general of
Moscow, Raaben’s successor reminisced, this hostile feeling was also
entertained by the czar’s immediate family. All efforts to induce the
latter to condemn the Kishinev pogrom, or even to give vent to some
sympathy by granting the sufferers material aid, “met with complete
failure.”35
Plehve soon dismissed the idea of persuading Constantinople to
let Jews enter Palestine, considering political Zionism a “chimera” in light
of strong Turkish opposition. He still wished to encourage Zionist
ideas in Russia, he informed Anglo-Jewish publicist Lucien Wolf that
October, because such involvement would make Jews less receptive to
Socialist influence. He “fully appreciated the gravity of the Jewish
question,” the interior minister went on, the difficulty being much
greater with the lower class of Jews because of their poverty and lack
of Russian education. Before treating the question of education, means
had to be found for them to earn a living. Jews could not be permitted
to live outside of the Pale, Plehve asserted, and he was considering
expanding the areas where they could reside.36
The trial of the Kishinev rioters made government intentions
obvious. Plehve insisted on closed doors, lest the truth be disclosed.
The president of the court ruled out any discussion of prepogrom
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 201
incitement and preparations and, to minimize the importance of the
trial, decided that it should be conducted as one involving twenty-two
separate cases. No officials stood charged. Government attorneys who
handled the prosecution in good faith were hampered at every turn;
almost all resigned. After this, the examination of the numerous
Jewish witnesses became a mere farce. The few convictions handed
down were quite nominal, at most a few years at hard labor. Claims
for compensation were rejected: Jews were told that their losses had
been met many times over in relief contributions from Russia and
especially the West.37
Krushevan, the prime instigator who never came to trial, printed
a shortened version of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in his
newspaper Znamya from August 26 to September 7. Thus, the public
first encountered the most famous and infamous source of modern
anti-Semitism. In January 1904, Krushevan published the “rabbis’
speech,” purportedly about Jewish designs for world conquest, in the
same newspaper without revealing who gave him the manuscript. The
same version but no longer truncated would later appear in the form
of a booklet that was likely edited by another Bessarabian, Krushevan’s
close associate G. V. Butmi. Receiving the approval of the St. Petersburg
Censorship Committee, it was published on December 9, 1905. Butmi
and Krushevan also helped in building up the radical monarchist
Union of Russian People and its terrorist arm, the “Black Hundreds,”
whose insignia the czar wore proudly on his chest. A different edition
appeared by the mystic Sergei Nilus, one of the imperial court’s favorites.
A somewhat revised and enlarged edition of Nilus’s work in 1917
would become “a force in world history,” but it was Krushevan, with
government sanction, who had first published the “Protocols” and its
demonological view of Jews and Judaism.38
Kishinev set certain patterns, as well, for the pogroms that
erupted across Russia during the next three years. Again and again,
Jews fell prey to effective anti-Semitic press agitation, local official
encouragement, police support, limited action taken against pogromshchiki,
and a central government taking the role of bystander, all the
while accusing the Jews of being responsible. In total, twenty-five
localized pogroms followed the Kishinev example. From September
until December 1904, reservists disgruntled by the country’s unpopular
and failing war against Japan, and encouraged by a press that
sought to shift the blame from the regime to the Jews, instigated a second
wave of twenty-four pogroms. (Though accused of evading the
draft and conspiring against Mother Russia, 33,000 Jews were, in fact,
fighting and dying in Manchuria for the Romanov Empire—6.6 percent
of the czarist force, although constituting only 4 percent of
Russia’s population.) An attempt to unite different Jewish political
202 Monty Noam Penkower
parties for self-defense quickly collapsed when the police arrested
Poalei Zion activists on their way to the conference. Given this oppressive
reality, Russian-born Arthur Ruppin concluded his pathbreaking
sociological study Die Juden der Genenwart (1904) with the following
declaration: “Zionism is not merely a national or chauvinist caprice,
but the last desperate stand of the Jews against annihilation.”39
The beginning of the 1905 Revolution against the Romanov tyranny,
initiated in response to the “Bloody Sunday” in January when troops
fired on thousands who had marched on the Winter Palace to petition
Nicholas II, unleashed a third phase of violence against Jews. Twentytwo
pogroms, the most serious in Kiev, Lodz, and Zhitomir, took place
between January and September. The Black Hundreds, encouraged
by a czar who wrote his mother that “nine-tenths of the troublemakers
are Jews, the People’s whole anger turned against them. That’s how
the pogroms happened,” declared as its program the annihilation of
the Jews in Russia.40
The number of attacks rose dramatically after Nicholas issued a
manifesto on October 17, 1905, which granted the people a parliament
or Duma. One day later, anti-Semitic assaults broke out in more
than 300 cities, most lasting an entire week, which, Dubnow wrote, “in
its horrors, finds no parallel in the entire history of humanity.” The
worst occurred in Odessa, where over 300 Jews were killed. With the
pogrom of June 1906 in Bialystok and that in Siedlce three months
later (both carried out by the army and the czarist secret police) ending
the deadly wave, the number of pogroms came to 657, according
to Shlomo Lambroza’s count. Since October, almost 3,000 (at least
one-fourth women) out of the empire’s 4.89 million Jews had been
murdered, and 2,000 had been seriously wounded. Some 1,500 children
were orphaned, 800 losing one parent. The destruction of property
caused by the pogroms of 1903–1906 is estimated to be 57.84
million rubles within the Pale and an additional 8.2 million rubles outside
it. And few could have any illusions about the government’s
increasing role in the pogroms, most dramatically challenged by
Urussov in a speech to the Duma in mid-1906.41
This excessive violence demanded a response from Russian Jewry.
The religiously Orthodox argued that survival depended on submission,
whereas the Zionist movement had supported widespread emigration
ever since the pogroms of 1881. After Kishinev, however,
armed organizations numbering hundreds of students were created in
Gomel, Dnepropetrovsk, Kiev, Shklov, Berdichev, Chudnov, Stolpce,
Vilna, Warsaw, Minsk, and Rostov-on-the-Don. “B’Ir haHareiga” convinced
Yitshak Ben-Zvi and other Poalei Zion activists in Poltava,
joined by assimilated Jewish youngsters, not to go “like sheep to the
slaughter.” The Bund consistently advocated armed resistance, and its
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 203
successful cooperative effort with Poalei Zion during the May 1905
pogrom in Zhitomir especially won over many converts. Odessa’s 302
dead included fifty-five who had fought their attackers. In 1905 alone,
Jewish labor parties and their military units could be found in fortytwo
cities; thirty of these went into action. Brenner’s prose piece “Hu
amar la” caught the prevailing mood, speaking of the young generation’s
insistence on self-defense for the sake of “vengeance and
honor,” rather than emulating their fathers’ craven hiding or relying
on either God or the authorities for protection from attack.42
The Kishinev outrage almost certainly had a related effect on
another Jew, Yevno Azef. This increasingly well-paid agent of the
secret police during the previous twelve years had found his way into
the inner circle of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. He helped organize
most of the major acts of terrorism against the regime, even as he
delivered up to his paymasters some of his most active fellow conspirators.
Radical groups like that party seized on Kishinev to portray the
czarist regime as a criminal force, making it easier to gain disenchanted
recruits, to obtain funds, and to justify acts of terror and sedition
as “revolutionary justice.” Azef helped organize an attempt
against the life of Plehve, so widely identified then as the author of the
Kishinev pogrom. The conspirators succeeded in July 1904.43
Self-defense and assassination could not check, much less halt, the
sustained savagery. The empire’s threatened Jews and a few Gentile
supporters were no match for the Black Hundreds, Cossacks, police,
troops, and Russian officialdom. When the Bund began calling for
armed revolution, an intimidated Jewish community gradually withdrew
support. Nor did the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party,
now under the thumb of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, applaud the Bund’s
emphasis on national-cultural autonomy to serve the Jewish proletariat
masses. In classic Marxist ideology, anti-Semitism was viewed as yet
another cursed bourgeois phenomenon that would diminish as the class
struggle ended with the victory of the workers. For its part, the Menshevik
newspaper Iskra played down Bundist and Zionist resistance to the
pogromshchiki, greatly exaggerating the help offered Jews by undefined
(but, by clear implication, non-Jewish) workers. Nor did liberal and
progressive circles speak out against the pogroms, except to label them
“counterrevolutionary,” or protest that the October 1905 manifesto
conspicuously avoided mention of Jews when promising rights for all.
Dubnow concluded that Jews should be wary of any illusion that major
differences would exist between the “old Russia” and the “new.”44
Across the Atlantic, at the same time, American Jewry’s response
weighed in the balance. An angry Jacob Schiff, whose Kuhn, Loeb firm
had become one of the two most powerful private investment banking
houses in the United States, backed a bond issue of $200 million for
204 Monty Noam Penkower
Japan during its war with Russia and consistently prevented other
firms from underwriting loans to the anti-Semitic czarist regime. When
Count Sergius Witte came to America for negotiations to end the
Russo-Japanese War, a Jewish delegation including Schiff and Oscar
Straus warned Nicholas II’s finance minister in September 1905 that
his country’s refusal to grant Jews equal rights endangered Russian
goodwill in the United States. Once President Roosevelt had secured
the Treaty of Portsmouth, ending the war and gaining himself the
Nobel Peace Prize, he prodded Witte to recognize U.S. passports
when issued to Jewish citizens. One day before sailing for home, Witte
met again with Straus and two colleagues and promised to do all he
could to relieve the situation of Russia’s Jews.45
News of the October pogroms galvanized Schiff, Straus, and
Sulzberger to work in tandem with British Jewish leaders Nathan
Rothschild and Samuel Montagu for a far more intense popular drive
than that of 1903. (The Rothschild banking house, like that of Kuhn,
Loeb, also refused to float Russian loans.) Thirty-nine pogrom orphans
were placed in private homes across the country as well. In addition, a
Jewish Defense Organization, headed by young Judah Magnes, then
secretary of the Federation of American Zionists, was quickly formed
of all groups; on December 4, some 200,000 marched to New York
City’s Union Square to hear speeches on self-defense. This joint venture
petered out, with Bundists and Zionists unable to maintain unity,
but the American Jewish Committee was formed in 1906 by “uptown”
German-born philanthropists like Schiff to “prevent infringement of
the civil and religious rights of Jews and to alleviate the consequences
of persecution.” And under Sulzberger’s direction, an estimated
$4 million was collected in the United States by September 1906
through the National Committee for Relief of Sufferers by Russian
Massacres and was sent to Russia for distribution.46
Roosevelt, though deeply sympathetic, did not think that Washington
could do anything to relieve the plight of Russia’s Jews. Diplomatic
intervention, he replied to an entreaty from Schiff, would only harm
them at a time when the Romanov dynasty faced political revolution
and social chaos. The United States had not gone to war against
Turkey on behalf of the Armenians some years before, he observed,
and was not prepared to do so against Russia now. At the same time,
Roosevelt chose Straus in early 1906 to be his secretary of commerce
and labor, telling the first Jew to join a presidential cabinet that he was
wanted not only because of ability and character but because it would
be a clear indication to Russia and other anti-Semitic countries of the
president’s sentiments.47
Nicholas II and his court could not be oblivious to these and
related developments. The resounding defeat by Japan, awarding that
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 205
rising Asian power a preponderant interest in Korea, patently
exposed Russia’s weaknesses just at a time of growing American imperialism
and influence. At least as significantly, the royal dictatorship
came to understand that popular demonstrations at home, whether
revolutionary or reactionary, represented a double-edged sword: they
were as dangerous as they were useful for the throne. Consequently,
when, at Straus’s urging, Roosevelt followed England’s unofficial
representations to Russia against the possibility of further pogroms in
the pre-Easter season of 1906, the United States received a reply very
different from that given after Kishinev. St. Petersburg informed the
American ambassador that it held the police responsible for maintaining
order; its ambassador to Washington, D.C., solemnly assured the
president in similar tones.48 The pogroms of 1906, it turned out,
would be Russia’s last during Romanov rule.
IV
The Russian government’s move to reestablish the status quo ante
proved to be short-lived. Nicholas and his supporters disbanded the
first two Dumas; the third, elected by a much smaller vote, was dominated
by pro-czarists and anti-Semites. High officials also conspired to
suppress evidence about the innocence of Mendel Beilis, charged in
1911 with murdering a Christian boy for Jewish ritual purposes, and
kept trying to “prove” their case even after he was declared not guilty
two years later. The Jews of the Pale continued to confront discriminatory
legislation, Gentile animosity, and poverty so grinding that an
estimated 30–35% at the turn of the century depended on charity provided
by Jewish relief organizations.49 Traumatized by the murderous
assaults of 1903–1906, many chose to seek liberation elsewhere.
The Kishinev pogrom and its successors triggered a massive emigration
to the United States. From 53,000 in 1903 (compared with
40,000 in 1901), the number rose to 74,000 in the next year. During
1905 and 1906, the bloodiest wave of pogroms, the figure rose to
91,000 and then 111,000. It reached a high of 115,000 the following
year and then fell but remained steady at about 60,000 until the outbreak
of World War I. This great wave, perhaps reaching 1,000,000
between 1900 and 1914, changed the face of the United States and of
its Jewish community.50
The American Jewish Committee oligarchy, led by Meyer Sulzberger
and Louis Marshall, greatly facilitated the exodus from Russia by contributing
to the defeat of a literacy test requirement for immigrants in
1907 and 1913 thanks to lobbying, propaganda, and publicity. In 1911,
its members conducted a successful campaign for abrogating the
206 Monty Noam Penkower
Russo-American treaty of 1832, charging that Russian discrimination
against the entry of American Jews violated the treaty. The committee
also hoped that abrogation would inevitably compel Russia to free her
own Jews. Once World War I began, the American Jewish Committee
drew $100,000 from what remained of the funds of the Kishinev
Committee for the Relief of Sufferers by Russian Massacres to aid
Jewish victims in the war zones. It also sparked the organization of a
central relief organization for stricken European Jewish victims that,
together with Orthodox and labor leaders, became the highly effective
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.51
The pogroms had a decisive impact on Palestine as well. Between
Kishinev and World War I, some 40,000 Russian Jews arrived, most of
them young. The minority who stayed would become the leaders of
the Zionist enterprise there, such as David Ben-Gurion, Yitshak Ben-Zvi,
Levi Eshkol, Moshe Sharett, and Berl Katznelson. The ranks of the
first arrivals swelled by coreligionists who had been disillusioned by
the outcome of the 1905 Revolution, this Second Aliya brought the
Jewish settlement (Yishuv) to 85,000, about 12 percent of the total.
Profoundly moved by “b’Ir haHareiga,” some veterans of self-defense
activity during the pogroms established Bar Giora and haShomer,
paramilitary units to protect settlers from marauding Bedouin and
others. The latter group adopted as its slogan the aggressive lines from
Yaakov Cahan’s poem “Biryonim,” written five months after Kishinev
and already cited in a Poalei Zion manifesto after the Zhitomir
pogrom of 1905: “In blood and fire Judea fell, in blood and fire shall
Judea rise again.”52 These two groups, in turn, would inspire many to
serve in Britain’s Jewish Legion during World War I and, from 1920
onward, in the Yishuv’s own Hagana (self-defense) organization.
The pogroms persuaded the world Zionist movement to adopt a
new platform at the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905. The philosophy
of “synthetic” or “practical” Zionism had first been proposed by
the Russian Menahem Ussishkin, vociferous opponent of the Uganda
scheme, to include educational and organizational work in the Diaspora
alongside diplomatic activity and agricultural settlement. Ahad Ha’am,
who lambasted the Uganda plan as the logical consequence of the
political Zionists’ detachment from their Hebraic past, also approved
the program of Gegenwartsarbeit—concurrent work in Palestine and in
the Diaspora communities. The Helsingfors conference of Russian
Zionists ratified this program one year later. The plan arose as a natural
response to various factors: the pogroms; Herzl’s death in July
1904; the weakness of political Zionism, which also could not check
Britain’s ultimate retreat from the East Africa project; the platform of
the last Zionist Congress; and the growing appeal for Jewish youth of
the Bund and of Marxist ideology.53
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 207
Zangwill drew far different conclusions. He had given Herzl the
first opportunity to describe his philosophy to a public audience in
November 1895, before the Maccabean Club in London, and hailed
his friend in Dreamers of the Ghetto as “a very modern Moses.” The famous
British author had also opposed the Anglo-Jewish Association’s conviction,
expressed after Kishinev and Gomel by President Claude
Montefiore, that the time had not come for losing all hope that the
Russian government would ameliorate conditions within the Pale. After
Herzl’s death, and in opposition to Ussishkin and the “Zionists of Zion,”
Zangwill left the movement in 1905 and established the Jewish Territorialist
Organization that same year. Its efforts were dedicated to the
creation of a large Jewish haven in some country that need not necessarily
be Palestine.54
A few years later, Zangwill came to believe that the final goal of
Jewish nationalism was the unity of all civilization and that only in
America might this be achieved. Owing to that country’s liberal immigration
policy, the peoples reunited in the New World would “ultimately
harden into homogeneity of race” combining the best of Hebraism,
Hellenism, and Christianity. Hence his play The Melting Pot, in which
David Quixano escapes from the pogrom in Kishinev, which had
claimed his entire family, to “shining America . . . where God would wipe
away tears from . . . all faces.” There the young Jewish violinist meets a
beautiful Christian settlement worker, Vera Revendal, with whom he
falls in love. He learns to his horror, however, that her unrepentant
father had inspired the massacre as “a holy crusade.” Eventually,
inspired by his faith in the crucible that melts all hate and vengeance,
David writes his great American symphony in honor of his newly
adopted country as the “land of tomorrow” and the “only hope of
mankind.” He and Vera are reunited as the curtain falls to the music
of America’s popular hymn “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”55
Most serious critics dismissed The Melting Pot as propaganda and
claptrap patriotism. Adolph Klauber of the New York Times, for example,
judged the play “insincere as a work of art and unconvincing as
a human document.” The shrewd Frenchman Crevecoeur had long
before been the first to observe, in Letters from an American Farmer
(1793), that in the United States “individuals of all nations are melted
into a new race of men,” but Zangwill’s catchphrase aptly captured the
current sense of Americanization triumphant. The play’s obvious
spread-eagleism, as a result, enjoyed great popularity. Speaking for
many of his countrymen, Roosevelt rose from his theater seat after The
Melting Pot’s debut in Washington, D.C., on October 5, 1908, and
exclaimed, “That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill!”56
Dubnow, another champion of territorialism, hardly embraced
the dissolving of Jewish separatism and the absorption of Judaism into
208 Monty Noam Penkower
what Zangwill would describe as “The Next Religion.” His program of
Yiddishist cultural autonomy in the Diaspora stood sharply at odds with
his friend Ahad Ha’am’s insistence that all this would be “Sisyphean
labor” unless the Zionist center were established in Palestine. In
Dubnow’s view, Jewish history offered examples of equal and independent
Jewish centers across the globe, none ever attaining a majority of
the population. Ahad Ha’am’s elitist caution, advocating a gradual
development of the “spiritual center,” disregarded European Jewry’s
pressing plight. Hence Dubnow’s continued call after Kishinev for an
orderly mass migration, particularly to the United States.57
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the appearance of “El haTsipor,”
Dubnow heartily thanked Bialik for the “holy tempest [se’ara kedosha],
for the marvelous expression which you gave to our national longings
from generation to generation, for the poetry of the new Jeremiah.”
He tried his own hand at capturing the Kishinev slaughter via a story
featuring a Russian Jewish soldier who arrives in the city soon after
the pogrom to find his young sister raped, her baby choked to death,
and her husband beaten. Wondering why Jews did not fight back, the
main protagonist approvingly cites lines from “b’Ir haHareiga” to
convey the personally bitter taste of synagogue prayers seeking Divine
retribution, and he quickly leaves for Gomel and other cities to prepare
Jews for self-defense. Anti-Semitism in the Russian army and
pogroms during World War I were depicted in the soldier’s recollections
as well. (One year later, following the downfall of Romanov rule,
Dubnow and a colleague would publish a documentary collection on the
Kishinev pogrom mostly taken from the files of the imperial Ministry
of Justice and the Department of Police.)58
Dubnow’s story appeared in Moscow’s haTekufa in 1918, along
with an asterisk indicating his conviction that “the Russian Revolution
had on its own solved the tragic question as the sense of world justice
would have solved it in the future.” It was a premature statement. The
civil war (lasting until 1921) that followed the Bolshevik triumph
brought havoc to Russia’s Jews. Although 700 Jews were killed in
pogroms mounted by Red Army detachments, the Red Army command
punished these actions as running counter to Marxist ideology. Far
worse, beginning in March 1919, the retreating Ukrainian national
army led by Semen Petliura and the peasant bands affiliated to it massacred
the Jews in Berdichev, Zhitomir, Proskurov (about 1,700 within
a few hours), and elsewhere. The counterrevolutionary White Army,
identifying the Jews as pro-Bolshevik, also pogromized Jews with the
support of many Russian Orthodox clergymen. The anarchists under
Nestor Makhno contributed their share to massive Jewish losses. It is
estimated that in 1918–1921, more than 2,000 pogroms of indescribable
cruelty took place, most of them in the Ukraine. Some 30,000 Jews
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 209
were killed directly; together with those who succumbed to their wounds
or to illnesses contracted during the pogroms, a total of about 150,000
died.59
Jabotinsky, arguably the emerging Jewish leader most transformed
by the Kishinev pogrom, entertained scant hope for life in Russia.
Admittedly having had no inner contact with Judaism during his
youth, the twenty-three year old who brought relief to Kishinev’s victims
knew nothing at the time of the writings of Bialik or of Ahad
Ha’am. By the end of 1903, however, readers of Jabotinsky’s widely
popular feuilletons, such as “Without Patriotism,” in Odessa’s Novosti
recognized the seriousness of his Zionist faith. He voted against Herzl
on the Uganda plan, helped draft the Helsingfors Program, and crusaded
against anti-Semitism, Jewish assimilation, and the Bund. “B’Ir
haHareiga” he considered to have been “the foundation for all Jewish
self-defense, comparable only to Deuteronomy’s chapter 28 of ‘tokhaha’ ”
(reproof ). In 1911, “Jabo” translated a selection of Bialik’s poetry into
Russian with Bialik’s kind advice (a German edition appeared in 1922),
presenting it as the symbol of a new Jewish generation’s desire to create
its own national history and thereby jettison the degradation of
ghetto life. Two years later, he wrote Bialik that he would continue to
try and realize the “Hebrew revolt” reflected in the poet’s oeuvre.60
This individual revolt began with him joining ex-Russian Jewish
officer and Galilee halutz (agricultural pioneer) Joseph Trumpeldor in
calling for the formation of a Jewish Legion, which would join the
World War I Allied powers in the effort to liberate Palestine from
Ottoman rule. Jabotinsky’s almost single-handed crusade finally got
London to create Jewish battalions that were later consolidated into
the “First Judean Regiment,” of which he was decorated as a lieutenant
in the first company to cross the Jordan River. In the spring of
1920, anticipating anti-Jewish violence by Arab extremists, he organized
the Hagana in Jerusalem, openly leading it to confront the
incited Arab masses during Passover. Briefly imprisoned, the charismatic
hero joined the Jewish Agency Executive for two years until
resigning because of what he considered to be Zionist acquiescence in
Great Britain not living up to her responsibilities under the League of
Nations’ mandate, particularly London’s separation of the area east of
the Jordan from Palestine. In 1925, “Jabo” and followers created the
World Union of Zionist-Revisionists, which openly demanded that
Palestine on both sides of the Jordan become the Jewish Commonwealth.
To check adamant Arab opposition (respectfully analyzed in
his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall”), he concluded that a Jewish majority
with a formidable Jewish army would be essential.61
Jabotinsky’s militant Zionism struck no responsive chord with Bialik.
Traumatized by the pogroms of 1903–1906, Jewry’s now uncontested
210 Monty Noam Penkower
national poet fell into increasing despair. In succeeding poems, he is
depicted as the unheeded prophet making for the grave (“Davar”) in
a world branded with the mark of Cain (“Yadati b’Lel Arafel”). An
unsatisfied creative soul (“Aharei Moti”) dies in the midst of unanswered
prayer (“v’Haya Ki Timtse’u”). The Eternal Light has gone out
in the empty Jewish study hall where the author was “the last of the
last” (“Lifnei Aron haSefarim”) and a broken, useless twig (“Tsanah
Lo Zalzal”). Bialik’s discarded draft of a poem, retrieved by Klausner,
expresses resignation that the Jewish people, creator of the great messianic
ideal, will be the only nation alive not to witness eventual peace
on earth. A youngster, caught between the call to preserve the last
spark of redemption and the lure of eros, plunges into the abyss
(“Megilat haEsh”). Dubnow, having implored Bialik to write “the
poem of atrocity” about the effect of World War I both on the world
and on East European Jewry, was greatly distressed to receive a letter
in reply about “awaiting heavenly aid” and personal doubts regarding
creative ability. Instead, Bialik’s poems call for a dance of death
(“laMenatseah Al haMeholot”) and describe the impossibility of return
to the purity of childhood in a present lacking faith and vision (“Ehad
Ehad v’En Roeh”). His poetic voice, in turn, became silent.62
These acutely personal reflections may well suggest, too, why Bialik
chose not to release in his lifetime the four notebooks of facts and
interviews about the Kishinev pogrom. Bialik complained at first that
he had to take fifteen rubles from his own pocket to work on this
effort, the Historical Commission not giving the funds promised.
Biographer Pinhas Lahover conjectures that the poet’s decision about
the notebooks lay in his feeling that “b’Ir haHareiga” was superior to
anything that might have resulted in book form. Yet publication
would have added the incomparable effect of authenticity, the many
eyewitness reports he transcribed far more powerful than documented
volumes at the time by Davitt, Errera, Henry, Singer, Adler, Stiles,
Prato, Urussov, and Herzl associate Berthold Feiwel (writing under
the pseudonym von Told). Rather, Bialik’s growing sense of failure at
his own perceived national mission, perhaps most keenly expressed
one year after Kishinev in “Aharei Moti,” left him harboring no illusions
about the present Jewish generation. Unprepared to receive his
message (highlighted in “b’Ir haHareiga”) and learn for the future, its
members should, he judged, die out in Exile. Not surprisingly, “b’Ir
haHareiga” offers no clear line of recommended action. At the poem’s
conclusion, Yosef Oren has observed, the suffering prophet takes over
from helpless God the mantle of silence. A later generation, Bialik
thought, would hear and respond to the call of history.63
Turning from poetry, which had ended without a ray of hope for
this “so tragic a soul,” in Zangwill’s phrase, Bialik began to undertake
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 211
manifold cultural activities. Public lectures, essays, criticism, translating,
and editing the best of classic Jewish literature followed for the
rest of his life. Thanks to the pro-Zionist Gorki’s intercession with
Lenin’s totalitarian Soviet government, Bialik and a group of other
Hebrew writers received permission in 1921 to leave the country. He
went to Berlin, a center of Jewish émigré authors, and worked there
until 1924, when he moved permanently to Tel Aviv. Bialik never
wrote “the poetry of rebirth” that a member of the Kishinev relief society
hoped that he would write after settling in Eretz Israel, having
long ago sensed a basic truth: “Know that the root of my soul is the
Exile, and who knows? Perhaps the Divine presence does not rest on
me except from sadness and specifically in an unholy land.” Yet he
hailed the new Hebrew University (1925) as a people’s welcome realization
that “without a tangible homeland, without private national
premises that are entirely ours, we can have no sort of a life, either
material or spiritual.” Bialik traveled to the United States and Great
Britain on cultural missions; served as president of the Hebrew Writers’
Union and of the Hebrew Language Council; and initiated the popular
Oneg Shabbat, a Sabbath cultural-spiritual forum for his secularized
contemporaries.64
On June 2, 1934, Bialik addressed a large Tel Aviv audience for, it
soon transpired, the last time. Noting that he was about to depart for
medical treatment in Vienna, he warned listeners about the Yishuv’s
own serious illnesses: foreign labor, political rivalry, and civic hatred.
Bialik ended with a prayer that all would see, upon his return, signs of
healing and recovery. The blessing was denied him; he died abroad
on July 4. An almost “dense silence” engulfed the stricken Jewish
metropolis for Bialik’s funeral, with Hadassah founder Henrietta
Szold finding it hard to believe that Tel Aviv, “a city in undress, could
assume such an aspect of dignity and spiritual elevation.” In keeping
with an earlier request, the national poet was laid to final rest next to
the grave of the man he always called “my teacher and mentor,” Ahad
Ha’am.65
V
No doubts arose as to Bialik’s legacy at the time of his death. Jabotinsky
on the political Right, remembering how he was so impressed when
first hearing the “prophetic thunder” of “b’Ir haHareiga,” characterized
the deceased as “the one poet in all of modern literature whose
poetry directly molded the soul of a generation.” On the Left,
Ben-Gurion replied, in part, to British High Commissioner Arthur
Wauchope’s condolence message thus: “He was the spiritual leader of
212 Monty Noam Penkower
his people, the master craftsman of our language. No Jew of our time
has had such a powerful impact on the life of his people. . . . In our eyes
he was the bearer of the nation’s legacy, of its ideals and aspirations.”66
Most agreed with the poet-critic Yaakov Fikhman’s assessment
that “b’Ir haHareiga” signaled “perhaps the most important date in
the history of modern Hebrew poetry.” For many readers, this most
enduring literary response to the massacre of April 1903 carried the
power of such classic indictments as Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and
Zola’s J’accuse! Accepting (despite evidence to the contrary) Ahad
Ha’am’s earlier gloss about Jewish quietism during the Kishinev
pogrom, “b’Ir haHareiga” created a new national text. In evoking the
hopelessness, the stagnation, and the shame of Exile, Bialik’s arresting
cri de coeur in Hebrew implied the necessity of a new path: human
defiance—as much for the sake of reasserting Jewish self-respect as to
save life and property. His cruel, uncompromising message, observed
Zalman Shazar, forbade tears, destroyed consolation, and uprooted
any remaining illusions thereafter. Especially once published with its
original title and several censored lines restored in 1905, along with
two other poems as Songs of Wrath, Bialik’s masterpiece contributed
greatly to the change of mood among the radical, modernist youth in
Russian Jewry. Zionists adopted the elegy into their historical canon,
with sovereignty in the Promised Land viewed as the only answer to a
bimillennial history of persecution and degradation.67
Jewish art, too, began to reflect the sea change wrought by Kishinev
and the succeeding pogroms of 1903–1906. For the cover of Gorki’s
miscellany, E. M. Lilien offered the traditional response of martyrdom:
an aged Jew, depicted as a Christlike figure on a stake, burned
in his prayer shawl and kissed by an angel holding a Torah scroll. In
related spirit, Samuel Hirszenberg’s “Golus” (1904) shows an endless
line of suffering Jews moving westward in stoic resignation, and his
“The Black Banner” (also called “Funeral of the Zaddik,” 1905) portrays
the tragedy of a sea of hassidim mourning not only their leader
but an entire way of communal life. Bialik, by contrast, instructed
Joseph Bodko to prepare woodcut illustrations for “b’Ir haHareiga”
that had the Almighty both raising His fist against the pogrom’s victims
and taking the image of a prostrate old Jew whose strength is
gone. More pointedly, bearded shtetl Jews occupy the background of
Lazar Krestin’s “Birth of Resistance” (1905), while young men and
one woman step forward to defend themselves with staves and guns.
The standard depictions by Abel Pann (Abba Pfefferman) of “The Day
after the Pogrom” (1903) and “Refugees” (1906) would be succeeded
by his graphic series of fifty sketches about pogroms in Russia during
World War I (“Jug of Tears,” 1916), including that of an armed
mother in “Defending Hearth and Home.”68
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 213
The Kishinev pogrom and Bialik’s presence continued to seize the
Jewish imagination. “In the last resort,” observed the English essayist
Philip Guedella in 1920, “if the highest argument for Zionism is to be
found in the prophet Isaiah, the case for it on the narrowest grounds
is—Kishineff.” Arab attacks against Jews in Eretz Israel that same year,
Trumpeldor falling in the defense of Tel-Hai, led some to draw analogies
to the slaughter of 1903; Brenner quoted from Al haShehita’s “All
the World Is My Gallows.” The Yishuv’s press cited “b’Ir haHareiga”
after the Arab riots of 1921, in which Brenner and forty-six other Jews
were murdered. In 1929, the butchery by Arabs of the “old Yishuv”
(deeply religious, non-Zionist Jews), who displayed helplessness in
Safed and Hebron, led the new Yishuv to embrace “b’Ir haHareiga”’s
censures against exilic life once again.69
This trend continued in the 1930s. Viewing the first official steps
taken against Germany’s Jews in March 1933 as “but another form of
what took place in Kishinev in 1903, and what happened in Kishinev
served to vitalize Jewry throughout the world as nothing else,” Herzl’s
former secretary, Jacob de Haas, pressed the Zionist Organization of
America to champion a program of mass immigration to Eretz Israel.
One week later, the Jewish Agency Executive in Jerusalem considered
that a public manifesto should be authored by Bialik to arouse the Yishuv
and world Jewry. Quoting Bialik’s “each people has as much heaven over
its head as it has land under its feet,” Hayim Greenberg unsuccessfully
tried to persuade Mohandas Gandhi in 1937 to speak out against the venomous
anti-Jewish propaganda amid the millions of Muslims in India as
Jews attempted to emerge in Palestine from the “anomalous state of
homelessness and landlessness” to which history had doomed them.70
Once World War II began, Jewish youth under the Nazi jackboot
rallied to Bialik’s message. Not prepared to accept Gandhi’s advice, given
three weeks after Kristallnacht, that Jews remain in Germany and pursue
his doctrine of satyagraha (passive nonresistance even unto death), their
organizations regularly commemorated the anniversary of Bialik’s death
and reprinted “Al haShehita” and “b’Ir haHareiga.” The poet Yitshak
Katzenelson, who translated the latter elegy into Yiddish while crammed
into the Warsaw Ghetto along with over 400,000 Jews, wrote that “Bialik
saw our anguish, expressed it, and captured it for all time to come.” And
on January 1, 1942, in the first call for armed resistance to the Holocaust,
Abba Kovner in the Vilna Ghetto echoed Bialik’s critique of exilic submissiveness
in exhorting fellow Jews: “Let us not go as sheep to slaughter!”
71 Subsequent revolts in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere, followed
by uprisings in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death centers, transformed
the poet’s words of 1903 into deeds forty years later.
Yet Germany’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” made any
analogy with a past pogrom, however savage, impossible to sustain.
214 Monty Noam Penkower
That nation’s policy of total, systematic annihilation, begun with the
Third Reich’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, had no
precedent in either Jewish or world history. Even regarding “b’Ir
haHareiga,” later recalled one of the primary organizers of the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising, “you couldn’t say that pogroms took place on
the same day wherever there were Jews. So, there wasn’t anything or
anyone to learn from; and if I had considered, even for a moment,
what we hadn’t seen in our worst nightmares, I would have thought:
‘Yitshak Zuckerman, go to the madhouse!’ Because you had to have a
sick imagination to come to such conclusions.”72
Everywhere under Berlin’s control in World War II, all Jews
were marked for murder. Dubnow, whose last volume (1940) in his
monumental History of the Jewish People concluded by heralding the
emerging autonomous Jewish communities in the United States and
Eretz Israel (“the state-in-the-making”), was shot on December 8,
1941, at the age of eighty-one by a Gestapo officer—a former pupil—
when the Riga Jewish community was deported to a death camp.
Of Kishinev’s 65,000 Jews in 1941, an estimated 53,000 had perished
by VE Day under the rule of Rumanian gendarmes and German
SS units. In the entire Polish–Soviet area, which had a Jewish
population of 7,005,000 in mid-1941, Jewish losses (excluding military
casualties) at the hands of Germans, Ukrainians, and Baltic-area
nationals amounted to 4,565,000.73 Given the unique fusion of
murderous Nazi zeal and methodic precision, the instances of Jewish
armed resistance did not present a significant factor in response. The
State of Israel, because of the sharp negation of the Exile by Bialik,
Brenner, and some of their intellectual contemporaries, only began
to comprehend this reality decades later.74
Remarkably, “Kishinev” still reverberates in Jewish memory.
Thus, for example, Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream: A Star Shines
over Mt. Morris Park (1994), the long-awaited sequel to the author’s
widely acclaimed Call It Sleep (1934), recalls that slaughter powerfully,
if briefly. In Roth’s autobiographical novel, immigrant Ira Stigman,
coming of age in New York City’s Lower East Side before America
entered into World War I, relates his mother’s still-haunted experience
of the anti-Semitic savageries in Russia:
The Great War came closer. The Huns impaled babies on their bayonets—
though Mom ridiculed stories of German atrocities. “What, the Russ is
better? Czar Kolki (kolki means bullet) iz a feiner mensh? Who in all the
world is more benighted than the Russian mujik? Who doesn’t remember
their pogroms, the Kishinev pogroms, in 1903? Pogroms led by seminar
students, especially on Easter—Kishinev when I was still a maid. And after
they lost to the Yaponchikis when I met your father, immediately they take
it out on the Jews. Go! More likely the Russ impaled the infant on his
bayonet.”75
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 215
An anti-Semitic orgy of outright murder, rape, and pillage in
Bessarabia’s capital 100 years ago should have receded into the forgotten
annals of recorded time. The number of victims and the destruction
in Kishinev in 1903 pale by comparison with the Holocaust and even
by the standards set during World War I and the pogroms of 1918–
1921. As for the author of “b’Ir haHareiga,” in early 2003 some Israeli
commentators wondered at the choice of the first four lines from
Bialik’s “Aharei Moti” by Navy chaplain Harold Robinson to eulogize
Ilan Ramon at the official U.S. memorial service for the Columbia
astronauts, pointing out that many in the reborn Jewish state are no
longer familiar with the Hebrew author’s work and his many references
to the rich Jewish tradition.76
Yet it is the very passage of a century that offers the perspective
required to appreciate one pogrom’s historical significance. Coming,
as the Bund proclamation put it, at the start of “a century in which
humanity boasts of its civilization, its progress, its education and culture,”
what took place in Kishinev shook much of the Western world
into protest against the Romanov regime for the first time.77 The brutal
assault also strengthened a greater sense of Jewish solidarity across
the United States, where a community of opposing camps took its first
major steps toward defending Jewish rights in America and elsewhere.
Russian critics of the czarist dictatorship, which was commonly
viewed as responsible, seized on the pogrom as another justification
for revolt. Free from pogroms for the past twenty years, the Jews of
Russia realized now how easily a few militant instigators could take
advantage of religious antagonism and economic rivalry to unleash an
organized attack. This anti-Semitic assault quickly turned deadly in
Kishinev, because police and soldiers were ineffective and hostile, religious
leaders remained silent, respectable middle-class Christians
passed by, and the central government wavered before blaming the
victims. As pogroms mounted in the next three years, St. Petersburg’s
true intentions became clear. The waves of Jewish emigration to the
United States and, in far smaller measure, to Palestine followed suit.
As a consequence of these different responses, the impact reached global
proportions.
“B’Ir haHareiga,” more than any other artistic creation in the
floodgate of response worldwide, gave voice to the seismic change that
had begun to affect the Jewish people. Judah Leib Gordon, Bialik’s
predecessor as the “poet laureate” of Hebrew literature, had reacted
to the pogroms of 1881 by calling for emigration against the “murderous
villains” in “Ahoti Ruhama” (1882), with God seen even earlier as
indifferent to historic Jewish suffering (“Bein Shinei Arayot,” “b’Metsulot
Yam”). Bialik’s seminal work, going much further, assumed God’s impotence
and, therefore, implicitly called for self-defense. That cause
216 Monty Noam Penkower
became a given among Russian Jewish youth and their counterparts in
Palestine’s Second Aliya, whose first members were veterans of the
Gomel pogrom resistance. And unlike Gordon’s emphasis on the
United States as a large refuge, Bialik only advocated Eretz Israel. As
for Jewry at-large, the poet’s dramatic monologue, suffused with raw
anger, helped mightily in turning Kishinev into a metaphor for pogrom
and vulnerability, much as Mainz and Nemirov had centuries earlier.
The complete publication of Bialik’s collected testimonies, to mark the
eightieth anniversary of the barbarous rampage in Kishinev, further
captures that metaphor’s potency to illustrate Jewry’s tragic past.78
In 1903, former U.S. president Grover Cleveland warned the Carnegie
Hall protest meeting that such things as occurred in Kishinev
“give rise to a distressing fear that even the enlightenment of the twentieth
century has neither destroyed nor subdued the barbarity of
human nature, nor wholly redeemed the civilized world from ‘man’s
inhumanity to man.’ ” Later, Chaim Weizmann, who assumed Herzl’s
role, fabricated a memory that he had joined a group of 100 youngsters
in defending the Jews of Kishinev during the assault, writing this to
Dorothy de Rothschild in September 1914 and repeating it as fact in his
autobiography. Yet, reminiscing in the same volume, the first president
of the State of Israel caught the essence of the vast divide that existed
between the moment of Cleveland’s expressed anxiety and the years of
the Holocaust, noting of Kishinev: “Certainly it cannot compete with
what we have become accustomed to in the fourth and fifth decades of
this century. Perhaps the key lies there: ‘What we have become accustomed
to.’ ” At the same time, Weizmann concluded that “in our memories
Kishinev has remained the classic prototype of the pogrom.”79
What erupted in that city during three days in April 1903, a turning
point in Jewish history, remains so. Its varied legacy is with us still.
TOURO COLLEGE
NOTES
1. For some contemporary accounts, see Michael Davitt, Within the Pale:
The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecution in Russia (New York, 1903); Yaakov
Goren, ed., Eduyot Nifgaei Kishinev keFi ShehNikhtevu Al Yedei H. N. Bialik
v’Haverav (Tel Aviv, 1991); Leo Errera, Les Massacres de Kishinev (Brussels,
1903); B. A. Henry, Les Massacres de Kichinev (Paris, 1903); Berthold Feiwel
(von Told), Die Judenmassacres in Kischinew (Berlin, 1903); Raffaelo Prato,
I massacri di Kischineff (Rome, 1903); Isidore Singer, Russia at the Bar of the American
People: A Memorial of Kishinev (New York, 1904); Cyrus Adler, The Voice of
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 217
America on Kishineff (Philadelphia, 1904); W. C. Stiles, Out of Kishineff: The Duty
of the American People to the Russian Jew (New York, 1903); and E. Semenov, The
Russian Government and the Massacres (London, 1906). The most recent description,
based on Russian archives, is Edward H. Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy
of a Pogrom (New York, 1992), pp. 49–75. The semiofficial St. Petersburg
newspaper, quoted in the (London) Jewish Chronicle on May 8, 1903, is cited in
David Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years (Oxford, 1982), p. 240.
2. Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 10 ( Jerusalem, 1973), pp. 1065–1066; Davitt,
Within the Pale, pp. 172, 174. In memoirs published years later, the senior surgeon
at the Jewish Hospital in Kishinev declared that he had treated at least
500 patients after the pogrom, many with serious injuries. M. B. Slutskii,
V skorbnye dni: Kishinevskii pogrom 1903 goda (Kishinev, 1930).
3. Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 7 (New York, 1925), p. 512; London Times,
quoted in Robert G. Weisbord, African Zion (Philadelphia, 1968), p. 38; Davitt,
Within the Pale, p. 95. According to the May Laws, no new Jewish settlers were
allowed in the Pale, Jews could not own or manage real estate or farms outside
the cities of the Pale, and Jews were not allowed to do business on Sunday or
other Christian holidays. These “Temporary Rules” remained in effect until
the fall of the czardom in 1917. A numerus clausus (quota system) was also
introduced in Russian schools, with an upper limit of 10 percent established
for the proportion of Jewish students in the Pale, 5 percent outside it, and
3 percent in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
4. Davitt, Within the Pale, pp. 97–98.
5. Davitt, Within the Pale, pp. 99, 189; Singer, Russia at the Bar of the American
People, p. 8; Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-
Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York, 1967), p. 109.
6. Davitt, Within the Pale, pp. 123–124.
7. Sefer Bernstein-Kohan, ed. M. Bernstein-Kohan and Y. Koren (Tel Aviv,
1946), pp. 127–137; Simon Wolf, The Presidents I Have Known from 1860 to 1918
(Washington, D.C., 1918), pp. 187–188; Cyrus Adler and Aaron M. Margalith,
With Firmness in the Right: American Diplomatic Action Affecting Jews, 1840–1945
(New York, 1946), pp. 261–263; New York Times, May 19, 1903.
8. Eliyahu Feldman, “Plehve v’haPogrom b’Kishinev b’1903,” HehAvar,
Vol. 17 (1970), pp. 137–150; Davitt, Within the Pale, pp. 181, 187–188; Edward
H. Judge, Plehve, Repression and Reform in Imperial Russia, 1902–1904 (Syracuse,
1983), p. 55.
9. Hayim Shurer, Y. Koren, and D. Vinitski, eds., haPogrom b’Kishinev (Tel
Aviv, 1963), pp. 176–181; Noah Grois, “haYehudim b’Hayav u’v’Yetsirato Shel
Korolenko,” HehAvar, Vol. 19 (1972), pp. 83–98. Korolenko’s Dom No. 13 (Epizod
iz Kishineuskago Pogroma) was first printed illegally in Russia by the Bund in
1903, with a second edition in London. It was published in Contemporary
Review in February 1904 (Vol. 85, pp. 266–280). The essay first appeared
openly in Russia during the 1905 Revolution.
10. Davitt, Within the Pale (his first dispatch published on May 21, 1903),
pp. 107ff; Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the
Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge, 1984), p. 474; Adler and Margalith, With
Firmness in the Right, pp. 263–264; Philip Ernest Schoenberg, “The American
Reaction to the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly,
218 Monty Noam Penkower
Vol. 63 (March 1974), pp. 262–283. Adding a distinctive voice to this chorus,
black journals and organizations also sought thereby to call attention to the
lynching of Southern African-Americans. See Arnold Shankman, “Brothers
across the Sea: Afro-Americans on the Persecution of Russian Jews, 1881–1917,”
Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 37 (1975), pp. 114–121.
11. David Vital, A People Apart: A Political History of the Jews in Europe, 1789–
1939 (Oxford, 2001), p. 516; Prince S. D. Urussov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor:
The Kishinev Pogrom, trans. Herman Rosenthal (New York, 1970); Sefer Bernstein-
Kohan, p. 135; Jewish Encyclopedia, p. 513. Also see F. S. Zuckerman, “Self-Imagery
and the Art of Propaganda: V. K. von Plehve as Propagandist,” Australian
Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 28 (1982), pp. 68–81.
12. Wolf, The Presidents I Have Known from 1860 to 1918, pp. 191–215; Tyler
Dennett, John Hay (New York, 1934), pp. 394–400; Howard K. Beale, Theodore
Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore, 1956), pp. 196–197.
13. Shurer et al., haPogrom b’Kishinev, p. 21; Vital, Zionism, pp. 243–248; Shimon
Dubnov, Divrei Yemei Am Olam, Vol. 10 (Tel Aviv, 1968), pp. 192–193;
Vyacheslav von Plehve, letter to Theodor Herzl, July 20, 1903, C/15, Natan Gelber
MSS (P83), Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP),
Jerusalem. When an associate wrote to Herzl while visiting Kishinev soon after
the pogrom, he received the leader’s reply that the only appropriate response
would be to have a Zionist organization established there. See Nahum Sokolow,
Ketavim Nivharim, Vol. 3 ( Jerusalem, 1961), pp. 175–176. Chamberlain had earlier
expressed his sympathy with persecuted Jews in Russia and in Rumania. See
Weisbord, African Zion, pp. 129–130.
14. Alex Bein, Theodore Herzl: A Biography (New York, 1962), p. 438.
15. Hayim Shurer, ed., Bessarabia: Kovetz (Tel Aviv, 1941), p. 21; Singer, Russia
at the Bar of the American People, pp. 285–289; A. R. Malakhi, “P’raot Kishinev
b’Aspaklarit haShira b’Ivrit u’v’Yiddish,” in Al Admat Bessarabia, Vol. 3, ed. G.
Kressel ( Jerusalem, 1963), pp. 1–98; David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse:
Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 77–78,
165.
16. Yisrael Halprin, Sefer haG’vura, Vol. 3 (Tel Aviv, 1950), pp. 20–21.
17. Halprin, Sefer haG’vura, pp. 21–35; Yirmiyhau Helpern, Avi, Michael Helpern
(Tel Aviv, 1964), pp. 256–257; Mivhar Igrot Weizmann, ed. B. Litvinoff (Tel
Aviv, 1986), p. 74; Kitvei Berl Katznelson, Vol. 11 (Tel Aviv, 1949), p. 38; Yitshak
Maor, HaTenua haTsiyonit b’Rusya ( Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 216–219; Ze’ev Ivinski,
Mahapeikha v’Teror (Tel Aviv, 1989), pp. 176–181. Dashevsky died in a Soviet
prison in June 1934. See Davar, July 29, 1934.
18. Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism
(Berkeley, 1993), pp. 202–203; Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Autobiografia ( Jerusalem, 1947),
pp. 44–47. For Pinsker, see Monty Noam Penkower, The Emergence of Zionist
Thought (Millwood, N.Y., 1986), pp. 31–40.
19. Igrot Ahad Ha’am, Vol. 3 (Tel Aviv, 1924), pp. 115, 120–121, 124–125.
20. Kol Kitvei Ahad Ha’am ( Jerusalem, 1956), pp. 501–502.
21. Igrot Ahad Ha’am, p. 127; Simon Dubnow, “Megillat Setarim Shel Ahad
Ha’am,” in haPogrom b’Kishinev, ed. Hayim Shurer et al. (Tel Aviv, 1963),
pp. 111–112.
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 219
22. Simon Dubnow, “Ninth Letter: A Historic Moment (The Question of
Emigration),” in Nationalism and History, ed. Koppel S. Pinson (Cleveland, 1961),
pp. 192–199.
23. Sefer Shimon Dubnow, ed. Shimon Rawidowicz ( Jerusalem, 1954), pp. 332–
333. For Spektor’s earlier activity, see Israel Oppenheim, “The Kovno Circle of
Rabbi Yitshak Elhanan Spektor: Organizing Western Public Opinion over
Pogroms in the 1880s,” in Organizing Rescue: National Jewish Solidarity in the Modern
Period, ed. S. I. Troen and B. Pinkus (London, 1992), pp. 91–126.
24. Joseph Klausner, “Sifrutenu,” haShiloah, Vol. 10 (1902–1903), pp. 434–
452; H. N. Bialik, Shirim (Tel Aviv, 1970), pp. 9–11, 29–30, 32–35, 67–68, 69,
313–333, 340–349. Ahad Ha’am did not publish Bialik’s “Bikhrakai Yam” in
haShiloah because he considered it dismissive of Herzl. See Ketavim Genuzim Shel
H. N. Bialik (Tel Aviv, 1971), pp. 131, 355n131.
25. Bialik, Shirim, pp. 152–153; Pinhas Lahover, Bialik: Hayav v’Yetsirotav, Vol.
2 (Tel Aviv, 1955), p. 426n.
26. Sefer Bernstein-Kohan, p. 138; Pesah Auerbakh, “H. N. Bialik b’Ir
haHareiga,” in haPogrom b’Kishinev, ed. Hayim Shurer et al. (Tel Aviv, 1963), p.
28; Igrot H. N. Bialik, Vol. 1, ed. P. Lahover (Tel Aviv, 1938), pp. 180–181;
Lahover, Bialik, pp. 424–425.
27. Bialik, Shirim, pp. 350–360; Y. H. Ravnitski, “H. N. Bialik,” in Sefer Bialik,
ed. Yaakov Fikhman (Tel Aviv, 1934), p. 130. I have used the English translation
by A. M. Klein, reprinted in David Roskies, ed., The Literature of Destruction: Jewish
Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 160–168.
28. Roskies, The Literature of Destruction, p. 146. Incisive analyses of “b’Ir
haHareiga” can be found in Hillel Barzel, Shirat haTehiya: Haim Nahman Bialik
(Tel Aviv, 1990), pp. 257–282; Alan Mintz, Hurban (New York, 1984), pp. 129–
154; Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, pp. 86–91; Shmuel Verses, “Ben Tokhaha
l’Apologetika—b’Ir haHareiga Shel Bialik u’miSaviv La,” Mehkarei Yerushalayim
b’Safrut Ivrit, Vol. 9 (1986), pp. 23–54; and U. Shavit and Z. Shamir, eds.,
b’Mevoei Ir haHareiga: Mivhar Ma’amarim al Shiro Shel Bialik (Tel Aviv, n.d.). For
examples of self-defense that Bialik had transcribed while in Kishinev, see
Goren, Eduyot Nifga’ei Kishinev keFi ShehNikhtevu Al Yedei H. N. Bialik v’Haverav,
pp. 94, 96, 106–107, 111, 114, 123, 141, 211–212, 217–218, 229. For the censorship,
see Igrot H. N. Bialik, pp. 189, 192–193.
29. Lahover, Bialik, pp. 433–438; Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de
Siecle (Berkeley, 2001), pp. 187–196; Malachi, “Pra’ot Kishinev,” p. 86. For Brenner’s
earlier praise of Bialik’s poetry, see Igrot Y. H. Brenner, Vol. 1 (Tel Aviv,
1941), p. 127. Curiously, the preeminent Jewish historian to succeed Dubnow
refers to Frug as “the leading Jewish poet of the age” when quoting from “Hut
Rahmones” and says nary a word about Bialik or his decisive influence on Jewish
self-defense after the Kishinev pogrom. See Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew under
Tsars and Soviets (New York, 1978), pp. 57–59. Is this because Bialik sharply
negated the Exile in “b’Ir haHareiga” and other poems, whereas Baron’s monumental
volumes on Jewish history throughout millennia champion Jewry’s myriad
achievements outside of Eretz Israel?
30. Lahover, Bialik, p. 439; Yisrael Berman, “Im H. N. Bialik b’Kishinev,” in
Bessarabia: Kovetz, ed. Hayim Shurer (Tel Aviv, 1941), pp. 160–164; Zalman
220 Monty Noam Penkower
Shazar, Or Ishim, Vol. 1 ( Jerusalem, 1964), p. 88; Y. H. Biltski, H. N. Bialik v’Yiddish
(Tel Aviv, 1970), pp. 126–131; Shirat H. N. Bialik: Antologia, ed. Haim Orlan
(Tel Aviv, 1971), pp. 216–217, 220–221. Klausner informed the poet that he
was very disappointed with the Yiddish version (also undertaken because Bialik
did not approve of I. L. Peretz’s translation), for Bialik had not restricted himself
to the use of “our national speech.” See Moshe Ungerfeld, “Keitsad Hiber
Bialik et ‘Al haShehita’ v’et ‘b’Ir haHareiga,’ ” in Measef: Mukdash l’Yetsirat H. N.
Bialik, Vol. 10, ed. H. Barzel (Tel Aviv, 1975), pp. 337–341.
31. Complete Diaries of Herzl, ed. R. Patai, trans. H. Zohn (New York, 1960),
pp. 1522–1524, 1534–1540.
32. Bein, Theodore Herzl, p. 444; Vital, Zionism, p. 282; The Diaries of Theodor
Herzl, ed. and trans. M. Lowenthal (New York, 1962), pp. 404, 407.
33. Vital, Zionism, pp. 285–308; Helpern, Avi, Michael Helpern, pp. 258–259;
Bein, Theodor Herzl, p. 456; The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, pp. 408–409. Tisha b’Av
in the Jewish calendar marks the destructions of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem
by the Babylonians (586 B.C.E.) and the Romans (70 C.E.).
34. Dubnow, Divrei Yemei Am Olam, p. 193; Halprin, Sefer haG’vura, pp. 46–62;
Vital, A People Apart, pp. 528–532. Plehve, aware of this new manifestation, sent a
circular to local government officials outlawing any Jewish self-defense. See
Maor, HaTenua haTsiyonit b’Rusya, pp. 214–215.
35. Vital, A People Apart, pp. 532–535, 582; Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia:
The Struggle for Emancipation, Vol. 2, ed. M. Wischnitzer (New York, 1976),
pp. 48, 82, 103, 108; Urussov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor, pp. 42–43.
36. Vyacheslav von Plehve, interview by Lucien Wolf, October 26, 1903, file
68, Wolf-Mowshowitch MSS, YIVO, Center for Jewish History, New York.
37. Jewish Encyclopedia, pp. 513–514; Singer, Russia at the Bar of the American
People, pp. 248–283; Judge, Easter in Kishinev, chap. 6. A secret government
report admitted that Kishinev’s Jews gathered for self-defense, not to attack the
Christian population. See Maor, HaTenua haTsiyonit b’Rusya, p. 211.
38. Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, pp. 65–67. The czar initially embraced the
“Protocols” as authentic but rejected their use by the Black Hundreds for propaganda
once a secret official inquiry proved the document’s spuriousness. See
Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, p. 115.
39. Shlomo Lambroza, “Jewish Responses to Pogroms in Late Imperial Russia,”
in Living with Antisemitism: Modern Jewish Responses, ed. J. Reinharz (Hanover,
N.H., 1987), p. 267; Abraham Rabinovich, “Jubilant over Japan,” Jerusalem Post
Magazine, April 9, 2004, pp. 32–33; Maor, HaTenua haTsiyonit b’Rusya, pp. 276–
277, 279–280; Arthur Ruppin, Die Juden der Genenwart (1904), reprinted in
English as The Jews of Today, trans. M. Bentwich (London, 1913), p. 300.
40. Lambroza, “Jewish Responses to Pogroms in Late Imperial Russia,”
p. 268.
41. Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (Philadelphia,
1920), pp. 128–129; Maor, HaTenua haTsiyonit b’Rusya, pp. 313–314; Lambroza,
“Jewish Responses to Pogroms in Late Imperial Russia,” pp. 268–269; Semenov,
The Russian Government and the Massacres, pp. 149–160, 195–224. At the request of
the World Zionist Organization, Leo Motzkin published a book, mostly written
by him under the name A. Linden, about Russian anti-Jewish violence from the
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 221
early nineteenth century through the pogroms of 1905–1906: Die Judenpogrome
in Russland, 2 vols. (Cologne, 1910). Also see files 1–28, Leo Motzkin MSS (P10),
CAHJP, Jerusalem.
42. Lambroza, “Jewish Responses to Pogroms in Late Imperial Russia,”
pp. 269–271; Vital, Zionism, p. 387; Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 14 (Jerusalem,
1973), pp. 1125–1127; Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ed., The Golden Tradition (New York,
1967), pp. 383–388; Kol Kitvei Y. H. Brenner, Vol. 6 (Tel Aviv, 1927), pp. 29–33.
Proceeds from the sale of the latter story, as the author’s dedication notes, went
to “Jewish self-defense in Russia.”
43. Richard Charques, The Twilight of Imperial Russia (London, 1958), pp. 83–84;
Judge, Easter in Kishinev, p. 144; Yaakov Mazeh, Zikhronot, Vol. 4 (Tel Aviv,
1936), pp. 96–108.
44. Lambroza, “Jewish Responses to Pogroms in Late Imperial Russia,” pp.
272–273; Vital, A People Apart, pp. 518–520; Maor, HaTenua haTsiyonit b’Rusya,
pp. 306–309. For a detailed analysis of Russian leftist opposition to the Bund, see
Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, chap. 4.
45. Naomi W. Cohen, A Dual Heritage: The Public Career of Oscar S. Straus (Philadelphia,
1969), pp. 132–133. For the economic and political considerations that
dovetailed with Schiff’s hostility to the anti-Semitic regime, see Daniel Gutwein,
“Yaakov Schiff u’Mimun Milhemet Rusya-Yapan: Perek b’Toldot haDiplomatia
haYehudit,” Zion, Vol. 54 (1989), pp. 321–350.
46. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, pp. 487–492; Morris Waldman, letter to
Cyrus Adler, May 28, 1933, German Policy Committee files, American Jewish
Committee Archives, New York City.
47. Aryeh Yodfat, “Memshelet Artsot haBrit u’Praot 1903–1906 b’Russya,”
HehAvar, Vol. 22 (1977), pp. 51–52; Cohen, A Dual Heritage, pp. 146–148.
48. Cohen, A Dual Heritage, p. 135. For the poet Naftali Herz Imber, whose
“Tikvatenu” (1884) would later become Israel’s national anthem, “HaTikva,”
Japan’s historic victory inspired an ode that included this stanza: “Tell ye the tidings,
to nations proclaim / How Ivan the Terrible fell, / Revenge for Kishinev’s
crime / To all tongues the tidings tell.” See Rabinovich, “Jubliant over Japan,”
p. 33.
49. Maurice Samuel, Blood Accusation: The Strange History of the Beiliss Case
(Philadelphia, 1966); files 29–36, Motzkin MSS, CAHJP; Zvi Gitelman, A Century
of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (New
York, 1988), p. 78.
50. Vital, A People Apart, p. 584.
51. Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee,
1906–1966 (Philadelphia, 1972), chaps. 3–5; Morris Waldman, letter to
A. C. Ratshesky, June 27, 1933, Max Kohler MSS, Box 11, American Jewish
Historical Society (AJHS), Center for Jewish History, New York City.
52. Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 9 ( Jerusalem, 1973), pp. 328–330; Kitvei Yaakov
Cahan, Vol. 1: Shirim (Tel Aviv, 1938), pp. 292–295; Maor, HaTenua haTsiyonit
b’Rusya, pp. 287–288; Yaakov Goldstein, “haHitgonenut, haShmira v’Irgunei
‘Bar Giora’ v’haShomer’ baAliya haShniya,” in haAliya haShniya, Mehkarim, ed. Y.
Bartal (Jerusalem, 1997), pp. 435–481; Yosef Gorny, “haShinuyim b’Mivneh
222 Monty Noam Penkower
haHevrati v’haPoliti Shel ‘haAliya haShniya’ baShanim 1904–1940,” haTsiyonut,
Vol. 1 (1970), pp. 231–232.
53. Vital, Zionism, pp. 309–310, 313–320, 459–462, 467–475; Zipperstein, Elusive
Prophet, pp. 211–212; Maor, HaTenua haTsiyonit b’Rusya, pp. 315–319.
54. Maurice Wohlgelernter, Israel Zangwill: A Study (New York, 1964), pp.
146–174; Weisbord, African Zion, p. 158. One month before Great Britain issued
the Balfour Declaration, pledging that government to facilitate the establishment
in Palestine of a “Jewish national home,” Zangwill cautioned in the Menorah Journal
that “either the Arabs must trek or there will be an Arabized Judea in no
way corresponding with the Zionist dream.” See A120/463, Central Zionist
Archives (CZA), Jerusalem. For his subsequent favoring of equal national status
between Jew and Arab in a “semitic Switzerland,” rather than political Zionism,
see Speeches, Articles and Letters of Zangwill, ed. M. Simon (London, 1937),
pp. 343–357.
55. Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (New York, 1910). Zangwill himself would
marry a Christian woman. Wohlgelernter errs in quoting the British author as
publishing an eyewitness account of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 (Israel Zangwill,
p. 138). The citation, quoted in an appendix to a later edition of Zangwill’s
famous play, is taken from a nurse who witnessed a pogrom in Odessa some time
after the massacre in Kishinev. See Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (London,
1914), pp. 190–191.
56. New York Times, September 12, 1908; reviews in A120/164–165, CZA;
Wohlgelernter, Israel Zangwill, pp. 174–186.
57. Wohlgelernter, Israel Zangwill, pp. 261–291; Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet,
pp. 155–157; Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha’am), letter to Simon Dubnow, November
9, 1907, in Ahad Ha’am, Mikhtavim b’Einei Eretz Yisrael, 1891–1926, ed. S.
Laskov (Jerusalem, 2000), pp. 237–238; Ahad Ha’am, “The Negation of the
Diaspora” (1909), in The Zionist Idea, ed. Arthur Hertzberg (New York, 1964),
pp. 270–277. For an extended analysis of the distinctions between Dubnow and
Ahad Ha’am, see David H. Weinberg, Between Tradition and Modernity: Haim Zhitlowski,
Simon Dubnow, Ahad Ha-am and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identity (New
York, 1996), chaps. 3–4.
58. Sefer Shimon Dubnow, pp. 335–336; Shimon Dubnow, “Historia Shel Ish
Tsva Yehudi MiMa’arkhot Shnat 1915—Vidui Shel Ehad MeiRabim,” haTekufa,
Vol. 1 (1918), pp. 617–630; Materialy dlia istorii antievreishikh pogromov v Rossii, ed.
S. M. Dubnow and G. Ia. Krasnyi-Admoni (Petrograd, 1919). A second volume
under the same title, published in Moscow in 1923, was devoted to the post-Kishinev
pogroms.
59. Dubnow, “Historia Shel Ish Tsva Yehudi MiMa’arkhot Shnat 1915,”
p. 617; Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence, pp. 99–106. Yeshayahu Klinov’s
account of pogroms that struck Ukrainian Jewry in 1920 was published by Bialik
in the collection Reshumot. See Moshe Kol, Morim v’Haverim ( Jerusalem, 1968),
pp. 126–127.
60. Jabotinsky, Autobiografia, pp. 47–51, 68–72, 83–88; Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Ketavim
Tsiyonim Rishonim (Jerusalem, 1949); Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Feuilletonim
( Jerusalem, 1954), pp. 33–51; Jabotinsky, quoted in Shirat H. N. Bialik, p. 220;
Refaela Bilski Ben-Hur, Kol Yahid Hu Melekh, HaMahshava haHevratit v’haMedinit
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 223
Shel Ze’ev Jabotinsky (Tel Aviv, 1988), pp. 22–23, 183–184; Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Al
Sifrut v’Omanut ( Jerusalem, 1948), pp. 97–120; Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Mikhtavim (Tel
Aviv, n.d.), p. 37.
61. Yosef Nedava, ed., Ze’ev Jabotinsky: haIsh u’Mishnato (Tel Aviv, 1980);
Penkower, The Zionist Revolution, pp. 120–132.
62. Bialik, Shirim, pp. 110–111, 166–167, 172–174, 186–187, 204–208, 218,
221–224, 261–264, 370–391; Yosef Klausner, H. N. Bialik v’Shirat Hayav (Tel
Aviv, 1950), pp. 123–125; Sefer Shimon Dubnow, p. 336. Also see Kol Kitvei Reuven
Brainin ben Mordekhai Brainin, Vol. 2 (New York, 1936), p. 168; and Dan Miron,
H. N. Bialik and the Prophetic Mode in Modern Hebrew Poetry (Syracuse, 2000).
63. Igrot H. N. Bialik, p. 181; Yosef Oren, Shevivim (Tel Aviv, 1981), pp. 135–
145. See also books cited in note 1. For Jabotinsky’s later thoughts about Bialik’s
poetic silence, see Jabotinsky, Al Sifrut v’Omanut, pp. 263–279. For Bialik’s lack of
hope in the revolutions that engulfed Russia, see Hamutal Bar-Yosef, “‘Lanu
HaYehudim Hashkafa Aheret’: H. N. Bialik B’Zman HaMahapekhot B’Russya
V’Yahaso LeRa’ayon HaMahapekha,” in MehVilna Ad L’Yerushalayim, Mehkarim
B’Toldotehem U’VeTarbutam Shel Yehudei Mizrah Eiropa, Mugashim L’Professor Shmuel
Verses, ed. D. Asaf, R. Shenfeld, and A. Holtzman. (Jerusalem, 2002), pp. 427–448.
64. Israel Zangwill, “The Jubilee of Bialik” (n.d.), A120/134, CZA, Jerusalem;
A. S. Orlans, “Siha Im H. N. Bialik” (n.d.), file 61, Yehoshua Ravnitski MSS (4/
1185), Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem; Igrot H. N. Bialik,
p. 180; H. N. Bialik, Devarim ShehBa’al Peh, Vols. 1–2 (Tel Aviv, 1935), esp. Vol. 1,
pp. 49–55. Gorki was quoted a year before the Kishinev pogrom as follows: “I am
told Zionism is a Utopia. I do not know; perhaps. But inasmuch as I see in this
Utopia an unconquerable thirst for freedom, one for which the people will
suffer, it is for me a reality. With all my heart, I pray that the Jewish people, like
the rest of humanity, may be given spiritual strength to labor for its dream and
to establish it in flesh and blood.” See Maccabean, Vol. 2 (April 1902), p. 213.
65. Avraham Broides, “b’Mehitsato Shel H. N. Bialik,” in Measef: Mukdash
l’Yetsirat H. N. Bialik, Vol. 10, ed. H. Barzel (Tel Aviv, 1975), pp. 350–352; Henrietta
Szold, letter to sisters, July 20, 1934, Henrietta Szold files #1, Hadassah
Archives, New York City. For Ahad Ha’am’s singular influence on Bialik, see
Bialik, Shirim, pp. 143–145; Igrot H. N. Bialik, p. 168; Bialik, Devarim ShehBa’al
Peh, Vol. 2, pp. 191–210; and Aliza Klausner Bar, “Al Hashpa’ato Shel Ahad-
Ha’am al Haim Nahman Bialik,” in Measef: Mukdash l’Yetsirat H. N. Bialik, Vol.
10, ed. H. Barzel (Tel Aviv, 1975), pp. 315–333.
66. Nedava, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, pp. 309–314; David Ben-Gurion, letter to Arthur
Wauchope, July 9, 1934, David Ben-Gurion Archives, Sdeh Boker, Israel.
67. Yaakov Fikhman, Shirat Bialik ( Jerusalem, 1953), pp. 60, 83; Yaakov
Fikhman, Sefer Bialik (Tel Aviv, 1934), pp. 141–158; Shazar, Or Ishim, pp.
135–141; Shimon Rawidowicz, Sihotai Im Bialik ( Jerusalem, 1983), pp. 28–30;
Boaz Arpeli, “ ‘Meiot b’Shanim Yarku Eleh (haGoyim) haMetoavim b’Fanenu,
vaAnahnu Mahinu et haRok’: Bialik, Brenner, Atsag,” HaAretz, literary section,
October 10, 2003.
68. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, pp. 276–281; Shavit and Shamir, b’Mevoei Ir
haHareiga, p. 130; Grace Cohen Grossman, Jewish Art (New York, 1995),
p. 282. The Israel Museum, in Jerusalem, featured Pann’s “Jug of Tears” (not
224 Monty Noam Penkower
shown in seventy-five years), together with his later romantic pastels of biblical
heroes and heroines, in fall–winter 2003.
69. Philip Guedella, Supers and Supermen (New York, 1924), p. 81; Anita Shapira,
Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (New York, 1992), pp.
111, 176–177.
70. Governing Council minutes, March 30, 1933, Zionist Organization of
America MSS, Box 2, AJHS; Jewish Agency Executive, Jerusalem, April 9, 1933,
CZA, Jerusalem; Hayim Greenberg, The Inner Eye (New York, 1953), pp. 219–
229. On the other hand, Jabotinsky asserted that in light of the Palestinian Arab
revolt, which began in April 1936, Bialik’s call for self-defense in “b’Ir haHareiga”
now had to be replaced with the Yishuv adopting an offensive ethos
against such sustained attack. See Yaakov Shavit, ed., Havlaga O Teguva
( Jerusalem, 1983), pp. 71–73.
71. Greenberg, The Inner Eye, pp. 230–238; Leni Yahil, “The Warsaw Underground
Press,” in Living with Antisemitism: Modern Jewish Responses, ed. J. Reinharz
(Hanover, N.H., 1987), pp. 436–437; Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, pp. 207,
211–212; Documents on the Holocaust, ed. Y. Arad, Y. Gutman, and A. Margaliot
( Jerusalem, 1981), p. 433. And, speaking to Mapai youth in Palestine a few
months before his death in August 1944, Labor Zionist ideologue Berl Katznelson
emphasized the significance of the Kishinev pogrom, “b’Ir haHareiga,” and
other related calls in 1903 as critical in stimulating armed resistance among
Jewish youth in Russia and in Palestine. See Kitvei Berl Katznelson, pp. 36–38.
Kristallnacht, the “Night of the Broken Glass” on November 9–10, 1938, witnessed
the deportation of at least 30,000 Jews to Nazi concentration camps and
the destruction of hundreds of synagogues, shops, and houses in Germany and
Austria. Ninety-one Jews were reported dead, and many were severely
wounded. Following that planned action, the Jews had to pay the Hitler
government an “indemnity” of one billion reichsmarks, as well as insurance
benefits for their destroyed property (another 250 million reichsmarks), and
were completely evicted from German economic life.
72. Yitshak Zuckerman (“Antek”), A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising, trans. and ed. B. Harshav (Berkeley, 1993), p. 72. On the eve of
World War II, Dubnow saw no fundamental distinction between totalitarian rule
and previous absolutist regimes and maintained his faith in autonomous Jewish
life in the Diaspora. See Y. Meirson, “Siha Im Professor Shimon Dubnow,”
Davar, July 19, 1939.
73. Dubnow, Divrei Yemei Am Olam, p. 300; Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 6
( Jerusalem, 1973), p. 252, and Vol. 10, p. 1068; Yehuda Bauer, A History of the
Holocaust (New York, 1982), p. 335.
74. Penkower, The Emergence of Zionist Thought, pp. 63–73; Eliezer Schweid,
“The Rejection of the Diaspora in Zionist Thought: Two Approaches,” Studies in
Zionism, Vol. 5 (spring 1984), pp. 43–70; Shalom Ratzaby, “The Polemic about
the ‘Negation of the Diaspora’ in the 1930s and Its Roots,” Journal of Israeli History,
Vol. 16 (1995), pp. 19–38; Shapira, Land and Power, pp. 330–341; Nili
Keren, “The Impact of She’erit Hapletah on the Holocaust Consciousness of
Israeli Society,” in She’erit Hapletah, 1944–1948, Rehabilitation and Struggle, ed. Y.
Gutman and A. Saf ( Jerusalem, 1990), pp. 427–436; Yehiam Weitz, “Yishuv,
The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 225
Gola Shoa—Mitus u’Metsiut,” Yahadut Zmanenu, Vol. 6 (1990), pp. 133–150;
Gershon Shaked, “Between the Western Wall and Masada: The Holocaust and
the Self-Awareness of Israeli Society,” in Major Changes within the Jewish People in
the Wake of the Holocaust, ed. Y. Gutman (Jerusalem, 1996), pp. 553–566; Dalya
Ofer, “Ma v’Ad Kama Lizkor Min haShoa: Zikhron haShoa b’Medinat Yisrael
baAsor haRishon l’Kiyuma,” in Atsmaut: 50 haShanim haRishonot, ed. A. Shapira
( Jerusalem, 1998), pp. 171–193.
75. Henry Roth, Mercy of a Rude Stream: A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park
(New York, 1994), pp. 74–75. By contrast, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred
Years Together echoes the Tsarist version: A drunken mob, provoked by Jews,
carried out an attack that left a very small number of victims. Witnesses did not
confirm the “heartrending” details in the newspapers, which were nothing more
than exaggerated stories on the part of the Russian revolutionaries, who took
advance of the pogrom as “an opportunity to attack the government.” See Boris
Sandler, “The Reaction to the Kishinev Pogrom, Three Perspectives: Leo Tolstoy,
Vladimir Korolenko and Alexander Solzhenitsyn,” November 4, 2003, conference,
YIVO, New York City.
76. Jerusalem Post, May 29, 2003.
77. Roskies, The Literature of Destruction, p. 154.
78. Kitvei Yehuda Leib Gordon, Shira (Tel Aviv, 1950), pp. 31, 103–111;
Goren, Eduyot Nifgaei Kishinev keFi ShehNikhtevu Al Yedei H. N. Bialik v’Haverav;
Gershon Shaked, The Shadows Within: Essays on Modern Jewish Writers (Philadelphia,
1987), pp. 123–132. In May 1096, at the beginning of the Catholic Church’s First
Crusade to redeem the Holy Land from Muslim rule, over 1,000 Jews died in
Mainz (some at the hands of crusaders and many, after an armed and spirited
resistance, by suicide as an act of sanctifying the Divine name, Kiddush
haShem). The synagogue and Jewish quarter were also burned down. For
Shaul Tchernihovsky’s poetic response to that martyrdom, “Baruch of
Mainz” (1902), which was hailed by his contemporaries as a prophetic
response to the Kishinev pogrom one year later, see Mintz, Hurban, pp. 123–
129. Also see Yaakov Bahat, “Kiddush haShem b’Yetsirato Shel Tchernihovsky,”
Moznayim, Vol. 17 (November, 1963), pp. 432–437.
79. Adler and Margalith, With Firmness in the Right, p. 264; Mivhar Igrot
Weizmann, pp. 117–118; Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error (New York, 1949),
pp. 79–80.