1903: The Birth of a Century.
Reconsidering the 49 Deaths That Galvanized a Generation and Changed
by: J.J. Goldberg
Forward, April 4, 2003
One hundred years ago, on April 6, 1903, the Jewish community of Kishinev
in what was then czarist Russia suffered two days of mob violence
that shocked the world and changed the course of Jewish history.
Provoked by a medieval blood libel, flashed around the globe by modern
communications, Kishinev was the last pogrom of the Middle Ages and
the first atrocity of the 20th century. The event, and the worldwide
wave of Jewish outrage that it evoked, laid the foundations of modern
Israel, gave birth to contemporary American-Jewish activism and helped
bring about the downfall of the czarist regime.
Much of that, curiously, resulted from a misreading of events at the
Kishinev, the capital of the czarist province of Bessarabia, today's
Republic of Moldova, was a town of some 125,000 residents, nearly
half of them Jewish. Ethnic tensions were running high that spring,
thanks to a noisy, months-long campaign of antisemitic incitement
by local nationalists.
The rioting began on Easter Sunday, after rumors spread through town
that a Christian had been killed by Jews in a ritual murder. Mobs
rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods for two days, burning, smashing,
raping and killing. When it was over, 49 Jews were dead and 500 wounded,
1,300 homes and businesses were looted and destroyed and 2,000 families
were left homeless.
The brutality sent shock waves across Russia and around the world.
Leo Tolstoy spoke out. Mass rallies were held in Paris, London and
New York. Western governments protested the apparent complicity of
the czar's police, who had refused repeated pleas to intervene. The
Forward reported the news with a banner headline: "Rivers of
Jewish Blood in Kishinev."
From nearby Odessa, the great center of Russian Jewish culture, the
young Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik was sent to Kishinev by the
Jewish communal commission to interview survivors and report firsthand
on the bloodbath. Before returning home he composed one of his most
powerful poems, "On the Slaughter," with its unforgettable
cry that Satan himself could not forgive the death of a child. A year
later Bialik would publish his epic masterwork, "The City
of Slaughter," a searing condemnation of Jewish passivity,
from which the following is taken.
Descend then, to the cellars of the town,
There where the virginal daughters of thy folk were fouled,
Where seven heathen flung a woman down,
The daughter in the presence of her mother,
The mother in the presence of her daughter,
Before slaughter, during slaughter, and after slaughter!
Touch with thy hand the cushion stained; touch
The pillow incarnadined:
This is the place the wild ones of the wood, the beasts of the field
With bloody axes in their paws compelled thy daughters yield:
Beasted and swined!
Note also, do not fail to note,
In that dark corner, and behind that cask
Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks,
Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath
The bestial breath,
Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood!
Watching from the darkness and its mesh
The lecherous rabble portioning for booty
Their kindred and their flesh!
Crushed in their shame, they saw it all;
They did not stir nor move;
They did not pluck their eyes out; they
Beat not their brains against the wall!
Perhaps, perhaps each watcher had it in his heart to pray:
A miracle, O Lord ¡ª and spare my skin this day!
poem fell on ready ears. Young Jews across Russia, electrified by
the events, took the poem as a call to arms and organized themselves
into self-defense units, most led by fledgling socialist or Zionist
parties. Thousands threw themselves into revolutionary movements,
determined to bring down the murderous czarist regime. Their rage
and energy gave new momentum to the revolutionary movement and led
directly to the abortive Russian revolution of 1905, which in turn
set the stage for the cataclysm of 1917.
Others, despairing of any Jewish future in Russia, began making
their way to the land of Israel in a wave of immigration that would
come to be known as the Second Aliya. Influenced by socialism, led
by young radicals such as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi,
the pioneers set about remaking the Zionist settlement in Palestine
on a foundation of Jewish labor and Jewish self-defense. Driven
by visions of Kishinev and the shame of Jewish passivity, they created
the kibbutzim, the towns and factories, the militias and political
parties that were the cornerstone of modern Israel.
In fact, the image of Jewish passivity was largely untrue. Eyewitness
accounts of the pogrom tell a very different story. Here is a front-page
report from the Forward of April 24:
with knives and machetes, the murderers broke into Jewish homes,
where they began stabbing and killing, chopping off heads and stomping
frail women and small children. If such a vicious, enraged mob would
have attacked a Jewish town somewhere in Volin or Lithuania, thousands
of Jews would have been killed in an hour's time. But Kishinev Jews
are tough, healthy, strong as iron and fearless. When the murderous
pogromists began their horrible slaughter, Jewish boys and men came
running and fought like lions to protect their weaker and older
brothers and sisters. Even young girls exhibited amazing heroism.
They defended their honor with supernatural strength.... The Jews,
however, fought with their bare hands and the murderers, armed with
machetes and knives, were primed to annihilate and decimate all
the Jewish townspeople.
How did Bialik get it so wrong? Like many young Russian Jews, Bialik
was ready to believe in the shame of Jewish passivity even before
he got to Kishinev. Zionist essayists had been hammering the theme
home for decades, none more powerfully than the Kishçnev-born
physician Leon Pinsker, whose 1882 essay "Autoemancipation"
is still regarded widely as the founding manifesto of Russian Zionism.
Pinsker's essay was on Bialik's mind when word of the bloodbath
reached Odessa on the second day of the rioting, April 7. Bialik
appears to have spent the evening at a meeting of the city's Jewish
literary circle, the Beseda ("Conversation") Club, which
included such luminaries as the historian Simon Dubnow, the Hebrew
essayist Ahad Ha'am and editor-publisher Yehoshua Ravnitzky. The
circle's April 7 meeting was devoted to a lecture by a little-known
journalist named Vladimir Jabotinsky, age 23. His theme for the
lecture, his first major public appearance, was "Autoemancipation."
Here is how the historian Dubnow recalled the evening in his memoirs:
It was the night of April 7, 1903. Because of Russian Easter, the
newspapers had not been issued for the previous two days so that
we remained without any news from the rest of the world. That night
the Jewish audience assembled in the Beseda Club, to listen to the
talk of a young Zionist, the Odessa "wunderkind" V. Jabotinsky
[....] The young agitator had great success with his audience. In
a particularly moving manner, he drew on Pinsker's parable of the
Jew as a shadow wandering through space and developed it further.
As for my own impression, this one-sided treatment of our historical
problem depressed me: Did he not scarcely stop short of inducing
fear in our unstable Jewish youth of their own national shadow?...
During the break, while pacing up and down in the neighboring room,
I noticed sudden unrest in the audience: the news spread that fugitives
had arrived in Odessa from nearby Kishinev and had reported of a
bloody pogrom in progress there.
When Bialik set out for Kishinev later in the week his mission was
to collect the facts, but it could be that his narrative was formulated
in advance, etched in his mind by Jabotinsky.
Most of Russia's Jews, to be sure, wanted nothing more than to flee
the czar's charnel house. Emigration to America, already a flood
tide, more than doubled by the end of the year. In America, Jews
scrambled to cope with the human tidal wave, leading to an explosive
growth of Jewish philanthropy and social service agencies. When
Russia launched its ill-fated war against Japan the next year, America's
leading Jewish philanthropist, investment banker Jacob Schiff, volunteered
to underwrite Japan's war bonds and personally financed Russia's
defeat. Schiff and other prominent Jewish business figures entered
a series of negotiations that led three years later to the formation
of the American Jewish Committee, arguably the world's first modern
human-rights lobby. President Theodore Roosevelt greeted the committee's
formation by inviting its best known figure, the former diplomat
Oscar Straus, to become his secretary of commerce and labor, the
first Jew to serve in an American cabinet. And not a word about
color-blind meritocracy: "I want to show Russia and some other
countries," Roosevelt wrote to Straus, "what we think
of the Jews in this country."
For all that, the enduring image of Kishinev is Bialik's.
The historian Rufus Learsi once wrote that the 1903 Kishinev pogrom
must be seen as "a dress rehearsal" for the far bloodier
wave of antisemitic violence two years later, following the 1905
revolution, which left some 3,000 Jews dead. But that violence was
only a rehearsal for the genocidal fury of the 1918 Russian civil
war, in which Ukrainian militias under Simon Petlura massacred as
many as 200,000 Jews. And that, of course, was just a dress rehearsal
for the Holocaust.
Like Kishinev in its time, the Holocaust was taken by survivors
and heirs to be an object lesson in the human capacity for evil
and the Jewish duty to stand up and fight. But for all the earnest
lessons, whether at Kishinev or at Auschwitz, the atrocities of
the 20th century seem to be little more than forerunners one for
the next, descending not as warnings but as dress rehearsals for
new and greater horrors. In Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and now Liberia
and Congo, neighbors continue to slaughter neighbors while the world
is busy elsewhere. Only the technologies improve. The mold was set