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the Constitution was a hopelessly pro-
slavery document, most abolitionists
moved the other way. They expanded
the scope of antislavery politics by in-
corporating more and more parts of
the Constitution: the Preamble, with
Pogrom:
Kishinev and the Tilt of History
by Steven J. Zipperstein.
Liveright, 261 pp., $27.95
Wittgenstein posed the question: Why
did one crucifixion captivate the world
for two thousand years, while tens of
thousands of other people crucified by
the Romans remain utterly forgotten?
One obvious answer is that we react to
stories, not statistics: a haunting story
exists for one crucifixion; statistics
barely account for the rest.
Steven J. Zipperstein has written
a smart and sensitive book about an
event—the pogrom of 1903 in the
Bessarabian city of Kishinev, on the
southwestern edge of the Russian Em-
pire—that poses a similar question.
Why did this pogrom receive world-
wide attention and acquire a symbolic
status in modern Jewish life as the
exemplary pogrom, although “only”
forty-seven Jews were killed? Com-
pared to the 1905 pogrom in Odessa, in
which 2,500 Jews were murdered, the
Kishinev Pogrom seems small-scale.
And yet the Odessa Pogrom never
seized the Jewish imagination or, for
that matter, the world’s. What made
Kishinev so memorable?
The Kishinev Pogrom lasted a day
and a half. It began on Easter 1903, a
dry, sunny April day. The weather is
important: Zipperstein believes that
had it rained, it would all have turned
out differently. While pogroms were
usually chaotic, there was some method
to the one in Kishinev, which strength-
ens the suspicion that the tsarist gov-
ernment was behind it. The houses of
Jews were specifically targeted: a group
of children hurled stones at them until
the adults broke in, brandishing clubs.
The perpetrators—among them a curi-
ously large number of seminarians—
had pillaged a Jewish-owned liquor
store, so they were fortified by consid-
erable amounts of alcohol.
Looting was a significant aspect of
the pogrom, but it also included the
gang rape of Jewish women and—after
widespread chanting of “Death to the
Jews!”—murder. The hooligans left
Jewish-owned houses and shops in
total devastation. It is estimated that
about two thousand people partici-
pated in various aspects of the pogrom.
But despite these horrific details,
the question of what turns an event or
site into a larger symbol remains a vex-
ing one. There is no reason to believe
that there is one explanation for all
such cases. Even if we limit ourselves
to especially notorious atrocities and
massacres, such as those at Lidice,
Nanking, Babi Yar, Guernica, Musa
Dagh, Oradour-sur-Glane, Deir Yas-
sin, or My Lai, let alone Hiroshima,
the question remains. The magnitude
34
its guarantee of the “blessing of lib-
erty” to all; Article 1, Section 9, guar-
anteeing the writ of habeas corpus; the
Fourth Amendment’s restriction on
unreasonable search and seizure; the
Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due
The Exemplary Pogrom
Avishai Margalit
Pogrom victims in front of a vandalized house in the Bessarabian city of Kishinev,
on the southwestern edge of the Russian Empire, April 1903
of the massacre may serve as part of
the explanation in the case of Babi Yar,
Nanking, or Hiroshima, but most of the
other examples were relatively small in
scale and in number of victims.
Works of art or literature may also
provide an explanation. There is little
doubt that Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s
poem was crucial to making Babi Yar a
symbol. In the case of Guernica, Picas-
so’s painting is probably the sole reason
it became a household name. Indeed,
many believe that “Guernica” refers
to the painting and not a place. Franz
Werfel’s 1933 novel The Forty Days of
Musa Dagh turned the mount of Moses
in southern Turkey into a powerful
symbol not only of the plight of the Ar-
menians but of genocide more broadly,
so much so that, according to the liter-
ary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Wer-
fel’s was the most sought after book
in the Warsaw Ghetto during World
War II. Isaac Babel witnessed Odes-
sa’s pogrom as an eleven-year-old. He
was saved by a Christian family, but
his uncle was murdered. Twenty years
later Babel published “The Story of My
Dovecot,” in which the pogrom cast its
long shadow. Yet the story didn’t make
the Odessa pogrom famous, perhaps
because it was written much later, or
because it is centered on the experience
of a child.
In the case of Kishinev, works of art
are significant. Haim Nahman Bialik’s
1903 poem about the pogrom, “In the
City of Killing,” helped propel him to
the status of national Hebrew poet and
shaped the way the pogrom has been
seared into the Zionist consciousness,
particularly among those of my gen-
eration who were raised in the Zion-
ist labor movement. Bialik was thirty
when, shortly after the pogrom, he em-
barked on a mission to Kishinev, where
process; the privileges and immunities
clause. If rigorously applied to the free
states of the North, the western terri-
tories, and the high seas, these basic
constitutional protections would se-
verely circumscribe the slave states. By
Topham/The Image Works
he amassed a great deal of evidence
about what had taken place there. He
even managed to interview extensively
some of the women who had been
raped—a taboo subject among the Jew-
ish religious community. (Puzzlingly,
apart from the poem Bialik never pub-
lished his findings, which were found in
his archive and appeared only after his
death.)
The narrator of the poem is a prophet
sent by God to observe what happens
at the site of the slaughter. But Bialik’s
God is a meek one: He stands by help-
less as the Jews are being killed. The
poet’s cry is directed to heaven as much
as it is to earth. It is a cry of despair,
aimed at the God of his youth. This
theological outcry has largely been
overlooked, as the poem is usually un-
derstood to be a call for regaining a
measure of dignity by standing up to
one’s assailants.
Zipperstein lingers on Bialik’s
poem but argues that he did not do for
Kishinev what Picasso did for Guernica.
He also invokes the Irish journalist
Michael Davitt as a major contributor
to the Kishinev story. Davitt’s reports
were among the most vivid and accu-
rate portrayals of the pogrom’s imme-
diate aftermath. They were crucial in
stirring international attention to it,
yet it is still worth pausing over why a
Hearst newspaper took such an inter-
est in Kishinev and sent Davitt there in
the first place. He arrived with a rather
grim view of the Jews as exploiters of
the local peasants. But he had a fiercely
independent mind and paid close atten-
tion to what he saw—and what he saw
was ugly.
The history of pogroms goes back a
long time, but the Russian word po-
the 1850s, this increasingly robust anti-
slavery constitutionalism had become
part of the antislavery mainstream.
This is the tradition whose significance,
whose very existence, neorevisionists
struggle to deny.
grom is relatively new and gained cur-
rency around 1882, with the so-called
southern storms—a wave of violent
anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish com-
munities in the tsarist empire. Pogrom,
which loosely means “destruction” or
“demolition,” became a loan word in
many languages, and its meaning was
extended from attacks on Jewish com-
munities to attacks on vulnerable eth-
nic or religious groups anywhere in the
world. These included pillage, rape,
destruction of property, and physical
harm, but not death. Kishinev is the
first pogrom of the twentieth century
that had all of those things as well as
murder.
The word pogrom is one of the rea-
sons that Jews during World War II
were slow to understand the nature and
scope of the Nazi atrocities. They be-
lieved that what was taking place in the
conquered territories was yet another
wave of pogroms of a familiar kind, on a
larger scale, perhaps, but still localized,
and in no way a systematic annihila-
tion of the Jews. To view the Holocaust
through the prism of the pogrom was
a tragic blunder—an understandable
one, but a blunder nonetheless.
One of the connotations of the word
is an attack on the innocent that is
spurred by the law-and-order forces of
a regime to divert public anger toward
a scapegoat. While this is true of many
pogroms, and in particular the ones
that took place after the tsarist govern-
ment claimed that Jews had been involved
in the failed revolution of 1905, it is not
true about the pogrom in Kishinev. In a
quiet, nonpolemical tone, Zipperstein
corrects this misperception, as well as
many others.
His book begins with a vivid descrip-
tion of Kishinev and the countryside. It
is extremely helpful for those for whom
Bessarabia—now largely within the in-
dependent country of Moldova—seems
as remote as Outer Mongolia. Even
by the low standards of tsarist Rus-
sia, Bessarabia was a neglected back-
water; it had only 144 miles of paved
roads. Zipperstein provides a guide
to Kishinev, including street-by-street
details, whose usefulness becomes ap-
parent as he proceeds with the story.
The outside world knew little about
Kishinev, though for a while its popu-
lation of 110,000, of which Jews con-
stituted 47 percent, was larger than
Kiev’s. There were several wealthy
Jewish families, most of whom fled
before the actual pogrom started, but
after witnessing the vicious incitements
in the days before. The socialist Bund
party, which was dominant among the
Jews at the time, seized on this fact to
show that pogroms affected the poor
disproportionately. And yet the Jews’
main problem was not poverty. It was
vulnerability.
The New York Review

The common view is that the tsarist
government was in one way or another
involved in the pogrom. The minister
of interior at the time was Vyacheslav
Pleve. If we accept Isaiah Berlin’s
shrewd characterization of an anti-
Semite as someone who hates Jews be-
yond necessity, then Pleve hated Jews
far beyond necessity—obsessively and
consistently. It is no wonder, then, that
he was suspected of stirring things up
in Kishinev. Moreover, a letter pur-
portedly written by him in late March
1903 set loose his subordinates on the
city’s Jews. Yet that letter is now known
to have been forged, and the true vil-
lain behind the pogrom was someone
else entirely: Pavel Krushevan.
Krushevan was a local writer of
some repute. He has been written off
as a rather obscure, insignificant figure,
but that, Zipperstein shows, is a grave
mistake. For one thing, Krushevan was
associated with the reactionary, ultra-
nationalist, and anti-Semitic Black
Hundreds movement. But he was also
responsible for writing and publishing
in 1903 the infamous Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, whose effects haunt us
to this day. The Protocols consists of
supposed conversations among a Jew-
ish cabal, which had in fact been lifted
from a French satire written by Mau-
rice Joly and aimed at Napoleon III.
Though Joly’s satire had nothing to do
with Jewish matters, it was nevertheless
peppered with references to Jews and
their money.
Until recently, conventional wisdom
held that the Protocols had been fab-
ricated around the first Zionist Con-
gress in 1897 by the Okhrana—the
tsarist secret police—and specifically
by Pyotor Rachkovsky, the head of
the Okhrana delegation in Paris, with
help from a journalist named Matvei
Golovinskii. Zipperstein claims, based
on current research, that the two were
not the authors of the Protocols and
that the Okhrana were not behind it.
Krushevan was the first to publish the
Protocols in his newspaper, but his in-
volvement as its main author has not
been widely recognized.
Krushevan was also the main source
behind a toxic conspiracy theory in the
Protocols about a gathering of promi-
nent Jews, headed by Edmond James
de Rothschild, that supposedly ex-
plained how Jews controlled the world.
The origins of the myth that ties Jews
to great wealth and power is mysteri-
ous. Broadly speaking, Jews have done
relatively well, but if you combine the
wealth of all Jewish people today it
would be about the same as the wealth
of Holland—impressive, no doubt,
yet no one would claim that Holland
controls the world. Once again, we find
a clash between scope and symbol. The
connection between Jews and money
has become a symbol—and no amount
of factual evidence would convince
anti-Semites of its lack of scope.
When the slain body of a Christian
boy was found twenty-five miles from
Kishinev on February 6, it was Krushe-
van who, writing in the St. Petersburg
newspaper Znamya (The Banner),
blamed the Jews, claiming that this was
a ritualistic murder and that the Jews
intended to use the victim’s blood to
make matzoh for Passover. (The blood
libel, according to which Jews murder
Christian children at Passover so as to
use their blood to bake the ritual un-
May 23, 2019
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leavened bread, has a long history. It
goes back to medieval England, where
in 1144 the Jews of Norwich were ac-
cused of murdering a child by the name
of William.) Krushevan was an im-
mensely effective inciter; it is hard to
underestimate his influence in bringing
about the Kishinev pogrom.
The pogrom brought to the fore a
touchy subject to which Bialik’s poem
gave a formidable voice: the supposed
cowardliness of the Jews (“with trem-
bling knees/Concealed and cowering—
the sons of the Maccabees”). In a town
in which Jews made up almost half the
population, how were two thousand
hooligans, at most, able to inflict such
devastation? Here, too, Zipperstein
makes an important correction. It is
not true that the Jews of Kishinev did
not try to defend themselves. But since
Pavel Krushevan, author of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 1900
they did so without the backing of Jew-
ish organizations, such as the Bund or
any of the Zionist movements, their ef-
forts were ineffective.
The victims of the pogrom were per-
ceived to be deeply religious Orthodox
Jews—an image that Bialik’s poem
only enhanced (“To the Rabbi’s house
they flitted”). For the Jewish social-
ists and Zionists of the time, such Jews
were viewed as weak and completely
dependent on others for protection,
mainly the tsarist government. Histori-
cally, the general attitude among the
Jews was that fighting and bloodshed
were for the gentiles, not for them, the
People of the Book.
And so Kishinev went down in history
as a symbol of Jewish passivity. The rise
of the socialist Jewish parties animated
the issue of self-defense as a major con-
cern of Jewish life. Bialik’s poem had a
large influence in calling for a change
in the attitude of the Jews and for coun-
tering violence with violence. The issue
was not so much about preventing the
loss of life as it was about defending
Jewish dignity against humiliation and
paralysis in the face of danger.
One of the most significant events
in modern Jewish life was the mass
exodus of Jews from tsarist Russia, es-
pecially to the United States. Jewish
history tends to view the Kishinev Po-
grom as the main factor driving Jewish
immigration between 1889 and 1914.
In 1882 there were 13,000 Jewish im-
migrants, whereas between 1904 and
1906—the years immediately follow-
ing the pogrom—that number rose to
a staggering 400,000. Yet the immi-
gration of Jews had more to do with a
demographic explosion: the number of
Jews in tsarist Russia, where the major-
ity of the world’s Jews lived, increased
fivefold during the nineteenth century.
This was accompanied by a marked
downturn in their economic situation
after they lost their virtual monopoly
as middlemen between Russian land-
owners and the peasantry to a new
class of gentiles. The impoverishment
of Jews was sharp and painful; their fu-
ture looked bleak.
The question remains, then, how
a “squalid brawl in a distant city,” as
George Orwell called it, managed to
turn into a world event. One explana-
tion has to do with geography: Bessara-
bia was close to the Austro-Hungarian
border, which meant that smugglers
could get telegrams out of Kishinev on
a daily basis. Yet the Kishinev Pogrom
resonated far and wide, particularly
among the Jewish immigrants of New
York’s Lower East Side, where entire
issues of Jewish newspapers, such as
the widely read Forverts, in Yiddish,
were devoted to it.
The salience of the pogrom was fur-
ther manifested in eight Yiddish plays,
which, though not significant from an
artistic point of view, were success-
ful in stirring emotion in their audi-
ences. They helped bring about an
unprecedented number of donations
from Jewish Americans to the survi-
vors. The relatively poor recent im-
migrants were known to send money
back home; their sense of community
and solidarity was well established.
But this time donations also poured
in from more established immigrants,
mainly of Jewish- German origin, who
historically tended to regard Jews from
Eastern Europe with aloofness and
condescension. When President Theo-
dore Roosevelt denounced the pogrom,
it became clear that the tragedy had
managed to transcend Jewish circles.
One of Kishinev’s direct influences
was on Zionism itself, with its relatively
new mantra: The future is Palestine.
But the pogrom affected all aspects
of Jewish-Russian communities. Jew-
ish political life became increasingly
organized into political parties instead
of the voluntary, ad hoc associations
that had existed before. These new par-
ties were centralized, doctrinaire, and
disciplined.
The political and cultural symbiosis
between Jewish life in Russia and the
Lower East Side of New York was total.
It was as if Bessarabia was no further
away than 14th Street. The ideological
debates within both communities were
identical. Chief among them was, in a
way, a revival of an old debate raised by
the founder of Labor Zionism, Moses
Hess: how to reconcile the tension be-
tween the universal appeal of socialism
and the parochial ethnic concerns of
nationalism. Each participant added
many complicated layers to the debate,
but the general dilemma of socialism
vs. nationalism endured.
On one extreme were those who be-
lieved that the road to Jewish salvation
lay in a socialist revolution that would
topple the tsarist regime. Socialism
would be the solution not only for the
plight of the Jews but for all oppressed
people. A growing number of Jews, es-
pecially among the youth of the semi-
intelligentsia, subscribed to this view.
Indeed, 30 percent of the political pris-
oners in Russia at the time were Jews.
As the tsarist finance minister Sergei
Witte asked Theodor Herzl in bewil-
derment: Why, if there are only seven
million Jews out of 136 million people
in the empire, do they constitute almost
half of the revolutionary cadres?
T he Bund, by far the largest Jewish
socialist party, tried to combine uni-
versal salvation and a deep commit-
ment to its fellow Jews, especially to the
Jewish proletariat. The Bund stressed,
however, that the solution to the Jew-
ish problem should be found within the
Jewish communities themselves and
not in some utopian territory. In this it
differed from “territorialists” who at-
tempted to find a place where the Jews
could live safely and freely—places
such as New Jersey in the US or Santa
Fe in Argentina. For a while, the trag-
edy of Kishinev convinced many (even
Zionists) to accept the idea of Uganda,
which had ostensibly been offered by
the British, as such a dwelling place.
And then there were the hard-core Zi-
onists for whom only the Holy Land in
Palestine would provide the solution
for the Jewish predicament, for it was
the only place to which Jews could be
motivated to move as an organized
nation. While the debate was still rag-
ing, tens of thousands of Jews began to
leave tsarist Russia on their own, not
waiting for the ideologues to resolve
their notions of salvation.
It is no exaggeration to say that this
debate was shaped to a significant de-
gree by Kishinev: the pogrom high-
lighted the Jewish dilemma between
relying solely on themselves and seek-
ing a larger sense of solidarity in the
form of a class-based revolution. In-
terestingly, the Kishinev Pogrom was
also instrumental in raising another
issue, especially in the United States,
regarding the nature and the extent
of Jewish identification with other op-
pressed people, African-Americans
most obviously. Were the Jews morally
obligated to show solidarity with other
vilified communities, especially once
the word “pogrom” became a generic
term in American English and called
for such comparisons? The similarities
between Kishinev and attacks on black
communities, for example the East St.
Louis Race Riots of 1917, were not
overlooked: Forverts called Kishinev
and St. Louis “twin sisters,” arguing
that they consisted of “the same soil,
the same people.”
Zipperstein has more to say on the re-
lation between the protection of blacks
from lynching and Jews from pogroms.
This relation provides “the immedi-
ate backdrop to the launching in 1909
of the first major American organiza-
tion for the promotion of black civil
rights: the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People,
or NAACP.” It was Kishinev in Russia
that precipitated the call for the pro-
tection of blacks in the United States.
This is indeed an astounding historical
connection.
While Zipperstein’s book doesn’t di-
rectly address the historical puzzle of
how the pogrom managed to endure as
a symbol given its relatively minuscule
scale, this admirable work of history
provides us with many clues. As for
Wittgenstein’s question of how to sepa-
rate the symbol from the scope, there,
too, Zipperstein manages to go beyond
the statistics and to offer a story—one
both singular and significant.
35