Pogrom
Page 6
Even those who acknowledged that they were antisemites admitted to Davitt that if Jews were to abandon the city in the pogrom’s wake, it could well tumble into financial ruin. They spoke disparagingly of those who chose to leave—though they also derided the continued stranglehold of Jews who remained on Kishinev’s economic life.
A glimpse at the confidence shared by the city’s Jews on the cusp of the massacre was the handsome Yiddish-language commercial guide for 1901; it was a close facsimile of a much-touted publication that had long appeared in Odessa. Kishinev’s version was in Yiddish, not Russian, designed as it was for merchants in particular, with a spotty knowledge of any language other than Yiddish, including those many newcomers to Kishinev from Romania and the southern belt of the Russian empire.
Doubling as a calendar—designed for use over the course of a ten-year period—and also a handy merchant’s reference guide, it boasted advertisements for the city’s impressive enterprises, large and small, in Jewish hands. Beautifully produced, it listed the dates of regional fairs and a glossary of commercially useful words—such as those for salt, cheese, wine, and fish, and some manufacturing terms, too—with translations into French, Turkish, Bulgarian, Romanian, Russian, and Hebrew. The calendar was packed with advertisements for Jewish-owned shops, many touting perfumes and expensive items. It was the document of a community on the rise, one whose story was just beginning.33
Known for its commercial opportunities, Kishinev drew few if any new occupants because of these Jewish cultural offerings. This was a region composed mostly of small-town Jews and of those recently in such places who now gravitated to the big city. None of Kishinev’s rabbis—before the second decade of the twentieth century, at any rate—achieved more than local standing. Hasidism flourished in Bessarabia’s towns, especially in the northern part near Austria-Hungary, but if this region appeared at all on the Jewish cultural map, it was because of the fabled gravestone cuttings, the most impressive of which were clustered to the north of Kishinev near Beltsy and Bostani. These intricate stone designs had been executed with rare skill, displaying flights of fancy, even whimsy.34
Most of the gravestones can be traced to the early eighteenth century, with the tradition dissipating over the next decades. But for nearly a hundred years, artisans from the region created many of the most original gravestones in the Jewish world. Today one can still see ornate Lions of Judah and Torah crowns, many tipped in gold and with the priestly four-fingered benediction, executed with breathtaking precision and drama. Particularly striking are representations of animals, many of them all but human in their features, which skirt the boundaries of traditional Jewish artistic expression while providing glimpses of the majesty and terror of death. Perhaps because of the region’s isolation and the presence of one exceptionally talented family—nearly all are the products of this one clan over some 150 years—did the gravestones manage to enjoy such a long, fertile run.35
Jewish gravestones in Bostani.
In Kishinev there was, of course, the standard array of Jewish religious and cultural institutions that existed in nearly all Russian Jewish communities: a large number of mostly quite small synagogues (the majority of these located in Lower Kishinev); two grand houses of worship; sixteen schools by the turn of the century, with a total of more than 2,100 students; many heders, or private Jewish religious elementary schools; and three yeshivas, or advanced rabbinic academies. None of these academies exerted more than a local reach, however. In 1838 Kishinev had opened its first modern Jewish school with an innovative curriculum of secular and Jewish subjects—which was, like so much else in Kishinev, something of a satellite of a pioneering modern Jewish school in Odessa launched more than a decade before. A particularly innovative local Jewish school offered a full complement of courses in the Hebrew language, including classes in the sciences; in 1902 one of its teachers published a zoology textbook in Hebrew illustrated with beautiful drawings of animals from throughout the world and printed by a local Hebrew publishing house. Some seven hundred Jews also attended Kishinev’s Russian schools. Various societies for the relief of the poor—which existed in nearly every Jewish community—could be found in Kishinev, as well, including a society for the assistance of Jewish clerks modeled on Odessa’s far larger organization (with eight hundred members and a respectable library of fifteen hundred volumes).36
Choral Synagogue, photographed 1930s.
The spark, then, that set the pogrom into motion was once again a fictive charge widely believed to be true; it was cobbled together out of a host of intricate details and finely tuned over the centuries. By the late nineteenth century, its ingredients were these: Jews were obliged to utilize the blood of a young Christian for ritual purposes, and specifically before the Passover festival; this meant that they must murder their victims, drain their blood, and then blend it into their festive matzos.
The difficulty of refuting a practice that never existed proved time and again taxing. It often required, for example, that those defending Jews provide proof that the dead had not been drained of blood, leaving open the prospect that, had such drainage occurred, ritual murder might well have been the cause. This is just what had transpired in Dubossary, a slow-paced fortress town on the Dniester of some five thousand, with half its population Jewish; it sat in the shadow of nearby Tiraspol and Kishinev. Though numerous, its Jews were mostly simple folk employed as shopkeepers, wine pressers, and lumber and tobacco workers. There, in the months before Kishinev’s pogrom, a drama unfolded that was at first macabre, eventually tragic.37
The episode in Dubossary started, as was so often the case, with the discovery of a dead Christian child, in this instance a fifteen-year-old boy. The orphan lived with his grandfather, who had designated him as his heir. Police soon investigated whether the killing was a ritual murder, prompted both by widespread rumors that this was the case (a local Jew was reportedly heard saying in Yiddish, “We already have the one we shall torment!”) and by the many stab wounds on the boy’s body. Their finding was that it could not have been a ritual murder because the body had not been drained of its blood. Still, the report’s veracity was widely dismissed; many people and, most vocally, Bessarabets (which followed the tragedy with steady, bombastic attention) charged that authorities had been bribed by Jews. Even a second autopsy report failed to quell rumors that Jews were the killers, which was also believed by the murdered boy’s grandfather.38
Rioting then broke out in the town, and those from neighboring towns and villages participated, as well. Reports sent to authorities on March 10, 1903, describe Jews beaten and a bazaar filled with Jewish stalls—most of them selling cheap manufactured items and food—plundered. Police attempted to arrest a rabble-rouser egging the crowd on; they jailed several local “village lads,” and they ordered Jews to shut their stores. The episode ended with no one killed or badly injured but with riots elsewhere, too.39
Police investigation later revealed that the murderer was a cousin eager to inherit. A local man—unemployed, something of a drunk, and desperately in need of cash—testified that he was contacted by the killer to help with the deed. He explained that the killer outlined for him how he planned to do away with his relative, deflecting all attention onto Jews by simulating a ritual murder. (The practice’s features were, apparently, well known.) This conversation took place as the two were sitting over glasses of wine at Jewish-owned “red-haired Yankel’s liquor store.” It was a tiny, spare spot, where they sat and plotted on one of its two wooden benches.40
Officials understood that, to test whether Jews were involved in the killing, it was necessary to determine if the body’s blood had been drained—if so, this would constitute proof that a ritual murder had occurred. The belief that this was part and parcel of Jewish practice—perhaps not done by more than a select body, perhaps only by Hasidism, but nonetheless an aspect of mainstream Jewish activity—is why news of Dubossary’s outrage could so readily inspire rioting there or elsewhere. Rarely
did such suspicions erupt into violence, and that it did now was the work of Krushevan or his close associates fanning the flames. That such embers were ever ready to combust is incontestable. Those responsible for the pogrom in Kishinev were likely no less certain—without misgivings, pangs of conscience, or the sense of anything amiss—that ritual murder had been the practice of Jews since time immemorial.
From its start, their attack on Jews was justified as self-defense, a reasonable response to a pariah people, capable of any and all transgressions, whose toxic activities, as hoary as history itself, had to be put to an end.
Shredded Torah scrolls.
3
“Squalid Brawl in a Distant City”
This squalid brawl in a distant city is more important than it might appear at first.
—GEORGE ORWELL, Homage to Catalonia
It began inconspicuously, as so many riots do. People jostled in a sparsely policed public square lined with Jewish-owned shops. Worshippers idled after Easter services at the nearby Ciuflea Church, some drinking steadily once services ended, and teenagers as well as Jews—restless near the end of the long, eight-day Passover festival—were all rubbing shoulders. The weather was suddenly and blissfully temperate, dry after intermittent rain.
Soon it would be a commonplace to juxtapose the pogrom’s horrors and its benign springtime weather. Bialik, too, would do much the same in “In the City of Killing,” while also highlighting the buoyant expectations that surfaced for Jews at the start of a fresh new century viewed against the obscenity of Kishinev’s butchery.1
Details of these terrible spring days, with their changes from moist to warm, would figure among the cascade of information, small and large, amassed by teams of reporters, Jewish activists, political radicals, well-known writers, philanthropists, lawyers, and civil servants in the months following the pogrom. The ubiquity of this knowledge had much to do with the city’s location, the swiftness with which word of the massacre spread, and the belief that—in its wake—proof had finally surfaced of government complicity. An epoch of permanent pogroms was now predicted by some, making Kishinev into a sort of talisman, a glimpse of terrible things soon to come, which meant, in turn, that its contours provided immeasurably more than mere information about the recent past but an indispensable glimpse into the future as well.
Rumors of attacks surfaced nearly every year in Kishinev before the start of Easter. In 1903 they appeared to be especially threatening. Accusations of ritual murder in the newspaper Bessarabets remained shrill despite official repudiation; there was word of menacing anti-Jewish meetings held in the back room of a Kishinev tavern; and leaflets calling for the beating of Jews were discovered in bars, cheap restaurants, and flophouses. “Grant a zhid free reign [sic], and he will reign over our Holy Russia, will take things into his own paws,” declared the leaflets. By then Bessarabets had launched a private club, a semisecret society that met regularly, it seems, with its goal being resistance to an imminent Jewish onslaught. All this, as Krushevan’s colleague Georgi A. Pronin would later insist, was in response to news that Jews had held a secret meeting in Kishinev’s largest synagogue, where they plotted to unleash horrible deeds.2
Against this backdrop, Jewish anxieties were heightened. Jewish shop owners admitted that, for the first time in recent memory, they took home bank records, receipts, and similar financial documents for safekeeping. Employees were informed that stores would likely stay shut for a day or two after the Passover festival—a precaution against Easter-day violence that was nearly always avoided since the long Passover festival already meant loss of profit. Such precautions were sporadic, however, with the risk of a particularly violent riot not taken all that seriously.3
Easter Sunday April 6 began with a chill in the air. Puddles from the downpour earlier that week still pockmarked the city’s mostly unpaved neighborhoods. By late morning families dressed for Easter service sauntered in the cluttered streets near Chuflinskii Square at the city’s eastern edge. Those at the Ciuflea Church spilled out onto the nearby square.4
By midday the square was packed. In previous years it had boasted a carousel, but officials seeking to dampen holiday revelry—which had sometimes gotten out of control—shut the ride down that year, stationing additional police at the square’s edge. Some Jews had gravitated to the square, despite warnings issued at Kishinev’s synagogues that morning that Jews should go directly home after services. With the Passover festival and its special foods and mandated conviviality nearly at their end, Jews overlooked the warnings to take advantage of temperate weather and the pleasures of the Christian festival.5
Around noon clusters of boys, few older than ten years old, started roughing up Jews. Police intervened, but the children ran away, and police caught only a handful. The taunting continued, but most people assumed it was no more than a harmless prank; Jews themselves took little notice. Children, some adults, too, started tossing rocks at the windows of Jewish stores—this in keeping with a well-trodden holiday tradition that was rarely more than annoying.6
By 2:00 p.m., the crowd had thickened, with some now much drunker. Many witnesses later reported that in the square were students from the local Russian Orthodox seminary, some in uniform, inciting the crowd to turn on Jews. Trial witnesses insisted that the students were joined by dozens of men sporting the festive red shirts favored by workers. In the first reports appearing in Western newspapers, the riot was described as an attack by workers; testimony later given in court indicated that these “workers” were most likely rabble-rousers close to Krushevan’s circle who were disguised so as to leave the impression that workingmen were turning on the Jews.7
In hindsight the questions are numerous: How many agitators were there in the first hours of the riot? How decisive were the provocations of seminary students spotted by so many at the riot’s start, and of those in the Bessarabets circle? Was there really a close connection—widely believed at the time but not examined by the court or conclusively proved—between Krushevan’s entourage and the massacre? Was this a linkage merely taken for granted because of his newspaper’s persistent Jew-baiting? Cutting through the thicket of rumor and counter-rumor is difficult to be sure; many of the most reliable reports are the ones that surfaced early, before the massacre coalesced into the event it soon became. In nearly all of these, Krushevan’s involvement, whether direct or somewhat less obvious but still critical, is prominently foregrounded.
Jewish-owned stores near Chuflinskii Square—today an ungainly parking lot just outside Chişinău’s Academy of Sciences—were ransacked first. Liquor stores, given their tempting contents, were targeted immediately; by the riot’s end, not a single Jewish-run liquor shop would be left unscathed, with many literally torn to pieces.8
Rioters later justified these attacks by saying that they had entered the stores merely to ask the Jewish proprietors for free drinks—and pillaged only once they were refused. Throughout the violence, similar explanations—with a roughly comparable interplay between seeming reasonableness and absurdity—circulated and were repeated at the subsequent trials. Rioters either drank all the liquor in these pillaged stores on the spot or poured what remained onto the street. Tobacco stores were ransacked next, with the remnants of their merchandise, too, scattered on streets now swimming in a mixture of rainwater and liquor. Arriving at the New Market, a mile and a half from the site where the riot had started and it, too, lined with Jewish stores, a shoe shop was emptied of its stock as those inside outfitted themselves with its goods. These forays, destructive as they were, involved only the theft of goods readily eaten, drunk, or worn.9
The riot spread westward through a cluster of a few streets, several of them quite large, where Jewish stores stood side by side with others owned by non-Jews—these were left unattacked; the mayhem stopped at the New Market, half a mile or so from the city center. Still no more than two or three dozen people were responsible for this rioting, and they could easily be written off as drunks or r
owdy adolescents. However, by 4:00 p.m., the crowd had grown, with seminarians and others guiding the mob to Jewish homes, which they started to pelt with stones. Jews insisted that lists of Jewish addresses had been drawn up in advance, but no such lists ever surfaced.10
The first residence attacked was that of Herman Feldman, an opulent home just down the street from where Kishinev’s mayor, Karl Schmidt, lived. It was also next door to the city’s most exclusive brothel, whose employees had already been packed off elsewhere. Nearby, the office of Bessarabets had its windows stoned because a radical student misdirected the mob to it, claiming it was the property of Jews. Jews found on the street became objects of abuse: An elderly Jew, his wife, and grandchild found themselves threatened but managed to escape when a policeman intervened to protect them. Others beseeched the police for help but were told that the mob was now beyond their capacity to control.11
By 4:00 or 5:00 p.m., as the afternoon yielded to evening, cries of “Death to Jews!” and “Strike the Jews!” could be heard. Buildings with large numbers of Jews—much of Kishinev’s housing had Jews and non-Jews living side by side—were surrounded and pelted with rocks. On the whole these buildings were attacked for no more than ten or fifteen minutes, the crowds then moving on to other targets. On rare occasions the mob stayed for hours, until outer doors were smashed and the building overrun. Jewish doctors seeking to respond to the needs of wounded Jews found themselves able to reach them only if they wore crosses. Christians scrawled crosses on the windows of their homes to protect themselves from attack; when Jews tried to do the same, it rarely worked—one more indication, as was widely believed, that rioters had been alerted in advance to where Jews lived. Jews managing to pass themselves off as gentiles were told that permission had been granted to attack Jews for the next few days because “they drink our blood.” A Jewish saloon owner who watched as his inventory was subsumed by rioters or poured onto the street overheard the mob toasting Krushevan’s health. A slab of meat found cooking in a shop owner’s home adjacent to his wrecked store was waved over the heads of rioters with the announcement that it was the remains of a Christian child. The wife of the Jewish shopkeeper Yudel Fishman, whose building was broken into, managed to escape with her child in her arms, but she dropped the newborn as she fled to the train station, the baby crushed to death in the onslaught.12