Bialik may well have felt that introducing this accusation—part and parcel of talk among Jews at the time—into an imaginative work was an act less overtly provocative than including it in a journalistic or historical account. Bialik understood that his poem would be read alongside the cascade of pogrom reportage still being produced at the time of the poem’s appearance, since trials of the accused continued well into December 1903. But already by then an essentially canonized version of the massacre had consolidated for Jews across the political spectrum, the bulk of liberals and radicals in Russia, and their sympathizers abroad. In such accounts, news of Kishinev’s wealthy Jews and their rush to safety or, for that matter, the role played either by Krushevan or by local seminarians in fanning the pogrom’s flames was sidelined or entirely dismissed. This was consistent with the certainty that the massacre was, first and foremost, the work of the government.
The appropriation by Bialik of some details of the pogrom and not others, and his decision to sideline resistance, were tinged, no doubt, by his own deeply felt cultural Zionist convictions. Still, the choice to concentrate so much of his poem on the most cowed of Kishinev’s Jewish males was likely part and parcel of his effort to piece together the pogrom’s raw data, his culling of unmediated reportage devoid of contextualization or countervailing evidence that was nevertheless not inaccurate. Like so much else in Bialik’s poem, traversing in astonishing detail every quarter of the city and its suburbs, this too can be said to have been done with the intention of telling the truth—an expression of the poet’s desire to capture the pogrom’s terrors as meaningfully as he could.
Bialik’s poem was designed to coexist with the onslaught of press reports, ideological tracts, instantly crafted synagogue liturgy, protest meetings, and the like inspired by Kishinev’s tragedy—to complement it while also superseding it. (Never was Bialik more ambitious or more fertile than at this point in his life.) In this respect at least, his prophetic-like eruption can be seen as more transparent than Davitt’s journalism. Perhaps it felt to Bialik less of a cruel confrontation to inject into a work of poetry the reference to the failings of Kishinev’s men than it did to journalist Davitt, scrupulously honest as he was but also attentive to the overriding message he hoped to deliver—namely that the likely fate facing the Jews of Russia was catastrophic and that their exit from the empire was essential. Here as elsewhere in his writing, journalism was hitched to an overriding moral or political lesson.
Indeed, Bialik’s anguished poem—long seen by critics, literary scholars, and historians as brilliant in its imaginative power but a distortion of the historical record—deserves to be reassessed. At its core is a kernel of historical truth that is painful to acknowledge, aired widely at the time and then, like so many other details, deemed shameful and therefore sidelined. This is an indication of how the most lavishly remembered event of the Russian Jewish past is also among the most assiduously edited, with many of its details treated like unnecessary baggage for an already overburdened people.
Bialik sought to piece together the pogrom with the intention of capturing its terrors as tellingly as he knew how. And it seems likely that he felt better equipped to include all that he did because his was a poem detailed much like journalism but of course not journalism. Criticized then and later for all that he excluded, he nonetheless managed to reveal in it uncomfortable details that those writing about Kishinev in newspapers or elsewhere felt less equipped to acknowledge.
Avraham Kariv, among Bialik’s most enthusiastic Israeli boosters in the 1950s and 1960s, commented often on how surprising it was that, sixty years after the appearance of “In the City of Killing,” it still inspired such vigorous debate. Bialik had long since passed from the scene, dead since 1934. Yet despite the many upheavals in Palestine, later Israel—political, demographic, and cultural—he retained a presence unlike any other writer. Even after his death, Bialik would be referenced in discussions of the full range of contemporary affairs—above all, the European Jewish catastrophe. The titles of his Kishinev poems remained household words: For example, the memoir in a Tel Aviv weekly in May 1940 about the escape of a Jew from Vienna to Lublin with the heading “In the City of Killing” needed no elaboration. Despite his secularism, he would be cited on religious conundrums, as well. When the religious Zionist newspaper Ha-Tsofeh reflected in 1947 on theodicy during the Nazi horrors, the writer thought it natural to query what Bialik might have said.69
Amid the turbulence of prestate Palestine and the rise of Israel, such veneration served to intensify the antagonism of some. Bialik’s poetic romanticism, his skittishness with regard to the use of sexual imagery in his poetry, his insistence that Jewish tradition must somehow animate his people’s future, and even his bourgeois lifestyle—as a publisher, public figure, and eventually also as the owner of one of Tel Aviv’s grander homes—made him into a natural target for those who found such characteristics repelling. Joseph Klausner had marveled, in his turn-of-the-century sketch of Bialik, at his capacity to capture the attention (not infrequently, the ire) of readers across the generations. This would remain true later in the century, too. Bialik was that rare figure who bridged the otherwise mostly unbridgeable chasms of early Israeli society. Bialik had long been praised by right-wing Zionism’s Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of his best translators, and by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, an avid reader since his teens. But for those exasperated with the new state’s wariness of individualism, its insistence on sacrifice, and its disdain for the Diaspora past, the ideal foil was Bialik.70
His Kishinev poetry was offered pride of place—alongside some of his other writings—in Israel’s school curriculum; this was set in motion in the early 1950s under the aegis of Minister of Education Ben-Zion Dinur. A superb historian and devoted nationalist, his admiration for Bialik was boundless, and he knew the poet from his days in Odessa. His curriculum sought to infuse the next generation of Israelis with a sense of shared destiny as well as a ready-made literary canon. This seemed all the more critical because half of the state’s school-age population came from outside the European orbit. Bialik would come to occupy a prominent role in this endeavor; his poetry slotted into the widest of rubrics.
Bialik’s poems—annotated with requisite lessons to be learned from them—became a fixture of Israeli textbooks in the first few decades of the state’s existence. They were said to teach, for example, that absolutely nothing new happened in Kishinev that had not already long been an aspect of Jewish fate. The value of prayer was now for Jews a thing of the past, since it was, as Bialik wrote, “all dried up.” So large would the poet loom that one seventh-grade text from the 1950s included no fewer than three sections featuring him: “the ways of torah,” or sacred knowledge; “Jewish childhood”; and “festivals.”71
Once this curriculum found itself undergoing a thorough review in the mid-1960s—similar efforts were then under way in the United States and Great Britain—Bialik’s prestige became subject to particular scrutiny. High on the list of criticisms was his portrait of Diaspora Jews as cowards. Whether or not critics of his portrait of Jews cowering in the face of aggression were inspired by Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem and its constant talk of Europe’s Jews going “like sheep to the slaughter” is unclear. But Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s use of the trial as a vast schoolroom—an effort also at the core of Hannah Arendt’s lacerating attack in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil—likely provided the backdrop to the discussion among Israel’s educators about Bialik’s value in the classroom.72
The idea that Bialik’s Kishinev poems, because of their disparaging talk about Jewish passivity, were a corrosive influence was spearheaded by the Haifa-based educator and poet Noah Peniel. A graduate of Vilna’s Tarbut, or Hebrew school system, and a wartime refugee, he greatly admired Bialik, and over the years he had produced a spate of textbooks that prominently featured him. But Peniel now argued that Bialik’s works, especially his Kishinev
poems, brilliant as they were, caused irreparable harm and planted—more authoritatively than anything else—in the hearts of schoolchildren a loathing for Diaspora Jewry. Amid the torrent of recent references to pathetic Jews going abjectly to their deaths, a generation had been left with no sense of what it meant to live alongside gentiles.73
Peniel’s campaign met with little success—so little in fact that, in a 1977 book on the role of literary study in Israel’s school curriculum, he offered a systematic evaluation of responses to Bialik’s poetry in Israel’s university-qualifying exams, or bagrut. He admitted it was inconceivable to imagine a high-school literature curriculum stripped of Bialik, but still insisted that the heavy reliance on him left a deep scar on Israel’s collective psyche. As proof he cited repeated mention in bagrut answers to questions about “In the City of Killing” of the cowardice of European Jews, of shock at their unwillingness to save their own lives, and of their succumbing to death much like a beaten pack of dogs.74
Whether Bialik’s portrait of Kishinev’s Jews was historically accurate remains a source of controversy, but, even if it was, Peniel doubted the value of teaching contempt for Jews of the past, whose attitudes toward military matters were completely different from that of the new generation of Israeli schoolchildren. When teaching “In the City of Killing,” he described how he sought to soften its blow with a fuller portrait of Jewish life in the past. Short of this and unless—as he continued to insist—the poem was not sidelined in all of Israel’s schools, there remained the risk of rendering the country’s youth incapable of understanding anything about their immediate past. The poem had long left a pernicious residue, Peniel said, with its portrait of the intractability of gentile hatred and, above all, its targeting of Jewry’s exilic origins, the dreadful clay out of which Israel inexplicably emerged.
“True Russian Heroes.” Postcard with satirical drawing of Krushevan (left) alongside extreme nationalists V. Gringmut and V. Purishkevich.
5
Sages of Zion, Pavel Krushevan, and the Shadow of Kishinev
Have you forgotten that, luckily, there are still anti-Semites? And, thank God, that there are still pogroms from time to time? However much you’re assimilated in a hundred years, you’ll be set back ten times as much by a single day’s pogrom. And then the poor ghetto will be ready to take you back in.
—MIHAIL SEBASTIAN, For Two Thousand Years
No one would be held more responsible for Kishinev’s riot—in the weeks just after its eruption, that is—than Pavel Krushevan. Newspaper headlines in Europe and the United States flaunted this Moldavian-born publisher, novelist, and short-story writer without need for identification. The cascade of accusations leveled in the months preceding the pogrom in his Kishinev newspaper, Bessarabets, including the charge of Jewish ritual murder, singled it out as Russia’s most notorious hate sheet. For years after the Kishinev pogrom, Vladimir Lenin still referred to arch-reactionaries as Krushevans; Yiddish songs originating in World War II cited him alongside the latest, most murderous oppressors of the Jews.1
Krushevan had so hungered for just such notoriety—infamy, he readily admitted, was far superior to anonymity—acknowledging already in adolescence that he cared for nothing so much as for his name to be widely known. Yet once his moment passed, the most consequential of his accomplishments would soon be overlooked or, at best, only fleetingly acknowledged. His role as Kishinev’s Svengali was sidelined when in mid-May 1903 the Plehve letter surfaced, with Krushevan now largely dismissed as a government stooge, as a hoodlum shielding true criminals in the upper reaches of officialdom. More surprisingly, his role as publisher of the first version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has also tended to be overlooked. Rarely is he more than mentioned in passing in the huge body of literature on the infamous text, arguably the most influential antisemitic one ever produced. And considerable evidence has surfaced indicating that Krushevan’s contribution to the document was still more critical: He was almost certainly its author or coauthor, writing it in response to the unseemly, destructive hubbub in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom.
Released by Krushevan in nine consecutive installments in late August and early September 1903 in his St. Petersburg newspaper Znamia—with an introduction and afterword clearly written by him—this inaugural version fell into obscurity while the text itself, albeit revised somewhat, was reissued in book form six times over the course of the next five years. One indication of the curious inconspicuousness of Krushevan’s version is that Herman Bernstein’s pioneering study of the text, The History of a Lie, published in 1921, made no reference to it at all, and he seems to have been unaware of its existence. Norman Cohn’s influential 1967 book, Warrant for Genocide: The World Jewish Conspiracy and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, dismissed Krushevan as “a typical pogromshchik.”2
“Peter Krushevan,” declared the American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune (misstating his first name) in June 1934. “That black name is not easily forgotten.” Contrary to the newspaper’s claim, he mostly was. Momentarily he was then revived in the mid-30s because of the mention of Krushevan’s Znamia version in the 1934–35 Bern trial when Swiss Jews brought the publishers of The Protocols to court seeking to stop its publication. Rarely was it cited later. The authorship of The Protocols would be widely attributed to the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, with the likes of Krushevan viewed as marginal, as rabble-rousers on the fringe of the Russian right. The many book-length versions of The Protocols, soon translated into numerous languages, entirely overshadowed Krushevan’s serialized text, published in a tough-to-acquire newspaper and available at the time only by subscription.3
Krushevan’s death from cancer at the age of forty-nine in 1909—after releasing his version he never spoke again of the text—also contributed to its obscurity. Though a public figure in both St. Petersburg and Kishinev, at the helm of the best-oiled branch of the Soiuz Russkogo Naroda, the Union of Russian Peoples (the Black Hundreds), and elected to the Second Duma in 1907, Krushevan nonetheless spent his life mostly behind the scenes at his writing desk or his printing presses. (At the time of his death he owned two, which took up nearly all the space in a sparsely furnished St. Petersburg apartment.) His reclusiveness was, if anything, only reinforced by a botched assassination attempt on him on a crowded St. Petersburg street in June 1903.4
For someone so hungry for recognition, such self-protectiveness was counterproductive and no doubt contributed to the excision of his name from nearly all accounts of The Protocols, among the most influential works of contemporary life. Certainly no other antisemitic work would come to enjoy the document’s endurance. In contrast, say, to Hitler’s Mein Kampf or the turn-of-the-twentieth-century best-seller William Houston Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century—these relegated either to the back shelves or the domain of misfits and cultists—The Protocols continues to draw widespread attention. In recent years a well-publicized Egyptian television series was built around it. Countless websites in a host of languages foreground its teachings, with the document given visibility in the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and its talk—peppered lavishly with Semitic names—of the mysterious cabal in control of the world’s finances.5
Only recently have its origins been traced to the impact of the Kishinev pogrom, with Krushevan identified as its sole or collaborating author. The evidence is persuasive, and this heightened attention has occurred, coincidentally, as he has captured great prominence as a pioneer of pro-Russian, anti-Western sentiment in Moldova and the surrounding post-Soviet region. He is now touted as an early, singularly incisive exponent of “Christian socialism,” which is seen as a healthy antidote to liberalism’s anonymity, its soullessness, and its susceptibility to the machinations of Jews.6
Krushevan’s vision is now embraced, at least in its broad strokes, in large swaths of Moldova and elsewhere nearby as a reasonable response both to late-imperial Russia’s mounting ills and to the region’s current malaise as we
ll. Apologists claim that Jews contributed significantly toward making these ills intolerable because of their large numbers, malevolent financial aptitude, and insistence on operating as a monolith—a veritable kingdom with their own selfish interests. Jewry’s dangerous insularity, it is argued, would have been challenged by any healthy state: It should have been challenged, as Krushevan urged, in the last years of the Romanovs—and must be now.
With regard to Kishinev’s 1903 massacre, such accounts see it as a scuffle born of great economic frustrations that soon got out of hand if only because of the aggressive response of Jews. Refusing to acknowledge responsibility, Jews immediately took advantage of it, pumping the world’s press with grossly exaggerated, one-sided accounts overlooking their own culpability, cashing in on relief funds. Amid all this they did so much damage to Russia’s reputation that it was defenseless by the time the Bolsheviks sought to take control.7
This recent spate of apologetic work now exists alongside new scholarship by the German historian Michael Hagemeister, the Italian Slavic specialist Cesare G. De Michelis, the linguist Henryk Baran, and others who have reassessed Krushevan’s contribution to The Protocols saga. He was a central figure in a small group hailing from Bessarabia and nearby regions smarting from—and intent on retaliation for—the pogrom’s slings and arrows, which they blamed on the Jews. The actual words they produced in their text they knew, of course, to be inaccurate, but its message they were certain was nonetheless true. And they were equally certain that they had just seen its insidious impact right up close in Kishinev: a Jewry so committed to conquest, so effective that it willingly sacrificed its own in the planning of the pogrom, and capable of transmuting all this into a tale of anti-Jewish persecution.8
Pogrom Page 13