14. Bessarabia: Handbook, 6; Urussov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor, 113–118.
15. Hamm, “Kishinev,” 25.
16. Bessarabia: Handbook, 28–29; Robert Edelman, Gentry Politics on the Eve of the Russian Revolution (New Brunswick, 1980), 34, 224; Rogger, Jewish Policies, 212–232.
17. Michael Davitt, Within the Pale: The True Story of the Anti-Semitic Persecutions in Russia (New York, 1903), 158–159; Istoriia Kishineva, 49, 101.
18. Zhukov, Goroda Bessarabii, 45.
19. Bessarabia: Handbook, 26–27; Konstaninov, Kishinev, 11–12.
20. Binyon, Pushkin, 123–124.
21. Ibid., 120.
22. Urussov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor, 13–14.
23. Istoriia Kisheneva, 49, 101; Judge, Easter in Kishinev, 20.
24. Michael Davitt, “Diary, Kishineff, 1903,” folder 6, Davitt Papers, Trinity College, Dublin.
25. Judge, Easter in Kishinev, 34–35; Urussov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor, 30–31; Davitt Diary, Ms. 9578, folder 16; Konstantin Korolev, Leninskaia v “Iskra” Kisheneve (Kishinev, 1970); Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy, 95.
26. Kishinevskii pogrom, 35.
27. Pavel Krushevan, Bessarabiia (Moscow, 1903), 7–40.
28. Urussov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor, 12–14.
29. Yaakov Goren, ed., ‘Eduyot nifga’e Kishenev, 1903: kefi she-nigbu ‘al-yede H. N. Byalik va-haverav (Tel Aviv, 1991), 82–160.
30. Davitt Diary, Ms. 9578, folder 11.
31. Wolf Moskovich, “Kishinev,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven, CT, 2008). On Jewish population statistics, see Yitshak Koren, Yehude Kishinev (Tel Aviv, 1940), 17.
32. Yosef Arokh, Der tsen yor’riger kalendar’, 1901/2–1910/11 (Kishinev, 1901).
33. Information on Jewish occupations in the late 1880s can be found in Koren, Yehude Kishinev, 211–212.
34. Ibid.
35. Simon Geissbühler, Like Shells on a Shore: Synagogues and Jewish Cemeteries of Northern Moldavia (Bern, Switzerland, 2010).
36. Ibid., 28–32.
37. Koren, Yehude Kishinev, 165–202.
38. Yosef Rubin, ed., Dubossary: sefer zikaron (Tel Aviv, 1965).
39. A selection of documents on the Dubossary affair in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF, f 102, 3) has been translated in ChaeRan Y. Freeze and Jay M. Harris, eds., Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia: Select Documents (Waltham, MA, 2013), 536–550.
40. Ibid., 536–538.
Chapter 3. “Squalid Brawl in a Distant City”
1. The most detailed eyewitness account can be found in the transcript of Bialik’s interviews, ‘Eduyot, and the documentary volume Kishinevskii pogrom 1903 goda. For an edited version of the trial transcripts see Isidore Singer, Russia at the Bar of the American People (New York, 1904), 248–283. The reports of Pesach Averbach in the St. Petersburg Hebrew-language daily Ha-Zeman (Averbach would soon assist both Bialik and Davitt with their investigations) are particularly useful in their detail and likely the first published eye-witness descriptions of the massacre. See also S. M. Dubnov and G. Ia. Krasnyi-Admoni, eds., Materialy dlia istorii antievreiskikh pogromov v Rossii, vol 1 (Petrograd and Moscow, 1919); M. B. Slutskii, V skorbnye dni (Kishinev, 1930); A. Beilin, Der Kishinyever pogrom (Warsaw, 1932); and Judge, Easter in Kishinev, 107–133.
2. G. A. Pronin’s court testimony, April 29, Kishinevskii pogrom, 262–263; Singer, Russia at the Bar, 249.
3. Dubnov and Krasnyi-Admoni, Materialy dlia istorii, vol 1, 210; Judge, Easter in Kishinev, 49.
4. Singer, Russia at the Bar, 10; Times, April 25, 1903.
5. Ha-Zeman, April 10, 1903; Kishinevskii pogrom, 226–228; Singer, Russia at the Bar, 11, 16.
6. Judge, Easter in Kishinev, 50; Sefer Bernshtain-Kogan, 127; Sankt Petersburg Vedomosti, May 8, 1903.
7. Jewish Chronicle, May 8, 1903; Urussov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor, 45–49; Davitt, Within the Pale, 97–100; Singer, Russia at the Bar, 3: “One single man succeeded in making a break in these tolerable conditions [in Kishinev]. . . . To him mainly are due the horrors of the April days of 1903. Six years ago a journalist by the name of Kroushevan started in a newspaper . . . .”
8. ‘Eduyot, 66; Davitt Diary, 9578, Davitt Papers, folder 17.
9. ‘Eduyot, 65–66; Ha-Zeman, April 14, 1903; Jewish Chronicle, December 16, 1903.
10. ‘Eduyot, 65; Motzkin, ed. Die Judenprogromme in Russland, vol. 2, 11; Ha-Zeman, April 10 and April 12, 1903.
11. ‘Eduyot, 65–66; Singer, Russia at the Bar, 252; Judge, Easter in Kishinev, 50.
12. Davitt, Within the Pale, 125; ‘Eduyot, 65–67.
13. Ibid., 76–78.
14. Singer, Russia at the Bar, 13; New York Times, August 13, 1903; Judge, Easter in Kishinev, 49.
15. Sankt Petersburg Vedomosti, May 8, 1903; New York American, May 17, 1903.
16. ‘Eduyot, 107.
17. Ibid., 110; Davitt, Within the Pale, 118.
18. ‘Eduyot, 87.
19. Kishinevskii pogrom; Ha-Zeman, May 8, 1903.
20. ‘Eduyot, 98; Kol shire H. N. Byalik (Tel Aviv, 1956), 364. The best English translation is Atar Hadari, ed. and trans., Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of Hayim Nahman Bialik (Syracuse, NY, 2000), 1.
21. ‘Eduyot, 99.
22. Ibid., 100–101.
23. See Singer, Russia at the Bar, 11–13.
24. ‘Eduyot, 69–72.
25. Ibid., 91–92.
26. V. H. C. Bosanquet and C. S. Smith, Dispatch from His Majesty’s Consul-General at Odessa, Forwarding a Report on the Riots at Kishinev (London, 1903). A summary was published in the New York Times on August 13, 1903.
27. ‘Eduyot, 100, 135.
28. Ibid., 133; Davitt Diary, Ms. 9578, folder 21, 1 v.
29. Davitt Diary, Ms. 9578, folder 19, r.
30. ‘Eduyot, 80–81; Michael Gluzman, “Pogrom and Gender: On Bialik’s Unheimlich,” Prooftexts 25 , nos. 1 and 2 (Winter-Spring 2005): 45–46.
31. Urussov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor, 147; Davitt Diary, Ms. 9578, folder 39.
32. V. G. Korolenko, “Dom No. 13-yi: epizod iz kishevskago pogroma” (Berlin, 1904).
33. ‘Eduyot, 82–83, 139.
34. Slutskii, V skorbnye dni, 35; ‘Eduyot, 85–93.
35. ‘Eduyot, 122–124.
36. Ibid., 131.
37. Ibid., 141.
38. Korolenko, “Dom No. 13-yi”; Slutskii, V skorbnye dni, 146.
39. Slutskii, V skorbnye dni, 146.
40. Urussov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor, 13.
41. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 84.
42. Halperin, Sefer ha-gevurah, vol. 3, 15.
43. ‘Eduyot, 159–160.
44. Ibid., 160–161.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 76.
47. Boris Tarnopolsky, “The Gomel Pogrom of 1903: A Case Study in Russian-Jewish Relations in the Pale of Settlement” (MA thesis, University of Haifa, 2007).
48. Michael Stanislaswski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley, CA, 2001), 178–202.
49. ‘Eduyot, 92, 109–110.
50. Ibid., 93–94.
51. Pronin argued in an article published in Novoe Vremia on October 16, 1903, that Jewish aggression was the cause of the pogrom. It is reprinted in Kishenevskii pogrom, 148–150. Much the same charge was leveled by the procurator of the Odessa Chamber of Justice, ibid., 151–152, and the Kishinev chief of police, ibid., 216–221.
52. ‘Eduyot, 113–14, translated in Gluzman, “Pogrom and Gender,” 43–44.
53. Sefer Bernshtain-Kogan, 127–128,
54. I draw for my analysis from William C. Fuller Jr.’s excellent Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (Princeton, NJ, 1985), 109–110; see also Kishinevskii pogrom, 22–26, 224.
55. Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict, xviii.
56. Ibid., 77–98.
57. Urussov, Memoirs of a Russian
Governor, 15–18; Judge, Easter in Kishinev, 46, 62–68.
58. Judge, Plehve, 96.
59. Times, May 6, 1903. For examples of how news of the Plehve letter now comes to dominate Jewish coverage of Kishinev, see Forverts, May 14 and 15, 1903, and Jewish Chronicle (London), May 29, 1903: “That the riots were pre-arranged down to the smallest detail there is no longer the slightest reason to doubt.” A detailed sketch of Plehve appeared in the Jewish Chronicle, June 5, 1903.
60. Times, May 6, 1903.
61. Judge, Easter in Kishinev, 120–133; A. A. Lopukhin, Otryvki iz vospominanii (Moscow, 1923), 15, 16.
62. Rogger, Jewish Policies, esp. 40–55 and 188–211.
63. Kishinevskii pogrom, 67–68, 121–134.
64. Singer, Russia at the Bar, 4–9; Urussov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor, 45–47.
Chapter 4. Burdens of Truth
1. New York Times, May 12, 1903.
2. Scott D. Seligman, “The Night New York’s Chinese Went Out for Jews: How a Chinatown Fundraiser Event for Pogrom Victims United Two Persecuted Peoples,” Forward, January 26, 2011; New York Tribune, November 19, 1903.
3. New York American, May 18, 1903; Adler, The Voice of America on Kishineff, 334.
4. Malachi, “Pera’ot Kishinev,” 24–64; Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 83–86; Monty Penkower, “The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903,” 192–193; J. B. Weber, The Kishineff Massacre and Its Bearing upon the Question of Jewish Immigration into the United States (New York, 1903).
5. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 473–474.
6. New York Times, May 17, 1903.
7. Taylor Stults, “Roosevelt, Russian Persecution of Jews, and American Public Opinion,” Jewish Social Studies 33, no. 1 (1971): 15.
8. “Kishineff,” NCOF+p.v.344, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
9. Philip Ernest Schoenberg, “The American Reaction to the Kishinev Pogrom,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 63 (March 1974): 264–265.
10. Mark Bornstein, The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish from 1845 to 1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 125; Lawrence Marley, Michael Davitt (Dublin, 2007), 256–259; Carla King, “Michael Davitt and the Kishinev Pogrom,” Irish Slavonic Studies 17 (1996): 19–44; Dermott Keogh, Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork, 1998), 27–32.
11. Davitt Papers,” Ms. 9501/5296–5396; Jonathan D. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888–1988 (Philadelphia, 1989), 64, 69.
12. See Dan Miron, “Me’ir ha-haregah,” in Michael Gluzman, Hanan Hever, and Dan Miron, eds., Be-’ir ha-haregah ve-hala—bikur me’uhar (Tel Aviv, 2005), 154. Biographies in Hebrew and English have appeared, both written by Avner Holtzman: Hayyim Nahman Bialik (Jerusalem, 2009) and Hayim Nahman Bialik: Poet of Hebrew (New Haven, CT, 2017).
13. Miron, “Me’ir ha-haregah,” in Michael Gluzman et al., eds., Be-’ir ha-haregah ve hala—bikur me’uhar, 152–154; Moshe Ungerfeld, Byalik ve-sofre doro (Tel Aviv, 1974), 277. Perlman’s critical essay is reprinted in Gluzman et al., eds., Be’ir ha-hagirah, 181–187; on Davitt’s arrival in Kishinev, see Sefer Kogan-Bernshtain, 135–136.
14. Chaim Tchernowitz [Rav Tsa’ir], Masekhet zikhronot (New York, 1945), 116–125.
15. Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley, CA, 1993), 21–66.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 105–169.
18. Ibid., 195–199.
19. Ibid.
20. Holtzman, Hayyim Nahman Byalik, 74–130.
21. Steven J. Zipperstein, “Odessa,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT, 2008); Guido Hausman, Universität und städtische Gesellschaft in Odessa: 1865–1917 (Stuttgart, 1998).
22. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, 72–73.
23. Kol shire, 156; Atar Hadari, ed. and trans., Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of Hayim Nahman Bialik (Syracuse, NY, 2000), 11; Dan Miron, The Prophetic Mode in Modern Hebrew Poetry and Other Essays on Modern Hebrew Literature (New Milford, CT, 2010), 91.
24. Robert M. Seltzer, Simon Dubnow’s “New Judaism”: Diaspora Nationalism and the World History of the Jews (Leiden, 2014), 133–226.
25. Yeruham Fishel Lachower, Byalik, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv, 1934–1935), 424–426; Kol shire, 158.
26. For the text of Bialik’s “Be’ir ha-harigah” see Kol shire, 364–376. An insightful analysis can be found in Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York, 1984), 141–154.
27. Pesach Averbach, “H. N. Byalik ve-‘ir ha-harigah,” in Ha-pogrom be-Kishinev, 28; Miron in Be-‘ir ha-haregah, 80–85; Holtzman, Bialik: Poet of Hebrew, 91.
28. Simon Dubnow, Kniga zhizni, vol. 2 (Riga, Latvia,1934), 240–243.
29. Ha-Zeman, April 10, 1903; Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, 203–208; Eric Zakim, To Build and Be Built: Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity (Philadelphia, 2006), 23–26.
30. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, 205–207.
31. Ibid., 203, 207.
32. Halperin, Sefer ha-gevurah, vol. 3, 17–20.
33. Ibid., 19.
34. Ibid., 19–20.
35. King, “Michael Davitt,” 10–60; Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford, 1982), 25.
36. Marley, Michael Davitt, 256–259. The banner headline above a photograph of Davitt in the New York American, May 15, 1903, reads: “I am going, resolved to find the truth.”
37. Michael Davitt, The Boer Fight for Freedom (New York, 1902), 28; Davitt, Within the Pale, ix, 89.
38. H. H. Hyndman, Further Reminiscences (London, 1912), 52.
39. Ibid., 55. On Hyndman’s views of Jews, see Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism and British Society, 1876–1939 (London, 1979), 22, 69. I thank Bryan Cheyette for this reference.
40. Davitt, Within the Pale, 86–87, 91–93, 126–127, 199; Keogh, Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland, 27–32.
41. Davitt, Within the Pale, 103–104, 111; Sefer Bernshtain-Kogan, 135–136.
42. Davitt Papers, Ms. 9578, Ms. 9501/5301; Davitt, Within the Pale, 17–27; King, “Michael Davitt,” 29–30. See Pesach Averbach’s obituary in Davar, April 4, 1945.
43. Davitt, Within the Pale, 101.
44. Gluzman, “Pogrom and Gender,” 39–59; Holtzman, Bialik: Poet of Hebrew, 92.
45. Gluzman, “Pogrom and Gender,” 50–54.
46. Ibid., 52.
47. Ziva Shamir, Li-netivah ha-ne’elam: ikvot parashat Ira Yan bi-yetsirat Byalik (Tel Aviv, 2000), esp. 7–50; Holtzman, Bialik: Poet of Hebrew, 92–112. The director of Beit Bialik, Moshe Ungerfeld, marked the ninetieth birthday of Manya Bialik in a commemorative article in Davar, December 31, 1965.
48. Lachower, Byalik, 442–443; Holtzman, Bialik: Poet of Hebrew, 96–97.
49. Lachower, Byalik, 442–443; Holtzman, Bialik: Poet of Hebrew, 104–105.
50. Ariel Hirschfeld, Kinor ‘arukh (Tel Aviv, 2011); Holtzman, Hayim Nahman Byalik, 116.
51. Ben-Zion Katz, Zikhronot (Tel Aviv, 1963–1964), 133–137.
52. Kol shire, 364; Hadari, Songs from Bialik, 1.
53. Miron, Be-‘ir ha-harigah, 103.
54. Kol shire, 365; Hadari, Songs from Bialik, 2.
55. Kol shire, 368; Hadari, Songs from Bialik, 4.
56. Kol shire, 370; Hadari, Songs from Bialik, 5.
57. Dan Miron, “Hayim Nahman Bialik’s Poetry: An Introduction to Songs from Bialik,” in Hadari, Songs From Bialik, 38.
58. “Listovka Odesskoi organizatsii bunda po povodu pogroma v Kishineve,” Kishinevskii pogrom 1903 goda, 60–62.
59. Kol shire, 367; Hadari, Songs from Bialik, 3.
60. Kol shire, 365–66; Hadari, Songs from Bialik, 3.
61. See, for example, Shlomo Dubinsky’s article on self-defense during the Kishinev pogrom in Ha’aretz, August 10, 1928.
62. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 89.
63. Michael Davitt Papers, Ms. 9577/5.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.; Ki
ng, “Michael Davitt and the Kishinev Pogrom,” 30.
68. Davitt, Within the Pale, 170. On the impulses behind Bialik’s poem, see Olga Litvak’s provocative article, “The Post in Hell: H. N. Bialik and the Cultural Genealogy of the Kishinev Pogrom,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 12, no. 1 (2005): 101–128.
69. Moznayim 45, no. 1 (1967–1968).
70. Ungerfeld, Byialik ve-sofre doro, 277; Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle, 178–202; David Ben-Gurion, Mikhtavim (Tel Aviv, 1972), vol. 1, 127; Holtzman, Bialik: Poet of Hebrew, 84.
71. Y. T. Helman, As’arah perakim le-shire H. N. Byalik (Tel Aviv, 1953–1954), 13–48.
72. Tali Tadmor-Shimony, Shi’ur moledet: ha-hinukh ve-khinun medinah (Beersheba, 2011); Leora Y. Bilsky, “When Actor and Spectator Meet in the Courtroom: Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Judgment,” History and Memory 8, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 1996): 137–173.
73. Al Ha-Mishmar, August 13, 1967; Di presse (Buenos Aires), August 4, 1976.
74. Ha-Hinukh, July 23, 1967.
Chapter 5. Sages of Zion,
Pavel Krushevan, and the Shadow of Kishinev
1. V. I. Lenin, “The Second Duma and the Second Revolutionary Wave,” in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 12 (Moscow, 1962), 113–118. Reference to Krushevan in Anna Shternshis and Psoy Korolenko, collectors and recorders, “Lost” Yiddish Songs of World War II (2017), was discovered recently by Moshe Beregovsky and his colleagues at the Kiev Cabinet for Jewish Culture. I thank Anna Shternshis of the University of Toronto for this information.
2. Benjamin W. Segel, A Lie and a Libel: The History of The Protocols of Zion, Richard S. Levy, trans. and ed. (Lincoln, NE, 1995); Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London, 1967), 108. See also Richard S. Levy, “Setting the Record Straight: Regarding The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Fool’s Errand,” in William Collins Donahue and Marthe B. Helfer, eds., Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies, vol. 2 (Rochester, NY, 2014), 43–62.
3. American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune, June 15, 1934.
4. Chemu uchit nas pokuyshchenie Pinkhusa Dasheshskago? (n.p., 1903); Ha-Zeman, June 13, 1903; Michael Hagemeister, Die “Protokolle der Weisen von Zion” vor Gericht (Zurich, 2017), 543. Biographical material on Krushevan may be found in GARF, Fond 102, Opis 231 (October 1903).
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