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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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It is with a wonderful feeling that I can stand here tonight and say that we have an inaugural lecture by our first Cronhill Visiting Scholar, a position that is now established at the YIVO Institute for the Teaching of East European Jewish History that has been made possible by the generosity of Irene Pletka and the Kronhill Pletka Foundation. And we are hoping to add similar positions in literature, in Yiddish language and linguistics, in music and in religion that will give a full spectrum, an opportunity for students to study a full spectrum of. Of dimensions of this great civilization that we all come from. We had an evening last night commemorating Michael Herzog, who was the first dean of the Max Weinreich Center. He had been the head of the Jewish Studies department at Columbia. He held the Atran Professorship for years. He's a great figure in our world. And one thing that he said was that there was utmost urgency to reconstruct the history of East European Jewish life. Not to commemorate it. And this is what was very interesting about what he said. Not to commemorate it, but to reconstruct it so that we could see, not just mourn, but see and know through seeing this complex and really profoundly interesting world that we come from. And that's our ambition, to reconstruct. To reconstruct that through our teaching programs, through our outreach programs, through our publications, through our exhibitions. I invite you all to become members of the YIVO Institute. There are signup forms in the background, and those of you who have not yet signed up for courses in our winter program, I do hope that you will consider doing so. There's still time. Classes start tomorrow, but there's always room. And for tonight's event and for the Winter program, I want to thank in particular Jennifer Young, who is the director of Educational programs at yivo, and Helena Gindy, who is the director of programming for making this possible. And now it's my real pleasure to introduce Steve Zipperstein Koshland professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. But much more important than that is that Steve went through our Zoomer program twice. Once, I guess, as a returning scholar. I guess so. And began life as an assistant in our Bund Archive, where he became inured to the complexities and wonders of the YIVO archive. Aside from that, he has taught at universities in Russia, Poland, France, and Israel for six years. He taught at Oxford University for 16 years. He was director of the Toby center for Jewish Studies at Stanford. He's the author and editor of eight books, including the Jews of Odessa Cultural history that was the winner of the Smilin Prize for outstanding book in Jewish History Elusive Prophet Achad Haam and the origins of Zionism, 1993 winner of the National Jewish Book Award, imagining Russian jewelry, 1999 and Rosenfeld's fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing, which were shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award and Biography. He has been awarded the Levian Prize of the Modern Language association, the Judah Magnus Gold Medal of the American Friends of Hebrew University, and the Corette Prize for outstanding contributions to American Jewish community. ZipFirstein's articles have appeared in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the Jewish Review of Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. He is an editor of the journal Jewish Social Studies, the book series Stanford Studies in Jewish History, and the Yale University Press Leon Black Foundation Jewish Live series in spring 2013. He is the first Cronhill visiting scholar at the YIVO Institute, and Professor Zipperstein is also chair of the Academic Advisory Council for the center of Jewish History.
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Had my life began at the Bund Archives, I don't know whether it would have been a happier life or less happy life. I don't know, but it's a question I'll ponder after tonight. It was really at that faded, ramshackle, ornate pile on East 86th street that was Yivo, where I in large measure learned to be an historian. And it was the base midrash that I entered entered after I left the base medrash and consequently to be named the first Cronhill Senior Scholar at Yivo is a great pleasure, a great honor, and one that I intend to take very seriously. I have a prepared text I'll be reading. Pardon me. Oh, do you ever notice that when you you speak to a Jewish audience, usually you're told you're not speaking loud enough and it's before you begin to talk. And. I'll speak for no more than about 45, 50 minutes. We'll open up for discussion afterwards. How, immune from myth making, from fantasies of any kind, was Kishinev at the epicenter of Bessarabia, that slice of 600 miles at the empire's edge, with Austria Hungary to the north, the sketchiest Black Sea access at its south, and with new raw Romania nudging against it uneasily at the West Humdrub, rusticated, distant from anything that felt world important. It was a region known for its wines cheap, sold in large quantities to Odessa's undiscerning harbor bars for its hides, its unusually large cucumbers and its all but officially sanctioned venality. Its local officials were known to be perhaps the most bribable in the empire. Chisnya, fifth largest city in Russia, with lovely wide streets. At its center, was a place still where countryside meshed promiscuously with city whose suburbs were essentially rural, and where illiteracy and infant mortality were highest in the empire. Never was this a region celebrated for Jewish learning. There was a dense Hasidic life in its towns, especially the area jutting near Austria, Hungary. For several generations, the region stood out for its uncannily eerie, gorgeous stone grave cuttings, vivid, fabulous designs originating in the early 18th century. The products mostly of one extraordinarily skilled family, centered in the region just northeast of Kishinev, skirting, perhaps because of distance from classical centers of Jewish learning, the traditional Jewish prohibition, better said to be a disinclination with regard to representational art forms. The region's artisans produce some of the most original carvings in the Jewish world. Grand, ornate lines of Judah, stunning Torah scrolls, many of them dipped in gold. These carvings, executed often with breathtaking precision. Dramatic flair, with animals all but human in their expressions. These providing a glimpse of the majesty, the reality of death, the prospect of afterlife. On the whole, if at all susceptible to myth making, it would seem, this was only because so few facts were known about Kishinev and its environs. In contrast to places like Odessa, Kiev, Berdichev. In contrast, these places were packed with a welter of associations with pungent Yiddish sayings. Beautiful girls were known as Odessa Moons, or there was the well known adage, left Vygot in Odess. This a city replete with buoyant and grim tales of boom and bust. Neither Kiev's gruesome 1913 bayless bacchanal, nor Odessa's murderous 1905 pogrom, which left some five to six hundred butchered. Two thirds of all Jews killed in that entire pogrom wave. None of this would indelibly define either. Kishineff, on the other hand, was little more than a blank slate. So much so that in May 1903, the New York Times ran a piece entitled, quote, chishinev is a city far from a bad place to live in, except for Jews, with the goal of filling in the following gap. So great, the article begins, has been the interest of the public in the recent massacre in Kishineff, that little or no attention has been given to the physical characteristics of the place. Thus provided in the article were basic physical and cultural data. A portrait of a mostly rather nice place with benign weather, pleasant topography if compared to anywhere at all, the New York Times suggested the most ready comparison was sunny, even tempered Southern California. By by the time the article appeared, Chisinov was of course, one of the world's best known and most notorious places, with a multitude of stories about it, truthful and fanciful. No more than mere mention of it was sufficient to evoke a welter of associations, all of them terrible. The then young Joseph Chaim Brenner, soon the closest Hebrew would come to brushing up against the literary imagination of a Dostoevsky, felt little more than the need to write the word Kishineff. This in a letter in September 1903, so as to evoke horror. Quote in the world there is certainly news. If one were to stand and scream all our days and all our nights, it would not suffice. Before the Second World War, no spot on the European Jewish map would be so conflated, so linked with horror, so that its name alone was all that was needed to evoke images of Diaspora catastrophe at its worst. We write and write about Kishineff. We talk and talk about its origins, started a Yiddish daily Forward editorial in early May 1903. Every single issue of the paper, starting in mid April until deep into June, featured banner headlines about the massacre. How is it that an event becomes an historical event, a moment felt to define something essential about one's age, imprinted beyond the mere moment of its occurrence, a talisman that does not fade into oblivion, into the back shelves of libraries or archives or administrative files? Like nearly everything else, most disappears. Only rare moments do not. Why Kishinev did not can't be explained entirely in terms of the pogrom's cruelties, 49 Jews were killed in the Kishnya pogrom. No, few were raped, with the bulk of this violence occurring within the span of two or three hours on six or seven intersecting streets. But then soon, just two years later, in the midst of the revolutionary fervor of 1905, 1906, many hundreds would be murdered, and little more than a decade later, say, in Proskurov, memorialized widely at the time, all but forgotten afterwards, in the span of little more than a single day, February 15, 1919, 1500-2000 Jews were brutally killed. Kishineff still evokes a chill Proskurov barely a shudder. The imprint it left was deep and astonishingly longstanding. The colonel of the Israeli army dates itself back to Kishineff. The NAACP referred to Kishineff in its original drafts. Kishineff was the immediate backdrop to major changes in the political compass of Jewish socialism as well as Zionism. It helped give birth and lend heightened credibility to territorialism. It inspired the writing of Bialiks in the city of Killing Bira Hariga and still widely regarded as the finest Jewish poem written in modern times. When Benjamin Netanyahu sought to capture a couple of years ago the horror of the Toulouse killings at a French ceremony, he could think of no better way to do this than to recite Bialik's Kishineff poem, whose linkage to the French outrage was of course non existent. Chronology better said, primacy is no doubt a crucial factor that such medieval like butchery, these terms were recycled time and again in the pogrom's immediate aftermath had transpired at the dawn of the new century lent the massacre extraordinary mileage. And then there was the role of ideology, namely the fact that the Jewish political scene in Russia and elsewhere of the first decade of the 20th century, while torn asunder by contestation on quite nearly every single issue. Immigration, Zionism, territorialism, social Yiddishism, Hebraism. Chaim Weizmann's mother was known to announce that no matter who eventually controlled Russia's fate, she was protected, since one or another of her 15 children supported at least one of the mutually conflicting ideologies. Conflicted ideologies divided Jews on nearly everything, but all embraced kishineff as their own. 1881 was to be claimed largely by Zionists 1905 mostly by Jewish socialists, Kishineff by everyone. This pogrom broke out at a moment of singular coherence and overall popularity for many of these political groups. Quite soon after the first empire wide conference of Russia's Zionists in Minsk, September 1902, at the height of the Bund's popularity before its debacle at the Second Party Congress in August 1903, these parties, especially Jewish Socialists, were now well poised to push forward an agenda onto the American Jewish community, which is just what they did in Kishinev's wake. They were the engine that pressed, and despite considerable resistance at the outset, the established leaders of American Jewish life, to make the massacre into a cause celeb, eventually even prompting Secretary of State Hayes to forward an extraordinary protest, the first of its kind, to the Russian government, which the Roosevelt administration fully expected it would never agree to receive. It did not. But this was done because of the irrepressible cascade of Jewish public opinion, mostly from the Lower east side. And then there was the undeniable impact of new Networks of information. Kishineff erupted at just the moment when what would soon become the greatest of all Jewish newspapers of the age, the Yiddish Forward, was primed to soar. And there was also the most rambunctious of all newspaper empires in the United States, perhaps the world, the then immense news regime controlled by William Randolph Hearst, that hungered for a campaign for Jewish readers, perhaps more important for Jewish voters, for Hearst's runs for New York governor, indeed the Democratic nomination for president for the Forwerts, Kishineff would become a galvanizing force. Abraham Kahan, newly returned to the paper, which was then little more than a fact sheet for the Socialist party, would transmute it into the greatest, certainly the most influential of all Yiddish language newspapers. And both Hearst and Kahan would use Kishineff as a vehicle not only for the selling of newspapers, but for grassroots activism. The newspapers they controlled immediately set in motion major relief campaigns for Kishineff's Jews, raising money for orphans of the Kishineff dead, their transportation to the United States, where they'd be adopted and their lives repaired for the building of schools. The disaster lent itself to relief work, with collections announced immediately by the full range of newspapers. Hearst ran for months a campaign advertising and on the front page, with his personal contribution listed on top day after day, the largest of all, Kishineff would thus provide the first instance when a matter of Jewish concern in the Russian empire captured center stage in the Western press. This visibility enhanced by the massacre's visual impact, with photographs a mainstay of journalistic coverage throughout the Western world in spring 1903. Rows upon rows of coffins, grimly manhandled women and men, demolished homes, overcrowded hospitals, shredded tourist rolls. Like most stories, this one too is made of small and large details of small details, casting great wide shadows of bigger than life grandees like Hearst and others too, eventually obscured by time, the fall of empires, the advent of revolution. I seek now to deepen and widen the explanation for the Kishineff pogrom's emergence as an event of incontrovertible prominence by adding to the mix factors, some so seemingly random or accidental factors, local, circumstantial, and that foregrounded individuals, now mostly obscure. I do this to unsettle straightforward, clear cut explanations, including those cited above, as to why Kishineff became what it became. The factors I now explore help better explain, as I see it, why this event, both in terms of its actual as well as its imagined details, has remained resonant. And for so long not only for Jews but also, oddly, as one of the prime props, one of the outstanding motifs of Russia's anti Semitic right wing arsenal. 2 When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sought to explain a few years ago in his late life book on Jews and Russians why Russia was so weakened by fall 1917 that it simply collapsed as he saw it, into the waiting arms of the insidious Bolsheviks, he placed much of the blame for its vulnerability on the shoulders of the Kishineff pogrom, its devastating impact on Russians, its true victims, not Jews, a story that has explained so much for so many. The noisiest drumbeat immediately preceding the pogrom's outburst fixed on the ever explosive charge of Jewish ritual murder, the disappearance and killing of an adolescent in a spot a couple dozen miles west of Kishineff. The investigation occurred amidst a cascade of relentless charges leveled daily in the area's one local newspaper, Besserabits, edited by the distinguished anti Semite at the time. By no means an oxymoron, Pavel Krushevan Kishineff before its pogrom, flew mostly beneath the radar. But its Jews were the objects of considerable attention for a not insignificant sector of Russian public opinion, the radical right, which fixed on Bessarabia, a tenuous border area still relished by Romania, from whom it was so recently extracted and where Jews it was charged, swarmed, less encumbered, more ominous and elsewhere. Not only was Bessarabia home to several of Russia's leading figures of the Russian right, but as they saw it, it was both a spot where Jews exploited non Jews more mercilessly than elsewhere, and also in the political cosmology of the right. It was arguably the darkest, most sinister hub of the Zionist movement's relentless juggernaut. Now this is fantasy, to be sure, but like much fantasy there was an internal logic, a certain illogical coherence to it. Most legends spring from facts, AJP Taylor once observed. This one too, was thickened with concrete, profoundly distorted data. This is because for some years Kishinov served as home of the correspondence bureau of the Zionist movement, one of four bureaus with different functions created by Theodor Herzl's movement soon after its launch in 1897. Kishineff, the most effective, had the responsibility of maintaining communication with branches in Russia and beyond to disseminate news pertinent to the movement to newspapers and organizations abroad. Kishineff was selected as its location simply because this one man operation, this grandly named correspondence bureau, was the home to one Yaakov Bernstein Kogan, a doctor with a less than sturdy practice. Never was Bernstein Kogan able to make more than a nominal living bouncing around for years, supported for various stints by the Zionist movements. He after working in Palestine, he actually made the counterintuitive choice to return to Soviet Russia, where he worked the Jewish Cooperative farm unit, dying there in the late late 20s. A man with an excess of heart, but not one of the towering minds or tacticians of his movement, he loomed nonetheless alarmingly large in and around the time of Kishinev pogrom, and mostly because he was the movement's chief conduit to the world's press. For not a few in the Russian government as well as in the hard right, it was Bernstein Kogan who personified all that was most horrible, most perilous in the challenge posed by Zionism and Jews as a whole. In some measure, these fears soared at the time because of Herzl's insistent claims that he and his movement were buttressed by limitless wealth, that it was on the verge of persuading Turks or Germans or the English to embrace Zionism's goals, that it possessed the financial capacity to purchase vast chunks of the Holy Land. Barely anyone believed this except for the Russian right. Such assertions were all either completely untrue or vastly overstated, were taken with deadly seriousness by the Russian right and by many Russian governmental officials, apprehensions that grew to fever pitch when Zionism launched its campaign to buy land in Palestine and then in 1901 petitioned for permission for the Palestine bank to function in Imperial Russia. This move transformed Zionism in the minds of substantial sectors of Russian opinion. From an organization intent merely on Jewish immigration, a benign, even positive goal, to one planning on acquiring Christianity's most sacred sites. And then, perhaps immeasurably more, a vivid glimpse of the Russian government's perceptions of Zionism's reach and Bernstein Kogan's uncannily powerful influence may be seen in Police Director Lopukhen's book length report on the movement, produced in 1903 for use by his agency, packed with information, much of it accurate. In the document, Lopukhen portrays Bernstein Kogan as a figure of uncontested influence. There are nearly as many references to him as to Herzl. He is described as chief of all Russian Zionism, as its virtual president, a populist in his youth, a lifelong atheist, brother of a political radical, Bernstein Kogan's activity was monitored with great care and his motives the object of the greatest suspicion. There was really little to discover. But neither the government nor the radical right believe this to be the case. But Bernstein Kogan's moment in the limelight was nonetheless intense, if very brief. He entered into history in the immediate wake of the Kishineff pogrom. What he had managed to set in motion as head of the movement's correspondence bureau in kishinev starting in 1898, was a well run outfit with runners capable of smuggling information across the most porous of all Russian borders about the movement and its concerns to newspapers elsewhere. Its capacity to disseminate information at the empire's most porous borders was the Kishineff Bureau's great assets. This good hearted, unusually portly man was but a second tier activist whose significance in the larger constellation of the movement was keenly overestimated by the government and others. But since the Kishina pogrom broke out on his home turf, and since he had at his disposal an impressive range of international contacts, he now found himself at at the epicenter of action. What I'm suggesting here, had it occurred 200 miles to the east, we would not be talking about it today. It was in no small measure because it occurred, where it occurred, when it occurred, and that Bernstein Kogan was there to spread the news. On the second night of the pogrom, once it was reasonably safe to walk outside. We know that Kogan Bernstein went to the homes of the city's wealthier Jews until the early hours of the morning, collecting money for the relief of pogrom victims. If he encountered resistance, he simply argued until the money was forthcoming. Jonathan. And by the night's end, he had collected 48,000 rubles in cash, 18,000 in checks. Then, working closely with messengers he knew through his Zionist work, he smuggled news of the pogrom across the Romanian border and arranged to transmit from IASI 1500 rubles worth of telegrams to the Western press. The messages yielded, as Bernstein Kogan later recorded in his memoirs, nearly 1.5 million rubles in immediate relief. With the bulk of the money coming to Kishineff in Bernstein Kogan's own name from as far away as Australia to this day, Portland, Oregon claims in its local histories that it gave the largest of all sums. A few days after having transmitted news of the pogrom via Yasi, Bernstein Kogan was summoned to Petersburg to meet with Russian jewelry's leading figures. There he was introduced as Herzl's right hand man. Minister of Interior Plehve astonished Theodor Herzl during their session together that August in Petersburg when Plehva declared. But take Bernstein Kogan. We know that he conducts a press campaign against us abroad. Above all, above all, the news regarding Kishineff that mesmerized the world's press. Still more than the massacre's brutality was the so called Plebe letter. What this was thought to signal was the most resonant of all lessons to be learned from the massacre. Namely that the government at the highest levels was directly responsible for it all, that it was intent on wreaking havoc, perhaps little less than the annihilation of its Jews. This would become the most unsaleable, the most canonic of all assumptions shared by Jews regarding the late imperial regime. And the Plehva letter would constitute the main body of evidence utilized by Jews and others in the effort, in the end quite successful, to block restrictions on Jewish immigration to the United States comparable to those under various consideration at the time in England. Now Plehve was an ideal boogeyman, Mordaunt's hauntier than Tolstoy's Karedin. No, no photograph of him shows him with anything but a grimace. I gave an earlier version of this in Paris a few months ago. There was an expert in the audience of 20th century official governmental photography. You see, we lead dangerous lives as academics who, who actually chastened me that apparently people did not smile for photographs at this time. I'm still convinced that Plevis smiled less than most. His loathing of Jews was deep, all the more so since in contrast to most Russian anti Semites, he had had sustained contact with them in the courtyards of his Warsaw youth. Rather obscure until the moment he became infamous. Plehv was barely known beyond Petersburg bureaucratic circles. Before the Kishinev pogrom, he had been appointed Minister of interior only in 1902. Yet when shortly afterwards Herzl rushed to Russia in Kishineff's wake, it was Plehve whom Herzl was most eager to see. Once the Tsar made it clear he wouldn't meet with him, as Plehve was now widely viewed as the keeper of Russian jewelry's fate. The single most damning piece of evidence implicating Plehve was a letter with his signature of the Minister of Interior himself, dated two weeks before the pogrom, outlining its basic details. In short, just the smoking gun that for so long had been so exasperatingly difficult to locate. It was first published in the Times of London a month after the pogrom and then was widely reprinted. The government's immediate Reaction was to expel the Times correspondent. It took eight days for the government to disavow the letter. It did so clumsily, with all sorts of reckless, insulting claims about Jews and their responsibility for the massacre. By the time the regime decided to react, it was simply taken for granted, probably even by most of its friends, that Pleva had written it. The letter reads as follows. Quote it has come to my knowledge that in the region entrusted to you why disturbances are being prepared against the Jews who chiefly exploit the local population, in view of the unquestionable undesirability of instilling by too severe measures anti government feeling into the population. Your Excellency will not fail to contribute to the immediate stopping of the disorders which may arise by means of admonitions without at all having recourse to the use of arms. End quote. It was a shocking document, a green light to marauders whose only concern was that local authorities would not respond too severely and thus alienate rioters. Not only did the letter offer no guide as to what ought to be done to stop the massacre, but it helped to explain why the government's response turned out to be so ineffective. Now, there's no doubt, there's no doubt that Plevitt greatly disliked and distrusted Jews. He made these feelings amply known. He saw Jews as a disruptive force, economically untrustworthy, politically subversive, alien to the natural rhythms of Russian life. He hated them because too many of them were radicals. He suspected that most of them were insufficiently loyal to the regime. Still, claims that his career was a long and unrelentingly anti Jewish one are overstated, mostly untrue. Lopuhen, who served under Plehve as police director, published remarkably candid memoirs after the 1917 revolution, where he stated that Plehva had nothing at all to do with fermenting the Kiryav pogrom. When Plehva's papers were open to scholars after the fall of the Romanov regime, researchers scoured the material for evidence of the infamous Kishineff letter and any other evidence of his responsibility for the Kishine of pogrom. But nothing was found. This despite the fact that they discovered a great deal of highly embarrassing data on a wide range of other sensitive matters. Pleva's antisemitism was born of deep conservativism in contrast to the consuming the all consuming antisemitism of the Russian right, which would reach so hysterical a pitch, especially in the years immediately after the revolution. His anti Jewish sentiment was of an altogether different mold. Theirs was radically reactionary. It sought not so much to conserve the Romanovs as to forge a new and sturdier foundational myth, to consolidate a Russia confronted with the eventual disappearance of the dynasty itself. The radical Reich stood ready to wreak havoc in order to conserve the most essential, irreparable, irreplaceable features of the Russia they held most dear. Compared to them, Plevy's anti Jewish feelings were really quite mild, the byproduct of an unyielding commitment to stability and hierarchy. Plevy's was an old fashioned patriotic antisemitism with none of the radical rights apocalyptic, nascent fascism. It's all but certain that the letter was a forgery. Its origins remain obscure, perhaps always will. Still, there's good reason to believe that whoever wrote it nonetheless believed it to be essentially accurate. This is because it was widely presumed at the time that an explosion like the Kishineff pogrom simply could not occur in autocratic Russia without governmental sanction, and that such permission could only have been issued by Plevor. And self evident as this presumption was, it was unfortunately unlikely that it could ever be proven to be true. So although those responsible for the letter knew that the exact words it attributed to Plehva were inaccurate, the sentiments the letter conveyed was as good a stab at reality as anyone was likely to muster now planned. The pogrom likely was, but not by Petersburg authorities. The most likely culprits were a clutch of local activists, led at least inspired by the owner of the newspaper Besserabits, the Moldavian turned Russian ultra right winger Pavel Krushevan. It was his paper that stoked the flames by spreading rumors of Jewish killings of Christian children for use during Passover, also claiming that Jews had devised a way to make wine without the use of grapes so as to undercut the international market. Contemporary accounts place Khrushchevan front and center in this tale. But he would soon be marginalized and when mentioned at all, mostly it was because of really rather slightly government ties linking him and his newspaper, which was now depicted as little more than a conduit for official machinations if judged only on the basis of the incendiary, as often as not blatantly ridiculous items appearing as news in Besserabitz. I actually wrote this draft before I actually had seen copies of Besserabitz. There's no run anywhere in the West. It's officially available in Russia, but I don't know of anyone who's actually gone through it. I just spent several days at Trinity College, Dublin, where, because Michael Davitt, who was a Irish radical hired by Hearst to cover the pogrom, after the pogrom, his papers are in Trinity College, and he had copies of Besser Abbotts, which is nothing like it was. One of the wonderful things about archival research is that as often as not, it just proves what you think wrong. And so it's not that this was not a hate sheet, it was a terrible hate sheet, but it was also this. It was this eerily informative newspaper with theater reviews and I mean, I wanted it to be this sort of utterly ugly thing. And it was, I mean, kilo, a newspaper. And so what I'll do with this, I don't know. I'm reading from a text that I wrote just before. What I'm saying is not entirely untrue. It just maybe just needs some slight revision. I won't do the revision while I'm reading. If judged only on the basis of the incendiary, as often as not blatantly ridiculous items appearing as news in his Besserabitz, Khrushchevan seemed your standard ultra right bigot, a figure cut from much the same debased cloth as, say, the protagonist of Umberto Eco's recent the Prague Cemetery. By and large, this is how Khrushchevan has been depicted in a few historical accounts that grant him at least passing attention. Essentially, he receded from the public arena soon after the Kishnev pogrom. A few months afterwards, he too was shot on the streets of Petersburg by young Jewish student, a Zionist stalwart named Pinchas Zhevsky, who, on his own initiative and without the support of his movement, stalked him for months from city to city, sleeping in city parks and the like, while waiting for the best moment to attack. And when he fired his pistol point blank in daylight on a busy boulevard, the gun jammed. Khrushchevan ran into the local, the nearest pharmacy, which was run by a Jew, and he was treated by Jewish pharmacists. Khrushchevan then spent the remainder of his life. He died in his late 40s of a heart attack in 1909. Fearful of another attack and in semi reclusion, he remained a highly respected figure of the ultra right, a member of the Second Duma and elected leader of Bessarabia's Black Hundreds, but mostly sequestered, rarely appearing in public except when absolutely necessary, passing from public life quickly with his reputation, such as it was mostly a byproduct of his primitive Bessarabian hate sheet. It's easy to underestimate him, but one should not. Not only was he the author of a spate of highly interesting essays in fiction, as well as the writer of a superb erudite guidebook to Bessarabia, but according to some, he was the most highly regarded figure in turn of the century Bessarabia. And what seems clear is that in Kishinev, in the months before the pogrom's outbreak, Khrushchevan emerged as leader of a small underground made up of neither marginals nor mere cranks. Khrushchevan himself was often was described as a highly respected man. His closest friend Ibutmi in 1905 publisher the first book like version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. More on that in a moment owned large estates at the edge of Bessarabia in the Kherson province. Another figure, Pronin, made a small killing in Kishinev's booming property market. It was these men who together with a handful of others, were probably responsible for setting the pogrom in motion. The massacre. The work of backroom conspirators, including young politically right wing religious devotees, inspired by an exceptionally xenophobic local press under the sway of one of Russia's most skilled, intelligent anti Semitic leaders. But far more astonishing is the likelihood that the same tightly bound, resolute group of men were responsible for composing the first version of what came to be known not quite yet, but a couple of years later went in book form as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There exists much internal textual evidence that the first version of the Protocols was written, better said, stitched together in the immediate aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom, Khrushchevan and other Russian anti Semites had had their sights on Kishinev. And because of the rotund, ubiquitously sinister Bernstein Kogan at the epicenter, as they saw it, of the international Jewish conspiracy, right here in provincial remote Chisinov, the claws of worldwide jewelry were being stretched, exercised in ways terrifying. All this grimly clear to the ultra right, but nonetheless tough to pin down. And then suddenly Kishineff appeared in the Hearst press, quite literally daily for two months and elsewhere on batter headlines, with nearly all reports devastatingly critical of the Russian regime. It seems likely that this worldwide hubbub bolstered local right wing Russian beliefs in worldwide Jewish conspiracy and prompted them to rush into print the core of the text of what would become the Protocols. A recent linguistic analysis of the first printed version of the document issued by Khrushchevan in nine installments of a St. Petersburg newspaper he owned in August September 1903 reveals, as Caesar de Michaelis has shown, the prevalence of distinctly Ukrainian turns of phrase that would likely only have been used by someone from the region where Krushevan and his colleague Bhutmi, both known to have been intimately linked to the initial stages of the document's publication, came from. Every one of these terms would then be expunged from the book length versions of the Protocols that would appear in 1905 and later to Michaelis muster striking evidence on this score. For instance, the word used for Gentiles in this first variant, Goryevsky, differs from the standard Russian term goysky that is dropped from all subsequent editions of the document. Numerous other Ukrainian spellings or word usages are studied throughout the text as well. There are Several reasons why Khrushchevan's role There are several reasons why Khrushchevan's role in the saga of the Protocols has been underestimated. First, he was generally dismissed as a run of the mill rogue and rabble rouser, in the words of Norman Kahn's influential study, warned for genocide, a typical pogromchik. I mean he was so truly marginalized that the fact that his sister married a Jew, his name was Bronstein. Settling in Baltimore where converted and Orthodox she was renamed Sarah, she granted in the 1930s an interview to a Russian language newspaper, and yet this too disappeared from view. Nekrushevon never claimed responsibility for the text, never mentioning it in fact once it appeared in book form after he released its original version in his newspaper, and despite his continued presence on the Russian ride following the attempt on his life, he hid away as best he could until his fatal heart attack. His close collaborator Bhutmi eventually too disappeared, killed probably in the turbulence of 1918, 1919 and before the Protocols achieved the worldwide prominence it would garner soon afterwards. More important still, the widely believed oft repeated linkage between the document and the government was itself consistent with the assumption that tsarism, not random pogromchiks like Krushevan, concocted late Imperial Russias greatest anti Semitic literary hoax since so much of the interest garnered by the Protocols focused on proving it as a forgery produced in the recesses of the Russian government, this presumption seemed a foregone conclusion, unnecessary to revisit, that the text was but another item to have tumbled from Kishinev's rubble never gained traction. Kishineff managed to distill for much of Jewry and much of liberal as well as radical opinion in Russia and elsewhere too, a coherent, long standing set of beliefs regarding Jews and Russia governmental repression. How to respond to it? The character of right and left, the character, arguably, of modernity itself, rendering the word pogrom, sketchily used before the Kishnya pogrom, into a phenomenon seen now as little less intrinsically Russian than vodka or the tsar himself. Kishineff may be said, without too much exaggeration, to have provided much of the original resilient glue, the original resilient glue that time and again has kept American Jews, in particular a community that took the Kishnev pogrom to heart and in many ways made it its own, attached, despite socioeconomic reasons to the contrary, to the naacp, the aclu, to Barack Obama. Much of what was learned by Jews regarding Kishineff was, as it happens, the product of half truths of mythology that morphed into historicity, of poetry read as documentary journalism of seemingly irrefutable facts passed from generation to generation, often without basis in fact, Kishineff morphed into myths so dense, so clotted as to obscure almost entirely for most the actual terrible horrors enacted on the dusty town's tiny alleyways, its darkest, poorest, most miserable corners that were almost immediately fixed for all time as the quintessence of Jewish life in the rotting Russian Empire. Its mythologies, in turn, made history dizzying in its twists, made of something so specific and made into something so vast and large and emblematic it begs to be cut down to size and then reassembled, with its many offshoots made into crucial parts of its story, one where fact and fantasy mesh, where digging down deep reveals immeasurably more than the details of one catastrophe, but little less than the mindset of Jews, Russians, and others too, at the cusp of a new century, whose perspectives on that springtime in Kishineff would be so laden with meanings and countermeanings they would resonate time and again long after the city itself fell into obscurity, a place now all but empty but filled nonetheless with lessons thick and conflicted and that once opened up might well reconfigure so much of what we believed we already knew. Thank. You. Did. Did I say anything to provoke anyone? There are official question takers, by the way. I understand the political implications of everything I'm saying. They're uncontrad to everything I believe. But as a historian, you do what you do and you try to get it as right as possible. And even if my own political beliefs many of my deepest political beliefs are predicated, as I now have come to see it, on historical half truths, so be it. So do understand that. I do understand the political ramifications of what it is that I just said. So it's not for want of self perception. I'll stop talking.
- [51:30]
C
Thank you for a fascinating lecture. You painted a very interesting picture of how the Western press spread the word and how it kind of got the west interested in what was happening in Russia. But I'm wondering about what was happening internally at that time as a result of the pogrom. Did fear of further pogroms spread throughout the Pale? Did it increase immigration as a result of that?
- [51:56]
A
Yeah. No and yes. And so one of the general assumptions of a contemporary Jewish life is that the mass migration, a huge migration, larger proportionally than any migration of its time, was, was inspired largely by pogroms. I've actually, for years collected eulogies published in the times of Jews who were born in Russia. And no matter where they were born, even if there was not a pogrom within four or 500 miles, the person came to Russia because of pogroms. I came to the United States because of pogroms. Now, I mean, historians have demonstrated that this notion for years, have demonstrated this notion as is simplistic. Proportionally, there was as much migration for the eastern reaches, the Austro Hungarian Empire, from Galicia, as from the Russian Empire, where there were barely any such attacks. The primary migration was actually from the northern provinces, the Pale, where there barely were any pogroms until 1905. I'll get to that in a moment. There was as much numerically, as much internal migration from the northern provinces to the southern provinces where pogroms occurred, as there was actually migration abroad, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. However, on some level, I'm convinced that you're also right that of course, the fact that a pogrom hasn't broken out in your town doesn't mean that a pogrom won't. And enduring the massive wave that engulfs not only the southern reaches of the Pale, but also to some extent Poland and some of the northern provinces of the Pale, we begin to see migration linked in some sense in some ways to pogrom, as I've come to see it, what pogrom comes to mean, and one of the reasons, I mean, among the reasons it's the prime causal explanation, is that it disavows any contingency. There was no choice. We had to leave. And even if this meant leaving family behind and all the consequent guilt. But at the same time I think there is a kind of historicity to it. And that pogrom comes to be a shorthand for the inescapable misery of what it means to live in the Russian Empire. And it's a shorthand way of saying we can't take it anymore. And so even if there isn't, and there wasn't certainly until 1905 06, a one to one relationship between these occurrences and migration, it becomes the, the darkest image of a dark world. And so in this respect, I think our notions of Russian Jewish life are not excessively lachrymose. And in other words, it's time now to reassess, to revisit whether historians of my generation took the great Sayla Baron too seriously. And now that we're going through Russian archival material both on the local and the central level, even though the Russian regime did not engage in fermenting the kind of activity like the Kishnapogram, the Jews assumed the views of Jews. The views of Jews were as sinister in official circles as the Jewish masses assumed. And yeah, yeah, so I'm saying that the Kishineff doesn't necessarily prompt mass migration, but it prompts a great deal of other kinds of activity. The presumption that Jews do not engage in self defense inspires all sorts of self defense organizations. First of all in Gomel in September 1903. And it's the Shomer, the precursor of the Haganah that dates its inspiration to the Gomel pogrom. Jews reactions to it and directly to Kishinev.
- [56:02]
D
Oh,
- [56:05]
A
can you please express who exactly were the cat person Kabbigi is whether
- [56:13]
B
a militia wasn't marked. What the peasants sobered up a B.
- [56:19]
A
Okay, so there's the question of who inspires and who kills. Okay, so who did? Yeah, I didn't. I mean for those who came expecting gorier talk. I apologize and I do, but I. So it's a difficult question to answer, but obviously it's a very important question and it just wasn't. I couldn't really get to that. But I will now briefly. And we know a good deal about who the pogromists are because there's trials, we have trial transcripts, trials that continue in clusters. About three or four defendants in clusters are tried actually for an entire year well into 1904. And we have the transcripts of these trials. Very often especially those who engaged in murder argue that all they were doing was self defense because Jews are not only economically rapacious but they're so aggressive that the Jews actually initiated the whole thing by beating Russians, and that Russians simply responded, understandably. And then things got out of hand. How did things get out of hand? I mentioned in my talk in passing that by and large, the butchery that we associate with the Kishnya pogrom occurs during a very, very brief period. It occurs on the pogrom second day, the first day property stores are attacked, barely any property, a couple of people are killed. It's not clear that any women are raped. The butchery that we associate, the killings, the rapes, the multiple rapes, occur inordinately within the span of three hours from the late morning of the second day of the pogrom into the early afternoon and on six or seven intersecting streets in the towns poorest area, at least the area where the poorest Jews live in. The assailants seem to be largely, not entirely peasants from outlying areas, almost all Bessarabian and not Russian, some Russian. We have a lot of anecdotal evidence of the languages that they're speaking during the mob attacks. And so. And yes, and so that seems to be the prime population that engages in the attacks, the most vicious attacks. I mean, it was shocking to me when I started working on this to learn really how brief this attack was and in its utter brutality, partly for the reasons that I described. Because yes, we end up knowing an enormous amount about the kinds of questions that you're asking. We know an extraordinary amount about even the domestic architecture of Kishinev Jews, because so many investigators, including the great poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, enter into so many homes and actually write descriptions and so descriptions that are incredibly important not only as depictions of horror, but as depictions of so many other aspects of just everyday life. It's material that is of great ethnographic value. And so.
- [59:57]
D
I have microphone. How you would explain Dreyfus case, Bailey's case, Kishinyov pogrom, many how you would explain Dreyfus case, Bailey's case, Kishinyov pogrom Many another events cover it broadly in press, in books and special investigation. But exactly 20 years ago, Pravda, that's contemporary time. 93 5th of May, published article Satanic tribe accusing Lubavitcher Khashidim in Moscow who came from America in killing of three Russian priests. They really were killed. It was not so long time ago. And after three days later, Pravda again confirmed same accusation in article satanic game in Izvestia after Zvestia try to Say something composite. This version, this case practically not covered at all. Even Lubavitch or Hasidim don't want even to mention this. How you'd explain such negligence. It's most contemporary case.
- [61:17]
A
What I've tried to explain was how it is an event actually soars into visibility. And I acknowledged that most events don't. Whether, as your question seems to suggest, correct me if I'm wrong, Whether, as your question seems to suggest, most of what disappears either in our depictions of the Russian past, the Soviet past, the French past, you mentioned Dreyfus are stories of Jewish denigration isn't entirely clear to me. And I mean Dreyfus is exonerated. It would have been impossible to have such a trial in Russia because he was an officer. I could turn to you and say how do you explain Liam Blum? So it's. I don't want to suggest because of my interest in this particular pogrom on this particular evening that this is all of Jewish history. I certainly acknowledge that there's a great deal of wisdom in what you've said, that most receipts and that the kind of toxins that you describe have remained very much a part of Russian life, much closer to the center of Russian cultural and intellectual life, both in the late imperial period and in present day Russia than many of us would like to acknowledge. Part of the reason why I emphasized how important savvy, talented and intellectual Khrushchevan was was because it seems to me that figures like Khrushchevan were immeasurably more normative in late imperial Russian life than we acknowledge. And indeed I think you're absolutely right that they're ominously more normative in contemporary Russian life than we'd like to believe. So hopefully that at least skirts the edges of your question. There's a question here.
- [63:36]
C
Thank you, Steve. I really enjoyed your talk and I found it very thought provoking and enlightening. I want to concur and then a little bit disagree. First I want to concur but maybe even sharpen what you said and hear if you agree that in a sense Kishineff was the perfect storm for the politically articulate Jewish elite. In other words, both Zionists and Bundists. I would just like to play up the left also. Could you exploit Kishinev to mobilize Jews? Because most of Russian Jewry was politically inert and inactive. And these are movements trying to mobilize and excite people. And both of them point to Kishinev to say, you see, either we have to leave or you see, we have to fight czarism. But I do think that the, and this is where I disagree and I want to hear how you react that we tend to overlook the politically inactive and the politically conservative Jews, I.e. baron Ginsburg or the Orthodox rabbis. They take Kishinev as a kind of aberration. They are very reassured by the words of the Russian Minister of Finance Witte, that we will rebuild Jewish businesses, we will pay compensation for all damages. And they take quite seriously Plevy's assurances if Jews will not be radicals, no harm will come to them. So there's a large part of Russian Jewry that doesn't seek Kishinev at that time in apocalyptic terms, but as some kind of aberration that will be fixed. But maybe the myth of Kishinev was created by these politically articulate elites, the Zionists and the Bundes, and they won out in our image of Kishinev. But in its own time, I'd like to suggest a lot of Jews saw it as a horrible, horrible incident, as an aberration. Again, politically conservative Jews or politically inactive Jews.
- [65:50]
A
Let me respond to both points. Yeah, I entirely agree to when you entirely agree with me and we've known one another for years, I would sharpen your sharpening. It's what becomes one of the reasons why this is an event that you could actually grab onto is that you don't need, unlike the Zionist, to focus on the faraway place, Palestine. And you don't need necessarily, if you're a Jewish socialist, to focus primarily on issues of self defense, on collecting arms, et cetera, which the Bund does. What you're able to focus on is relief. In other words, that's the focus, that's the focus of the forewar from the very beginning. And that Galvan, they're the Yiddish speaking Jews, the Lower east side are the first ones who begin to emphasize relief. And they're the ones who bring those people into Carnegie hall initially screaming and shouting. And so it's the way in which you actually could concretize this activity as a focal point, as something you could actually do that cuts across these political boundaries. And I think this will help me argue with your second point. And I mean, of course you're right in terms of numbers and in terms of what it is that Jews in Petersburg or elsewhere are saying. I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong in what they're saying, but I think it's at this moment between now and 1905 that they really lose their political centrality. And I think this is a point made in the American context very effectively by Tony Michaels, my student, in a fire in their hearts in the US And I think it's fair to say that in a Russian context, too numerically they're outnumbered. But in terms of their basic credibility, the arguments that has won and is holding sway, I think it's their argument. Now, this is an impression one would have to demonstrate this. Your criticism, I think, is a very interesting one, and I'll try to get to work at it, responding to it.
- [68:18]
E
If I could ask a very sort of unscholarly question about my understanding of a. Of the backstory to Kishinev, which is that, and I may be wrong about all this, but it's I think an understanding that I've read in books in an unscholarly way, but that in the 1890s there were also there was persecution of Jews throughout Russia and that the American Jewish community responded. And on that occasion or on earlier occasions, Jewish bankers in organized to pressure the President, I think it was President Cleveland went to him and said, free these people and said, we are not going to have rallies, we are not going to do public organization around this. And in the 1903 Russian Japanese War, whenever that Russian Japanese war actually leveraged economic power to stymie the Russian effort, surely with some consequences in terms of the mythology of the protocols and that it was then they were effective in terms of policy making in the United States, in terms of freeing my ancestors. So I just wonder if this is a potted history I'm offering you or what degree of mythology I'm reflecting.
- [69:36]
A
No, no, I'm not here to criticize those grandees who liberated your ancestors. I'm not. And much of what you've said, I think is altogether accurate, and especially the point you made about the insistence that this not flow into the streets. That's the great difference here. The great difference here is actually who is the engine and the engine of politics in the wake of the Kishnew pogrom, as I suggested in my response to Dovid Fishman, were precisely those figures who had never been on the center stage of Jewish politics before in the United States. And it's they who branded this as their own and then consequently wrote this event correctly, incorrectly into our understanding of 20th century Jewish history. So what you're saying is entirely correct. But there's a weather change in the wake of the Kishnepogram, and those figures could try, but they're no longer able to negotiate These deals behind closed doors. And that's why there's this spillage onto the press, into halls, into Cooper Union, and a spillage that is largely orchestrated at the outset by Yiddish speaking Russian Jews. It's the first instance that this happens in American Jewish life. And this also turns the stage in a Russian context as well. And so in other words, you're right and I'm right.
- [71:16]
C
We have time for one more question.
- [71:18]
A
What was the reaction, or was there
- [71:20]
D
much of a reaction of the Russian non Jewish intelligentsia to the program?
- [71:25]
A
Yeah, so this is, I mean, this is another turning point. And I, I mean I, I had a pact with, with myself that I wouldn't speak for more than about 45 minutes. And so I, I can talk longer now if you want. No, this is in large measure because of the Plavid letter. In other words, because of the belief that the Pleva letter is accurate and the widespread belief that Pleba actually wrote it. This breaks the dam. So this is the first anti Jewish events that Tolstoy speaks out against? The very first. And the Russian intelligentsia more or less across the board, from left liberal to radical. There wasn't much liberal liberal in the Russian intelligentsia for reasons that were intrinsically Russian. But across that spectrum there's absolute unanimity that this is the event that really defines, more so than anything else the insidious nature of the Russian regime, that they actually are fermenting violence on their own streets and against their own subjects. There's so much. And it wasn't, I mean, I stumbled into this really not intentionally, and I've never focused my scholarship on pogroms. And I've always felt, as Jonathan said at the beginning, that we tend to concentrate too much on misery and have written many works that skirt in many ways these kinds of stories. Hopefully books that tell the truth but don't focus on these particular episodes. But I kept on finding that almost like an onion. As I kept on opening this up, it revealed more and more and more and more. Just two final examples, one that I alluded to and one that I did not. The very term pogrom. If you track the way in which attacks against Jews are described, the terminology that's used until 1903, there's a wide array of terms that are used and pogrom is just one of a wide variety of terms. In May 1903, after the pilfer letter is published, the Times of London has an entire article and entire article that it prints and it says, now let us define what a Pogrom is in contrast to all those other activities. And what a pogrom is is a government condoned or executed attack on Jews. And it's an immediate wake of Kishinev that this term becomes as widely known in the Western world, arguably as vodka or tsar. One other example that I'm convinced is tumbles from this story. So the term pale of settlements, it's a strange term, and it's not a direct translation of the term in Russian, which means the line of settlement. Why pale? And the term is used by Zangwill in one of his plays. But it becomes to be popularized, I'm convinced, by Michael Davitt, who I mentioned in passing before an Irish radical. The term pale, of course, widely used in an Irish context to describe that area around Dublin, that fortified area around dublin from the 12th century onward that was controlled by the English. Michael Davitt is sent by Hearst, writes the most widely cited newspaper articles on the Kishnep Bagram, ends up turning them quickly into a book. It's a book that comes to be embraced by the American Jewish community. The Jewish Publication Society of America reprints it and gives copies of it, hands copies of it to the president, every member of Congress, every member of the Supreme Court, et cetera, et cetera, and he becomes a folk hero. I found Yiddish poems written praising Michael Davitt. They're plays written for Broadway about Michael Davitt. And his book is called within the Pale. And so, in many ways, so much of the knowledge that we have, the basic knowledge about the Russian Jewish past, is based on the events in this one place, this one moment in time that ends up spilling over so much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Sa.