Two weeks ago the scholar Steven Zipperstein gave an excellent talk at the Yivo Institute in New York called “Rethinking Kishinev, How a Riot Changed 20th Century Jewish History.” Zipperstein’s theme was that this pogrom, which killed some 50 Jews over two days in the fifth largest city in Russia, was seized on by Zionists and socialists and anti-Semites too to promote their programs, in ways that previous anti-Jewish violence had not been deployed. Ideologues created new “engines” of public opinion, using the western press, that made Kishinev a world event, and cemented the American-Jewish idea of Jewish history as a skein of persecution.
I’ll have a fuller report in days to come, but I wanted to light on one fascinating angle of Zipperstein’s talk. Kishinev was seized on by a heroic liberationist writer of the 20th century, someone I’d never heard of before: Michael Davitt of Ireland. Davitt was an Irish Republican and populist who inspired Gandhi. He’d spent years in prison, he believed in non-violence. He went as a journalist to Kishinev to report on the pogrom, and then wrote a book about it called Within the pale: The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecutions in Russia. Zipperstein said that Davitt took the word “pale” from the English area of control in Ireland and applied it to Russia; and thus changed Jewish vocabulary. (And in fact it was in Davitt’s archived papers in Ireland that Zipperstein was able to find copies of the leading anti-Semitic newspaper of Kishinev.)
I bring this up for one reason. A hundred years ago, enlightened world opinion was on the Jews’ side against terrible forces: the rise of rightwing radical anti-Semitism. Even Tolstoy wrote against Kishinev, Zipperstein said. On the other side, anti-Semites had support inside the Russian government.
And a leading Irish republican writer took up the oppressed Jews’ cause.
Today there is simply no question whose side a Davitt would be on: the Palestinians against the Israelis. This is obvious because of the rich connection that today exists between the Palestinian solidarity movement and Irish republican activists; the Irish say that the colonized Palestinian condition reminds them of their own.
There were a couple hundred people at Yivo the other night, most of them Jewish. I’d urge all Jews to reflect on where Zionism has swept the American Jewish community in its political values– how alienated we are today from our champions of a century before.
P.S. Noam Chomsky brought up Kishinev on Amy Goodman’s show last week, apropos of Ariel Sharon’s role in the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, which he termed “a horrifying massacre, actually one that should resonate with people who are familiar with Jewish history. It was almost a replica of the Kishinev massacre in pre-First World War Russia, one of the worst atrocities in Israeli memory, [and] led to a famous nationalist poem by the main Israeli poet, Chaim Nahman Bialik, ‘City of Killing.'”
“In the City of Slaughter” – Haim Nahman Bialik
ARISE and go now to the city of slaughter;
Into its courtyard wind thy way;
There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of
thine head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead.
Proceed thence to the ruins, the split walls reach,
Where wider grows the hollow, and greater grows the
breach;
Pass over the shattered hearth, attain the broken wall
Whose burnt and barren brick, whose charred stones reveal
The open mouths of such wounds, that no mending
Shall ever mend, nor healing ever heal.
There will thy feet in feathers sink, and stumble
On wreckage doubly wrecked, scroll heaped on manuscript,
Fragments again fragmented—
Pause not upon this havoc; go thy way.
The perfumes will be wafted from the acacia bud
And half its blossoms will be feathers,
Whose smell is the smell of blood!
And, spiting thee, strange incense they will bring—
Banish thy loathing—all the beauty of the spring,
The thousand golden arrows of the sun,
Will flash upon thy malison;
The seven fold rays of broken glass
Over thy sorrow joyously will pass,
For God called up the slaughter and the spring together,—
The slayer slew, the blossom burst, and it was sunny
weather!
Then wilt thou flee to a yard, observe its mound.
Upon the mound lie two, and both are headless—
A Jew and his hound.
The self-same axe struck both, and both were flung
Unto the self-same heap where swine seek dung;
Tomorrow the rain will wash their mingled blood
Into the runners, and it will be lost
In rubbish heap, in stagnant pool, in mud.
Its cry will not be heard.
It will descend into the deep, or water the cockle-burr.
And all things will be as they ever were.
http://faculty.history.umd.edu/BCooperman/NewCity/Slaughter.html
I first heard of Kishinev when I read Chomsky’s “The Fateful Triangle”–it begins the chapter on Sabra and Shatila.
Great multi-cultural perspective, although, since I didn’t know much about Kishinev, I had to look it up to learn that it occurred in 1903.
On reflection, I’m reminded that an English translation of Solzhenitzen’s book, Two Hundred Years Together, has never been published. It would be interesting to see how he reported, if at all, on Kishinev, from his Russian perspective. Always valuable to see things from different perspectives, rather than relying on “engines” of public opinion.
What a nonsense!!! Why stop short on Kishinev pogroms, comparing them to Sabra and Shatila, why not compare all the atrocities against Jews to actions by Israel in it’s wars?
That’s a stupid and insensitive equivalence- typical of self-appointed righteous anti-Zionist. Another thing, that I’m actually glad that this event came up here- it takes out the whole argument of post-Holocaust “Zionist invaders” and gives a more historical context for Zionist immigrants and creation of Israel.
Four possible differences between Shatila and Kishinev:
1. Were the governments of each directly involved?
2. Did any primary religious figures in the dominant religion of each country speak out?
3. Is there a body count comparison?
4. Did the West see the victims in both cases as white?
A similarity perhaps:
On the other side, anti-Semites had support inside the Russian government.
That’s true. Did anti-Palestinians have support inside the Israeli government?