Edward H. Judge: Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom. NY: NY University Press, 1992. 186 pp.
At the time of publication (1992), Easter in Kishinev was practically the only book in English that focused on any aspect of the history of the Moldovan capital. Edward Judge, Professor of History at Lemoyne College in Syracuse, NY, deals with the darkest chapter in the city’s history: the pogrom of 1903. He reexamines the evidence surrounding the horrific events that made international headlines at the beginning of the last century, events that are unknown to many inhabitants of Kishinev today, though they have not been forgotten by the numerous Jewish families who used to live there and are now scattered around the world.
In the first part, Judge carefully lays out the ethnic makeup of the city – the number of Jews, Russians, Moldovans, etc. who lived there. At the beginning of the 20th century, the 50,000 Jews of Kishinev made up roughly 45% of the city’s population. Moldavians and Russians together accounted for another 45%. Judge observes that three quarters of the factories were owned by Jews, and the mayor at the time said that they had brought financial prosperity to the city.
Once he begins to discuss the pogrom itself, however, ethnic precision is replaced by broad religious categories: Jews and Christians. The latter are subdivided chiefly by economic status – peasants, working class, and so on. Is the author suggesting that prejudice was equally strong among all ethnic groups? It seems so. “For Russians and Moldavians alike, anti-Semitism could be patriotic, politically acceptable, religiously tolerable, and – for those who felt the strain of financial competition – perhaps even economically useful.” But as a rule Judge does not say “Russians and Moldavians,” he says “Christians.” Why not “Orthodox”? Are there no important differences between the Eastern and Western types of Christianity regarding the Jews? My guess is that he has chosen “Christian” because it functions as the lowest common denominator. On the one hand it’s never wrong, but on the other it does not provide as much information as one would like. In any event, the overall effect is to emphasize religious over national affinities.
If Kishinev was a multi-ethnic city, it was also a linguistically diverse community. But Judge pays scant attention to languages and related communication problems in this polyglot urban setting. What was the lingua franca of the day, and how fluent were the Jews (particularly the less well-educated ones) in that tongue? To what extent were the Jews isolated by language as well as ethnicity, religion, appearance, employment circumstances, and ghettoization? In any event, cultural differences and the perception of Jewish prosperity clearly led to distrust and envy, which fueled the long-standing hostility toward Jews, most of whom were in fact quite poor.
Anti-Semitic fervor was whipped up by Pavolachi Krushevan, the Moldavian publisher of the newspaper Bessarabets, which spread rumors and outright lies calculated to defame the Jewish population. And Krushevan was well-connected to tsarist officials in St. Petersburg, such as Vyacheslav Konstantinovich von Plehve, the Minister of the Interior.
Bessarabets was not above reporting improbable and outlandish tales of Jewish villainy, such as their supposed invention of a new process for making wine without using grapes, thus threatening to undermine an important local industry. Far more irresponsible was the paper’s reporting of a murder of a 14-year-old Christian youth in the village of Dubossary. Ignorant people were ready to believe the rumors of blood libel, that is, the allegation that Jews had stabbed the boy in order to obtain his blood, which supposedly was needed to prepare matzah, the unleavened bread eaten at Passover.
Needless to say, this rumor was utter nonsense. As Judge points out, “Jewish law strictly forbade blood sacrifice and even the consumption of animal blood.” But the need for a scapegoat overwhelmed any sober consideration of the facts, which indicated that the unfortunate child was killed by his own cousin and uncle, who stood next in line to become the heirs of his wealthy grandfather. None of this mattered to Krushevan or to the lower classes in Kishinev, among whom the word spread that, for three days beginning on Easter Sunday, the tsar himself had given permission to attack the Jewish community without fear of police interference. BTW, Vladimir Nabokov’s father published an article “The Blood Bath of Kishinev” in the review Pravo, in which he condemned the part played by the police in promoting the pogrom.
Because of Krushevan’s connections in high places, and the presence in Kishinev at just that time of Baron Levendal, the shadowy chief of the Okhrana (secret police), it has widely been assumed that the pogrom was the product of a conspiracy instigated by high Petersburg officials, particularly von Plehve. As an oppressed group, many Jews had naturally allied themselves with any movement that promised to do away with discrimination and replace it with a more just society. Such a movement was socialism, whose growing strength was a cause of anxiety for the autocratic Russian government. By instigating pogroms, the tsar’s officials could redirect popular discontent away from the regime and toward a group that provided its political enemies with significant support.
Judge reexamines the evidence for such a conspiracy, however, and finds it wanting. “There is, in fact, little reason to believe that [interior] ministry officials wanted a pogrom. Von Plehve’s comments to the minister of war and threats to the Jewish delegation show that he was angered by the prominent role of Jewish youth in the revolutionary movement. But they by no means prove that he or his colleagues were anxious to encourage riots. Their highest priority was to maintain order, not disrupt it” (italics in original).
In response to this, two aspects should be noted. First, von Plehve’s highest priority was arguably not so much to maintain order as to maintain tsarist power, and that could very well entail encouraging pogroms. Second, Simon Dubnow reported that von Plehve himself had said he would drown the revolution in Jewish blood. Judge omits this telling remark.
Throughout the narration of this horrific tale, the author strives to be fair, balanced, and impartial. He exercises the admirable restraint of a professional historian, though some readers might miss a sense of outrage about a subject that at times seems to call out for passionate comment, even after more than a century. The rioters were never really called to account for their crimes. The few who were convicted appealed on the grounds that sending them to prison in the summer “would be to take them away from their fields and gardens when their labor was needed the most. It would also impose a hardship on their families, who would be left without income for much of the coming year.” The implicit logic of this argument is that prison is apparently not supposed to be a hardship. In any event, the appeal was successful, ultimately receiving the blessing of the emperor himself. At the same time, efforts of Kishinev Jews “to secure state financial relief were consistently disallowed…” Judge lucidly shows how the laws were applied with extreme rigor toward the victims, and with extreme leniency toward the rioters.
One quibble: This book could have used a map indicating the layout of Kishinev in 1903, and perhaps a current one as well, in order to make the reader’s orientation easier. Overall, Judge is intimately familiar with the details of the case, which he presents within the larger social and political context of the times. How could such an event have taken place? “From the perspectives of both the official nationalism of imperial Russia and the emergent nationalism of the subject nationalities, the Jews were outsiders. They were not really Russians, but neither were they Ukrainians or Moldavians. They were not really citizens, not really part of the ‘nation,’ not really ‘us.’ ”
And what was the legacy of this pogrom? It showed that, at the beginning of the 20th century, violence against Jews might provoke outrage and denunciations in far-away places such as Western Europe and America, but at home no one would protest – not the police, not the press, not the churches, not the neighbors. The green light had been flashed: One could kill Jews and not be punished.
Note: In 1998, a Russian translation by Dr. Clara L. Jignea of the Moldovan Academy of Sciences was published by Liga in Kishinev.
(This review first appeared in Balkanistica, vol. 13 [2000], pp. 183-185. It has been slightly updated.)
Update 1: For a review of another book dealing with things Romanian, see my discussions of Anne Applebaum: Between East and West, and Ted Anton: Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu elsewhere on this site.
Update 2: Readers may also be interested in an article I wrote years ago, not on this site, dealing with events in Prussia in the 18th century: “Neither Goshen nor Botany Bay – Hippel and the Debate on Improving the Civic Status of the Jews.” In: Lessing Yearbook XXVII (1996), pp. 63-101.
Update 3: A recent book on the topic of this pogrom: Steven J. Zipperstein: Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (New York and London: Liveright, 2018). It received a short, positive review in the New Yorker, April 16, 2018, in the “Briefly Noted” section.
hamiltonbeck 