A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (38 page)

Between 1791 and 1917, the Pale of Settlement was the only part of the Russian Empire where Jews could legally live. The Pale, which included parts of present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia, Ukraine, and Moldavia, was home to 95 percent of all Jews in Russia. In fact, more Jews were concentrated there than in any other region in the world.

Not every Jewish community experienced violence, but all of them were deeply affected by it. As Pauline Wengeroff wrote, “The new word, launched in the 1880s, was pogrom.”
¹⁰
The term
pogrom
comes from the Russian word for “thunder”—the sound heard just after lightning strikes, signaling the storm to come. Now the word came to refer to an organized, and sometimes officially encouraged, massacre. Wengeroff described its effect on her, her family, and other Jews:

In the city of Minsk the mood was dark. Business slowed down, the Jews left their stores, they hurried through the streets uneasily, casting suspicious glances about them. They were on guard. In case of a
pogrom,
they were ready to fight desperately. The air was charged; an explosion was expected any moment. The Jewish market women who came into my home, filled with fear and horror, told of the rough threats made against them by the farmers who brought their wares to market twice a week, speaking openly of an imminent attack and of the imminent murder of all Jews. My husband, too, brought such news from the bank, and the children brought it home from school…
.

The Jews of Minsk armed for battle. Their homes became fortresses, everyone according to his way, whatever was possible for him. One might provide himself with strong clubs called
drongi.
Another might be mixing sand and tobacco to be thrown into the eyes of attackers. Boys as young as eight, girls as young as ten, took part in these terrible preparations and were courageous and unafraid in the streets…
.

Nobody felt safe, even in his own house. The Christian servants, who had worked for us for some time, suddenly became impolite and impertinent so that we were forced to protect ourselves in our own home. After the servants had gone to bed every evening, I took all the knives and hammers out of the kitchen and locked them up in a cupboard in my bedroom. I put up a barricade, secretly, in front of the door, consisting of kitchen benches, chairs, a ladder, and other pieces of furniture. I smiled a little as I did this, for I didn’t believe for a minute that in the case of a pogrom we would be able to save ourselves in this way. But I built this barricade over and over again, got up first every morning to take it down and put everything back into place, so that the servants would not notice our fear.
¹¹

As the pogroms spread from town to town, Count Nikolai P. Ignatiev, the minister of the interior, called for an investigation to determine who was responsible for the violence. He claimed it would show that Jews were to blame because of the “Jewish exploitation of the peasants.” Jews were outraged. Moses Leib Lilienblum was one of the most influential Jewish writers of the time. When he learned about Ignatiev’s comments, he wrote what became one of the first calls for Jews to establish a homeland in Palestine:

They write: “One should collect and assemble the data about those Jewish activities which harm the natives.” We, then, are not native. During the pogroms, a native woman, ragged and drunk, danced in the streets, joyously shouting, “This is our country, this is our country.” Can we say the same, even without dancing in the streets, without being drunk? Yes, we are aliens, not only here but in all of Europe, for it is not our fatherland. Now I understand the word “antisemitism.” This is the secret of our affliction in exile. Even in Alexandria [Egypt], in the time of the Second Temple, and in all the lands of our dispersion, we were aliens, unwanted guests. We were aliens in Europe, when religion flourished because of our religion; now when nationalism reigns, we are aliens because of our origin…
.

Our future is fearful, without a spark of hope or a ray of light—slaves, aliens, strangers, forever. Yet why should we be aliens in alien countries if the land of our fathers has not yet been forgotten and remains vacant? It can absorb our people! We must cease to be aliens and return to our fatherland. We must buy land there, little by little, becoming rooted there, like other people who live in the land of their fathers. We are being uprooted from the land of our residence, the gates are open for us to leave. We are, in fact, fleeing. Why, then, flee to America and be alien there, too, instead of to the land of our fathers?
¹²

As a result of the pogroms, many Jews in Russia made plans to emigrate. As the image on the postcard suggests, hundreds of thousands headed west to Germany, France, Britain, and the United States.

Lilienblum and others wanted to settle in Palestine, the traditional homeland of the Jewish people. They called themselves Zionists (after the name of the hill where the Temple once stood in Jerusalem) and organized groups like
Hibbat Zion
(Lovers of Zion) and BILU, an acronym based on a verse from the Biblical book of Isaiah (
Beit Ya’akov Lekhu Ve-nelkha
—”Let the house of Jacob go”).

Over the years, some have criticized Lilienblum for suggesting that Palestine was “vacant.” At the time, it was home to about 450,000 Muslims and Christians and about 24,000 Jews. Lilienblum was aware that the land was occupied; he was simply describing it as a place that could absorb many more people. If he had seen the land as having no people, he would not have urged his fellow Zionists to buy land—which many of them did.

In the years immediately after the pogroms, about 35,000 Jews answered Lilienblum’s call and left Russia for Palestine. But thousands more emigrated to North America and western Europe. Between 1880 and 1914, more than two million Russian Jews settled in the United States.

Jews in Russia had few ways to resist in the 1880s. Poorly armed civilians were no match for a mob supported by police battalions and an army. A few Jews decided that their best hope was to let the world know exactly what was happening. A small group of Orthodox Jews in Russian Lithuania formed a secret society to do exactly that. Although members of the group lived in the northern province of Kovno and the pogroms were farther south, they managed to collect hundreds of bits of information. Little by little, they put the pieces together. The group’s leader, Rabbi Yischak Elhanan Spektor, then wrote a letter summarizing their findings. He sent it to prominent Jews in other countries, asking them to make the story known.

The letter sent to England was addressed to Baron Nathaniel Rothschild. He immediately turned it over to the
Times
of London. A reporter used the information to write two articles, which appeared on January 11 and 13, 1882. The beginning of the first article suggests the power of the story the rabbi wanted told:

Men ruthlessly murdered, tender married women the prey of a brutal lust that has also caused their death, and young girls violated in the sight of their relatives by soldiers who should have been the guardians of their honor, these have been the deeds with which the population of southern Russia has been stained since last April.”
¹³

In the paragraphs that followed, the reporter listed the names of towns in which pogroms had taken place, exactly what crimes had been committed, and the number of victims. Wherever possible, he used the victims’ names and provided details that would allow readers to picture them as real people. Readers were not told simply that “a child” was thrown from a window; they were told that the child thrown was the three-year-old son of Mordichai Wienarsky. They read not merely that a house was burned to the ground but that it was the house of the Preskoff family in Kitzkis. And they learned that the father of that family and two of his children died in the fire. The authors used that same attention to detail in identifying the perpetrators.

The articles ended with a call to action by the editors of the
Times
. “It is the lesson taught by all experience that the only solution of the Jewish Question is the granting of full equality…. The Russian Jewish question may… be summed up in the words: Are three and a half millions of human beings to perish because they are Jews.”
¹⁴

The articles in the
Times
prompted demonstrations in support of Russian Jews. The largest was held in London on February 1, 1882. The leader of the Catholic Church in England condemned not only the violence but also the degrading laws that had harassed Jews throughout Europe for centuries. The demonstrators passed a resolution condemning the pogroms as an “offense to Christian civilization” and expressing the hope that “Her Majesty’s government [of Great Britain] may be able, when an opportunity arises, to exercise a friendly influence with the Russian government in accordance with the spirit of the preceding resolution.”
¹⁵

Prime Minister William Gladstone acknowledged the horror of the pogroms but refused to send the resolutions or even petitions signed by British Jews to the Russian government. He also refused to respond to the United States’ request that the American and British governments jointly approach the Russians.

Why was Gladstone unwilling to speak out? He may have been following standard diplomatic procedure: one nation is not supposed to interfere in the internal affairs of another. However, Britain and other nations had interfered in the internal affairs of a number of nations from
time to time throughout the 1800s. Some historians think that Gladstone revealed his reason for remaining silent when he asked the House of Commons to avoid a public discussion of the pogroms because it was “more likely to harm than to help the Jewish population.” He told them that he would prefer to rely on private, unofficial contacts to express England’s feelings on the matter.

Gladstone’s comments suggest that the Russian government was threatening to harm Jews if other countries intervened. A statement that appeared in a Russian government journal supports that idea: “Any attempt on the part of another government to intercede on behalf of the Jewish people can only have the result of calling forth the resentment of the lower classes and thereby affect unfavorably the condition of Russian Jews.”
¹⁶

Despite Britain’s silence, other nations did send messages and petitions to Russia. And demonstrations took place in many countries, including the United States, France, Spain, and Italy. The tsar ignored this disapproval.

Foreigners were not the only people outraged by the pogroms. Many Russians, including some antisemites, were also deeply disturbed. They believed that the government’s policies were hurting Russia’s economy. On May 30, 1881, not long after the pogroms began, one of these Russians, an important textile manufacturer in Moscow, sent a letter to Ignatiev, the minister of the interior, outlining some of the economic problems he was having as a result of the violence. He usually sold his cloth to Jewish merchants in the Ukraine, but now they were unable to work, and some could not pay their bills. If these problems continued, he and other textile manufacturers would be forced to make less cloth and to lay off workers in central Russia. He urged the government to take action.

That letter was just the beginning. In May of the following year, representatives of 50 Moscow businesses presented a petition to the Ministry of Finance that described how the pogroms were harming their businesses. They said that merchants in the southern provinces owed them tens of millions of rubles, and they feared that if the debt was not paid, the entire economy would be affected.

Independent observers—diplomats from Austria-Hungary—confirmed the manufacturers’ fears. They reported that in areas where there were pogroms, it was nearly impossible for peasants or ordinary workers to borrow money. Jewish lenders refused to make loans because they knew those loans would never be repaid. As a result, train stations in central
Russia were jammed with peasants looking for work. There was also a rise in unemployment beyond the Pale of Settlement, including in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The pogroms also worried government officials. When Ignatiev, the minister of the interior, offered a plan to help the peasants by expelling Jews from all rural areas in the Pale of Settlement, many of his colleagues were critical. The minister of finance claimed that the plan would outrage Jews around the world and therefore make it impossible for Russia to borrow money abroad. He also pointed out that if Jews were expelled from rural areas, Christians would suffer as well as Jews. The strong trade networks that had developed in the south involved people of all religions, and what harmed one group would surely harm the others. And, he added, if Jews were expelled from the countryside, they would move to urban areas, placing an enormous burden on the towns and cities.