John Doyle Klier’s Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882, Part 3

2,307 words ^[1]

Part 3 (Part 1 ^[2], Part 2 ^[3])

John Doyle Klier
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882
Cambridge University Press, 2011

The Jewish Response

Klier makes it clear early on that the Jews themselves viewed the 1881-1882 pogroms as a pivotal moment in their history. It remains so today with a consensus of historians. The pogroms began to dash whatever optimism Jews had at the time of being able to live unmolested in the galut—or under foreign rule. The pogroms also gave way to “the new Jewish politics,” which preached emigration and ethnonationalism rather than the shtetl-nationalism of the then-current Jewish leadership, which sought stability for a distinct, Semitic diaspora in the sometimes turbulent sea of Orthodox Russia.

Klier reports on the mainstream Jewish reactions to the pogroms—something which naturally obsessed nearly all of Russian Jewry at the time—as well various eccentric, and subcultural responses. In many cases, Jews dove into religiosity with fasting, recitation of scripture, and special services at their synagogues. Politically speaking, however, mainstream Jewish leaders had three primary responses. They bombarded the authorities with requests for special protection, they defended themselves against the various charges of exploitation, and they appealed to international Jewry for aid. The primary goal behind all of this was the eventual attainment of greater civil rights for Russian Jews.  This was their holy grail. The Gintsburg family in St. Petersburg exemplified the kind of secular, plutocratic leadership the Jews could rely upon in Russia at the time.

Younger Jews quickly lost patience with this course of “passivity and petition,” however, and began promoting emigration as a possible solution. The two main camps of the new Jewish politics diverged on their ultimate destination: either the United States or Palestine. This is why the 1881-1882 pogroms were so pivotal not just for Jewish history but for world history as well. They accelerated Jewish globalism as well as kick-started the Zionist movement. Furthermore, many of the Russian Jews who managed to emigrate to the United States participated in the American Jewish labor movement, thereby becoming major players in twentieth century American politics. Klier writes that “‘emigration mania’ consumed Russian Jewry for the better part of eighteen months.” Lending fuel to this fire was Ignatiev’s often contradictory statements about the desirability of Jewish emigration. Putting the issue front and center, however, was the prosecutor of the Kiev Military District V.S. Strelnikov. Klier writes:

Strelnikov denied that socialist agitation was the cause of the pogroms (the preferred Jewish explanation), attributing them rather to Jewish vices such as the evasion of civil obligations and economic exploitation. If the Jews were unable to live without exploiting their neighbors, Strelnikov proclaimed, “the western border is open to them.” This was the decisive moment in bringing the debate over emigration to a mass audience. If a state official could speak so casually about emigration, and have it widely and uncritically reported in the press, publicists could assume that emigration was a concrete reality and a legitimate matter for public debate.

As with Solzhenitsyn in 200 Years Together ^[4], Klier also unearths self-aware Jews who appreciated the gentile perspective and sought true rapprochement with them. Where Solzhenitsyn writes glowingly of twentieth-century Jews such as Josef Biekerman, Isaak Levin, and Danil Pasmanik—who believed Jews had much to do with the rise of Communism—Klier tells us of Iakov Goldin and his Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood, who were willing to point the finger of blame inward, rather than outward. They rejected Jewish materialism and exploitation (which Goldin called “a moral illness”) and believed in spiritual reawakening through agriculture and strict Mosaic Judaism. They had much in common with Christian rationalists in Ukraine known as the Stundists, and sought to productively bridge gaps between the Christian and Jewish populations. Klier quotes Goldin:

Our greed, insatiability, covetousness, cupidity, our persistence, pushiness, our extreme willingness to flaunt ourselves, our extravagance, our slavish and stupid imitation of proud and unbridled Russian haughtiness, our usury, tavern-keeping, go-between activity, and similar shortcomings arouse the Russian people against us, stirring up the envy of the merchant and the contempt of the noble.

Well! That about says it all, doesn’t it? Sadly, however, Goldin’s was a voice in the wilderness amid the more strident ones among Russian Jews. Despite being praised by many Russians, Goldin was accused by his co-religionists of sympathizing with or even inciting pogroms. His Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood did not survive as a result.

The International Response

The most far-reaching and instructive impact of the pogroms was undoubtedly the decisive reaction among European Jews, which was based on frankly dishonest reporting coming from the Jews themselves. In Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882, Klier pulls off the coup of dismantling the lugubrious Jewish narrative of universal Jewish victimhood and gentile culpability by catching Jewish propagandists in flagrante delicto, if you will, atrocity-mongering the pogroms in a vicious and self-serving vendetta against the state of Russia itself. Klier offhandedly refers to such people as “Russophobes,” ^[5] either unaware of or indifferent to the fact that prominent Jewish intellectuals such as Wistrich, Walter Lacquer ^[6], and Josephine Woll ^[7] had linked this term with anti-Semitism thanks to the writings of Igor Shafarevich ^[8]. Such positioning from the author goes well beyond exonerating the Tsarist government and vindicating the Jewish exploitation narrative, as valuable as these revelations are. Indeed, the lies and exaggerations spread by international Jewry surrounding the pogroms of 1881 and 1882 evince the same hatred of gentile Christians that the Bolsheviks possessed decades later when they initiated the greatest murder-campaign in history up until that point.

Right away, the Russians found themselves plunged into a foreign policy crisis by the pogroms, despite their vigorous pleas on the world stage. Yes, the Russians pointed to the thousands of arrests and indictments of pogromists as well as their stiff and often draconian punishments. But this did little to persuade foreigners—especially influential Jewish ones—that the Russians weren’t somehow at fault by oppressing and alienating their Jews to begin with. Accompanying this were many pro-Russian explanations which were too frankly Judeophobic for most Westerners to stomach—largely because Westerners had less experience living alongside Jews than the Russians did. (Compare the Jewish population of France, which could be counted in the tens of thousands to Russia’s four million.)  A great example comes from Zenaide Ragozin, a Russian expatriate living in the United States who tried to persuade Americans that Jews were “a parasitical race” which chokes the life of commerce and industry “as the creeper throttles the tree that upholds it.”

This tack backfired, and soon world leaders were feeling the pressure from the Western Jewish elite, which included lawmakers, to retaliate against Russia itself. For example, after The Times of London published sensationalist and unsubstantiated pogrom stories in January 1882—which included lurid and entirely fictitious accounts of rape—British Prime Minister William Gladstone was forced to address demands of intervention by outraged Jewish MPs. Not only this, but the Anglo-Jewish leadership in England attempted to drum up public protest over “Russian barbarism,” which the Russians saw as a “weapon to poison the good relations between Britain and Russia.” In December of 1881, Nathaniel Rothschild, acting on behalf of the Russo-Jewish Committee, approached the Russian embassy with a demarche demanding legal equality for Jews and the abolishment of the Pale. The Russians rightly saw this as foreign interference and refused. The subsequent publishing of the demarche in the British press further deteriorated public perception of Russia in the West.

Fortunately, Gladstone held his ground against all of this, and pointed to how the consular reports on the pogroms collected by the British government directly contradicted the coverage from The Times and other periodicals. It turns out that the pogrom coverage in the English press was not merely wrong, but wildly so:

In response to the horror stories contained in The Times account, Odessa consul-general [G.E.] Stanley declared on 18 January 1882 NS that “amongst the riots described are the disturbances which took place at Odessa last May, and the description is so incorrect and exaggerated, and the descriptions of what took place at some other of the places mentioned so far exceed in horrors the descriptions given to me by eye-witnesses at those places, that I think very little faith can be given to any part of it, more especially to the accounts of the violations of women.”

Finding all of this quite rich was Frank Hugh O’Donnell, an Irish MP, who was quick to point out how the MPs who were leaping with great urgency to solve the humanitarian crisis in Russia had moved with much less alacrity when it came to resolving similar problems with the Empire’s own Irish and Indian subjects. He also said something quite telling: “[I]n the hands of the Jews themselves rested the control of the money markets of the world; and, so long as that was the fact, a government like Russia must depend largely upon the favor of the rulers of the money market.”

This was correct. As a result of the gruesome lies spread about the pogroms, Russia lost an estimated 152 million rubles on the stock exchange. Trade decreased dramatically as British and Austrian firms ended their shipments of goods to southern Russia. The Rothschilds announced that they would no longer buy Russian state bonds, which had profound rippling effects across global finance. In 1882, when a Russian emissary had requested a meeting with the Paris Rothschilds to discuss the possibility of reversing their ban, he was rebuffed—as was Nathaniel Rothschild before him—being told that “it can’t be done because of the persecution of our co-religionists in Russia.”

Conclusion

Klier provides space for both the Jewish and Russian perspectives on the pogroms. He frames much of the dispute as a duel between Ignatiev and the Gintsburg circle, with the former representing the growingly archaic notion of gentile ethnocentrism and the latter the more ascendant notion of civic or pluralistic nationalism. He is also quite cagey in his representation of these perspectives. He seems to refrain entirely from drawing definitive conclusions, and instead allows these conflicting perspectives to assert themselves. He condemns neither, and effectively champions each side when presenting them.

For example, in chapter eight, when paraphrasing a manifesto written by “Palestinophile” Jews seeking to emigrate to the Holy Land, he writes [emphasis mine]:

Faced with persecution in the past, the Jews had lacked the mental or moral qualities of resistance. Now they were served by a contingent of people who possessed both a higher education and strong moral convictions. It was true that this elite had been tempted by the lure of assimilation and had sought to spread Russian language and culture among their people. Events in Russia—and also in Germany—now demonstrated their mistake. Judeophobes claimed that both the pogroms and antisemitism were responses to Jewish exploitation. This was demonstrably untrue. “They beat us because we are Jews, who despite various sorts of persecution, degrading laws, the Pale of Settlement, have nonetheless remained true to our religion, our national traditions, which are sanctified by age-old suffering.”

Yet in chapter six, when summarizing the debates surrounding the final draft of the May Laws, Klier provides oxygen for a classic anti-Semitic stereotype [again, emphasis mine]:

It was thus the consensus of the committee that the proposal should not be ratified. Legislation of this nature should be passed through the State Council. The minister of internal affairs had insisted the Jews be forbidden to buy or sell estates in the countryside, where they were genuine vampires. Such a regulation had to be put into statutory law.

So which is it? Are Jews innocent victims of persecution? Or are they genuine vampires? Was it Klier speaking in these passages? Or was he merely using evocative prose to embody the voices of people from the past? It’s hard to say. But what isn’t hard to say is that Klier is quite evenhanded in his approach and, if anything, provides more real estate on the page to the Russian perspective than the Jewish one.

This is highly unusual, especially for a work of history dealing with such an explosive topic as the Jewish Question. Yes, Klier explicitly establishes points 1 and 2 described in Part 1 of this series. He exonerates the Russian leadership of inciting or encouraging pogroms, and he uncovers Jewish mendacity in their atrocity reporting. Thanks to research from people like Klier, these have become matters of fact rather than opinion. If the blurbs on the back cover of Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882 are any indication, Jewish historians seem to agree—which is a very good thing. But one wonders if these Jewish historians had read to the final two pages of the book in which Klier compares the false mythology surrounding the pogroms to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is hitting the mainstream narrative of the pogroms where it hurts, which is also a very good thing, not least because it puts Klier in the same camp as those who are skeptical of the lugubrious narrative of Jewish victimhood to begin with. This is where you will also find today’s Dissident Right.

As for point 3 and the veracity of Jewish exploitation, Klier is much hard to pin down. Did the Jews really exploit the Russian peasantry enough to incur their violent hatred? Were they really that corrupt and malevolent? Well, the Russians certainly thought so. And with four million Jews living inside their borders, it’s not like they were speaking out of ignorance like many in the West. Regardless of John Klier’s personal opinions on the matter and whatever conclusions he had hoped to draw in his wonderful Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882, the fact that the Russian perspective emerged out of good faith concern for the peasantry comes through loud and clear.

For most of us searching for a clearer understanding of the Jewish Question, that’s all we need.