A Kishenev Moment

Yesterday was the 85^th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Reich-wide pogrom in 1938 that signaled to the world that the Nazis were not going to settle back into being armchair anti-Semites who expressed their loathing for Jews through hate-inspired rhetoric and discriminatory legislation, but were going to morph forward into becoming brutal, barbarous killers for whom there would eventually be no bottom line at all when it came to attacking Jews or defaming Judaism. The numbers say it all. 267 synagogues were burnt to the ground in the course of that unimaginable night. Over 7000 Jewish businesses, including both family-owned shops and giant department stores, were damaged, looted, or utterly destroyed. Over thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, the fig leaf of some sort of phony indictment accusing the incarcerated of having committed some sort of crime not even bothered with. Hundreds were murdered or prompted by the pogrom to take their own lives. The die was cast. Millennia of Jewish life in Germany and Austria were at their end. Other than for those able somehow to escape at the very last moment, there would be no future at all, not even a difficult or unpleasant one, for the Jews of the Reich.

We have not forgotten any of this. Nor has the eventual adoption of Yom Hashoah as the annual memorial day for the six million Jewish victims of Nazi anti-Semitism made it feel superfluous to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht each November. Yom Hashoah, which has its own complicated backstory, ended up as the day on which Jewish people formally mourn for the martyrs who died al kiddush ha-shem during the Second War. But Kristallnacht has its point, its own specific contribution to make. And, indeed, for many of us, Kristallnacht represents not the final debacle, but the early-on turning point, the moment at which the anti-Semitism which underlies so much of Western civilization stepped boldly out of the closet and blatantly shed even the patina of shame that is in theory supposed to attach to race- or ethnicity-based prejudice in the sophisticated lands of our dispersion, in the enlightened West, in lands ruled (as was Germany in the 1930s) by leaders democratically elected by voters fully aware of their platform and program for the nation. There is something tragic about both Yom Hashoah and Kristallnacht, but whereas Yom Hashoah inspires regret, Kristallnacht inspires dread.

For me personally, the events of October 7 in the towns and kibbutzim on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border inspires just that kind of ominous feel that Kristallnacht also awakens, that sense that a line was crossed, that the fantasy that a reasonable solution could one day yet be reached with the Hamas leadership was not only a pipedream, but a malign, dangerous one at that, an example of the kind of illusory pipedream that leads, at least eventually, to Treblinka, to the slaughter of innocents, to hell.

And yet the event in Jewish history that I keep seeing referenced with respect to the Simchat Torah pogrom is not Kristallnacht at all, but Kishenev.

Today, Kishenev (now called Chișinău) is the capital of Moldova, a landlocked Balkan nation wedged in between Romania and Ukraine, and home to almost a full third of its population. But long before Moldova was an independent nation, Kishenev was the capital of the Bessarabian Governate in the Russian Empire and home to a huge Jewish population of about 50,000 (out of a total population of 280,000). The Jews of Kishinev were neither better nor worse off than any other Jewish community in eastern Europe: they had business dealings and social dealings with their neighbors, people with whom they shared a common nationality, a common language, and a common hometown. But shortly before Easter in 1903, things began to go off the rails. There were low level anti-Semitic incidents at first, some violent and others just defamatory. But things escalated quickly and an out-and-out pogrom began on April 19 of that year. The violence was, at the time, almost unprecedented. Countless Jewish homes were broken into, plundered, and destroyed. Synagogues were demolished. Jews were openly attacked by mobs armed with pitchforks and guns; hundreds of women were raped openly in the streets. The violence went on for three days and, at the end, about 1500 homes had been destroyed, forty-nine Jewish people had been murdered, and many hundreds had been seriously wounded. The whole story is told in detail in one of the most shocking books I’ve read in a long time (which is saying a lot): Stanford University historian Steven J. Zipperstein’s Pogrom: Kishenev and the Tilt of History, published in 2018 by Liveright Books. The book, which I can recommend wholeheartedly, is well written and very thoroughly researched. Intelligent and fully forthright in its account of the terror, the book should be read—and read carefully—by every single one of the so-called academics on our nation’s campuses who are willing to be known publicly as supporters of Hamas.

It might be hard for readers familiar with the horrors of the Shoah to take a pogrom in which only forty-nine people were murdered all that seriously. (By way of comparison, the Nazis murdered about 15,000 Jews every single day from August to October in 1942.) And yet the importance of Kishenev lies not so much in its own detail, but in its aftermath because it served in its day as a wake-up call that had repercussions and echoes across the entire Jewish world. And that phenomenon too is chronicled in detail in Professor Zipperstein’s book.

The sense of powerlessness felt by Jews who had no recourse but to cower in their own cellars and hide from the miscreants, rapists, and murderers wandering the streets in search of their next victim was chronicled by many contemporary authors, but by none as successfully as Hayyim Nachman Bialik in his famous poem, Be’ir Ha-hareigah (“In the City of the Killing”), which soon became his most famous work. Others wrote in a similar vein, focusing not on the power of the crowd by on the powerlessness of their victims. And, according to Zipperstein, the combined weight of journalistic accounts, poetic responses, dramatic representations, and literary retelling led to a sea change in Jewish attitudes towards the world and the place of Jewish people in it.

And, indeed, the notion that the Jewish people could only survive in the long term in a Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people—the core concept of Zionism—moved quickly from an out-there kind of political theory espoused by some to the kind of basic truism that Jews the world over suddenly found themselves embracing naturally and easily. Kishenev was thus a kind of a catalyst moment, a threshold in time over which the Jewish people itself had somehow stepped…and which could not really be crossed back over again. This was a sea change in public opinion rooted in the realization that the barbarism of the Middle Ages—a time when Crusaders routinely and without fear of reprisal massacred entire Jewish communities and Inquisitors burnt at the stake any Jewish person deemed not wholeheartedly enough to have abandoned Judaism, that that level of barbarism was not a thing of the past but a thing fully of the present. And that triggered a response in the Jewish world that was, so Zipperstein writes, unprecedented.

And that brings me back to October 7, to the Simchat Torah pogrom, to Gaza. I follow the news incessantly. I suppose we all do. The story has yet to reach its conclusion, but I’m already sensing that Gaza was a kind of Kishinev moment for Jewish youth in our nation. The college campuses, once naively imagined by most (including myself) to be bastions of learning, of dispassionate scholarship, of culture, and of civilization, have shown themselves—and we are talking about the biggest and most highly-rated schools in America, these schools have shown themselves to be cesspits of anti-Semitism staffed by at least some faculty members morally depraved enough to feel that the murder, mutilation, and rape of innocents, including children, is a valid mode of political expression. But the Jewish students in those places are waking up and feeling—some, I’m sure, for the first time—the danger, the precariousness that inheres in Jewishness itself, the angst that underlies even the most confident statement of Jewish self-awareness. They too have crossed a line in the course of these last few weeks. And that, just as it was in the wake of Kishenev, will have to suffice as the silver lining in this cloud of unremitting horror stories that we have all heard and read over these last weeks.

Whether this truly will be a transformational moment for America’s Jewish youth remains to be seen. But Kishenev, which surely could have ended up as just one more pogrom on a long list of such events, somehow altered something in the DNA of the Jewish world. Nothing was the same afterwards. And the rise of Nazism just a few decades later only made even more evident the fact that, in the end, hiding from the hooligans and hoping that someone else steps forward to save their potential victims is not a cogent plan forward. Not for Jews, certainly. But also not for anybody.

Professor Zipperstein’s book is a shocking, bracing, very intelligent study of a single moment in Jewish history, but one that somehow nonetheless managed to divide what came before from all that came after. You won’t enjoy the book. No normal person could. But you will learn a lot from it, as I did. For those struggling to understand Gaza in the context of Jewish history, I recommend it wholeheartedly.