Chapter VIII: II. Letters From Kishineff3 (2)

These circumstances account for the complacency--to put it no stronger--with which merchants and leaders of the Christian community looked on at the pillaging of shops and the destruction of saloons which belonged to their Jewish rivals. And they also explain why saloons and stores of Jewish ownership were alone the objects of the mob’s attention; for the riot was not an affair of blind, popular fury, bent upon indiscriminate lawlessness. Nothing of the kind. It was deliberately organised and intelligently directed from start to finish by leaders who knew what they were about, and how to discriminate between Russian and Moldavian property and Semitic belongings, in the matter of looting, and between Jewish and Christian women in another and more infernal business.

Kishineff, in its central and chief business parts, is a handsome town. Its leading boulevard, Alexandra Street, would do credit to any American city. It is more than twice the width of Broadway, New York; is planted on both sides with acacia trees, and can boast of imposing public buildings, substantial shops, banks, and jewellers’ stores.

The municipal headquarters, built, like most of the prominent structures of the city, with a whitish stone, is situated near the middle of the leading thoroughfare and wears a stately and striking appearance. The streets are all wide and run as in American cities, at right angles to each other in uniform arrangement. They are nearly all planted; a feature which adds greatly to the beauty of the city, in combining the light green foliage of the acacia trees with the bright, clean look of the houses and public buildings.

The Royal Gardens and People’s Park are in the centre of the city. Military bands play each evening in the former, and attract large crowds of well-dressed citizens, officers of the garrison, youth, and particularly ladies.

The city, in its chief business and fashionable districts, has the look of a comfortable, fairly wealthy, up-to-date bourgeois centre, and a well-governed municipal community; a most unlikely place, in the eyes of a visitor, to offer itself as a theatre for one of the most abominable tragedies in modern times.

Kishineff owes its success and prosperity almost exclusively to the Jews. Thirty years ago it was little more than a rough Bessarabian village. To-day it ranks, in South Russia, next to Odessa--where there are over 200,000 of the same race--in population, commercial standing, and wealth, and all this is freely admitted by educated Russians.

Jews in Russia are compelled by law to reside inside a Pale of Settlement, or territory comprising some fifteen governments, or provinces, of western and southern Russia, extending south from the coast of the southern Baltic to the Crimea, and westward from Charkov and Smolensk to the borders of Roumania, Galicia, and Prussian Poland. The area thus embraced in the Jewish Pale is about equal to that of France, and the number of people of this section of Russia is upward of 27,000,000.

Under the ukase of 1882, which compelled Jews to leave the villages and live within the towns, these centres became crowded inside of what thus became virtual economic concentration camps.

Within these limits of legal domicile the density of Hebrew population is at the rate of some 2800 per square mile. In the non-Jewish towns of Russia the average is about 60 of urban to 1000 of rural population. Within the fifteen provinces included in the Jewish Pale, the average is close upon 230 of urban to every 1000 of country population.

The effects of this crowding of Jews into the towns of the Pale are as obvious as they are inevitable. There is a dense population, restricted by necessity and disposition to certain pursuits and occupations, in places where the economic conditions do not provide opportunities for the healthy exercise of one-fourth of the industry or abilities which could under normal conditions find opportunities for profitable employment.

There are towns in which Jewish tradesmen and artisans are 50 per cent. of the total population. They are literally penned in within these places.

This is the economic side of the problem of the Russian Jew. The political side is even more serious to the Russian administration, and here we are approaching the consideration of what was the real underlying cause of the outbreak of a month ago.

All the Jews of the Pale are not poor. Quite the contrary. Despite the restricted area allowed them, large numbers of them are wealthy through successful trading. Another and larger section exploit inferior Russian intelligence and capacity, and earn money in legally forbidden ways by making it fairly profitable for the obliging Christian to act as a shield or deputy for the legally boycotted Jew.

Saloons are owned in this way by Jews, and are worked for them by Christians.

The Jew must not own land. But he can organise a company, place a Russian in nominal headship of the concern, and in this manner make a profit out of Russian agriculture.

In many other ways the keen intelligence, the inherited racial capacity for financial undertakings, the greater natural ability and better education of the business Jew, and also of the higher artisan Hebrew section, enable them, even in the face of all the obstacles put in their way, to give their sons and daughters an education which is gradually evolving out of an oppressed and degraded race a people of progressive thought and of political aspirations, who are deemed to be a most dangerous menace to the government and administration of an autocratically ruled country.

The educated Jew in Russia is more than an accidental ally of what may be termed Russian liberal tendencies. He occupies within this huge empire a semi-penalised political and racial status.

None of the higher state schools must admit more than 5 per cent. of Jew pupils, even where, as in Kishineff, the Jews are five times more numerous than the Russians proper.

The Jew cannot buy land.

He is debarred from administrative positions, except in lower grades of employment, and while he is compelled to serve in the army, he cannot claim the usual rewards or aspire to the ordinary ambition of men who make no greater sacrifice than he in the common military service of the empire.

All these facts, disabilities, and oppressive and depressing conditions, acting upon the thoughts and ideals of a brainy people, are producing a powerful anti-Russian political force along the southwestern portion of the Tsar’s most vulnerable frontier--that bordering upon the Austrian and Germanic empires. In other words, the Jewish Pale is becoming the nursery of revolutionary Socialist ideas and the active centre of an anti-autocratic propaganda.

The riots and terrorism of April, with their attendant horrors, were deliberately planned, not by robbers or murderers, not on account of religious bigotry, but for the reasons I have just given--namely, the feeling of hostility in the minds of administrative employés to a race believed to be plotting against the Empire, combined with the jealousy of local artisans and proletarians of the cheaper, better, and pushing Hebrew workingmen, compelled by absolute necessity to earn a living within a legally circumscribed sphere of industrial activity.

Hence, on the direct incitation of the local anti-Semite _Bessarabetz_ newspaper, edited by a Russian, who is really a Moldavian, and which is the only paper published here and read by administrative employés, Seminarists, and other enemies of Jews, it was resolved, in an organised riot, to strike terror into the Jewish community of Kishineff, with the double object of punishing what is believed to be a hostile element conspiring against the Government, and of forcing the Jews to leave the city.

_Letter VII_

DALKEY, June 9th, 1903.

The hideous realities of the actual outrages committed during the two days’ inferno of murder and outrage surpass in the naked horror of their details almost anything which the imagination could invent. I hate to return to further reference to these deeds. It has become a horrible and repugnant subject, but I convince myself that some good will come of it in tending to keep alive the sympathy of the American people in the future of the victims who escaped with life, but also with broken hearts and the outlook of a dismal future.

Meyer Weissman had a very small store in one of the poorest Jewish quarters of the city. He had lost an eye, by an accident, when young. The mob attacked and demolished his little grocery on Easter Sunday. He offered them all the money in his possession to spare his life. It was a sum of sixty roubles. The leader took the money, and then said: “Now, we want your eye; you will never again look upon a Christian child.” He implored them to kill him instead of making him blind for life. They gouged out his eye with a sharpened stick, and left him. Amidst sobs and suffering he told me his story in the Jewish Hospital.

Near the bed of poor blind Meyer Weissman was that of Joseph Shainovitch, whose head had been battered with bludgeons, and the victim left for dead. He told me that it was this same gang who killed his mother-in-law, by driving nails through her eyes into the brain. This story I refused to believe, thinking it might be born of some horrible nightmare following the poor fellow’s terrible experience. But from no less than six different sources, one of them being a Christian doctor, I learned that the facts were as stated by Joseph. Among the other witnesses were the men who dug the unfortunate woman’s grave.

In the female ward of the same hospital there were still upwards of a dozen girls and married women, when I visited the place, whose injuries were too serious to allow of their discharge. I heard their stories: at least those which could in part be related to a man.

One of the girls, aged about seventeen, was a perfect type of Jewish beauty, with a face which a painter would envy as a model for a Rachel. Her head was covered with bandages. She had been alone for three hours in the hands of a dozen men, who had killed her father and mother, and they left her for dead. A young Jew, evidently her lover, sat at her bedside while the tale of her sufferings and losses was being told.

In the next bed was a married woman, a mother of four children. She had not fully recovered consciousness, and all the events of the night of her agony were as yet not completely known to her. She, too, had been beaten and left for dead, after having been assaulted by many men.

At the Rabbi’s house, as already related, I met several more victims of the mob’s nameless infamies. One was a girl of sixteen, named Simme Zeytchik, very pretty, and childish-looking for her years. She said that all her assailants were Russians, mainly Seminarists, and told the Rabbi that fifteen of these young ruffians had outraged her.

She was one of twenty women who had sought refuge in the loft of the house No. 11 Nicolaievskai Street, and who were discovered by the mob, as were several other groups of women and girls in similar hiding-places.

I have before me a record of thirteen girls and women of ages ranging from seventeen to forty-eight, who were assaulted by from two to twenty men, and in many cases left for dead.

Six young girls who are known to have undergone similar violence were ashamed to come to the Rabbi’s house to tell their tale of wrong and ruin.

The foregoing list does not exhaust the number of women who were subjected to the greatest wrong that can be done to their sex.

All house-breaking and robbery were suspended in the night-time during the outbreak, and the younger men of the thirty or forty gangs of rioters went in search of the hidden girls and married women. Those who can do so naturally hide the narrative of their wrong, and suffer in silence. The actual number of the mob’s victims in the most ruffianly of their crimes will therefore never be fully known.

Apart from the desperate and hopeless efforts of the forty murdered men to save wives and daughters, and the solitary attempt at organised resistance described in a previous letter, the 10,000 or 12,000 Jewish men of Kishineff offered little or no resistance to the 1500 or 2000 Moldavian and Russian assailants of their women, homes, and property. Ninety per cent. of them hid themselves, or fled to safer parts in and out of the city for refuge.

A thousand determined men, even in spite of the action of the Chief of Police in virtually protecting the mob, could have saved many lives and averted most of the outrages on the women and girls. One plucky little Jew, Leon Koulberg by name, a member of the Kishineff Fire Brigade, with only a few helpers, faced a band of fifty-six Moldavians and drove them from his district.

Many Russians of both sexes nobly exerted themselves to protect the women from the mob. But from no quarter in the city, and from no source, did I learn of any attempt being made by Russian or Moldavian clergymen (with one solitary exception) to perform a similar Christian duty.

Instances of incredible baseness on the part of the Moldavians were given me by various witnesses.

Mordka Mynduik was escaping from a gang of ruffians in the Skulanska Rogatka suburb. He was invited into a Moldavian neighbour’s house, and murdered by those who had offered him hospitality and protection.

Israel Ullman fell a victim to a similar act of Moldavian perfidy.

Three men and a woman with a child were fleeing from pursuers, and were directed to take a certain course over a field towards the railway station. They ran into an ambush, and two of the men were killed, the woman and child, however, escaping.

Another woman and her child sought the house of a converted Jew for safety, after her home had been demolished. The “Christian” Jew holds a position under the City Government. He knew the frightened woman well, and had been on terms of the closest intimacy with her family before climbing into office as the reward of his “conversion.” He shut the door in the face of the terrified wife of his former friend.

What impressed one most painfully in Kishineff, after the narratives of outrage, was the seeming indifference of the mass of the Russian and Moldavian people over the whole infernal business. They had to recognise the great injury done to the city by the riots and their results. That was too patent to be ignored. But, with the exception of a comparatively small number of Christians, already alluded to, there appeared to be neither regret nor remorse among the citizens generally over the deeds which had riveted the world’s attention upon them as a community capable of perpetrating acts so base and inhuman. This callous bearing I attribute mainly to the tactics of the anti-Semitic press, combined with the amazing silence maintained by the Greek Church prelates and clergy in relation to these crimes.

The _Bessarabetz_ and _Znamya_, the only papers circulating in Kishineff, audaciously blamed the Jews for what had occurred, and carefully abstained from reproducing the comments of foreign journals upon the rioting at Eastertide. By this means the people were prevented realising the extent and character of the external indignation aroused by the reports of the events of April, and they were left by these means, or by their own indifference, a community apparently unconcerned about the massacres and infamies which had found victims only among Jews.

As far as I could learn, there had not been a solitary word spoken or act done by any of the prominent ecclesiastical authorities of Kishineff which could be construed, even charitably, into a condemnation of the killing of harmless men and the ravishing of innocent girls beneath the shadows of the many Christian churches which adorn the capital of Bessarabia. The sufferers were only Jews.

Each evening during my stay in this soulless city large crowds gathered in the Royal Gardens to enjoy the music of the fine Dragoon Band which performed Polish polkas, and the Hungarian “Chardash” and Russian marches in faultless fashion. Throngs of gaily dressed ladies, under the escort of the young officers of the garrison, were always in evidence, along with students from the colleges and Seminarists supplied by the religious high schools of the city. It was fashionable Kishineff’s rendezvous for evening enjoyment, recreation, and social gossip, and the tables of the cafés rang with laughter when the groups of visitors were not drinking in the music of some operatic selection or of an inviting waltz from the band.

Not a single Jew had been seen in this place of popular resort since April 19th.

One evening my dragoman called my attention to a group of young Seminarists sitting at a table near to ours. They were boisterous in their merriment, and appeared to be enjoying the recital of some unusually piquant incident or adventure, amidst the smoke of their cigarettes and the relish of their coffee.

“That gang,” observed my dragoman, “judging from what I have heard some of them say, must have been among those who violated the girls and women in the loft of No. 11 Nicolaievskai Street, where Simme Zeytchik was outraged by a number of young students.”

It was only that morning we had seen this girl of sixteen at the Rabbi’s house, and heard her story.

The Mayor of Kishineff, M. Karl Schmidt, received me most courteously when I called upon him in the fine municipal buildings on the Alexandra boulevard. He has been burgomaster of the city for a quarter of a century, almost in unbroken succession. A man of some sixty summers, of tall and commanding appearance and of cultured manner, he impresses you at once with the feeling that you are in the presence of a strong, capable, and upright personality.

He willingly accorded me an interview, but answered my questions in a manner suggesting a reserve which was more official than personal:

“What was the origin of the outbreak, Mr. Mayor?”

“The writings in the anti-Semitic press, and their effect upon the minds of ignorant people who dislike the Jews both for their race and religion. The alleged murder by Jews of the Christian boy at Doubossar and of a girl here in Kishineff, who committed suicide, inflamed the populace. When the real facts were published, the truth was believed to be an invention to cover up a Jewish crime, and the frequenters of cafés and the workingmen, who are hostile to the Jews, remained convinced that Christian blood had been actually obtained in this way for ritual purposes.”

“Do you find the Jews of the city a turbulent or provocative people?”

“No. They resemble most other people, in having good and bad numbered among them. There has been nothing whatever in their behaviour, as far as my many years’ experience of Kishineff goes, to explain or in any way to palliate the attacks made upon them. The great mass of them are very poor, but they are most patient and never disorderly.”

“Have they any secret or revolutionary society here?”

“Nothing, in my belief, worth serious attention. Some of the younger Jews call themselves Socialists, but there are not many, and I do not think they need cause the authorities any serious anxiety.”

“Is there any similar organisation, under any name, among the Russian or Moldavian workingmen?”

“There is some kind of a society which scatters pamphlets about and things of that kind from time to time. Its members were among the rioters and against the Jews.”

“Do you take the reports of the riots in the matters of the killed, wounded, and looting as having been exaggerated?”

“No. I am sorry to say there were more people killed than the forty-three reported deaths. A few bodies have been found since the last report was issued. The number of persons wounded is difficult to find out. Many poor Jews who want to obtain a share of the relief funds declare they were injured, but they carry no traces of wounds or hurts, when examined. The accounts of the destruction of dwellings and stores have not been overstated. Enormous damage has been done, and both the city and the actual sufferers will feel the great loss for years to come. I understand you have been visiting the scenes of the disorders, and you can judge for yourself as to the extent of the damage and mischief done.”

“Do you anticipate any recurrence of the trouble on the Emperor’s day?” (Date of the Tsar’s Coronation, May 27th.)

“I have seen the Vice-Governor on the matter, owing to the rumours you mention, and I am satisfied he will act promptly and severely if any attempt of the kind should be made. He will post soldiers at all points of danger near where the Jews reside, and these will be under officers who will have orders to fire on any persons who may try to renew the riots.”

“Is it true, as reported, that the police were, to some extent, participators in the Easter outrages?”

“That is not an easy nor yet a pleasant question to answer. I have no control of any kind over the police force of the city, and I was not a witness of the disgraceful events in April. Some loot was, I believe, found in the possession of a few policemen, and this fact has given rise to the charge to which you refer. But it is most unfair to impute to all the force of the city and to its officers conduct so disgraceful, owing to the very few who were mixed up with the disturbers and their looting.”

“What forces, military and police, were in the city in April?”

“Probably about seven or eight thousand troops and three hundred police and officers.”

“Surely, there were in these forces means enough to have dealt promptly and effectively with the bands of rioters?”

The Mayor showed evidence of painful hesitation before replying to this question, but ultimately said:

“Oh, there was a most lamentable and unfortunate misunderstanding!” Whereupon he politely handed me another cigarette, to indicate that it would be no use to pursue that subject any further.

“Can you suggest any remedy to prevent these anti-Semitic outbursts, Mr. Mayor?”

“I fear not. The Government measures promulgated, from time to time, with regard to the Jews, are deemed necessary for the preservation of order. I cannot discuss the worth or wisdom of these measures, but I can understand why the Jews should think them unjust.”

“One question more, sir: Do you think that the Zionist movement offers any feasible or effective solution of the question?”

“As the Mayor of Kishineff, I would consider the loss of the Jewish community as a commercial calamity for the city. But, I confess, if I were a Jew, I would be a Zionist.”