The word pogrom, which comes from the Russian language, can be literally translated as killing, massacre or massacre. However, this word only takes on its own characteristic when it defines the killing of Jews. The word has been around for around 200 years, having been absorbed by dozens of other languages.
Why stigma? Because stigma can be defined as the scar left by a wound. In the case of the pogrom, it is a wound that has been open for centuries and remains so. It is a wound that, although it seemed to be contained, exposed its viscera in the fierce and atrocious pogrom that on October 7, 2023 killed 1.200 Israeli citizens and other nationalities, the vast majority of them Jews, in the territory of their own country. This pogrom was perpetrated by Hamas, a terrorist organization with absolute power in the Gaza Strip, bordering southern Israel. Article number one of paragraph number one of the Hamas Charter preaches the forcible extinction of the Jewish State, a proposition passively accepted by the international community.
SINCE ALWAYS
There is speculation as to whether the first massacre occurred with Jews as the explicit target. Some historians point to the occurrence of pogroms in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. From 1189 to 1190, pogroms occurred in London, York, and other cities and towns in England. These deadly attacks rank as some of the worst atrocities committed against European Jews at that time in history. Other attacks followed in different European countries over the centuries. During the Crusades, members of such “war excursions” towards the Holy Land took advantage of the course of long journeys to inflict martyrdom on Jews they happened to encounter on their path.
One of the most accurate records of pogroms is the one that occurred in Odessa, in the Crimea, in 1821. But, unlike all the others, carried out in Tsarist Russia, Poland and Bessarabia, as we will see later, the one in Odessa did not have the Russians as executioners. Another reliable record points to the existence of pogroms in shtetls (inhabited villages with a majority of Jews) spread across the Russian Empire. These carnages became more common and violent from March 20, 1881, two days after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. The monarch was the victim of an attack carried out by young anarchists, at the behest of a woman involved in problems with the emperor's police. Although this had been evidenced, the crime was attributed to a Jewish plot and bloodbaths ensued, some lasting three days.
The outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution led to a new series of pogroms. It is estimated that in the civil war fought from 1918 to 1920, at least 30 Jews were killed in pogroms throughout the former Russian Empire. Studies reveal that a large number of pogroms were carried out by Ukrainian nationalists accompanied by bands of hooligans (vandals). The conflicts and killings extended to Poland, where the authorities turned a blind eye to what was happening to the Jews.
The bloody violence committed in those years was inescapable for the Jews and came from two directions. On one side was the Red Army, an ally of the communist revolutionaries. True to deep-rooted Russian anti-Semitism, the Red Army attacked Jewish villages between battles against the other side, the White Army. This was made up of counter-revolutionaries loyal to the Tsar's regime, which always had a deeply anti-Semitic bias. Both had their own reasons for carrying out pogroms. The Reds acted according to tradition and some of their commanders were unhappy with the large presence of Jews in their ranks and resented the powerful leadership exercised by the Jew Leon Bronstein, known as Trotsky. Whites, in turn, attributed the rise of communism to Jewish influence, pointing to Trotsky as an example.
DEADLY FRAUD
The Russian monarchy had kinship links with royal houses in central Europe and England. The pogroms carried out in their territorial domains meant that Tsar Nicholas II and the Russian aristocracy were seen as undesirable human beings for encouraging or accepting the consummation of barbarism.
It was necessary, therefore, to develop some expedient that would justify and even validate the successive killings of Jews. The emperor's secret service was responsible for producing a fraudulent and slanderous leaflet entitled Os Protocols of the Sages of Selfwill. The publication, falsely considered an authentic document, was ingenious and referred to a series of meetings that would have been held in Basel, Switzerland. The date and place were carefully chosen: August 1897, to coincide with the First World Zionist Congress, in that city. According to its content, Jews and Freemasons there drew up plans to erode Christian civilization and, consequently, dominate the world. Its destructive ideological foundations were liberalism and socialism.
A concise version of Os Protocols it was printed in Russia in 1903 and given to a daily newspaper which published a summary of the libel. Two years later, the initial edition had an even more scathing addendum by an official of the tsar. Os Protocols They were immediately translated into German, French, English and, over the years, there were translations into other languages around the world, reaching a longevity that few classics of universal literature have achieved to date. Along with longevity, the way in which Os Protocols They were accepted as true and disseminated without question in the 20th century and continue to do so until the current century. Furthermore, in addition to having given ideological “support” to massacres of Jews, his false narrative gained substance as one of the pillars of anti-Semitism.
In 1920, Jewish British journalist and diplomat Lucien Wolf exposed Os Protocols like fraudulent plagiarism in a book with unanswerable arguments. In the same year, in the United States, the newspaper Dearborn Independent, belonging to Henry Ford, published a long article entitled The International Jew, Americanized version of Os Protocols. This text was sent to more than a dozen languages and subsequently gave rise to a book with the same title. The following year, Irish journalist Phillip Graves reported Os Protocols as plagiarism of a 19th century French author in a series of newspaper articles The Times, from London. Soon afterwards, the newspaper reporter New York Herald, Herman Bernstein, published The Story of a Lie: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the first revelation to the American public of the Tsarist publication as a blatant fraud.
Still in the 1920s, Os Protocols they were cited in texts signed by Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler. The first noted that he considered the publication a falsehood, but that he believed in its “intrinsic truth”. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, Os Protocols they merited 23 editions that year alone. In 1938, the publication served as justification for the massacres, looting, arson and depredations carried out during the “Night of Broken Glass”.
There is a reference to Os Protocols dated 1988 with the endorsement of Hamas: “The Zionist plan is unlimited. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates and when they have dominated the conquered region, they will intend to expand further. Their plan is exposed in Os Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and your present conduct is the best proof of what we assert.” In 2003, a television miniseries with 30 chapters, called Al Shatat (The Diaspora) was air in Al-Manar TV, from Hezbollah, in Lebanon. The series depicts a “global Jewish government,” as described in Os Protocols. In 2005, an edition of Os Protocols published in Mexico City reached the height of absurdity, suggesting that the Holocaust had already been plotted by the Elders of Zion in exchange for a country for the Jews.
TRAGEDIES IN ODESSA
Among the thousands of cities and villages in which Jews lived in the European Diaspora, none had such a unique history as Odessa, in Crimea, illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
In that effervescent Jewish, Ukrainian hub, some of the greatest intellectual exponents of the People of Israel flourished. In the 19th century, the Jews of Odessa endured terrible days due to the pogroms they suffered. The existence of two large ports in the city was essential for its cosmopolitan profile. The modernization of Odessa attracted a large number of Jews, to the point that the city was considered the most Jewish of the cities in the Russian Empire, totaling 40 thousand souls, which corresponded to 30% of its total.
Pogroms in Odessa occurred in 1821, 1859, 1871, 1881, and 1905. The 1821 massacre, perpetrated by Greek immigrants rather than Russians, is cited in some sources as the first documented pogrom of the modern period in Russia. In Odessa, Greeks and Jews were two rival ethnic and economic communities, but lived side by side, as peacefully as possible. That pogrom was attributed to the outbreak of the Greek War for Independence, during which Jews were accused of sympathizing with the Ottoman authorities who dominated the region of present-day Greece. In addition to accusing the Jews of having contaminated the city's drinking water with poison, the most terrible accusation was accusing the Jews of hidden assistance to the Turks in the murder of the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory V.
The first pogrom carried out by the Russians occurred in 1859. In reality, it was not just a Russian pogrom because it involved the participation of Greek sailors from ships anchored in local ports. The pogrom occurred on Christian Easter and the local press, hostile to the Jews, minimized the scenes of violence as much as possible.
Other pogroms occurred in 1871, 1881 and 1886. Historians note as pretexts for the killings economic rivalries with the Greeks and religious frictions with the Russians. But the fact is that all those terrible events took on similar forms to others that occurred in the vast Russian Empire.
The 1905 pogrom was the worst in Odessa's history. Between October 18 and 22, Russians, Ukrainians and Greeks killed more than 400 Jews and damaged or destroyed 1.600 Jewish properties. The Russians justified the attacks as a reprisal for the fact that the Jews had supported Japan in that year's Russo-Japanese War, which ended with the shameful defeat of the Tsar's army. It was an unacceptable justification because even if the Jews had supported Japan, they would never have been naive enough to express their position.
THE MARTYRED CITY
The city of Chisinau, with 550 thousand inhabitants, is the capital of Moldova, the poorest country in Europe. Moldova is the former Bessarabia, located between Romania and Ukraine, which came to be dominated by Romania at the end of the 1st. World War. While it belonged to the Russian Empire, the city was named Kishinev.
This name was inscribed in the history of pogroms, not so much because of the number of victims, but because Kishinev was twice the scene, within a short interval, of horrible scenes of brutality. For this reason, the killings carried out there achieved unusual international repercussions and impacted the Jewish world. These two pogroms took place in 1903 and 1905 and each of these dates contains a particular circumstance.
The year 1903 marked six years since the conclusion of the First World Zionist Congress in Switzerland. Although Zionism was then an incipient presence in the lives of Jews throughout Europe, the vaunted claim to create a Jewish homeland led to belief in the possibility of a future more worthy of being lived. This impression was annihilated by the pogrom of April 7th. The Jews of Kishinev were accused of having murdered a Christian boy, an accusation that would serve as a pretext for other pogroms. Ritual murder was a medieval slander that survives into this century. The pogrom of April 20, 1905 went further. Jews were falsely accused of killing not one, but two Christian children to use their blood in rituals.
That year, the growing number of followers of Zionism were still mourning the death of Theodor Herzl, just 44 years old, in July of the previous year, in Vienna. Added to this context, the Kishinev massacre boosted the Zionist movement in such a way that the movement would perhaps still take a good couple of years to expand. Herzl's book, The Jewish State, released ten years earlier, began to multiply with successive editions in Russian, Polish, Yiddish and German, the languages spoken by Jews in central Europe and the tsar's empire. The Kishinev pogroms motivated the young intellectual Ber Borochov (1881-1917), born in Ukraine, to formulate his Zionist-socialist ideas and to found the party Poalei Sion (Workers of Zion) who was preponderant in the Jewish emancipation movement until the creation of Israel, 31 years after Borochov's death.
The earliest documentation of Jewish presence in the Bessarabia region dates from the early 18th century, when Kishinev was home to just 540 Jews. In 1838, a Jewish school with a secular curriculum was opened there. Twenty years later, the Jewish educational system included two more schools.
By the turn of the century, the number of schools had reached 16, highlighting the Jewish priority for education. Kishinev was a vibrant, multi-ethnic city where Jews lived with Russians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Poles, Germans, Armenians, Greeks and Gypsies. During the 19th century, the Jewish population went from a small percentage to almost half of the city's inhabitants. In 1903, there were around 50 thousand Jews, corresponding to 46% of the total inhabitants. However, many Jews lived in poverty, causing the community to establish a social assistance system with significant humanitarian scope.
The first pogrom was preceded by a series of anti-Semitic articles in the local newspaper Bessarabets, in which Jews were accused of a long variety of crimes. Because of the rumor about the dead minor, a mob attacked the Jews, killing 49 people, maiming 586, destroying 1.350 houses and 588 stores. Local authorities and Russian police did not stop the carnage. The horrors of the massacre sparked protests in Europe and the United States.
The poem In the city of massacre, written in Hebrew by the great poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, moved the Jewish masses with its stupefying vigor, as one of its verses reads:
Take your soul, tear it into many pieces.
In helpless rage, his heart deforms.
His tear runs over barren dilapidated stones.
And send your bitter cry into the storm.
The 1905 pogrom lasted two days and was inflicted during two turbulent moments in imperial Russia: the revolt led by the battleship Potemkin and the disastrous war against Japan. For the Jewish world, its most intense consequences were the strengthening of the Zionist movement and the initiatives of pioneers who in 1909 would undertake the first aliya (emigration to Ottoman Palestine) and there they established the first kibbutz, called Degania Alef, on the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee, territory under Ottoman rule.
Non-Jewish Russian intellectuals, such as Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky, published condemnations of crimes against Jews. The Kishinev pogroms remain in the memory of humanity as a symbol of Jewish suffering in Tsarist Russia.
THE TIME FOR REVENGE
The following narrative appears in edition no. 77 of this magazine, twelve years ago. It is important to remember it, even concisely, in the historical context of the pogroms.
It was two-fifteen on a sunny spring afternoon in Paris. That day, May 25, 1926, two men passed each other on the corner of Racine and Saint-Michel boulevards. One of them approached the other and asked: “Are you Symon Petliura?” – “I am”, replied the other. Immediately, the first hit him with five shots from a revolver. Caught in the act, the shooter said his name was Samuel (Shmuel) Schwarzbard and that he had just avenged the deaths of thousands of Jews, victims of pogroms in Ukraine. Until the day he assassinated Symon Petliura, a Ukrainian leader held responsible for successive pogroms, Schwarzbard had a stormy existence. Shmuel was born in Bessarabia on August 18, 1886 and as a child, his family moved to the city of Balta, in southwestern Ukraine. In 1900, the population of Balta was at least 50% Jewish, where Shmuel's father had set up a tiny grocery store, while his son learned the trade of a watchmaker.
In 1909, at the age of 23, he joined a group that robbed a bank in Vienna. Arrested, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor. After serving four months of his sentence, he managed to escape and went to Budapest. There he robbed a restaurant. He was expelled from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, the following year, he settled in Paris, where he found work in a watch shop, but for a short time, because, due to his past, he was always in the sights of the police.
He decided to enlist in the Foreign Legion in 1914, at the beginning of the First World War. He was posted to an infantry regiment and had his baptism of fire in the victorious French battle of Carency. Two years later, during the war, he was seriously injured by a grenade explosion that damaged his lungs and left his left arm practically useless. He then received the prestigious Cross of War. After demobilization, in 1, he married Anna Render, a young Jewish woman from Odessa. That year, pogroms in Ukraine began to reach frightening proportions. From 1917 to 1917, 1921 Jewish communities were attacked following 530 pogroms.
At the end of 1919, he went with his wife to Odessa, still under the control of the anti-Bolsheviks, whom he thought he could confront. He escaped arrest because he was able to board a French ship as a decorated WWI veteran. In January of the following year, the couple were back in Paris, where Shmuel opened a watch repair shop. But, behind that peaceful man, an agitated political consciousness boiled. He founded the Union of Ukrainian Citizens in Paris, at the same time as he applied for French citizenship, which was granted to him in 1.
Shmuel knew of Petliura's presence in Paris and had done everything to find him, until he was successful. According to details published by the French press, the dialogue between the two men would have been as follows: – “Are you Symon Vasiliovitch Petliura?” - "Yes, I am". – “Then defend yourself, you thug!” Petliura raised his cane when he began to be shot, while Shmuel shouted: – “This is for the pogroms! This is for the massacres! This is for the victims!” When he was handcuffed by the police, he reacted calmly: “You can arrest me. I killed a murderer.”
The investigation of the case against Schwarzbard lasted one year and five months, during which French public opinion was divided, as had happened from 1894 onwards, during the clearly anti-Semitic trials of Captain Dreyfus. The newspaper Paix et Droit argued that to the extent that the Jewish community supported Schwarzbard, it became complicit in the murder. At the same time, a Yiddish newspaper highlighted the similarity between Dreyfus's trials and Shmuel's. A large part of the French press remained neutral and the subject was used for dozens of reports that once again reported with greater emphasis on the pogroms that occurred in Ukraine, a circumstance that favored Schwarzbard. Even so, publications like L'Intrasigeant, L'Action Fraçaise e Le Figaro they did not hide an anti-Semitic bias in their editorials.
The matter gained greater dimension when Shmuel's legal defense was taken over by the Jew Henri Torrès, a left-wing activist, then considered the greatest lawyer in the country. Torrès' strategy consisted of calling more than 80 witnesses and obtaining statements favorable to the accused from personalities such as Albert Einstein, the writer Joseph Kessel, Leon Blum (who from 1936 onwards would be Prime Minister of France three times) and Édouard Herriot (who was also Prime Minister), Henri Bergson, Romain Rolland and Alexander Kerensky. From a legal point of view, he made an impressive survey of the pogroms, in order to move the jurors and place Schwarzbard more in the position of accuser than defendant.
Shmuel Schwarzbard's trial began on October 18, 1927 and lasted eight days. In the opening argument, Torrès said that Shmuel's crime was not a crime, it was a fair act of revenge for the thousands of Jewish victims of pogroms in Ukraine. The prosecution, headed by the competent Cesare Campinchi, argued that Petliura had never had any responsibility for the pogroms and that the accused had acted as a paid agent of the Soviet Union. The defendant was accused of violating articles 295, 296, 297, 298 and 302 of the French Penal Code, that is, premeditated murder subject to the death penalty.
Shmuel did not behave like a frightened defendant. On the contrary. He raised his voice and declared with a hint of pride: “For months I walked the streets of Paris with a photograph of Petliura in my pocket. I imagined he was in the vicinity of the Latin Quarter”. The judge asked: “Do you mean to say that the crime was premeditated?” Shmuel replied exultantly: “Yes, it was!”
Of the 80 witnesses listed, Torrès called only seven. The most striking testimony was that of a young Jewish woman named Haia Grinberg who had worked as a Red Cross nurse and whose grandparents had been victims of the massacres.
Then, Torrès, using his magnificent histrionic gifts, took the floor: “Members of the jury, grant freedom to this man who bears the stigma of his people's tragedy on his forehead. Today you hold in your hands the destinies of thousands of human beings who will be linked to the verdict that France will pronounce here. I urge you to perform a true act of civility by pronouncing absolution. I do not ask them for forgiveness driven by emotion. If this man is deprived of his freedom, France will no longer be France and Paris will no longer be Paris!” The jury retired to deliberate and returned just 35 minutes later.
Shmuel Schwarzbard was acquitted. But pogroms will never be absolved by the civilized world.