The Russian Pogroms
In the third month of the year five thousand six hundred and forty-one, the Tsar Alexander the Second was killed in his carriage on the bank of the Catherine Canal in Petersburg, and the bomb that took him took also…
Biblical Narrative
In the third month of the year five thousand six hundred and forty-one, the Tsar Alexander the Second was killed in his carriage on the bank of the Catherine Canal in Petersburg, and the bomb that took him took also the long peace that the Jews of Russia had known under his rule. A daughter of Russian gentry, Hesya Helfman, had stood among the conspirators of the Narodnaya Volya, and so the rumor spread by word and by ink that the Jews had killed the Tsar — and from Yelisavetgrad in the south, in the spring of that year, the storm broke loose.
It came in waves, like a sickness that does not pass. They burned the houses. They smashed the shopfronts and tore the goods into the mud of the streets. They beat the men, raped the women, broke the beards of the rabbis. The Russian peasants and the Cossacks and the soldiers came together, and the police stood aside. The cry rose from town to town: bey zhidov, beat the Jews. Two hundred and fifty pogroms in 1881 alone, and after them the May Laws of the new Tsar Alexander the Third, which closed villages to Jews, closed schools to Jews, narrowed the Pale of Settlement until it choked.
And then in the second month of the year five thousand six hundred and sixty-three came Kishinev. Forty-nine Jews murdered, ninety-two seriously wounded, hundreds of women violated, fifteen hundred houses destroyed. Hayim Nahman Bialik, sent by the Jewish Historical Commission to gather testimonies, descended into the cellars where the corpses still lay and emerged and wrote: in the City of Slaughter, where the Lord summoned the spring and the slaughter together — a poem so terrible that it broke the back of the old Jewish patience. The flag of self-defense was raised. The flag of departure was raised. The flag of Zion was raised.
Two million Jews left Russia between 1881 and the First World War. Most went to America, and built the great Yiddish world of New York and Chicago. Tens of thousands went to Palestine and made the First Aliyah and the Second. A few stayed and learned to fight back: in Odessa, in Gomel, in Bialystok, the youth organized self-defense leagues with revolvers smuggled from Vienna. The pogroms did not break the Jewish people. They scattered it, hardened it, modernized it — and made the question of a Jewish home no longer a dream of poets but a calculation of survival.
Arise and go now to the city of slaughter; into its courtyard wind thy way. There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head behold the cloven of head, the slit of throat.Hayim Nahman Bialik, In the City of Slaughter, 1904
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The Russian pogrom wave of 1881–1906 unfolded in three principal phases, analyzed in I. Michael Aronson's Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburgh, 1990) and John Klier's Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (Cambridge, 2011). The first wave (April 1881 – July 1882) followed the assassination of Alexander II on 13 March 1881 and saw approximately 250 pogroms, concentrated in the southern Pale (Yelisavetgrad, Kiev, Odessa, Warsaw). Klier's archival research demolished the older theory of central government orchestration, showing instead a complex interaction of local economic resentment, peasant rumor, and inadequate Tsarist policing.
The Tsarist legal response was the so-called May Laws (Temporary Regulations of 3 May 1882), drafted by Interior Minister Nikolai Ignatiev. The laws barred new Jewish settlement in rural villages within the Pale of Settlement, prohibited Jews from purchasing rural property, and forbade Jewish business on Christian holy days. Educational quotas (numerus clausus) followed in 1887: Jews were limited to 10 percent of student places in Pale-region high schools and universities, 5 percent outside the Pale, and 3 percent in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Simon Dubnow's History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (vol. 3, 1920) remains the comprehensive contemporary chronicle.
The second great wave centered on the Kishinev pogrom of 6–8 April 1903 (19–21 April N.S.), during Easter and the last day of Passover. The local Bessarabets newspaper, edited by Pavolaki Krushevan, had spent months publishing blood-libel accusations regarding the death of a Christian boy, Mikhail Rybachenko, in nearby Dubossary. The official toll was 49 dead, 92 seriously wounded, 1,500 houses and shops looted; the Jewish Historical Commission's investigation, led by Bialik, gathered testimonies later published as Edah u-mi-Edah (1903). The pogrom provoked unprecedented international condemnation, including a petition signed by 12,500 Americans and presented at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt.
The third wave (October 1905) accompanied the constitutional revolution: roughly 690 pogroms in two weeks, with 800 to 3,000 Jewish dead, in many cases organized by the proto-fascist Black Hundreds and tolerated or facilitated by local police. Henry Abramson's Prayer for the Government (Harvard, 1999) covers the Ukrainian phase. The 1903–1906 pogroms drove the second great migration wave: between 1903 and 1914 over 1.5 million Jews left the Russian Empire, founding the demographic core of American Jewry, and seeding the Second Aliyah of 1904–1914 to Ottoman Palestine — the wave that included Ben-Gurion, Ben-Zvi and Berl Katznelson.
The pogroms did not create the Jewish question; they revealed that no answer to it could be given within the political framework of late imperial Russia.John Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (2011)