Russ Roberts: We have two topics for today. The first, we’re going to take an historical look at European Jew-hatred, antisemitism, and the second is the current situation here in Israel as the war in Gaza enters its sixth week. And we’ll see some of the ties between those two events.
Now, the first part of the conversation is based on a column we’ll link to, you did back in April of this year, long before the war. And, it stuck with me. I thought about asking you to do an interview on it even before the war. That piece was called “The forgotten horrors that hide in the Holocaust’s long, dark shadow.”
And you begin by saying the Holocaust is thought of as this terrible, unique catastrophe for the Jews. And of course, that’s true in some sense. But the genocidal uniqueness is a bit misleading. You write, quote:
Haviv Rettig Gur: It’s a good question. There is a European Jewish experience of the 20th century; we’ll call it the long 20th century from roughly 1881.
In 1881, a anarchist group, activist group assassinates the Czar of Russia. They had tried multiple times; they finally succeed. This is Czar Alexander I, a profoundly reformist czar, a czar who had in the 1860s abolished serfdom and a czar who apparently on the morning of his assassination–he was assassinated in the afternoon–on the morning of, he gave the order to draw up some kind of a constitutional document ahead of the establishment of a serious parliament for the Russian Empire. He was a reformist who looked at Western Europe and said, ‘I want Russia to be brought into the modern age.’ But, for these anarchists that wasn’t enough. They viewed these reforms as a way to preserve–with, I think, some justification, a way to preserve the prevailing social classes rather than abolish them and bring equality. And, they killed him. They managed to kill him. It was a clumsy thing, but it was ultimately successful.
Czar Alexander I was replaced by his son, Alexander II. Now, his son was a very different kind of man, a very conservative one, educated on Russian Orthodox religious teachings, uninterested in the reforms–in fact, blamed the reformist impulses of his father for his father’s ultimate death–and began a massive crackdown on everything that he came to view as enemies of the Russian Empire, reversed most of his father’s reforms. He didn’t reinstitute serfdom, but he did reverse many of his father’s reforms.
Part of that was passing, a year later into his reign, of the May Laws. The May Laws were antisemitic laws passed by the czarist regime. It’s a very short–I think on Wikipedia, people can find the 10 sentences or so that make up the May Laws–but essentially it further limited the already very strict limitations on where Jews can live and what employment they could pursue, and education, and essentially narrowed Jewish life.
But, another thing happened in the wake of the assassination of the Czar, and it was something that the Russian Empire didn’t expect and didn’t want. And it had a lot to do with industrialization, and it had a lot to do, especially with railroads and electrification of the empire. And, it mostly occurred in southern Russia–the Southern Russian Empire–and basically what is today Ukraine, cities like Odessa, and that was the beginning of mass popular pogroms. Started bottom-up where Jews and non-Jews lived together; and pogromists would march down the streets of cities in what would today be, I guess, Western Ukraine and attack Jewish homes, catch Jews in the streets, sometimes kill, often beat–really in 1881. And very, very quickly pogroms spread from one city to the next. And, there are these fascinating sociological studies of these early pogroms that they really did follow the rail network, and they were often spread by rail workers.
And so there was–it was an antisemitism that was, in some sense, driven by a lot of the industrializing changes that were happening to Russian society–the Russian Imperial society at the time–which included urbanization and the weakening economically of the peasant class that–you know, serfdom was abolished, but not everybody benefited from it in the same way.
There are all these complex and fascinating historical reasons for this sudden outburst, bottom-up of waves of pogroms that essentially would last at least 40 years. Over the next 40 years they would get steadily worse.
Some of these pogroms became very, very famous: the pogrom in 1903 in Kishinev.Every Jew knows the name Kishinev. Now they don’t know the name Kishinev because they’re familiar with, you know, modestly-sized towns in Moldova. They know the name Kishinev because in 1903, there was this pogrom, roughly 50 people were killed. Jews were killed in this pogrom. But, what caught the Jewish imagination and turned Kishinev into a rallying cry throughout the Jewish world, wasn’t the 50 dead. It was how they died. It was the cruelty of the pogromists. It was the way that women were captured and raped in front of their husbands and fathers and brothers. It was the humiliation, the dehumanization, the emasculation of Jewish men. Hebrew poets like Hayim Nahman Bialik famously wrote about these men who carry the burden of that moment when they were forced to watch the rape and then murder, often, of their loved ones.
And so you had, in Kielce [Poland] and many other places, you had all throughout the Russian Empire, decade after decade, these bottom-up pogroms in many places.
Now, the Jews believed, because it came with the May Laws, because it came with this crackdown and reactionary political impulse of the new Czar, the Jews believed that this was a regime act: in other words that the regime instigated it. But, historians generally agree that that Jewish belief at the time is probably a mistake–a misunderstanding of the internal mechanisms of Russian politics and society around them. And that actually something much worse was happening, which is that it was genuine and authentic and popular and bottom-up. The people around them, around whom they had lived, really wanted them gone and really wanted them tortured and dehumanized until they understood the point.
And, in many places, the Czarist police actually saw the pogroms as a threat to public order and ultimately a threat to Imperial rule.
And so, there were attempts to crack down on these; and they were largely unsuccessful by the regime. In some places like Kishinev, for example, the global outcry, the Jewish outcry, which in places like the United States or Britain where you had influential Jews, that translated also into governmental outcry against Russia.
This caused the Russian Empire real diplomatic damage. And, Kishinev inspired the writing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by supporters of the regime–of the Russian Imperial regime–who couldn’t understand why the world cared that Jews had died.
And so they saw this diplomatic blowback, and that really made them start to think in–or they’d already thought in conspiratorial terms of the Jews–but it made them want to explain it and create an anti-Jewish politics that was more explicit. Also to validate the pogroms themselves and to really create an intellectual–right?–level of this.