CHAPTER 13

Perils of Emancipation: Protestants and Jews in the Revolutionary Whirlwind

ALTHOUGH in the long run revolutionary situations benefit oppressed and persecuted religious minorities, in the short run they put them in peril. In 1789 the Protestants and in 1791 the Jews of France gained full emancipation; in 1917 the Jews of Russia. Each time, however, there was a price to be paid. In terms of lives, the cost of religious liberation was, of course, infinitely greater during the Russian than the French Revolution. But while adverse reactions against emancipation were very different in scale, their causes and dynamics were uncommonly alike. During both revolutions, antirevolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries were the chief instigators and carriers of religious intolerance. Following the emancipation of 1789, anti-Protestantism played a considerable role in the resistance to the nascent nouveau régime in southeastern France, particularly in the lower Languedoc. Following the emancipation of 1917, anti-Semitism played a similar role in southwestern Russia, mainly in Ukraine.

The theorists and public intellectuals of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were sensitive to the disabilities affecting, respectively, French Protestants and Russian Jews. For many of them, prejudice and religious discrimination against minorities were emblematic of the old order’s iniquity, and Protestants and Jews its preeminent victims. The battle against religious intolerance was a vital part of the battle against autocracy and obscurantism. In the same manner that the Calas affair of 1762–65 enraged French Voltaireans, the Beilis affair of 1911–13 incensed their Russian descendants: in the one trial a Protestant was condemned for allegedly murdering his son to prevent his conversion to the Catholic faith; in the other a Jew was charged with the ritual killing of a Christian child. Both before and after the fall of the Bastille, French Voltaireans pointed to the Wars of Religion and the Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre as characteristic of the immutable villainy of the ancien régime. By the same token, before as well as following the fall of the Peter and Paul Fortress, Russian reformers and revolutionaries, in addition to recalling the persecutions of the Jews in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stressed that the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1881–82 and 1903–6 as well as the anti-Semitic agitation of the Black Hundreds revealed the intrinsic infamy of tsarism. Needless to say, in the one case the responsibility of the Catholic Church was underscored, in the other that of the Orthodox Church, the throne and altar being inseparable in both instances. But to écraser l’infâme was to denounce less church and religion than intolerance, superstition, and fanaticism.

Departments of Strongest Protestant Concentration, End of 18th Century

The Pale of Settlement, End of 19th Century

Protestants and Jews were the perfect scapegoats on whom to discharge a broad range of anxieties and resentments activated or intensified by the revolutionary turbulence. In particular, the last-ditchers of the old order portrayed these most prominent and vulnerable out-groups as incarnating a treacherous plot to desacralize, modernize, and level civil and political society. Of course, in absolute numbers, Protestants and Jews were small minorities. But their heavy geographic concentration in southeastern France and southwestern Russia made them prominent in these regions and led to their being turned into victims through whom to strike at much larger targets. Especially once they aligned themselves with the architects of a new undivided sovereignty, the dominant classes and masses of the Languedoc and Ukraine combined their age-old anti-Protestantism and anti-Judaism with their deep-rooted hostility to invasive tax collectors and magistrates, which they now directed at the agents of the centralizing revolutionary state. As may be expected, conditions of decomposing sovereignty simultaneously favored the freeing of religious or ethnic minorities from bondage and the reawakening and incitement of chronic inter-religious or inter-ethnic animosities.

The conspiratorial logic was central to this dialectic, but of particular import to the anti- or counterrevolutionary side. There are several prerequisites for a stereotypical fantasy or myth about the boundless and wily power of a designated enemy to take hold. Not the least of these is a thoroughly ingrained belief in the importance of conspiracy as a decisive agency of history. In this mind-set a select but half-hidden and alien few can manipulate the many who are presumed supremely ignorant and gullible. For the conspirators of evil to be credible, they must lend themselves to being portrayed as constituting a distant and sinister cabal bent on seeking control of both civil and political society. If this anti-minority strategy is to be effective, the “object” that is to serve as the focus of hostility or enmity cannot be inconsequential or trivial. Indeed, to serve as designated scapegoat, the targeted minority must be endowed with a historically well-established mythos and persona suitable for rigid stereotypical representation and projection. It must be “tangible, yet not too tangible, [and] it must have a sufficient historical backing and appear as an indisputable element of tradition,” susceptible to a “minimum of reality testing.”1

In France in 1789 and Russia in 1917, conditions ripened for the insidious myth to take hold that, respectively, Protestants and Jews were at the core of the diabolic conspiracy responsible for the overthrow of the time-honored monarchy and church. This mutation of the traditional conspiratorial demonology was under way during the prerevolutions, which were fraught with aristocratic reaction, well before the fall of the Bastille and the Peter and Paul Fortress. In France, anti-Enlightenment Catholic clerics and public intellectuals had started to assign the Protestants a growing if not decisive place in a deep-laid conspiracy sworn to undermine the established moral, cultural, religious, and intellectual order.² In this plot they were said to be leagued with sects of Jansenists, philosophes, and Freemasons. Similarly, in Russia, Jews were increasingly vilified and denounced for their allegedly pivotal role in a plot to corrupt and sap the foundations of the tsarist regime, as string-pullers of the liberal-democratic and Socialist movements.³ In both cases, the scapegoated minority was charged with having a religiously informed basis for its rebellion against the existing authority principle and social system.

Both anti-Protestantism and anti-Judaism were fueled by the religiously sanctified nativism and hostility to modernity rampant in predominantly traditional and peasant societies. The religious dimension was, in fact, all-important, since the reactivation of the conspiratorial predisposition in all strata of society was contingent on a reinflammation of latent popular anti-Protestantism and anti-Judaism. It stands to reason that the conservative and reactionary action-intellectuals, politicians, and priests who proposed to instrumentalize distrust and fear of Protestants and Jews knew that in France and Russia particular audiences were prepared to respond to their demonizing and paranoid predications. With societal values and political institutions breaking down, the encounter of upper-tier orchestrators of collective fears of outsiders and their lower-tier and anxiety-driven followers was bound to be explosive. In such moments panic-stricken local and national notables keyed their cries in defense of the established order so as to engage or reinforce the pressing concerns and forebodings of political and civil society’s subalterns. This Faustian convergence placed Protestants and Jews at the center of conspiratorial anxieties and hatreds in 1789 and 1917, respectively.4

In 1789 Protestants counted between 600,000 and 700,000 souls, or less than 3 percent of the French population.⁵ About one-third of them were Lutherans settled in Alsace, but the rest were Calvinists anchored in the Huguenot tradition, and almost half of these were concentrated in the Languedoc, the cultural center of French Protestantism. This was a region saturated with collective memories of fiery revolts and bloody repressions. Protestants occupied a disproportionately large place in the economic elite of the cities, where they all but controlled commerce and manufacture. But the overwhelming majority of them were, like the French working population as a whole, peasants and artisans, albeit with a distinctly higher literacy rate than among their Catholic neighbors.

During the 1770s and 1780s the leaders of French Protestantism were negotiating with the royal authorities to lift disabilities deriving from Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. These efforts culminated in the Edict of Toleration of November 1787, drafted by Lamoignon de Malesherbes with the advice of Marquis de Lafayette, Baron Breteuil, and Jean Paul Rabaut Saint-Etienne, a politically engaged pastor from Nîmes. Although the edict reaffirmed the state’s unalterable tie to the Catholic Church and its continuing support for the promulgation of the Catholic faith “by instruction and persuasion,” it granted Protestants certain civil rights, including the right to record births, marriages, and deaths in special civic registers, as well as to bequeath and inherit property.

Despite these gains, the Protestants remained second-class citizens. They were still enjoined from worshipping in public, and continued to be barred from positions in the state bureaucracy, judiciary, and university, as well as in municipal government.6 While many Protestants were disappointed that the Edict of 1787 fell short of granting them full religious freedom and citizenship, they were not about to press for additional concessions, all the less so because they realized that they faced dogged opposition. Few of the cahiers (grievance lists) of the Third Estate took heed of the “Protestant question,” and almost none called for further liberalization: those that did call for comprehensive religious liberty originated in districts with large Protestant populations. But the Third Estate’s disinterest in the venom of intolerance was made up for by the First Estate’s counteractive sectarian zeal. Nearly “three-fifths of the clerical cahiers of 1789 … specifically request[ed] that the Edict of 1787 be revoked or, at least, that Catholicism be the sole religion practiced in public.”⁷ The Second Estate, though less strident, was equally hostile to full religious emancipation. Immediately in the wake of the first tremors of 1789, several members of the first two estates and of the ultraconservative press began to denounce Protestants for conspiring with Jansenists, philosophes, and Freemasons to subvert, nay overthrow Catholicism, the Church, and the monarchy. In fact, they anticipated Pope Pius VI’s pronouncements of 1790 which excoriated the Reformation for being the Revolution’s fountainhead and Calvinism its evil genius.⁸

Whatever their ideological differences, Protestants and philosophes were agreed on the importance of religious toleration as a test and warrant of progressive reform. There is good reason to believe that “the ideologies of 1789 were a perfect expression of Protestant aspirations … : free inquiry, freedom of conscience, political liberty, civil liberty, respect for the individual and of his rights.”⁹ Not surprisingly, therefore, from the very outset most Protestants enthusiastically supported the assault on royal absolutism, all the more so since the Edict of 1787 had at once raised and disappointed their expectations. Characteristically, Rabaut Saint-Etienne proclaimed that religious dissidents demanded “not tolerance but liberty.”¹⁰ And by December 24, 1789, as if to fulfill and seal a tacit covenant, the National Assembly adopted a decree granting Protestants full freedom of worship and admitting them to all elective and appointive public offices as well as to all professions.

In the meantime, throughout southeastern France, progressive politicians of Protestant faith or origin began to cut a figure in local electoral meetings, notably in Montauban, Montpellier, Nîmes, and Uzès. Some of them were among those chosen to represent this region in the Estates-General, about to become the Constituent Assembly. Fifteen Protestants sat in that body and the ensuing Legislative Assembly, and double that number were elected to the National Convention. Of course, they were a mere handful in assemblies of over six hundred members; few of them were stellar figures; and on critical issues they fell out among themselves. Still, Rabaut Saint-Etienne was elected to preside over the Constituent Assembly; Antoine Pierre Barnave (Grenoble) of the feuillant triumvirate was a Protestant; and so was Pierre Joseph Cambon (Hérault). All three “had what Sainte-Beuve called the Girondin temperament” by virtue of “their optimism and enthusiasm for liberty,”11 for which Rabaut Saint-Etienne and Barnave paid with their heads during the Great Terror.

But not all politicians of Protestant origin were moderates. Although Marat was not Protestant, his most intemperate detractors seized upon his father’s allegedly furtive conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism to blacken him as such. But there certainly were some genuine Protestants who were hard-liners: Thomas-Augustin de Gasparin (Bouches-du-Rhône) and (Pastor) Jean Bon Saint-André (Montauban) served on the Committee of Public Safety; (Pastor) Jean Julien de Toulouse (Haute Garonne), Jean-Henri Voulland (Gard), and Moïse Bayle (Bouches-du-Rhône) on the Committee of General Security.¹² Clearly, Protestant politicians were as divided as their non-Protestant peers in the fluid revolutionary camp. Characteristically, at the king’s trial, even though nearly all the Protestant members of the Convention found Louis XVI guilty and approved the death penalty, nine voted for a stay of execution, and twelve against. Nevertheless, there is no denying the political minimum on which all Protestants were agreed: to prevent the return of the ancien régime, which they feared would spell the revocation, once more, of their emancipation. Indeed, while the Protestants bade fair to be among the great beneficiaries of the Revolution, they were also in danger of becoming preeminent victims of its miscarriage or deformation.

In the southeast, events since 1787 had quickened the political activism not only of Protestant supporters of the Revolution, but also of its Catholic foes. From the onset in 1789 the two sides were “prepared for either course”: while leading Protestant activists seized the hour to turn it to their advantage, their Catholic counterparts were ready not just to contain them but, if possible, to press for the clock to be turned back.13

Locally, Protestants were in the vanguard of the challenge to the old regime.¹⁴ In several cities, including Montauban and Nîmes, their daring activism was reflected in their rush to join, not to say control, local National Guard units and municipal councils with a view to at once redress and avenge the great wrongs of the past. This new-found self-assurance and presumption could not help but lash die-hard Catholic royalists into fury. The region’s ancient and pervasive, even if abeyant, Protestant-Catholic hostility was about to resurge to become the essential catalyst for the eruption of communal violence and terror.

The sources of this eruption were complex. There were, to begin with, underlying social discontents. These were fed by built-in and contingent strains and stresses in the regional silk industry which increased the dependence of small operatives, artisans, and peasants on merchants and tradesmen, many or most of them Protestant. In turn, since large sectors of the majority Catholic population resented the perceived wealth and weight of Protestants in general and of the middlemen (including the moneylenders) among them in particular, their conspicuous bid for political power was all the more grating.

Militant counterrevolutionaries of the first hour did not hesitate to play on anti-Protestant biases and fears as they linked local with national developments. Within a few months after July 14, members of the landed and clerical orders of the lower Languedoc looked for ways to rally popular support in town and country for the ancien régime, including their extensive rights and privileges within it. They represented themselves as guardians, in particular, of the innocence and purity of the rural world against the baneful and cunning encroachment of the forces of modernity. To achieve their purpose, they did not shy away from “fomenting jealousies and … rivalries.”¹⁵ They fired deep-seated resentments, intensified by the fallout of economic recession, against moneyed wealth, the corrupting city, and the intruding state. In their portrayal, Protestants embodied all three of these evils, especially now that they took the lead in the upheaval which redounded, above all, to their own advantage. In the Languedoc zealots of Catholic royalism instinctively affirmed “that to grant the Protestants freedom of religion and admission to civil and military offices and honors was tantamount to committing an evil act,” with dire consequences for individual Catholics, the Church, and the State. Insisting that in earlier times “the Calvinist heresy had only ceased to be contagious once its public cult had been put under the ban and abolished,” they called for the revocation of the measures of both 1787 and 1789: to “reestablish the Edict of Nantes” was to court disaster, since the Protestants were still what “they have always been.” Should the doors be fully thrown open to them, “they will only think of despoiling” their hosts. Whereas Catholics “suffer” Protestants to be Protestants, the latter “will never pardon” Catholics for being Catholics. Indeed, the Protestants, who visited “horrible excesses upon your forefathers,” were “loathsome vipers” certain to “put you to death.”16 Revived and updated, the Protestant stereotype was given pride of place in the anti-revolution’s conspiratorial imagination.

For their part, the Protestants rushed forward to exploit the highly unstable conditions in the cities of the lower Languedoc to break into political society, from which they had been excluded through the ages and which was the key to their emancipation. They eagerly joined the forces of change which, should they prevail, would ensure the consolidation of the liberties proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Edict of Protestant Emancipation. Whereas militant Catholic royalists battled to maintain or restore the old political order as the essential bulwark of religion and church, militant Protestants fought to transform this order with a view to securing basic secular rights, including the unqualified freedom to worship.

Meanwhile, the growth of the religious friend-enemy dissociation in the capital left its mark on the Languedoc. By the end of 1789 the National Assembly had all but eliminated feudal privileges, adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, curtailed the authority of the king, placed ecclesiastical property “at the disposal of the nation,” and extended full religious and civil liberties to Protestants. Then, in the first half of 1790, came the proscription of monastic vows; Pius VI’s condemnation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man; the investiture of Rabaut Saint-Etienne as president of the National Assembly; and the defeat of Dom Gerle’s motion to make Catholicism the established state religion. All of this lashed the diehards into an aggressive furor trained upon the Protestants, charged with masterminding the Revolution for their sectarian cause. Nothing was easier than to project both the insurgence against king, church, and nobility in Paris and the “patriotic” breakthrough in the Languedoc as part of a vast conspiracy by Protestants to seize the political, social, and cultural reins, by means fair and foul. Local counterrevolutionaries stirred up long-standing distrust and loathing of the ever-intrusive central state by warning that its encroachments were all the more baneful now that they were being effected by Protestants.

The Protestants, for their part, became more and more convinced that their own fate hinged on the survival of the embryonic nouveau régime. Increasingly, they saw themselves as a “small herd trapped among Catholics, and marked for slaughter.”17 Unlike their enemy brothers, who sought to stir the embers of Catholic fanaticism with a view to reviving the internal crusades of old, Protestants rallied to a temporal cause which for them only gradually, in the face of intense and all too familiar hostility, assumed a quasi-religious character. But either way, both communities were being swept up in an atmosphere reminiscent of the wars of religion.¹⁸

Indeed, “the past survived in the memories which transmitted it, and the two groups came face to face: Protestants and Catholics were equally defiant, hostile, and prompt to claim to be on the defensive while perceiving the deterrent moves of their adversary as a plan of attack, making a clash inevitable.”¹⁹ As they confronted each other, ready to strike, “the two sides in Nîmes, Toulouse, and Montauban looked to Paris,” with each side putting its own construction on the radicalization in the capital.²⁰ The zealots of the one side pressed for smiting the Protestant Hydra before it would be too late; those of the other favored seizing the opportunity “to wreak the vengeance they had been waiting for since days of yore.”²¹

This, then, was the general context in which the first popularly based and religiously impregnated resistance to the Revolution exploded in the early summer of 1790. Unlike the antirevolutionary revolt in the Vendée three years later, this resistance broke forth in a region with a long history of conflict between Protestants and Catholics; it started from the top down, not from the bottom up; and it was centered in and around dynamic cities.

The spiraling imbroglio came to a head first in Montauban and then in Nîmes.22 Montauban was a city with a population of about 25,000, approximately 6,000 of them Protestants, who formed a separate but vibrant community. Protestant business- and moneymen well-nigh dominated the all-important manufacture and commerce of cloth of the city and its environs. Although economically powerful and relatively wealthy, they were shut out of the local political and cultural life, which was the preserve of the Catholic elite of land, church, and public office. Montauban’s workforce, which included the artisans and laborers of the textile sector and the clerks in numerous religious and government establishments, was of course heavily Catholic.

Nîmes had a similar profile, except that it had a proportionately larger and economically more powerful Protestant population. France’s tenth largest city, Nîmes counted between 40,000 and 50,000 inhabitants and was second only to Lyons in the production and distribution of silk textiles, which also bore upon the economic life of the surrounding countryside. Between one-quarter and one-third of the population was Protestant. As in Montauban, the Protestant community comprised an important group of relatively wealthy manufacturers and moneylenders in the textile sector who were ascendant in the region’s economy; the nonagricultural workforce of the region was mostly Catholic.

From the start, the Protestants of Montauban and Nîmes were in the forefront of the forces seeking to have their cities join in with the dramatic changes taking place in Paris. With the old elite firmly entrenched in the municipal councils and churches, the challengers rushed to join the hastily improvised and new-model popular assemblies, action committees, and, above all, national guards, with an eye to outflanking rather than storming the old power centers. Needless to say, the incumbent governors viewed this drive with a mixture of suspicion, fear, and hostility.

By the end of 1789 the Protestants of Montauban were vastly overrepresented in the militia and patriotic committees, in which they also all but held the reins. The National Assembly having decreed new municipal elections throughout France, the Protestants proposed to contest them locally, in league with the forces of change. Ironically, the enlarged franchise worked against the challengers. Montauban’s traditional notables were able to not only benefit from the customary deference of the Catholic lower orders but play on their anti-Protestantism, all the more so in these increasingly hard economic times. In addition, the clergy provided the old guard with an as yet unequalled agency for mobilizing voters. In any case, on February 1, 1790, the traditional notables of blood, land, and church easily and decisively won the elections: the municipal government remained a bastion of uncompromising Catholic conservatives, if not reactionaries, standing over against the Protestant controlled national guard of middle-class patriotic reformists, not to say revolutionaries. Hereafter, in Montauban, the former hastened to organize national guard units of their own while the latter, in addition to jealously guarding their military advantage, intensified their bid for a commensurate political say.

Here things stayed until, in the face of the National Assembly’s increasingly radical anti-ecclesiastical policies, which were imputed to Protestant cunning, the clergy of Montauban convoked a special meeting in the Church of the Cordeliers on April 23. This assembly exhorted the king and the National Assembly to recognize the Catholic religion on the lines of Dom Gerle’s resolution, to maintain the local religious orders and foundations, and to exempt Montauban from the mandatory inventory of church property. Similar meetings were held in other houses of worship, all of them with sharp anti-Protestant overtones. In fact, the vicars “fomented a crusading spirit in the churches” at the same time that they “galvanized their flock by urging them to make the forty-hour devotion for their imperiled religion.”23 While there is no denying that “the clergy displayed remarkable organizational skills,” it is perhaps going too far to claim, as Michelet does, that they also “excelled at inciting a civil war that by and large the population did not want.”²⁴

The bagarre of Montauban erupted on May 10, 1790, triggered by the start of the Paris-mandated inventory of the local religious establishments to be put “at the disposal of the nation.” Whether intentionally or not, the day which municipal officials chose to implement the National Assembly’s decree was the first of the three Rogation Days before Ascension, complete with processions intoning chants of solemn supplication. In any case, the official inventory takers had their access to convents blocked by women whose fury was primed by the ideological intoxication of the moment. Encouraged by this success, in the afternoon some of these same women, joined and encouraged by other popular Catholic elements, marched to the city hall, where Protestant national guardsmen were rumored to have assembled. Having surrounded the building and the eighty militiamen guarding it, the demonstrators called on the latter to disperse. When they stood their ground, the crowd, abetted by like-minded municipal officials, surged past them and stormed the building. Several Protestant guardsmen were killed or gravely wounded.

The timely arrival of patriotic military units prevented the situation going from bad to worse, but the incident was far from over. Although the Protestant guards were successfully evacuated, on their way to Montauban’s prison they were reviled and manhandled by the still-seething crowd. Apparently, none of the city fathers made any effort to interpose themselves. According to Michelet, the throng “ripped apart the national uniforms of the poor unfortunates, tore off their cockades, and trampled them under foot.” Still in physical danger, the guards were “stripped of all but their shirts and made to hold candles … as they advanced through bloodstained streets to the cathedral where they were forced to kneel, plead guilty, and make honorable amends.”25 Incidentally, Taine, sympathetic to the Catholic cause, also pictured the Protestant guardsmen as having been “forced to advance, two at a time, covered by a shirt, to the cathedral, to make honorable amends on their knees.”²⁶ In the words of Jean Bon Saint-André, “we apprehended this day of vengeance for over a hundred years.”²⁷

In the wake of this journée there was a massive exodus of frightened Protestants from Montauban. The discomfiture of the patriots, despite their hold on the local national guard and their tie to Paris, emboldened the enragés among the old elite. These turned against their own moderates who sought to pour oil on the troubled waters and protect the imprisoned guardsmen, who for all intents and purposes were being held hostage. At the same time, the diehards resolved to strengthen the military forces loyal to the municipal council.

It took external intervention to make the patriots feel secure and to align Montauban with Paris. The reformist municipal authorities of Bordeaux and Toulouse sent detachments of their national guards to the outskirts of Montauban with orders to press for the release and safety of all Protestant prisoners. At the same time, alarmed by the challenge to government authority and eager to discourage the elites of other cities, the National Assembly publicly guaranteed the safety of all non-Catholics in Montauban. To prove its resolve, it sent a special commissioner to the scene to act on its behalf as well as in the name of the king. Mathieu Dumas arrived at the end of the month. Lacking both military force and outside help, the defiant local authorities set free the prisoners and momentarily abandoned their revolt. In contrast to similar showdowns in other cities at a later stage of the Revolution, Montauban was extricated from the defiant grip of would-be counterrevolutionaries without avenging reprisals.

Compared to the bagarre of Montauban, the bagarre of Nîmes was much larger and more savage, but its underlying causes, driving forces, and stakes were essentially the same. Since it began a month later—on June 13, 1790—the conduct of politicized Catholics and Protestants in Nîmes most likely was influenced by their respective readings of the course of events in Montauban. Also specific to Nîmes was that well before 1789 ultraconservative Catholics and radical Protestants had clashed over the major issues of their day, including, of course, Protestant emancipation. As previously noted, local Protestants had ventured out of their “desert” under the leadership of their pastor Rabaut Saint-Etienne to press for the Edict of 1787. They had also considerably influenced the drafting of the cahiers and the elections to the Estates-General. Not too surprisingly, all six of Nîmes’s deputies to the National Assembly were Protestants. In reaction, a faction of Catholic intransigents began to pressure the established elite of land, office, and church to mount a vigorous defense of “the ancient and the honorable.” In sum, the vanguards of both camps were poised to press for a showdown.

In Nîmes, as in Montauban, within days of the fall of the Bastille Protestants rushed to form a national guard and join it. They provided the bulk of the rank and file of the légion nîmoise of over 1,300 men, and nearly all of its commissioned and noncommissioned officers. In the fall of 1789 the old elite reacted by raising several Catholic companies of its own. While the Calvinist “patriots” flaunted new national emblems, the Catholic royalists took pride in the white cockade. The former were heavily middle and lower middle class, the latter from distinctly more modest social and economic strata. To the extent that there was cooperation between the two forces, it was minimal and strained.

The decomposition of sovereignty took the form of confrontation between military force and political power, for over against the reformist Protestants national guard, there stood the old municipal authorities controlled by hard-line Catholics. Starting in January 1790 in Nîmes, as in Montauban, the polarizing friend-enemy struggle focalized on the municipal elections decreed by Paris. Needless to say, the old guard was desperate to maintain or even bolster its traditional political and social ascendancy, which bade fair to stand or fall with that of King and Church. One of their most visible and effective organizers was François Marie de Froment. A former treasurer of the diocese, he was a fervent Catholic royalist who had already gone to Turin to do homage to the Comte d’Artois. He worked closely with local churchmen, high and low, to weight the new electoral lists heavily against the Protestants. The Establishment scored a sweeping triumph, capturing thirteen of the seventeen seats on the town council. The new mayor, Jean-Antoine Teissier, baron de Marguerittes, was of the Catholic party as well, even if he was not one of its firebrands.

The Protestants were less outraged and frightened by their defeat than its unseemly proportions. Aware of the risk of not having sufficient political influence and power to legitimate the force of their militia, they created the Société des amis de la Constitution to face the new city administration. Presently well over 80 percent of the over 400 relatively well-to-do members of this purposely nonsectarian club were Protestants. More than ever insecure and in quest of a political base, especially in the wake of developments in Montauban, in early June the Protestants set their sights on winning the impending departmental elections. Control of the local national guard became the focal point of the showdown between the opposing sides. Encouraged by their victory at the polls, Froment and his associates portrayed the conflict as the local equivalent of their Parisian confederates’ losing battle against the Protestant-conspired anticlerical campaign, which they excoriated for being the motor of the Revolution. In preparation for a meeting called for April 20, 1790 in one of Nîmes’s major churches, they circulated a tract giving the supporting arguments for Dom Gerle’s motion, which had just been defeated. The rally in the church, after calling for the closing of the fledgling constitutional club, approved a petition asking the National Assembly to restore the king to his full powers, to declare Catholicism the state religion, and to halt the scheduled inventory of church properties. The themes of this petition were, in turn, integrated into a pamphlet distributed throughout regions with large Protestant minorities. In addition, this broadside proclaimed that the public “welfare” and personal “happiness” depended upon “the preservation of the monarchy and the religion of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church,” and this in turn required “that no other cult be granted the right of public ceremony.”28

At the beginning of May some of Froment’s partisans took to the streets of Nîmes shouting “vive le roi! vive la croix!” and in one of their many clashes with the forces of order a patriotic soldier was killed. Even after martial law was declared on May 4 the situation remained tense, in part because Mayor de Marguerittes, even if reluctantly, winked at the zealots of Catholic royalism.

Finally, on June 13 several Catholic militiamen went to the bishop’s palace to protest its transformation into an encampment of Protestant national guardsmen, some of whom proceeded to seize one of the protesters. One of the firebrands was seized by the guards. When word spread that the Protestants were holding a Catholic militiaman inside the palace, a crowd of true-believers gathered to press for his release. At this point the Protestant guards, taking fright, fired into the throng. There were several casualties, including one killed. The crowd broke up, only to regroup and rally additional militants, inviting further scuffles and casualties. Hereafter “each side saw the other as bent on extermination: the Protestants were certain that they faced another Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Catholics that they were confronted with another ‘Michelade.’”²⁹ But in fact there was a crucial difference: in 1790 in Nîmes, unlike in 1572 in Paris, the Protestants had forged a military shield, which they wielded quite effectively.

While dancing the war dance inside the city, the two sides summoned or anticipated help from their respective coreligionists of neighboring towns and villages, near and far. Given the customary solidarity of oppressed minorities, the circuits of mutual aid functioned rather better among Protestants than Catholics. In any event, starting June 14 Calvinist artisans and peasants from the region around Alès, including the Cévennes mountains—“the rudes cévennois”30—arrived in not inconsiderable numbers, presumably imbued with the collective memory of the revolt and persecution of the camisards of 1702–10. That very day, in confused circumstances, a shot was fired allegedly from the Convent of the Capuchins, killing a Protestant national guardsman. This fatal bullet triggered a two-day pogrom in which Protestants massacred and pillaged Catholics. The Protestants vented their rage and perhaps also wrought their historical vengeance on religious houses, beginning with the devastation of the Capuchin Convent, slaughtering several monks in cold blood. Outnumbering and outgunning Froment’s militiamen, Protestant guardsmen and irregulars from within and outside Nîmes mercilessly hunted down and killed Catholic royalists and their sympathizers. When the national guard of Montpellier finally succeeded in restoring order, the Catholic side counted about 300 dead, the Protestant side about twenty.

The breakdown of sovereignty had created the possibility for the Protestants of Nîmes to affirm themselves, successfully, in the face of tried and true Catholic political, social, and cultural power. The cost of defeat was high for yesterday’s overlords. Had the outcome been the reverse, however, most likely the Protestants would have paid at least as heavy a price. Neither side was in a position to prevail without outside help. The zealots of Catholic royalism were completely isolated, and short of a successful counterrevolution they and their patrons perforce reconciled themselves to losing their timeless ascendancy. In turn, the Protestants were able to capitalize on the fragility of the holdout ancien régime, at both the local and regional level, to secure the rights and liberties which had been denied them for too long. Ironically, they resorted to violence and terror to force compliance with the emancipatory and promissory decrees of the National Assembly before vacillating revolutionary governments in Paris condoned their use at the center and nationwide. In the meantime, the Protestants of Nîmes knew only too well that their own new-found and contested freedom was contingent on the survival of the nascent new regime in the capital and nationally, lest there be a virulent backlash.

Having gained a hold upon the streets of Nîmes the Protestants proceeded to consolidate their political position. The Protestant elite, heretofore only a ruling class, now also became a governing class. Protestants were prominent among the political leaders who took over the municipal council and occupied major administrative positions. This meant that they were also centrally involved in the disarmament of the Catholic militias, and the imprisonment and eventual trial of those Catholic militants who had failed to escape. Before long they were disproportionately powerful in the government and administration of the department of the Gard as well. Of course, the Parisian authorities sanctioned and encouraged this radical shift. This made it all the easier for the counterrevolutionaries of the Languedoc to portray their battle against Protestants as a local variant of the battle against the Protestant-engineered Revolution which threatened to overwhelm and rack the whole country, with nefarious consequences for the rest of Europe.

Forced to yield the southern Languedoc’s urban bastions to the enemy—not only Montauban and Nîmes but also Toulouse and Montpellier—the adepts of Catholic royalism turned to organizing resistance in the countryside. Fearful of Protestant vengeance, not a few members of the old elite fled the cities, and so did militant zealots like Froment. They rightly assumed that the calamitous bagarres of Montauban and Nîmes would send shockwaves through the departments of the Ardèche, Lozère, Aveyron, and Tarn, whose population was partly Protestant as well.

The upshot was the so-called Jalès movement, named after the town in or near which the counterrevolutionaries held three huge open-air meetings in order to rally resistance to the Protestants and the Revolution.31 From the beginning this movement was at once fostered and cemented by fear and hatred of Protestants. Its initial camp meeting of August 18, 1790, which apparently assembled some 20,000 Catholic peasants along with Catholic-royalist national guardsmen, demanded the release of all Catholics imprisoned in Nîmes and the removal of Protestants from power in all the municipalities that had fallen to them. The conveners also set up a committee to prepare a regional uprising; this effort was stillborn, as were similar schemes at the meetings of February 1791 and of July 1792, both of which were swiftly dispersed by patriotic military units, the last with a considerable loss of life. But to the bitter end the Comte de Saillans, one of the leaders of the counterrevolutionary resistance in the southeast, urged one and all to hold in mind the “diabolical and tyrannical cunning … [with which] the Protestant sect was ruling throughout the Midi, usurping vested authorities and controlling the armed forces,” their objective being “the destruction of both the Catholic religion and the Monarchy.”32 By then, of course, the pace of the Revolution was quickening and the challenge of the clerical oath had further strengthened the religious and anti-Protestant element in the mixture of impulses driving the resistance in the Languedoc.

None of this is to suggest that Protestantism and Catholicism were the essential and prime movers, respectively, of revolution and counterrevolution. To be sure, in the Languedoc the counterrevolution followed in the “indelible footsteps of the old religious wars, with millions of Catholics lording it over a few hundred thousand Protestants who risked being strangled as surrogates for the Revolution, should Protestantism and the Revolution be construed as being one and the same.” But this “ingenious formula” did not succeed with “the Catholics of the Rhône, specifically of Avignon, who proved to be as revolutionary as the Protestants of the Languedoc.” Even if the conflict in Avignon became “violent and bloody … it did not become a religious war” by virtue of not being “grafted onto the old, hateful, and many-layered undergrowth running from the Albigensians to Saint Bartholomew’s Day and the massacres of the Cévennes.” In sum, while in the Languedoc the issue “became entangled with a dark and infinitely dangerous element, the day which broke over the Rhône was terrible without, however, being quite so explosive.” Even so, there were family resemblances between the one and the other “epileptic fanaticism, that uniquely contagious disease.”³³

In any case, on October 16, 1791, in an atmosphere of simmering civil strife, Lescuyer, the secretary of Avignon’s patriotic municipal administration which favored annexation to France, was fatally mutilated in the Church of the Cordeliers.³⁴ In retaliation, a throng of patriots, who exaggerated the antirevolutionary hostility of the opposition to the newly established government, brutally killed and mangled some sixty inmates, including several women, whom they seized in the prisons of the Papal Palace. To a certain extent this “massacre of la Glacière” was influenced by the “example of Nîmes,” where “the massacre of 1790 was presumed to have contributed to the foundation of the Revolution.” The trail of “horrid crimes ran from the Albigensians to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and from there to the dragonnades and the carnage of the Cévennes.” There was, indeed, a fateful concatenation of memory and mimesis: “Nîmes remembered the dragonnades; Avignon imitated Nîmes; Paris followed the example of Avignon.”35 Since the deed was done by patriots who did not bear the stigma of Protestantism, and also because of the raw savagery of the avenging violence, “the sixty victims of Avignon troubled not a few of the minds unaffected by the 300 dead of Nîmes.” To the extent that the victims included both “moderate revolutionaries and enemies of the Revolution,” the Avignon prison massacre of October 1791 was the “hideous prototype” for the Paris prison massacres the following September. Both contributed to staining the Revolution and lessening its attraction for the outside world.³⁶

In the Russian Revolution, the liberation of religious minorities exacted an immeasurably steeper price than in the French Revolution. There were, as noted, striking similarities in the size, geographic concentration, and economic profile of the respective minorities, as well as in their segregation, stereotyping, and demonization. There were, in addition, remarkable homologies in the circumstances conducive to their becoming imperiled in their moments of liberation: the breakdown of political and judicial sovereignty; the intensification of centrifugal forces; and the reawakening of dormant prejudices and collective memories of past paroxysms of blind ethnic violence. These conditioning and radicalizing circumstances were, however, significantly more intense in 1917 than in 1789. To begin with, even if during the prerevolution a few enlightened officials urged a relaxation of Jewish disabilities, Russia’s old order never promulgated a liberalizing edict comparable to that of 1787. In fact, notwithstanding a minimal opening in 1905, the tsarist regime’s policies went from bad to worse during the prewar years, when sectors of the state bureaucracy and imperial court integrated anti-Semitism into their strategy of aggressive social and political defense. Whereas anti-Judaism and Judeophobia became a living part of the conservative and reactionary political formula as well as of popular culture, left-wing radicalism made considerable inroads among Jews, who with time ceased to look to government for protection and emancipation. But above all, almost from the very outset in 1917, and without cease until 1921, attacks on Jews were closely correlated with the fortunes of civil and foreign war. This correlation was all the more intense because this twinned struggle was entangled with nationalist and anarchist risings in the would-be secessionist peripheries where Jewish communities were heavily concentrated. Russia perhaps best illustrates that in modern times Jewish emancipation has not progressed along a straight path.

The philosophes of the eighteenth century had stressed that both the torments and vices of Jews were a function of Christian persecution and societal iniquities. In September 1791 the Jews of France, following the Protestants, became full-fledged citizens and, like their Protestant counterparts, kept vigil to prevent the return of the old regime. Thereafter French Jewry, bent on assimilation, trusted the march of progress to erode the need for Jewish separateness and singularity, except in denominational terms. Outside France, in central Europe, the political reaction to the revolutionary aftershocks of 1812 and 1848–49 entailed reversals in emancipation, foreshadowing the eruptions of discriminatory violence in Russia between 1880 and 1917, and again in 1918–21. During these forty years Russian Jewry increasingly sought relief first by way of emigration and then, through its new-fashioned secular leaders—who, incidentally, also spearheaded the unbinding from orthodoxy within their own community—by joining the tsarist empire’s embattled political opposition.

In this era, and notwithstanding the Dreyfus affair, republican France represented the positive pole of Jewish emancipation, while autocratic Russia stood for its notorious antithesis. As Lenin wrote in 1913, “of the ten and a half million Jews in the world,” almost half live “in the civilized world” where there was no caste-like segregation, no Pale of Settlement, and no numerus clausus, and conditions were favorable to assimilation. As for the other half, “they live in Galicia and Russia, backward and semi-barbarian countries, where the Jews are forcibly kept in the status of a caste.”37 Of the approximately six million Jews within Russia’s 1914 borders, the vast majority was forced to live in the Pale of Settlement, consisting of the provinces of the Kingdom of Poland and of fifteen of the empire’s western and southwestern guberniyas. While they made up about 5 percent of Ukraine’s population of some twenty-eight million, owing to their being barred from acquiring and farming land, they claimed a much larger share of the population of many cities and small towns or shtetlach, not only of Ukraine but of Belorussia as well, in which they were petty traders, middlemen, shopkeepers, and artisans. Although many of them were mired in relative poverty, by virtue of their peculiar occupational and social cast, Jews tended to be mistrusted as strangers in their own land and reviled as parasites and usurers.

With at best only limited possibilities for geographic and social mobility, this disproportionately literate, skilled, and adaptable non-peasant population looked to emigration as a way out of the Pale and the ghetto: hundreds of thousands of Jews migrated abroad, notably to the United States. At the same time, among those who continued to suffer their condition, and despaired of emancipation, an ever larger number began to sympathize with the far left. As of the late nineteenth century, apart from beginning to organize self-defense units, more and more Jews banded together in the culturally and nationally sectarian Bund, which soon became Russia’s largest Marxist party. But after the pogroms of 1903–6, which in every respect vastly surpassed those of 1881–82, Jews also joined the Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, determined to make common cause with non-Jews in the battle for political, civil, and social rights.

At most 5 percent of Russia’s Jews resided outside the Pale, by special permission, subject to revocation. Most of these privileged Jews and their families lived in the two “capitals,” where they were active in banking; railway development; the processing and export of sugar, oil, timber, and grain; the professions; and the arts. Except for being smaller, this socioeconomic layer was the equivalent of central and western Europe’s stratum of secularizing, assimilating, and acculturating Jews. At all levels of imperial Russia’s civil and political society, know-nothings and nativists hawked stereotyped fantasies about the corrosive and immoral influences of this nontraditional element of the Jewish out-group. Indeed, in Russia, unlike farther west, the bulk of the ruling and governing classes, including most of their progressive and reformist elements, took it for granted that tsarist society faced a serious “Jewish question” which called for urgent attention. After 1881, and until 1917, in addition to extenuating the segregationist Pale, the imperial elite supported or condoned quotas for physicians and lawyers as well as quotas for higher education. It also accepted that Jews be barred from the state bureaucracy, judiciary, and officer corps.

Just like the anti-Protestant violence in the French Revolution, the anti-Jewish violence in the Russian prerevolution and Revolution was marked by the logic and memory of past torments. In urban as well as rural Russia the pogroms against Jews were embedded in a long and deep tradition of popular violence sporadically fomented and sanctioned by respectable leaders of society, government, and church—local, regional, national.

Historically the southwest of the tsarist empire, notably Ukraine, was Russia’s primary zone of anti-Jewish outbursts, just as the southeast, specifically the Languedoc, had been the heartland of France’s anti-Protestant eruptions. When rebelling against Polish rule in the mid-seventeenth century, the freebooters, or Cossacks, led by Bogdan Khmelnitzky, had massacred several thousand Jews, laying waste many of their settlements. There was a second wave of these prototypical pogroms in southwestern and western Russia in the middle third of the eighteenth century, with by far the worst massacre in Uman, halfway between Kiev and Odessa. Both times Jews were the victims of violence aimed at other and larger social and political targets.

Starting in the spring of 1881, for the first time in post-1789 Europe, the Jews of the Pale of Settlement once again “had to face anti-Semitism not simply as a permanent inconvenience but as an immediate threat to their established way of life, as an explosive force, as a dynamic rather than static phenomenon.” In the wake of Alexander II’s assassination, a wave of pogroms swept over 200 Ukrainian and Bessarabian cities, towns, and villages with large Jewish populations. Kiev and Kishinev were struck, and so was Odessa, with the result that overall “some forty Jews were killed, many times that number wounded, and hundreds of women raped.” Although there was no killing in Belorussia, the Jewish quarters of several of its cities suffered arson and looting, leaving “tens of thousands of Jews … homeless and penniless.”38

This anti-Jewish violence of 1881–82 marked more a fresh start than a last gasp of official and populist anti-Semitism in imperial Russia. In many important respects the Jews became the most severely harassed and vulnerable of the Romanov empire’s several major religious, ethnic, and national minorities, or, in Lenin’s words, “no nationality [was] as oppressed and persecuted as the Jewish.”39 Shortly after the turn of the century, Jews were cruelly reminded of their vulnerable pariah status among the host people of southwest Russia. This time the Jews of Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia, were the prime victims: on April 6, 1903, Easter Sunday, street gangs fell upon them with the silent complicity of local authorities, in the wake of rumors that local Jews had murdered a Christian boy with a view to mixing his blood in their Passover matzoth. Close to fifty Jews were murdered, several hundred were injured, and quite a few girls and women were raped. In addition, over a thousand homes, workshops, and stores were looted or destroyed.⁴⁰

By now Jews were being anathematized not only for causing the latest ills of Russia’s civil and political society but also for being the kingpin of the irrepressible revolutionary movement. When economic strikes misfired, even semi-skilled and unskilled workers turned on Jews for allegedly having recklessly urged them on.⁴¹ Then, as defeat in the Russo-Japanese War triggered the uprisings of 1905, the tsar and the court camarilla, as well as the diehards in and out of government, embraced the conspiratorial creed. Indeed, they denounced the Jews, along with the faithless intelligentsia, for masterminding the would-be revolution from above which forced Nicholas II to issue, à contre-coeur, the October Manifesto promulgating limited representative government and civil rights.

Characteristically, the momentary destabilization and dislocation of sovereignty in 1905–6 was accompanied by a new brushfire of about 700 anti-Jewish disturbances, the bulk of them in southwestern Russia, including in Ekaterinoslav, Kiev, and Bialystok. Odessa was the scene of the single most deadly and vicious of these pogroms: during four days in October 1905 some 300 Jews were killed in cold blood, several thousand were wounded, and over 10,000 were left homeless.⁴² This was a new-model pogrom not only on account of its scope but also by virtue of its inner springs, in that the police of Odessa, instead of merely turning a blind eye, had a hand in organizing and arming the frenzied and savage crowds. Compared to those of a quarter of a century earlier, the anti-Jewish attacks were blatantly political: the agitators and thugs brandished “the national flag and the tsar’s portrait.” Whereas “before government had been inactive” and had let pogroms run a limited course, now “it cooperated … in organizing [what had become] murder and massacre.”43 The tsar became the self-proclaimed patron of a counterrevolution intended to save but also subvert the old world. Sharing the conspiratorial vision, he let it be known that he considered the Jews the chief instigators and carriers of Russia’s revolutionary unrest and violence. In a letter to his mother, he himself claimed that “the people were enraged by the audacity of the socialists and revolutionaries, and since nine-tenths of them were Jewish, they directed their full fury against them, which accounts for the anti-Jewish pogroms.”⁴⁴

In fact, Jews were overrepresented not only among the rebels but also among those arrested for revolutionary activity in 1905. In his analysis of the events of 1905–6, Lenin noted that “the Jews furnished a particularly high percentage (compared to the total Jewish population) of leaders of the revolutionary movement” and that “tsarism adroitly exploited the basest anti-Jewish prejudices of the most ignorant strata of the population in order to organize, if not to lead directly, pogroms—over 4,000 were killed and more than 10,000 injured in 100 towns.”⁴⁵

After 1906 anti-Semitism became an integral part of the political reason of the hard-liners who recaptured the initiative from liberals and other moderates in order to scuttle the October settlement. This became transparent during the Beilis affair of 1911–13, which, following a Jew’s involvement in the assassination of Stolypin, became something in the nature of a “judicial pogrom.”⁴⁶ Even though the courts eventually found Mendel Beilis, a prototypical scapegoat Jew, innocent of the spurious charge of ritual murder, for two years the champions of the ancien régime kept pressing for his conviction, as if to appropriate traditional anti-Judaism and Judeophobia for their new-wrought political anti-Semitism. For Lenin the Beilis case meant that there was nothing “resembling legality in Russia” and that the police and administration were free to engage in the “unbridled and shameless persecution of Jews—everything was allowed, including the cover-up of a crime.” No less appalled, leading public intellectuals raised “their voice against the new surge of fanaticism and superstition of the unenlightened masses,” and against their governors who were fomenting “religious enmity and ethnic hatred … [and] inciting national prejudices, increasing superstition, and stubbornly calling for violence against compatriots of non-Russian origin.”47 They knew that this aggressive know-nothingism permeated the Romanov court, the interior ministry, and the secret police, the triangle of power in which the counterfeit Protocols of the Elders of Zion were given their imprimatur and instrumentalized.⁴⁸

Indeed, reputable members of the old ruling and governing elites now embraced a Manichean worldview, and foisted the responsibility for the crisis of Russian civil and political society, and their own endangered standing in it, upon the Jews, who best lent themselves to being portrayed as the incarnation of the principle of evil. Jews became the subversive and conspiring Protestants and Freemasons of their day, all the more so now that the opposition increasingly denounced the persecution of Jews as symptomatic of the ancien régime’s depravity. Every accusation, traditional and new-fashioned, was fastened upon them: they were charged with being not only modernizers, strangers, and infidels, but also Christ-killers and westernizers, as well as master revolutionaries.

The Great War was ominous for the Jews, whatever its outcome: victory would regenerate the tsarist regime and reinforce its illiberalism; defeat would be blamed on the Jews, to be saddled with the additional stigma of treason. To be sure, the Jews, like all Russians, fought and died for the Romanov empire and regime. But by reason of the Pale of Settlement being the principal theater of war, it was there that they became hostage to military misfortune. With the advance of the armies of the Central Powers in 1915, the Russian command, suspecting the loyalty of Jews, ordered the relocation of many thousands to the interior, while still others hastened off on their own. At the same time that in some battle zones the military tried and executed several Jews for treason, it disseminated the charge that the Jews were spying for the enemy. It was but a short step to fasten the reverses of the imperial armies on the Jews.⁴⁹

Once again, as in 1904–5, military defeat unhinged the tsarist regime. The Jews were not in the vanguard of the February revolution, having well-nigh given up on reformist constitutionalism following its betrayal after 1905–6. Rather, they were conspicuous by their absence from the liberal and democratic parties which once again took the reins in a moment of disarray at the top and rebellion from below. This time, however, conditions seemed more favorable: the Romanovs had abdicated, Russia was allied with the democratic powers, and the insurgents were more numerous and better organized than in 1905. Above all, on March 22, 1917, within weeks of the fall of the Romanovs, the Provisional Government issued a decree guaranteeing the same rights to all citizens and abrogating all disabilities, including those bearing on the Pale of Settlement. This instant and sweeping edict of emancipation could not but fire the enthusiasm of Jews, without exception. Even so, haunted by the memory of the avenging pogroms of 1905–6, many of them were at best guardedly optimistic as they rushed to support and broaden the emergent revolution in the hope of making the crisis of the hateful ancien régime irreversible. In sum, the Jews were exhilarated by “the dawn of freedom” at the same time that they apprehended a new “Bartholomew’s Night of pogroms.”50

Some Jews openly and significantly contributed to intensifying the rolling thunder of revolution as members of the Menshevik, Socialist Revolutionary, and Bolshevik parties. All of these had long before condemned the ancien régime’s unbending anti-Semitism, above all its growing political exploitation by conservatives and reactionaries, the forerunners of counterrevolution. But in the parties of the socialist left the Jews were noticed less for their numbers than the prominence of their positions.

In February 1917, when the Bund counted about 33,000 adherents, fewer than 1,000 of the approximately 23,000 members of the Bolshevik party were of Jewish descent, or under 5 percent. Close to 3,000 Jews joined the party in 1918, and nearly four times that number in 1919 and 1920, the high tide of the pogroms. But bearing in mind the enormous growth in party membership as a whole, the proportion of Jews remained relatively small. In the leadership, however, they figured rather more conspicuously. From 1911 to 1914, the troika which ran the Bolshevik party, with Lenin as first among equals, included two Jews, Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev; and Zinoviev remained through much of the war. At the next level, in 1907 three of the fifteen members of the Central Committee were of Jewish descent, and in 1917 three out of nine: Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Iakov Sverdlov. Four months later, in August, when the committee counted twenty-one members, the former three were joined by Grigorii Sokolnikov, Trotsky, and Moisei Uritsky. Thereafter, throughout 1918–20, the proportion of Jews on the Central Committee remained steady at about 20 percent.51

After the Bolsheviks took the reins, several militants of Jewish ancestry assumed important positions in the central executive of the Soviet as well as the Council of People’s Commissars. Following Sverdlov’s appointment to chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets, Lenin proposed that Trotsky head up Sovnarkom. Trotsky declined, insisting that Lenin needed to take the helm himself. Lenin yielded, but then asked Trotsky to become Commissar for Home Affairs. Again Trotsky begged off. Apparently he was concerned that since “the counterrevolution would whip up anti-Semitic feeling and turn it against the Bolsheviks … [especially in this position] his Jewish origin might be a liability,” a concern shared by Sverdlov.⁵² At all events, presently Trotsky agreed to serve first as Commissar for Foreign Affairs and then as Commissar for War. Particularly as chief of the Red Army, he became as much a focus for the Whites’ anti-Semitic wrath as he would have been as interior minister, charged with enforcing revolutionary law and order. Along with members of other heretofore subject nationalities, Jews also began to take up posts in the Cheka: during 1918–20 they eventually filled many of the highest positions in the Cheka, and ever so many of them served as Cheka agents in Ukraine, including Kiev.

Probably to a man, these Bolsheviks of Jewish background had long since turned their backs on Judaism. They were thoroughly assimilated, acculturated, and secularized Jews, who considered themselves fully Russian. To mark their turn away from their native roots and communities many of them, their “souls seared by tsarist persecutions,” had adopted Russian surnames.⁵³ In doing so they converted not to Russian Orthodoxy but to a secular religion and creed promising a world not only without class inequalities but also free of religious and national oppression. Even though they forswore their respective Jewish communities, they remained “non-Jewish Jews” in what they retained of prophetic Judaism’s social precepts.54

For many reasons Jews were now able to enter worlds that heretofore had been hermetically closed to them. After the Bolshevik takeover, the incipient new regime needed new cadres, the old ones being discredited, in hiding, or in exile. All things considered, the Jews were at once qualified, impatient, and vigilant. With illiteracy running to over 80 percent nationwide, including in Ukraine, the Jewish population stood out for its literacy.⁵⁵ In addition, by virtue of their experience in left-wing organizations, including the Bund, not a few Jews had acquired basic political skills. From the Jewish perspective, the new order provided unimagined channels of mobility: the previously forbidden and forbidding civil service opened up, as did the army and new institutions like the Bolshevik party. As if to make up for centuries of humiliating exclusion, young men of Jewish origin lost no time filling posts in particular in political society, which had been completely out of bounds for them. This opening of party and state, as well as of higher professional schools and cultural institutions, coincided with the abolition of the Pale, clearing the way for taking residence in major cities, which many Jews perceived as nerve centers of opportunity, assimilation, acculturation, and modernization.

The ascent of Jews in the nascent strategic elites of the fledgling Bolshevik regime was remarkable: almost overnight they became unexceptional members of the commonweal’s ruling and governing class. For Maxim Gorky, in the early afterglow of 1917, the emancipation of the Jews was “one of the finest achievements of our Revolution.” By liberating the Jews, who contributed more than their share to the fight “for political freedom …, we have erased from our conscience a shameful and bloody stain.” At the same time, to release “the Jews of the Pale of Settlement from their … slavery” was to enable this country “to make use of the energies of people who know how to work better than we ourselves.”⁵⁶

Of course, the old elites took a radically different view of the penetration of Jews into Russia’s sanctum sanctorum of power and influence. They fixed on this aspect of the Revolution to validate their conspiratorial and Manichean view of it. Their own political anti-Semitism was deeply anchored in the age-old anti-Judaism and Judeophobia which possessed the mind of large sectors of Russia’s masses and classes and which they proposed to mobilize quite ingenuously. Indeed, many counterrevolutionaries of the White Armies and anti-revolutionaries of the Ukrainian Greens made the Jew their surrogate archenemy: the former excoriated the Bolshevik regime and party in general for being a Jewish usurpation; the latter held local Jews responsible for all the intrusions, exactions, atrocities, and blighted hopes of the Revolution. And just as after 1789 the Whites had defamed Marat for his alleged Protestant origins, so after 1917 their Russian counterparts stigmatized first Kerensky and then Lenin for their supposed Jewish ancestry.

In turn, Lenin and his associates inveighed against anti-Semitism as a dangerous political weapon in their enemies’ arsenal. As early as July 27, 1918, in reaction to “sporadic outrages against the toiling Jewish population [incited by] agitation for pogroms in many cities, especially in the frontier zone,” the Council of People’s Commissars issued a resolution declaring “the anti-Semitic movement and pogroms against the Jews … [to be] fatal to the interests of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution and [calling] upon the toiling people of Socialist Russia to fight this evil with all possible means.” After warning that “the counterrevolutionaries” were exploiting the “hunger and exhaustion” as well as the “remnants of Jew hatred … among the most retarded masses,” this resolution directed “all Soviet deputies to take uncompromising measures to deracinate the anti-Semitic movement” and see to “the proscription of pogrom-agitators.”57 Not surprisingly, it was Lenin, rather than his colleagues of Jewish descent, who spoke out against anti-Semitism. In any case, the salience of the issue of anti-Semitism in the passage of ideological arms prompted even hitherto skeptical and nonpolitical Jews to rally around the hard-pressed Bolshevik regime: as party activists, sympathizers, or supporters, they feared the worst should the Whites carry the day in the civil war. If the resolve to fight and win the civil war, at great cost, was the original sin or curse of the Bolshevik leaders and the infant Russian Revolution, then probably most Jews of Russia—and many abroad—shared in it. Obviously the field of forces, ideas, and actors, as well as of perceptions and representations, was far from being that simple or binary. Still, the Jewish issue simultaneously fostered and illustrated the bent to polarization characteristic of revolutionary situations.

From 1918 to 1921, Ukraine was the site of the most decisive and fiercest fighting of the civil war as well as of by far the highest waves of murderous pogroms. Ukraine was home to about 1.5 million of pre-1917 Russia’s six million Jews, or nearly a quarter of the entire Jewish population. The population of Kiev and Odessa, its two largest cities, was somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 each, with Jews accounting for about 10 percent in Kiev and over 30 percent in Odessa. Ukraine had a long history of pogroms, from the seventeenth century to the renewed anti-Jewish outbreaks during the decades before 1914. All along the fury of pogroms was correlated with the intensity of ethnic, social, or political struggles, periods of general tranquility going hand in hand with “mere” apartheid, which was in the nature of a chronic “cold” pogrom. If the “hot” pogroms of 1918–21 were so uniquely extensive and savage, it was because they were linked to the rising and falling tides of civil and foreign war. In Ukraine the civil war between Reds and Whites was complicated by intermittent war with foreign powers and, in particular, resurgent national and ethnic conflicts as well as old-fashioned peasant rebellions. Indeed, of all the regions of the imploded Russian empire, Ukraine was the most severely struck by the fallout of the breakdown of sovereignty, all the more so because of its critical geopolitical location and economic importance. Depending on rapidly shifting contingencies, the Jews were execrated and victimized for being pro-Russians, Bolsheviks, Socialists, or Shylocks. By virtue of their polymorphous quality, they became the chosen surrogate victims of many adversaries and enemies of the Russian Revolution in the protracted struggle in Ukraine.

The pogroms unfolded in four distinct but overlapping periods, each corresponding to a different “regime”: the Central Rada from January through April 1918; the German-sponsored rule of Hetman Skoropadski from late April through November 11, 1918; the (socialist) Directory led by Simon Petliura, alongside countless minor hetmans, past mid-1919; and the White Volunteer Army from June 1919 through the fall of 1920. As noted, of all the peripheries of the multiethnic ex-Romanov empire, Ukraine was the most completely consumed by the creeping anomie accompanying the wreck of political and legal sovereignty. Of course, there was a resurgent and insurgent nationalism which aspired to autonomy or secession. Although this nationalism had its political pacemakers and ideological drummers, it was above all driven by a burgeoning jacquerie of peasants whose latent animus against Russians, Poles, Jews, and cities was easily inflamed and manipulated, just as the Vendean hatred for the cities and agents of the French state had been turned against the Jacobins in 1793.

Not that in its political disposition the Ukrainian disaffection was Vendeé-like from the outset. The Central Ukrainian Rada, which was set up in Kiev in July 1917, shared the liberal democratic orientation of the Provisional Government in Petrograd. On January 9, 1918, it issued a decree guaranteeing equal cultural rights to all minorities. Several Jews served in the government and sat in the Rada. At the same time, local Great Russians lost no time blaming Jews for the disastrous dislocation of the old empire and old regime.

But above all, unlike not only the bagarres of Montauban and Nîmes but also the Vendée, all of which remained isolated and remote, the turmoil in Ukraine was carried by the tidal currents of the Great War and the foreign intervention in Russia’s civil war. In March 1918, with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the embryonic Bolshevik regime ceded Ukraine to Germany, making Germany the midwife and temporary protector of its independence: the semi-autocratic Kaiserreich sponsored a short-lived republic before backing a congress of conservative parties which on April 28 made Skoropadski chief of a Ukrainian state more in tune with the old order of the Central Powers. This satellite regime promptly cancelled the liberalizing minorities decree. Presently Jews began to be held hostage for all opposition, both real and imagined, to the making of Ukrainia by indigenous Russians, socialists, liberals, and Bolsheviks. Under conditions of rising lawlessness and economic hardship, in the provinces of Kiev and Poltava Jews were subjected to looting and extortion, often combined with physical violence.

While the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had made the Germans master of a secessionist conservative Ukraine, the Armistice of November 11, 1918, enjoined the Central Powers to evacuate it. Their departure, along with that of the Skoropadski collaborators, cleared the way for a Directory run partly by outright separatists, and partly by nationalists with Socialist convictions or affinities. Once again the Jews cheered, but soon again met their nemesis. Just as Skoropadski had almost immediately put an end to the Ukrainian Rada and republic, so Petliura used his military strength to cut short the Directory. With the overall situation going from bad to worse, Petliura tapped into peasant unrest to raise partisan bands, and so did a score of other hetmans. Meanwhile, in the far south several Cossack units were moving into action as well.

Like any newly emerging and orderless secessionist state, Ukraine needed a measured external cementing force in order to congeal. The Red Army might have provided it, except that even in its embryonic and overstretched condition it was too powerful to simply serve as a force of negative integration. For a host of reasons, the Bolshevik regime never even considered keeping hands off Ukraine: it was of vital importance by virtue of its strategic location and its granary, all the more since it was fast becoming the chief redoubt of the foreign-backed White Guards.

In any case, within a few weeks, by February 6, 1919, Kiev fell to Bolshevik forces, which had started their advance in December.58 In the meantime a clear pattern emerged: wherever Ukrainian military forces, of whatever sort, were overrun or routed, they tended to vent their avenging rage on the Jews. As of late December, and beginning with the pogrom in Sarny, south of the Pripet Marshes and half way between Lublin and Kiev, Jews were in acute danger of being made to pay, first, for the reverses of the hetmans’ militias and second, as of July 1919, for those of the fighting forces of the White generals and their confederates.

The Jews of the ex-Pale were trapped in what became the main combat theater of the Russian civil war, in which were opposed Reds and Whites, Russians and Ukrainians, centripetal and centrifugal forces. Although Red Army units also committed excesses against Jews, such incidents were relatively infrequent, and the Bolshevik authorities publicly reproved and denounced them. In any case, the field of action came to be so structured that for the captive and defenseless Jews, control or liberation by the Red Army was, if not the star of hope, nevertheless by far the lesser evil. Accordingly, especially with this realization prompting Jews to cheer or help their circumstantial saviors, they could not help giving credibility to the allegation—feeding the self-fulfilling prophecy—that all Jews were pro-Bolshevik and anti-Ukrainian.

The scourge of pogroms erupted in January 1919 in the northwest, in Volhynia province. During February and March it spread to the cities, towns, and villages of many other regions of Ukraine. After Sarny it was the turn of Ovruc, northwest of Kiev. Hetman Kozyr-Zyrka, who was aligned with Petliura, ravaged the Jewish community of this small town in mid-January—robbing, killing, and terrorizing. But perhaps the most deadly pogrom erupted a month later, on February 15, in Proskurov, between Ternopol and Vinnitsa, in the west-central province of Podolia, controlled by Petliura. The population of this medium-sized city of 50,000 was about 10 percent Jewish. In this instance, exceptionally, the pogromists struck not to avenge military defeat at the hands of the Red Army but in retaliation for an attempted Bolshevik takeover within Proskurov, in which Jews had participated. Hetman Semossenko ordered his troops to massacre the Jews but forgo plunder and arson. Within a matter of hours well over a thousand Jews were slaughtered.

In districts where the Reds prevailed, liberation—or, as many local people considered it, subjugation—by the Red Army was followed by the establishment of Bolshevik, and hence centralizing control. Most of the new-wrought officials and administrators, including their local helpers, spoke Russian, thereby flaunting their status as outsiders and offending the indigenous population. Not surprisingly, the latter were suspicious of alien food and tax collectors as well as Cheka operatives: they perceived them as agents of the new governors in Moscow bent on not only winning the civil war and consolidating their regime but reimposing Great Russia’s ascendancy over Ukraine.

Forthwith, in addition to individual acts of violent resistance, there were organized counteractive campaigns under the leadership of the various hetmans. These traditionally self-appointed chiefs rallied their partisans, most of them peasants, with slogans focusing hatred upon encroaching and extortionate outsiders, notably Great Russians, Bolsheviks, and Jews. Although they called for Ukrainian independence from Russia, sometimes with distinctly populist-egalitarian inflections, their strident war cry was, above all, a categorical imperative to fight Bolshevism and its proxies, principally the Jews. The hetmans had an essentially localist or at best regional vision and definition of their respectively invented homelands as well as of their “primitive rebellions.” They were not fighting to transform the myth of a nation into the reality of a nation-state. Even though some of them, to a degree, had ties to Petliura, they all proceeded, characteristically, in utter isolation. Their main zones of action—which for the Jews became zones of blood—were contained in a rectangle bounded on the north by a line running eastward from Sarny to Chernobyl; on the west by a line running down to Kamenets-Podolsk; on the south by a line running eastward to Uman; and on the east by a line running up from Uman and passing through Kiev. This area included the core of the ex-Pale east and south of its Polish and Belorussian regions.

Hetmans Zelenyi and Struk rallied their peasant partisans, who operated west and north of Kiev, with the incendiary slogan “Death to the Jews and down with the Communists!” Around Tarasca, south of Kiev, Hetman Yatsenko proclaimed that “all Jews [were] Communists” and were “defiling our churches and changing them into stables.” On April 10, 1919, Hetman Klimenko, who had a considerable following in the district between Uman and Kiev, led an attack on the Ukrainian capital in which local citizens joined his partisans in thundering “Death to the Jews! For the Orthodox Faith!” And Hetman Tiutiunuk cried out against “our age-long enemies, and their agents, the Jews.”59

Above all, the bandit-Hetman Nikifor Grigorev was emblematic of the leaders and presumptions of the “primitive rebellions” within the Russian Revolution, though his exceptionally frequent and unscrupulous changes of course made him an extreme case.⁶⁰ Adept at partisan warfare, Grigorev had a considerable following east of Uman. His worldview was chameleonic, without either core or contour. Grigorev was a weathercock in the turbulence which defined his fortunes. After following in the trail of Petliura, he had his partisans fight alongside units of the Red Army. But no sooner had he rallied to Bolshevism than he pulled back and prepared to join Denikin. In early May 1919 Grigorev vowed to fight and defeat Bolshevism at all costs. Convinced that Bolshevism was dominated by Jews, he became fiercely anti-Semitic, apparently to the point of personally participating in pogroms.

Grigorev perpetrated his worst pogrom in mid-May in Elisavetgrad, a medium-sized town east of Uman, whose Jewish community had been struck in April 1881. In preparation he leveled a broadside against Bolshevik commissars for being agents of “ever-greedy Moscow and from the country where they crucified Christ”61 and summoning the “tormented people of Ukraine” to rise up in arms against “Jew-Communists … [who were] converting our holy houses of God into stables.”⁶² The proclamation was not without success: in the three-day pogrom that followed, Grigorev’s gunmen and torturers had the collaboration of townspeople and peasants from surrounding villages. Some 400 Jews were murdered, and hundreds were injured. Many of the dying victims were abused, defiled, and mutilated. Hereafter, and through July, there were scores of minor pogroms not only in nearby provinces where Grigorev had considerable sway, but beyond as well. It was at this point that Grigorev had his fatal encounter with Nestor Makhno. To be sure, at the time the former was by far the weaker party, the Red Army having dispersed and broken his irregular and uncohesive bands. Still, Makhno publicly upbraided his would-be ally for his pro-landlordism and anti-Semitism before Grigorev met his end in a shoot-out.⁶³

It bears repeating that all this time Ukraine was in totally “unharmonious harmony.” To speak of its political order during the first half of 1919 as the “Petliura regime” is to overstate the degree of structured authority and leadership. Petliura had, it is true, played a considerable role in the opposition to Skoropadski, all along advocating a democratic and socializing peasant state. Following the withdrawal of the Germans and their myrmidons, he had become a member of the Directory as well as commander-in-chief of the military forces of the fledgling Ukrainian republic, originally spawned by the Rada. In February 1919, with the support of the intervening Allied and Associated Powers, he also assumed the presidency of the Directory. But Petliura’s regime was no less a phantom than Skoropadski’s, except that as backers the Allies were a mere shadow of what the Germans had been. In fact, for all intents and purposes Petliura was left on his own to face not only the Red Army and the Whites but also a country in headlong decomposition. Petliura was unable either to discipline his own would-be army or to coordinate the operations of Ukraine’s uncounted partisan bands, each under its own more or less independent hetman. Lacking a firm and stable center, Petliura’s government was in no position to bring order to a chaotic realm. One of the consequences of this disjointed sovereignty was that the hetmans were free, and indeed obliged, to act on their own, which meant that they were also free to strike at the Jews.

Not that Petliura himself or his government was conspicuously anti-Semitic, at any rate not at the outset. In fact, officially Jews were emancipated. But during the first half of 1919, in his uphill fight against the Red Army, Petliura blinked at the pogroms carried out or sanctioned by his own troops or by the hetmans who were beyond his control. In his eyes the Jews were at once anti-Ukrainian and pro-Bolshevik, and given the logic of the situation, the incitement and explosion of deep-seated popular anti-Judaism served his purposes. He did eventually issue a manifesto denouncing pogroms and forbidding anti-Jewish agitation. But that was in July–August 1919, and by then the war against the Jews within the war against the Bolsheviks had taken its hideous toll.

The White Armies in general, and the Volunteer forces in Ukraine in particular, were, of course, more disciplined, efficient, and coordinated than the hetmans’ bands of irregulars. Accordingly the Whites had it in their power not only to feed the anti-Jewish Furies but also to curb them.64 Whereas the pogroms of the hetmans were fueled by the blind and age-old Judeophobia and anti-Judaism of volatile peasants and Cossacks, those of the White generals and officers were, in addition, informed by ideologized political anti-Semitism. Given the largely similar social composition of the rank and file of the partisan bands and Volunteer armies, the ways of their pogroms nevertheless had strong family resemblances. Both killed thousands of Jews in cold blood, and many of their victims were beaten, mutilated, raped, hanged, burned, dumped into wells or thrown from rooftops, and buried alive. This physical cruelty was accompanied by verbal abuse, pillage, and extortion on an ever larger scale.

Although there was a chronological overlap between the pogroms of the hetmans and the generals, those of the latter only really began with the start of operations against the Red Army in mid-1919. To be sure, the White troops fell upon Jews in western Ukraine during their successful advance in the course of the summer. But again, the worst of their anti-Jewish excesses coincided with military setbacks, most notably the decisive defeats later that year. These pogroms were less acts of measured and ritualized revenge than of unbound vengeance. In addition to being fueled by military reverses, they were fired by mounting economic hardships.

The driving forces behind the White pogroms, however, were not only circumstantial but also ideological. Indeed, these two sets of factors were closely entwined and mutually reinforcing. Naturally, Denikin and most of the officers of his “officers’ army” blamed the Jews for the Revolution, all the more so once in their vision it became incarnated in Trotsky, the commander-in-chief of the unseemly but increasingly formidable Red Army. With the unexpected defeats of the civil war intensifying their humiliation, they increasingly imputed all their trials and tribulations to the Jews. Lacking a comprehensive ideology and program capable of mobilizing popular support, the Whites assigned anti-Semitism an ever more central and conspicuous place in their essentially arrogant and bitter, as well as uncompromising, creed. While Denikin, unlike Kolchak, was neither a declared nor a furtive political anti-Semite, he was consumed by traditional anti-Judaism, which partly accounts for his not disavowing those who were. Even if he himself never said so publicly, Denikin considered the Jews to be the original architects and past masters of the Bolshevik Revolution. Osvag, his government’s propaganda agency, disseminated strident versions of this conspiratorial cunning, and so did some of his senior associates. A prototypical proclamation issued by one of his generals incited the people to “arm themselves and rise against the Jewish Bolshevik communists, the common enemy of our Russian land,” with a view to extirpate “[t]he evil [diabolical] force which lives in the hearts of Jew-communists.”65 In this way, the Revolution radicalized the prescriptive anti-Judaism of the conservative field officers.

It should be emphasized that in the highest political and military echelons of the counterrevolution in Ukraine, few voices protested this rampant anti-Semitism. Denikin, like Petliura before him, did issue a declaration disavowing anti-Semitism. But this was essentially tactical, to court the favor of the Allies, since Western champions of the anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia kept cautioning that anti-Semitic excesses were alienating public opinion and complicating continued aid to the Whites. Incidentally, the White generals counted on kindred spirits among the Allies. In August 1919 Sir Eyre Crowe, a high functionary at the British Foreign Office, urged Chaim Weizmann, who called on him to protest the pogroms, to consider that what for Weizmann were “outrages against the Jews, may in the eyes of Ukrainians be retaliation for the horrors committed by the Bolsheviks who are all organized and directed by the Jews.”66 And at Denikin’s headquarters, even the Kadets did not take a stand against the pogroms. Indeed, their parent party eventually went to the execrable extreme of “calling on the Jews to repudiate Bolshevism in order to save themselves.”⁶⁷

The Orthodox Church spoke in a similar key, thereby providing a powerful religious sanction for pogromism. Practiced in the art of playing on anti-Judaism and Judeophobia, the clergy charged that having subverted the God-given ancien régime, the Jews were now using Bolshevism to subject Russia to anti-Christian rule. While there were hawks among the priests, high and low, who stirred up support for attacks on Jews, there were few if any active doves among them. Remarkably, Patriarch Tikhon, the head of the Orthodox Church, issued a remonstrance on July 21, 1919, declaring that anti-Jewish violence brought “dishonor for the perpetrators, dishonor for the Holy Church.”⁶⁸ But except for this statement, which apparently fell on deaf ears, in the provinces the churchmen condoned even the worst excesses by their silence.⁶⁹ When a delegation of Russian Jews asked the Metropolitan of Kiev to raise his voice against pogroms, he, like the Kadets, responded by urging them to “first turn to their coreligionists and ask them to leave the Bolshevik establishment forthwith.”⁷⁰ In sum, there were no dams to obstruct the wave of pogroms which swept over Ukraine as part of the flux and reflux of the fight to the death in the civil war.

From incidental and relatively mild actions against Jews in June and July, when the White forces seized control of much of Ukraine and made it the chief bastion of counterrevolution, the anti-Jewish assaults spiraled to reach their peak in November–December 1919, which saw the final disarray and fall of Denikin’s host. As the pogroms rose in number they also became more ferocious, with pillage and extortion declining in favor of wholesale murder and savagery.71

In late summer and early fall the Red Army began to face down the Volunteer forces around Kiev in western Ukraine, from where Denikin had meant to march upon Moscow. The stepped-up fighting, involving the usual cruelties of civil war, boded ill for the Jews. This became clear in late September, when a savage pogrom racked the Jewish community of Fastov, a small town immediately southwest of the Ukrainian capital. In the course of several days, and without hindrance from higher military or civil authority, a brigade of Cossacks slaughtered over 1,000 Jews, most of them “older people, women, and children,” many of the younger men having fled in time.⁷² This wildfire of death was coupled with an orgy of massive rape, profanation, and plunder. With the Jewish quarter ravaged, “the flourishing town of Fastov [was] transformed into a graveyard.”⁷³

Before long, in early October, the Jewish community of Kiev was once again set upon. Red forces unexpectedly made a brief incursion into the city, only to be driven out by Volunteer troops a few days later. Once they returned, the Whites intensified their castigation of Jewish Bolshevism and denounced local Jews for having collaborated with the enemy. Like the Jews of Fastov, the Jews of Kiev suffered a tempest of death, plunder, and destruction which took over 250 lives. In the wake of this deadly onslaught V. V. Shulgin, a conservative politician close to Denikin and editorialist of the local Kievlianin, claimed that “at night … a dreadful medieval spirit stalked the streets of Kiev,” with the “heartrending wails” of Jews breaking the city’s “general stillness and emptiness.” How would the Jews respond to this “torture by fear”? In effect they had only one of two choices: either “confess and repent … before the whole world … [for their] active part in the Bolshevik madness,” or else, and despite “these dreadful nights, full of anguish,” organize “a league to combat anti-Semitism, thereby denying well-known facts and inflaming anti-Jewish feelings still more.” Insisting that the “ fate” of the Jews was in their own hands, Shulgin was confident that this “torture by fear would … show them the right way.”⁷⁴

With local variations, the crescendo of anti-Jewish violence, as practiced in Fastov and Kiev, was closely correlated with the climacteric of the civil war in Ukraine, notably with the losing battles which the Whites fought to defend, capture, or recapture small towns and villages with sizable Jewish communities. Unlike the Protestants in the Languedoc in 1790, the Jews in Ukraine were in no position to form or join “national guard” units. Completely defenseless, they were reduced to hoping and praying for the timely arrival of government forces.

The record of the Red Army was not spotless either. Soviet forces are estimated to have committed slightly over 8 percent of all anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine. Usually the troops that turned on the Jews had fought with either a hetman, or Denikin, or both, before going over to the Red Army. It does seem, however, that higher echelons sought to identify and punish the soldiers of the Boguny and Tarashchany regiments who committed most of these outrages. Indeed, the military command of the Red Army, like the political command of the Bolshevik regime, repeatedly declaimed against anti-Semites, and several pogromists were brought to account. And in June 1919 the Soviet government assigned funds to help “certain victims of pogroms.”75

To be sure, the Jews of Ukraine were disproportionately favorable to Bolshevism and welcoming of the Red Army, and undoubtedly in some towns there were Jewish elements that were something in the nature of a Trojan horse. This preference and conduct were not, however, a function of predetermined and conspiratorial pro-Bolshevism. Rather, the Jews acted as they did because they were terror-struck by their helplessness in the face of certain peril in a situation in which the hetmans and Whites left them no other choice.

It is striking that the non-Jewish Jews in the Bolshevik leadership as well as among the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries remained curiously silent. Although Trotsky received many reports about the pogroms of the summer of 1919, apparently he did not cry out against them either in public or behind the scenes. Ironically, Red and White leaders were equally reluctant to confront the issue head on: the former were concerned about “playing into the hands of those who accused them of serving ‘Jewish’ interests … [and about] encouraging pro-White sentiments among its population”; the latter were afraid of alienating the anti-Semites among their officers.⁷⁶

Perhaps there was a tacit understanding that the non-Jewish colleagues of the Bolsheviks of Jewish background would speak up. Certainly, throughout the areas they controlled, by and large “the Bolsheviks did not tolerate overt manifestations of anti-Semitism, least of all of pogroms, for they realized that anti-Semitism had become a cover for anti-Communism.”77 On July 27, 1918, over Lenin’s signature, Sovnarkom “issued an appeal against anti-Semitism, threatening penalties for pogroms.”⁷⁸ In March of 1919, when asked to “make sixteen three-minute records for propaganda purposes, Lenin chose as one of his themes ‘On Pogroms and the Persecution of Jews.’ ”⁷⁹ Insisting that with an eye to “divert the hatred … [and] attention” of workers and peasants “from their real enemy,” the late tsarist monarchy had “incited” them against the Jews. Lenin emphasized that “hatred of the Jews persisted only in countries in which slavery to landowners and capitalists had created abysmal ignorance among workers and peasants, that only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews,” and that such practices and beliefs were “a survival of ancient feudal times, when priests burned heretics at the stake.” Clearly, among the Jews, as “among us,” the working people “form the majority” and “are oppressed by capital.” Accordingly, Jews were not “enemies of the working people … [but] our brothers … [and] comrades in the struggle for socialism.” To be sure, there were “kulaks, exploiters, and capitalists” among the Jews, just as “among the Russians, … [and] rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob, and disunite workers,” sowing and fomenting hatred “between workers of different faiths, nations, and races.” Lenin concluded with a denunciation of both “the accursed tsarism” which in the past had “tortured and persecuted the Jews … and of those who nowadays are fomenting hatred toward the Jews as well as other nations.”⁸⁰ Whatever the shortcomings of Lenin’s highly ideological but ingenuous pronouncement, it was in stark contrast to the all but total absence of plain-spoken public censure of pogromism by the Whites—not to mention the contrast with the declamations of those who gloried in the idea of weaning the Jews from Bolshevism by subjecting them to “torture by fear.” This discrepancy in rhetoric matches the discrepancy in deeds, between the relatively small number of pogroms perpetrated by Red Army units and those committed by the partisan bands and regular divisions of the various resistances, for which the Whites must take most if not all of the responsibility.

It is difficult to get a precise measure of the extent and intensity of the Jewish suffering.81 Indeed, there will never be an exact reckoning of the number of Jews killed in pogroms during the civil war. In Ukraine alone more than 1,000 pogroms struck over 500 Jewish communities, most of them in the Kiev, Volhynia, and Podolia provinces, which had been the center of anti-Jewish Furies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well. Estimates of the number of Jews who were killed or died in pogroms in all of Russia during the civil war range between 60,000 and 150,000. At all events, the death toll ran into the tens of thousands. In addition, countless Jews were maimed, wounded, orphaned, traumatized, and despoiled; and the rape of women and girls knew no bounds.

It is, of course, equally difficult, not to say impossible, to separate the pogroms perpetrated, respectively, by Whites, Ukrainian nationalists, Greens, and Reds. Certainly the Whites, including the Cossacks who provided the main body of their troops, bear a heavy burden, perhaps even the palm. Neither their senior officers nor their political leaders made any concerted effort to restrain the indiscriminate massacre of Jews. To the contrary, since they conflated Bolshevik and Jew in their perception of the enemy, they considered the drive against the Jews inherent to their counterrevolutionary precept and practice. The Jews were as much the target as the victims of their rage: they were trapped in the vicious circle of vengeance and re-vengeance peculiar to “religiously” fired civil war. Probably Shulgin, the aforementioned conservative politician-journalist, came close to capturing the White outlook and temper: “We reacted to the ‘Yids’ just as the Bolsheviks reacted to the burzhoois. They shouted ‘Death to the Burzhoois!’ and we replied ‘Death to the Yids!’ ”⁸² By contrast, among the Greens—and Ukrainian nationalists—Makhno stands out for having stood against the torment and victimization of Jews. Likewise, although several Red Army units carried out pogroms, the Bolsheviks opposed anti-Semitism and sought to discipline those who practiced it. All in all, the wages of Jewish emancipation were exorbitant, and the ways and means of achieving and securing it left a perplexing and perilous legacy for the future within Soviet Russia, and beyond.

NOTES

1. J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972), passim; T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950), pp. 607–8; Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, Dynamics of Prejudice (New York: Harper, 1950), pp. 32–33; Franz Neumann, “Anxiety and Politics,” in Herbert Marcuse, ed., The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), ch. 11.

2. Roberts, “The Origins of a Mythology: Freemasons, Protestants, and the French Revolution,” in Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research XLIV (1971): pp. 78–97.

3. Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernization and Revolution, 1881–1917 (New York: Longman, 1983), esp. pp. 199–206.

4. Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence: A Documentary History (New York: Knopf, 1970), pp. 11–13, 22, 30–31, 39; and Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein, Die These von der Verschwörung, 1776–1945: Philosophen, Freimaurer, Juden, Liberale und Sozialisten als Verschwörer gegen die Sozialordnung (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1976), passim.

5. The following profile of French Protestantism is based on R. R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939); Burdette C. Poland, French Protestantism and the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), esp. ch. 9.

6. Barbara de Negroni, Intolérances: Catholiques et protestants en France, 1560–1787 (Paris: Hachette, 1996), pp. 212–13; and André Dupont, Rabaut Saint-Etienne, 1743–1793: Un protestant défenseur de la liberté religieuse (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1989), pp. iii–xi.

7. Tackett, Religion, p. 209.

8. See Augustin Theiner, ed., Documents inédits relatifs aux affaires religieuses de la France, 1790–1800, 2 vols. (Paris, 1857–58); Abbé Isidore Bertrand, Le pontificat de Pie VI et l’athéisme révolutionnaire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1879); Joseph de Maistre, “Réflexions sur le Protestantisme dans ses rapports avec la souveraineté (1798),” in Maistre, Écrits sur la Révolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1989), pp. 219–39, esp. p. 227 and pp. 231–32. Also see chapter 11 above.

9. André Siegfried cited in Poland, French Protestantism, p. 141.

10. Cited in Negroni, Intolérances, p. 214.

11. Pierre Chazel cited in Poland, French Protestantism, pp. 189–90.

12. J. F. Robinet et al., eds., Dictionnaire historique et biographique de la Révolution et de l’Empire, 1789–1815, 2 vols. (Kraus Reprint, 1975).

13. Colin Lucas, “The Problem of the Midi in the French Revolution,” in Royal Historical Society: Transactions, Fifth Series, 28 (1978): p. 5 and p. 15.

14. See Poland, French Protestantism; Hubert C. Johnson, The Midi in Revolution: A Study in Regional Political Diversity, 1789–1793 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Gwynn Lewis, The Second Vendée: The Continuity of Counterrevolution in the Department of the Gard, 1789–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978); James N. Hood, “Protestant-Catholic Relations and the Roots of the First Popular Counterrevolutionary Movement in France,” in Journal of Modern History 43 (1971): pp. 245–75; Lucas, “The Problem of the Midi,” pp. 1–25.

15. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, vol. 1(Paris: Laffont, 1979), p. 303.

16. A diehard pamphlet cited in Poland, French Protestantism, p. 119.

17. Michelet, Histoire, p. 304.

18. Cf. Poland, French Protestantism, p. 135

19. Hippolyte Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine, vol. 1 (Paris: Laffont, 1986), p. 488. Taine stretches a point when insisting that with the Edict of 1787 the Protestants had “all their civil rights restituted to them, but in vain.”

20. Michelet, Histoire, pp. 304–5.

21. Jean Bon Saint-André cited in Taine, Les origines, p. 488, n. 1.

22. For the bagarres of spring 1790, see Lucas, “The Problem of the Midi,” pp. 1–25. See also James H. Hood, “The Riots in Nîmes and the Origins of the Counterrevolutionary Movement,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1968.

23. Michelet, Histoire, p. 305.

24. Ibid., p. 302.

25. Ibid., p. 306.

26. Taine, Les origines, p. 489.

27. Cited in Roberts, “Origins of a Mythology,” p. 88.

28. Cited in Lewis, Second Vendée, p. 21.

29. Taine, Les origines, p. 490.

30. Ibid., p. 490.

31. Johnson, Midi, pp. 130–32; and P. M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 220–21.

32. Cited in Lewis, Second Vendée, p. 36.

33. Michelet, Histoire, pp. 622–23.

34. René Moulinas, “Violences à Avignon: Les massacres de la Glacière, Octobre 1791,” in Bruno Benoît, ed., Ville et Révolution française (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1994), pp. 93–104.

35. Michelet, Histoire, p. 639.

36. Ibid., pp. 646–47.

37. Lenin cited in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Lenin Anthology (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 655–56.

38. Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 51–52. See also John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pts. 1–3.

39. Lenin writing on February 5, 1914, cited in Hyman Lumer, ed., Lenin on the Jewish Question (New York: International Publishers, 1974), p. 126.

40. See Lambroza, “The Pogroms of 1903–1906,” in Klier and Lambroza, eds., Pogroms, ch. 8; and Die Judenpogrome in Russland, 2 vols. (Koblenz/Leipzig: Jüdischer Verlag, 1910), vol. 2, pp. 5–79, esp. pp. 5–37.

41. See Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dniepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

42. See Robert Weinberg, “The Pogrom of 1905 in Odessa,” in Klier and Lambroza, eds., Pogroms, ch. 9; Judenpogrome, vol. 1, esp. pp. 109–32; Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), ch. 2.

43. Simon Dubnow [Doubnov] cited in Frankel, Prophecy, p. 136.

44. Cited in Simon Doubnov, Histoire moderne du peuple juif, 1789–1938 (Paris: Cerf, 1944), p. 1485, n. 1.

45. Lenin cited in Tucker, ed., Lenin Anthology, pp. 289–90.

46. Doubnov, Histoire, p. 1526. For the Beilis affair, see Rogger, “The Beilis Case: Anti-Semitism in the Reign of Nicholas II,” in American Slavic and East European Review, 25:4 (December 1966): pp. 615–29.

47. Cited in Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews (New York: Vintage, 1995), pp. 9–10.

48. Laqueur, Black Hundred, ch. 3.

49. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 100; and Sonja Margolina, Das Ende der Lügen: Russland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1992), p. 37.

50. Dubnow’s memoirs cited in Margolina, Ende der Lügen, p. 39.

51. Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 77–82.

52. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (New York: Oxford, 1954), pp. 325–26.

53. Doubnov, Histoire, p. 1526.

54. See Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1968).

55. See Joel Perlmann, “Russian-Jewish Literacy in 1897: A Reanalysis of Census Data,” in Proceedings of the Eleventh World Congress of Jewish Studies, 3 (Jerusalem, 1994): pp. 23–30.

56. Maxim Gorky cited in Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 216.

57. This resolution is cited in Lumer, ed., Jewish Question, pp. 141–42.

58. The following discussion of anti-Jewish pogroms through July 1919 is based on William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1957); Arthur E. Adams, Bolsheviks in the Ukraine: The Second Campaign, 1918–1919 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963); Ilya Trotsky, “Jewish Pogroms in the Ukraine and in Byelorussia, 1918–1920,” in Gregor Aronson, Jacob Frumkin, et al., eds., Russian Jewry, 1917–1967 (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969); Peter Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989); Pipes, Bolshevik Regime; Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

59. For all quotations in this paragraph, including their contextualization, see Adams, Bolsheviks, pp. 232–36; and Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, pp. 224–25.

60. This discussion of Grigorev is based on Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, p. 230; Adams, Bolsheviks, pp. 326–27, 402; Adams, “The Great Ukrainian Jacquerie,” in Taras Hunczac, ed., The Ukraine, 1917–1921: A Study in Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 247–70; Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918–1921 (Detroit: Black & Red, 1974), pp. 136–37; Lincoln, Red Victory, pp. 320–21.

61. Cited in Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, p. 225.

62. Cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 320.

63. See chapter 10 above.

64. The following discussion of the anti-Semitic predisposition and discourse in the counterrevolutionary camp in Ukraine relies heavily on Peter Kenez, “Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War,” in Klier and Lambroza eds., Pogroms, pp. 291–313; and Lincoln, Red Victory, pp. 321–23.

65. Cited in Kenez, Civil War, p. 175.

66. Cited in Richard H. Ullman, Britain and the Russian Civil War: November 1918–February 1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 218–19, n. 40. See also Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, p. 112.

67. Kenez, Civil War, pp. 173–74.

68. Cited in Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, p. 111.

69. See William C. Fletscher, The Russian Orthodox Church Underground, 1917–1970 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 25.

70. Cited in Kenez, “Pogroms,” p. 306.

71. Kenez, “Pogroms,” p. 298, adapts this periodization and taxonomy of the pogroms of the second half of 1919 from N. I. Shtif.

72. Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, p. 109.

73. Report in the Kievan Echo cited in Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 323.

74. Cited in Chamberlain, Russian Revolution, pp. 230–31.

75. Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, p. 111.

76. Ibid., pp. 101–4.

77. Ibid., pp. 101–2, 111.

78. Ibid., p. 111.

79. Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 204.

80. V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 29 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), pp. 252–53.

81. This summary estimate of casualties, etc., is based on Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, p. 240, n. 8; Baron, Russian Jew, pp. 220–21; Trotsky, “Jewish Pogroms,” pp. 79–81, 87; Kenez, Civil War, p. 170; Kenez, “Pogroms,” p. 302; Doubnov, Histoire, p. 1633; Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London: Cape, 1996), p. 679.

82. Cited in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 677.