My father, Ben Fleishman, was ten days old when the worst of the 1905 pogroms – anti-Jewish riots - swept the Ukraine.  Shortly after, my grandfather Max and grandmother Tillie escaped to America, along with hundreds of thousands of other Jews. 

The pogroms began around 1881 and climaxed in 1905.  Ten thousand Jews were killed in those 1905 pogroms, homes and businesses destroyed, and synagogues burned to the ground.  Women young and old were raped by the scores, and countless children left orphans.  The Jews of the Pale of Settlement finally concluded they would never know anything but oppression under Russia’s tsar.

One hundred years later, I returned to the Ukraine.  I paid my respects at a pair of tombstones honoring the victims of the 1905 pogroms, and stood in the square where the Nazis in 1941 rounded up thousands of Jews and marched them off to be executed.  From those moments, I began to understand the horror of the pogroms into which my father was born, and the probability that if my grandparents had not made their escape to America, I too would have died there when the Germans overran the Ukraine.

The Road to Russia

The Jews' journey began when the Romans conquered Palestine in the first century A.D. and expelled the entire Jewish population from their homeland.  Most of them migrated first to Spain and Italy then, over the centuries, into France and Germany, often chased at the point of a sword.

By the Middle Ages, the largest concentration of Jews was in Western Europe, but persecution had reached horrifying proportions.  Knights of the Crusades on their way to free the Holy Land from Muslim control found it only logical to attack the Jews, the killers of Christ, along the way.  They drove many Jews eastward.  The hostile Christian communities segregated and tormented those Jews who chose to stay.

The Black Plague which swept Europe in the mid-1300’s killed a third of the population.  Jews were blamed for the plague, though it killed Jews as often as it killed Christians.  The Europeans responded by slaying the remaining Jews or hounding them out.

Those who were expelled moved into Poland, leaving much of Western Europe devoid of Jews by the end of the 15^th century.  They were welcomed into Poland by King Kazimierz the Great who needed the skills they brought.  Though they remained despised, isolated outsiders, over the next few centuries they established a society in Poland.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Polish kingdom expanded through a series of successful wars with their neighbors, conquering everything between the Baltic Sea in the north and the Black Sea in the south.  Some of the Jews became merchants and innkeepers in these new territories, while many others were employed to manage the large estates of the aristocracy in the lands the Poles had conquered.  

Thus Jews administered much of the agricultural economy in the Ukraine.  But they were both aliens and infidels.  The Poles themselves were Roman Catholic while the Ukrainians were Eastern Orthodox, adding fuel to the cauldron of resentment.  As overseers and tax collectors, Jews were often caught between the peasants and the Polish aristocracy, attracting the animosity the peasants might otherwise have directed at their foreign landlords.   

 

The Pale of Settlement

In the late 1700's, Russia under Catherine the Great conquered Poland and took all of the lands Poland once owned.  Poland ceased to exist as an independent sovereign country, not appearing again until 1918. 

Catherine and the tsars that followed her held a very different attitude toward the Jews than the Polish kings had.  She believed, as did the Russian Orthodox Church, that God tormented the Jews in retribution for killing Christ, and that it was the Russian monarch's job to help God in this work.  So she did, with enthusiasm. 

From the moment of Russian conquest, horrid Jewish oppression began.  All Jews were confined to an area called the Pale of Settlement running along Russia's western frontier and most of Poland.  They were restricted in where they could live, what they could own, the occupations they could pursue, and the education they could receive.

   

THE PALE      www.berdichev.org/mappaleofsettlement.html

 

The tsars had barred Jews from entering Russia since the Middle Ages.  But by winning these Polish lands, the large majority of Jews in the world now lived under Russian rule, perhaps as many as four to five million.  Under the yoke of Russian rule, they were soon poor, crowded, and oppressed beyond salvation.

To separate Jewish boys and young men from their religion and foster assimilation, beginning in 1827, many were conscripted into the army for a term of twenty-five years.  Much effort was spent during their term of enlistment trying to convert them to Christianity. 

In 1844 special public schools were established through which the Russian government hoped to bring the Jews “nearer to the Christians and to uproot their harmful beliefs which are influenced by the Talmud.”  Most Jews ignored these schools, continuing to educate their children in their traditional religious schools.   New laws were enacted that barred more than a handful from attending institutions of higher learning.

Largely isolated, the Jews developed their own culture.  Their synagogues and village marketplaces were the center of their universe.  Though they interacted frequently with their gentile brethren, they had by choice and circumstance become a separate cohesive society distinguished by their religion, customs, occupations, and their own language -  Yiddish.  There were Jewish doctors, teachers, restaurants, music, literature, and theater.  But the Pale of Settlement covered a large area and Jewish sub-cultures varied considerably from place to place. 

 

The First Wave of Pogroms

On March 13, 1881 a member of the People’s Will, a revolutionary group, assassinated Tsar Alexander II with a bomb thrown under his carriage while he was riding on the streets of St. Petersburg.  The Tsar’s son, Alexander III, ascended to the throne.  The government, in a state of confusion and desperate to defend itself, quickly turned to the age-old tactic of blaming the Jews for the assassination though there was no substantive foundation.  The government instigated rumors, fanned by the press.  All segments of Russian society, be they revolutionaries or pro-government, turned their fears and rage on the Jews.

Pogrom is a Russian word meaning devastation or riot.  It has come to mean a mob attack against Jews instigated or condoned by the government.  On April 27, 1881 the first of the pogroms hit the Ukraine town of Elizavetgrad.    The pogroms quickly spread to more than 200 towns and cities throughout the Ukraine.  Government collusion was evident everywhere with police and the military at times joining the rioters in attacking and destroying Jewish homes, stores, and synagogues.   

In the aftermath of the 1881 pogroms, a government investigative commission concluded that the Jews were themselves to blame because of the “Jewish exploitation” of the Russian people.  New laws were enacted with even more severe restrictions.  The poverty became so devastating that nearly one third of the Jews turned to Jewish welfare organizations for help just to survive.

The head of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church essentially formulated the new policy objective of the government, spelling out that “one-third of the Jews will convert, one-third will die, and one-third will flee the country.”

In spite of all the restrictions and obstacles placed before them, the Jewish parents and their children worked tirelessly to get an education, if not in the public schools then through their religious schools.  The official 1897 Russian government census reports that the literacy rate among Jews was nearly twice that of the Russian population as a whole.  Among Jews, nearly 65 percent of the men and 37 percent of the women were literate.  Among the gentiles, the numbers were roughly half that.

If things were bad for the Jews in Russia, they were little better for everyone else except the aristocracy.  Smoldering rebellion was punctuated by periodic acts of terrorism, invariably followed by stiff government reprisals.  The government blamed the troubles on the Jews and often used the gentiles' animosity toward the Jews to rally the country to their side.  Marxists, socialists, democrats and anarchists drew ever-larger followings. 

Tsar Alexander III died unexpectedly in 1894 leaving his son Nicholas II to ascend to the throne.  Only twenty-six years old, Nicholas was ill-prepared in training or in temperament to rule in tumultuous times.  He was both a s
tubborn and incompetent autocrat who continued to believe in the divine right of the Tsars to rule.  This was at a time when such thinking was out of step with the wave of democratic liberalism sweeping the Western world.

It's around this time that our story, Goliath’s Head, begins.

The Aftermath of the Pogroms

The Russian pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were of biblical horror and importance.  Yet even many Jews know little or nothing about these events.  Until then, the Pale of Settlement was the religious, cultural, and population center of the Diaspora.  But the pogroms triggered a relocation as profound as the first Diaspora nearly two thousand years before.  In the resulting migration, over two million people left for the United States and Palestine.  The Holocaust eliminated most of those who stayed behind.  Without this massive exodus, Hitler may have succeeded in destroying Judaism. 

The last big wave of Jewish migration began soon after the Kishinev pogrom  in 1902 and climaxed after the October 1905 pogroms.  Those who left probably constituted a third of the four to five million Jews then living under Russian rule.  Most came to the United States.  But several thousand Zionists traveled to Palestine and joined the struggle that culminated in the formation of the state of Israel in 1948.

By the time Hitler and the Holocaust
were finished, there were few Jews left in Europe.  Depending on who's counting and how they're counting, there are about fifteen million Jews in the world today.  Many people are surprised that this number is so small.  Probably forty percent of them reside in the United States and another forty percent in Israel.  These are now the dual centers of Jewish life and culture. 

When I visited the Ukraine in 2005, the poverty and depression of the people were evident.  I couldn't help but think how different that country might be today had they embraced their Jewish brethren a hundred years before, instead of driving all that talent to America.  And how different America might be if it did not have the contribution of its Jews.