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The City of Slaughter
Pajamas Media ^ | May 29, 2011 | David Solway

Posted on 05/29/2011 5:51:04 AM PDT by Kaslin

Chaim Nachman Bialik’s great poem about Russia's Kishinev pogrom of 1903 needs to be read and re-read.

In 1903, the Jewish community in the town of Kishinev, the capital of the Russian province of Bessarabia, was decimated by a pogrom, a frequent occurrence in that part of the world. It was triggered by the age-old blood libel, the Jewish inhabitants of the town suspected of murdering a young Christian boy and using his blood in the baking of matzo. The riot lasted three days, killing and wounding hundreds of Jews, destroying houses and looting businesses. As the New York Times for April 28, 1903, reported, “At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.”

Events of this barbarous nature have been a commonplace of Jewish history, whether in Eastern and Central Europe or in the Holy Land, whether in Kishinev or in Hebron where 67 Jewish men, women and children were butchered and the Jewish community expelled in the anti-Jewish riots of 1929. These are only two of the more notable “incidents” in an uninterrupted chronicle of anti-Semitic bloodletting, culminating in the Holocaust and morphing today into the multipronged attack by the Muslim world, the international left, the United Nations and European capitals on the state of Israel.

The rampage in Kishinev, however, has assumed a kind of emblematic status owing to a celebrated poem, “The City of Slaughter,” by Israel’s national laureate, Chaim Nachman Bialik, who visited the town to prepare a report on the massacre. Few read the report today but the poem, over 400 lines long and filled with macabre detail and vehement denunciation, has become part of the Jewish archive, and is said to have contributed to strengthening the Zionist project and to the eventual formation of the paramilitary Hagannah in Mandate Palestine. Interested readers might be moved to consult Simon Dubnow’s History of the Jews in Russia and Poland and the essay collection Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History.

What makes the poem especially memorable is not only its vivid account of the pogrom but its undisguised condemnation of Jewish passivity and abject resignation — in some instances, as we know, even of collaboration — in the face of endemic Jew-hatred and the repeated eruptions of carnage to which Jewish communities were subjected. Its description of Jewish men cowering in cellars while their women were being raped and disemboweled is utterly harrowing and unforgettable. Bialik knew, as Daniel Gordis explains in a seminal essay, “The Shame of It All,” that the re-creation of Israel was “about changing the condition of the Jew, by changing the nature of the Jew.”

Jews could no longer sit back, defenseless and afraid, while their people were being terrorized and killed. A state would need to be re-established in which the Jewish people would refuse to be the helpless victims of the world’s undying enmity, “shocked by what is done to them [and] infuriated by their powerlessness,” as Gordis writes. And so in the course of time it came to pass that Israel rose again from the darkness of history, not without great suffering and continued slaughter, but with pride, conviction, strength and purpose. Bialik’s poem, with its unsparing judgment of Jewish docility and nonresistance, was instrumental in “changing the nature of the Jew.”

Not entirely however. For among the Jewish population both in Israel and in the Diaspora are many who, like their Kishinev forebears, remain feeble and compliant, timorous conciliators rather than courageous fighters. They live in modern cities, not in shtetls and ghettos. Most flaunt university and college degrees, not yehshiva parchment, and preen themselves on their sophistication and putative insights. The texts they bend over, indifferent to the fury that rages around them, are not the sacred scrolls of the faith, as was the case with their ancestors, but treatises of propitiation, anti-Zionist screeds and manifestos of spurious enlightenment. The result is, mutatis mutandis, the same. True, they no longer cower in cellars while their women are being defiled, but their complicity in the campaign to weaken the Jewish state, reduce its borders to indefensible proportions and encourage its adversaries who wish to destroy it is evident. They are content to watch Israel being raped and dismembered.

Indeed, many actually facilitate the process. Elhanan Yakira in his important 2010 book, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust, transfers Bialik’s thesis into the contemporary milieu, speaking passionately about “the participation of Jews and Israelis in the anti-Zionist campaign,” which he regards as “in effect…annihilationist,” as a position characterized by “ignorance, bad faith, or malice” adopted by a “community of opprobrium.” It is nothing short of a “moral disaster” perpetrated by the descendants of Bialik’s colony of submissives who today have transformed the acceptance of victimhood into the disparagement of their own.

For the Court Jews are everywhere, the kapos abound, the so-called “peace” constituency retains its prominence, left-wing Jewish professors work tirelessly in classrooms, lecture halls, blogs, articles and op-eds to delegitimize an embattled nation, rabbinical fellow-travelers engage in “dialogue” with antis-Semites and support influential figures ill-disposed toward the Jewish state, Jewish voting blocs mobilize on behalf of their antagonists and betrayers, Israeli revisionist historians and Jewish UN apparatchiks act as Palestinian water-carriers, Jewish public intellectuals and journalists propose solutions to the Middle East conflict that would lead to the disappearance of Israel, directors of Jewish organizations invite Palestinian jihadists to lecture them, or abet sanctions against Israel, or back a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. These trimmers and delinquents stubbornly deny who their real enemies are, as they saunter cheerfully toward the abattoir. For those who want names and addresses, I provide a compendious list of such tergiversators in my recent book, Hear, O Israel!. But the most reprehensible among them are already well known.

Bialik still has their measure. This is why his poem stays fresh and contemporary and needs to be read not simply as a literary artifact but as a political lesson for the present and a warning for the future. I present below a sort of hybrid version, a cross between an adaptation and a free translation, substantially abridged and focusing on the spiritual and intellectual defection of far too many Jews wherever they may be found. I have taken a few small liberties in the rendering but I believe they are warranted in the evolving context of cultural resilement among a significant element of modern Jewry. The message of the poem is no less relevant today, when the very existence of Israel is increasingly threatened and terrorist charters call for the killing of Jews, than it was in 1903 when the Zionist movement was just gaining momentum.

From The City of Slaughter:

Do not fail to note
in the dark corners of Kishinev
crouching husbands, bridegrooms, brothers
peering through the cracks of their shelters,

watching their wives, sisters, daughters
writhing beneath their bestial defilers,
suffocating in their own blood,
their flesh portioned out as booty.
And what did these watchers
cradle in their hearts?
Did they pray for a miracle:
Lord, Lord, spare my skin this day?
These are the sons of Maccabees?

The heirs of Hasmoneans
who lie in the privies and jakes and pig styes
with trembling knees,
concealed and cowering,
crammed by the scores
in all the sanctuaries of their shame?
Their pious ruses and denials are of no account,
and in the time of affliction,
on the trampled ground of the present

or on the horizon brimming with blood,
their cries, their confessions, their scourgings
will be of even less account,
fists beating against the stones.
There will be no salvation for the shamed.
And even their resignation,
their making peace with shame,
will not redeem
the cracked pillars of the synagogue

or recompose
the charred scrolls of the Sefer Torah.
For there is rot in their bones,
corruption in their hearts,
weakness in their knees,
and their bitter cry sent into the storm
of Kishinev and every Kishinev to come
shall not be heard,
not even in the porticos and corridors of heaven.


TOPICS: Poetry; Society
KEYWORDS:

1 posted on 05/29/2011 5:51:05 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

That last tsar deserved whatever happened to him; there’s just no excuse for a Russian ruler tolerating anything like that in 1903.


2 posted on 05/29/2011 5:57:38 AM PDT by wendy1946 (Bork Obunga; Before he borks you...)
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To: Kaslin

Compliance seems easier. Today, American people of faith all too often cooperate with those who seek to annihilate their identity. All education is religious education — and “free” public education is structured around statism, the pious fraud that civil government can serve as a de-facto deity.


3 posted on 05/29/2011 6:00:04 AM PDT by it_ürür (but the caravan moves along)
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To: Kaslin
Okay, it's true of some Jews. But why single them out? There are people like that in all nations. Right here in the USA we have leftist professors and pundits who condemn our country. We have people, including police, who tell us it's better to give criminals what they want than to resist them. We have pacifists who would disarm us, both as a nation and as individuals. We no longer hear the slogan "Better Red than dead," but the idea is still around, and will reappear as soon as a threat makes itself visible. So don't beat up on the Jews for not resisting pogroms. They were doing what a significant fraction of the human race has done as long as there have been humans. We need to inspire a spirit of courage and resistance in all peoples, not just Jews.
4 posted on 05/29/2011 6:07:40 AM PDT by JoeFromSidney (New book: RESISTANCE TO TYRANNY. A primer on armed revolt. Available form Amazon.)
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To: Kaslin; All

If you are interested in further researching this subject, you must read Bernard Malamud’s unforgettable novel The Fixer


5 posted on 05/29/2011 7:21:52 AM PDT by notdownwidems (Vote Republican! We'rewhy not injure him and bring him for 1/10 of 1% better than the other guys!)
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To: JoeFromSidney

What you say is unfortunately true, sadly even in the U.S. I believe you intended to write “better dead than Red”, a conviction also held by many John Deere loyalists. Sorry, your comments are nothing to joke about.


6 posted on 05/29/2011 7:40:05 AM PDT by derSchurfer (When the Rule of Law is ignored good citizens will take the law into their own hands.)
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To: wendy1946

No, he didn’t deserve to be murdered, nor did his wife, four daughters, and invalid son. The statement you made is the underlying reasoning at the core of Bolshevism and the neo Bolshevists to this day. The murder of the czar and his family was the threshold of the gulags the.Ukrainiam famine, and the Bolshevik slaughter of 20 million people.
Oh, but they were mistly anti-Semites, so I guess they deserved whatever happened to them, too.


7 posted on 05/29/2011 8:40:06 AM PDT by kabumpo (Kabumpo)
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To: JoeFromSidney

Yes, but the Jews have been excessively abject and cowardly for many generations.


8 posted on 05/29/2011 8:42:01 AM PDT by kabumpo (Kabumpo)
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To: kabumpo

Tsar Peter would have had those idiots flogged. If they’re going to be doing pogroms in the 20’th century they should have the decency to do it over banking or money issues or communism or some such and not because they’re stupid enough to believe that Jews would be cooking Christian children into matzas. Any tsar who DIDN’T have those idiots flogged didn’t deserve to live.


9 posted on 05/29/2011 1:02:07 PM PDT by wendy1946 (Bork Obunga; Before he borks you...)
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To: wendy1946

And neither did his wife, four daughters and invalid son, who were also killed. And the other 25 million who were exterminated.
Don t you see that was the logical and practical result of whar you are sating. You are endorsing the murder of the czar and his family, and the Bolshevik takeover because the czar failed in his duty and was “stupid”.


10 posted on 05/29/2011 1:49:44 PM PDT by kabumpo (Kabumpo)
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To: kabumpo

The fact that Russia did not need a Bolshevik takeover does not change the fact of that last tsar being too stupid to live. Don’t ask me to feel sorry for him.


11 posted on 05/29/2011 3:09:49 PM PDT by wendy1946 (Bork Obunga; Before he borks you...)
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To: wendy1946
And you.seem too vengeful to understand that his murder made all the Bolshevik horror for the next 70 years possible. So who is stupid?
12 posted on 05/29/2011 3:23:01 PM PDT by kabumpo (Kabumpo)
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