Within the Pale: The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecution in Russia

by Michael Davitt

TO arrive at definite conclusions as to the immediate and the contributory causes of the sanguinary outrages perpetrated upon the Jews of Kishineff on the 19th and 20th of April, was a tedious and painful process, beset with innumerable difficulties. To try to find the truth amidst a mass of conflicting testimony, where murder and rape and rapine are charged against one side, and where the actual perpetrators of these deeds are supposed to be all in prison awaiting some form of trial, would be a formidable task even where the law and popular feeling were on the side of justice. But in a city where the injured class are placed almost beyond the protection of the law of the land, and where public passion is alike the author of outrage and the apologist of partisan officials, it is necessarily much more difficult for the searcher after unbiassed evidence to secure the object of his quest.

Disregarding entirely the accounts which have been published in the Russian and foreign press, I adopted the following means of reaching something approximating to the real facts as to the outrages; their instigators, cause, and extent, and the measure of representative Russian feeling in relation thereto:

On arriving at Odessa I interviewed Count Schouvaloff, the retiring Civil Governor of South Russia, and I reproduce from memory (not having taken notes of the conversation) what he was courteous enough to say. I also obtained expressions of opinion from Russian and other merchants in Odessa upon anti-Jewish feeling in South Russia; and these views, frankly biassed as they were, will speak for a very large class of Russian and of resident foreign Christian opinion about the Jews and their racial and commercial character, as developed in this country.

Immediately upon reaching Kishineff, I called upon the responsible leaders of the Jews to whom I carried letters of introduction from London, Paris, and New York. They are prominent citizens, and are largely of the medical profession. I obtained from them and others, including the three Rabbis of the city, a very copious statement of all that occurred there on the 19th and 20th of last month.

Resolved to compare this ex parte testimony with such Russian evidence as might be least tainted with anti-Semitic prejudice in this now somewhat demoralised place, I solicited and secured interviews with two Christian doctors of Russian blood; also with one of the highest civil functionaries in the district, who is a noble of great wealth, of unique local influence, whose name I am not permitted to use, but for whose bona fides I can absolutely vouch; and, in addition, I was privileged to hold fully an hour’s conversation on the subject of the riots and outrages with M. Karl Schmidt, who has been Mayor of the city for the last twenty-five years without interruption; the strongest possible evidence to his popularity with all classes of his fellow-citizens, and to his worth and capacity as a Russian municipal ruler.

I then met by appointment in the Jewish Hospital all the medical men, Jews, who had professionally attended to the persons brought there during and after the riots, who could speak as to the number of killed and wounded, and the extent of the injuries inflicted upon the unfortunate victims of the mob’s fury. The statements made to me by these doctors I repeated to the two Russian doctors I have already referred to, and I have noted down their comments upon the accounts given me by their Hebrew medical confrères.

My next step was to visit the scenes of outrage in the city, and in the Skulanska Rogatka district, where the most atrocious of the crimes were committed, and to obtain from the living witnesses of the outrages an account of what they saw and experienced, some of them from women and girls who went through the saturnalia of ruffianism as victims of outrage and of rape.

From these tales of revolting deeds I proceeded to the Jewish Cemetery, where I saw and counted the forty-four newly made graves of the massacred men, women, and children, whose freshly turned mounds stand there to-day with their simple Hebrew wooden marks of identity, as an appeal to the God alike of Christian and of Jew against deeds done in the pretended name of religion which might even shame devils to perpetrate.

I have taken pictures of these graves, of the shed in which the young girl of thirteen was assaulted, and killed with four men, of groups of little girls and women who passed through the two nights of horror in the quarter where the Moldavian fiends committed the worst deeds, and of houses in which numerous murders were committed.

Knowing how unlikely it would be for me, or for any man, to obtain from modest maidens and respectable married women any account, or even admission, of their having been violated, I sought the Rabbis of the city, and got from them and from some of the victims whom I met there particulars of the outrages to which they and others were subjected. These will, as far as the subject can permit it, be dealt with in subsequent letters.