The Ghosts of Kishinev in the East End: Responses to a Pogrom in the Jewish London of 1903

Abstract

The story of the Kishinev massacre has become familiar within Jewish collective memory. It was coming up to the Russian Orthodox Easter in 1903. In the Russian empire, the Easter weekend was traditionally a focus of blood libels, combining the representation of the Jews as the murderers of Christ with images of sacrifices and other bloody rituals associated, in the antisemitic imagination, with the Jewish festival of Passover. A violently antisemitic campaign had been circulating in the regional newspaper in Bessarabia, where the town of Kishinev lay, including an inflammatory article by the local police chief.1 On the eve of the Easter weekend, the body of a Christian child was found and a Christian young woman patient committed suicide in a Jewish hospital, giving rise to a blood libel story. There followed, over 19–20 April, a weekend of violence: according to official statistics, 49 Jews lost their lives and more than 500 were injured, some of them seriously; 700 houses were plundered and destroyed and 600 businesses and shops were looted. About 2,000 families were left homeless. One feature of the pogrom (the violent anti-Jewish riot) seemed to be an official collusion, with the police involved, a garrison of 5,000 soldiers taking no action to quell the violence, and local theological seminary students playing a leading role.