Pogroms and Students

The true terror of communal violence

I think a cold open with a testimonial of survival is required for this one. This is from a 26-year-old Israeli named Shmuel in an interview he gave on October 20th, 2023 about what happened when his flight from Tel Aviv landed in the Dagestani region of Russia.

I was travelling to Makhachkala to see my fiancé. The flight arrived at 8:19 p.m. local time. Out of the 45 passengers onboard, 15, including children, were Israeli. Many had a layover in Makhachkala on their way to Moscow. We were brought to passport control and asked to wait due to a riot on the street. There were a lot of police around.

Suddenly, we see hundreds of people breaking into the airport. The police evacuated us into a bus, while people were running along the runway and throwing rocks after us. Children were screaming. One girl was injured by shards of broken glass. Very scary. The bus loops around the airport, people are chasing us, rocks are flying. I cover the window with my suitcase. At one point, the crowd stops the bus. They enter inside and ask each of us whether we’re Muslim or Jewish. We’re lucky that the Israelis on the bus speak Russian. It could have all ended with us getting killed (I know the rioters shot and wounded a flight attendant.)

I don’t speak Russian, but Israelis who did helped me out. I answer that I’m Muslim and I’m scared to die. Luckily, they believe me. I saw death on that bus. If they had given me a serious interrogation, they would have realized that I was Israeli. The police rescue us. They place the bus under protection. Thousands of Hamas supporters were on the field. After four hours of terror, a Russian army helicopter evacuated us. It shoots into the air to scare the crowd, like in action movies, and then takes us to a Russian military base in another city. We sleep there, eat there. Whoever wants to, flies to Moscow, but some others stay.

My friend Kristaps Andrejsons of the Eastern Border podcast recently put out some incredible coverage of the event described in this testimonial and the similar events that broke across the Dagestani region which, unless you speak Russian, you probably won’t get anywhere else. But in that coverage, he made a very important distinction: this was not a protest, this was not unrest, this was not a riot—this was a pogrom. While no one died, which is usually a feature of a pogrom, it requires a monumental feat of mental gymnastics to imagine that this wouldn’t have escalated to the point of murder, especially if we take this testimony at face value, as I believe we should. One need only watch the disturbing footage to see the multitudes of mostly young, college-aged men yelling and laughing, while demanding to know “where the Jews were,” to anyone they came across, to know exactly what this was. And that is not even the most potentially damning part of the story.

Kristaps, while making sure to couch the commentary with a major grain of salt, has even reported that a source he trusts saw evidence that, interestingly coinciding with the meeting Hamas held with Putin, suggests the pogrom was essentially given the green light by the Russian government. This last part is still merely a rumor, but it is not historically unprecedented, especially in the Russian context, which is the context in which the modern pogrom was birthed (we’ll come back to that). This event didn’t occur in a vacuum either, with a Jewish community center in Nalcik being torched after being inscribed with the totally normal and reasonable “Death to the Jews” inscription being painted on one of its walls. In addition, citizens from Cherkessk were recorded demanding that Jews leave their country. It’s gotten so bad that Moscow’s ex-chief rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt’s warning from almost a year ago that “the best option for Russian Jews is to leave” is feeling a bit like the warnings made by Rabbi Stephen Wise during the 1930s. Disturbing as all of these events were, however, they’re still a world away from most of the world’s Jews, many of whom live in the United States. However, it is clear, to the historically-minded among us, that Jews are starting to (or at least appearing to) fill a role in the West that they haven’t filled in a relatively long time, because the threats, attempts at intimidation, and even violence directed at Jews has made its way to these shores.

One could describe what happened on October 25th, 2023, at Cooper Union, an elite liberal arts and engineering college in New York City, as similar, but less terrifying. However, the parallels are clear. According to a report in the independent Jewish publication Forward, “Jewish students at Cooper Union [were] told to hide as pro-Palestinian protesters banged on doors of locked library.” According to the report, the protesters were banging on the locked doors, shouting “Globalize the Infitada!” in direct reference to several events throughout Arab history that, to be blunt, tend to involve violence being directed exclusively at Jews. While the protesters never got into the library, it was already became clear that the goal was intimidation of the Jewish students inside the library, especially when seeing the protesters banging against the window behind which a Jewish student wearing his yarmulke sat. This was apparently what had provoked them to do what they did. One, of course, can’t say for certain what would happen had these young people gotten into the library, but one of the Jewish students who was inside was quoted saying, “I really, truly believe they would have done physical assault if they came in. For me it was like: How could it get to this point?” After the protesters eventually dispersed, Cooper Union’s administration, instead of admonishing a clear breach in anything resembling free speech—in this case, speech designed to directly intimidate a smaller group of people based on their group identity—“downplayed” the event, according to Forward, “saying in a statement Wednesday night that the library was closed for about 20 minutes while student protesters passed through.” This has resulted in over 300 alums from Cooper Union threatening to cut their donations to the school in a letter published on November 2nd, 2023.

The scenes of harassment and intimidation of Jewish students has not been confined to Cooper Union, however. Footage taken on October 18th and released to X on November 1st, 2023, depict a Jewish student on the Harvard University campus being surrounded by pro-Palestinian activists, with one physically assaulting him for the crime of him filming their antics with his phone (what a shock, someone using their phone to film a loud and obnoxious event in their periphery). The first main takeaway from this event, like the event at Cooper Union, was that the man who assaulted the Jewish student was an editor at the Harvard Law Review, and that most of the people involved in the protest were themselves students. The second main takeaway from this event was the Harvard Business School’s dean Srikant Datar making a statement in which he condemned antisemitism, but, like many in his position, pulled an “All Lives Matter” and also condemned Islamophobia, as if that had anything to do with the inciting incident. While Datar is likely in a difficult position—and one I would not want to be in—it’s clear that he’s trying to appease people that have very little issue with a Jewish student being surrounded by a mob and assaulted by one of its members.

Clearly, this is how it’s being perceived by some, including the hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who penned a letter to Harvard’s President and posted it on X on November 4th, 2023. Writing that it “became clear that the situation at Harvard is dire and getting worse, much worse than I had realized,” Ackman detailed several other incidents that were revealed to him at a seven-hour meeting “on campus meeting with Jewish, Israeli, and non-Jewish students and faculty at the Law School, at HBS and in a 90-minute town hall in Aldrich 112 with 230 Jewish college students.” He continues:

Jewish students are being bullied, physically intimidated, spat on, and in several widely-disseminated videos of one such incident, physically assaulted. Student Slack message boards are replete with anti-Semitic statements, memes, and images. On-campus protesters on the Widener Library steps and elsewhere shout “Intifada! Intifada! Intifada! From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free!” as they knowingly call for violent insurrection and use eliminationist language seeking the destruction of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.

He accuses the school of doing nothing about what he frames as the growing threat to Jewish students’ safety on the Harvard campus and, most damningly, pointing out the rampant hypocrisy of Harvard’s administration, who would never accept such galling expressions of invective as “a Harvard white supremacist protest where students shouted ‘Tulsa! Tulsa! Tulsa! From the Atlantic to the Pacific, America should be free of Black people.’” The point is well-taken.

Other violent altercations involving students and young activists on college campuses have occurred in the days between October 7th and November 7th, 2023, including a pro-Hamas supporter snatching an Israeli flag from a CUNY - Hunter College student, two University of California at Berkeley students assaulting a Jewish student during a pro-Palestinian rally on their campus, a Jewish student being attacked by pro-Palestinian activists at Tulane University, and the mask slipping all the way off¹ of various pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Montreal and Concordia University, as well as the shots fired at two Jewish schools on the night of November 8th (many thanks to my editor and collaborator Jamie Paul, as well as previous History Impossible guest Oren Kessler, for spotting these examples). This isn’t even covering the other attempts at intimidation and desecration being seen on the streets of many American cities.² As best I can tell, with the exception of the McGill University Vice Chancellor condemning the planned “National Day of Shutdown” on November 9th, (the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht), and Columbia University suspending its Students for Justice in Palestine group for allegedly “threatening rhetoric and intimidation,” no disciplinary actions have been taken against the students involved in the violence and intimidation and apart from some equivocating public statements (whose equivocation would have been unthinkable after George Floyd was killed in 2020), administrations have done very little in the way of intervention.

The overall takeaway, therefore, is this: these near-pogroms and bursts of anti-Jewish violence and intimidation were enabled by authorities, whether its the staff of Cooper Union, the dean of Harvard Business School, or the Russian government and involved almost exclusively young people, many of whom (or most in some cases) being students. This is not insignificant.

One could say the event at Harvard, or the event at Cooper Union, or the incidents at UC Berkeley and Tulane, or what we saw occur in Dagestan was “merely” in response to the horrors that have been unfolding in Gaza since Israel’s retaliation began, but at what level does the throat clearing and excuse-making become an exercise of self parody? All of these events were aimed at doing one thing: intimidate Jews. It might have been coded in the language of “decolonization”—which is anything but non-violent, as Frantz Fanon has taught us—or that of simple anti-Zionism, but one must ask themselves this if they’re willing to make such excuses: if this is about anti-Zionism, why aren’t Christian Zionists or Evangelical dispensationalists being intimidated, surrounded, assaulted, or threatened with worse? Why aren’t non-religious Zionists being targeted? Is one really so naïve as to believe something isn’t happening when it clearly is? Is one really so unable to understand that what we are looking at are textbook examples of pogroms that, thanks only to circumstance or luck, haven’t resulted in actual murder?

It is fair to say, as some have, that we should not be fearmongering. No pogroms have actually happened, and despite the disgusting displays of casual Jew-hatred and near-misses when it comes to mass violence, we’re okay. That’s always important to remember: we are okay. Our own police forces and government, at least in the United States, are not complicit in the way other police forces and governments in the past have been. There is more legal recourse now than ever before and there is no reason to believe that is going to change anytime soon, despite tone-deaf equivocations being made by progressives and the Biden administration. However, this does not mean we should take lightly the open hostility toward Jews that has accumulated over the course of a mere month, often at scales previously thought unthinkable. It does not take long or much for these things to spiral out of control in a burst of shocking violence that, in the moment, feels like it has come out of nowhere. This is why having perspective while also making sure one does not live in denial is vital.

The truth is, no one wants to imagine a pogrom happening in 2023, especially in Western nations. No one wants to imagine regular, everyday people engaging in shocking violence and desecration upon their neighbors and schoolmates. No one wants to imagine that it is self-righteously outraged students, not uniformed Nazis, that serve as the first warning sign of such a horrifying event. No one wants to imagine that their son—who was, seemingly just yesterday, asking to borrow the family Toyota so he could go see his girlfriend or go see a movie with his bros—is capable of feeling the tingle of bloodlust in his heart when he realizes that there are people, arguably millions of people, who would see his expression of violence against that filthy colonialist Jew as being one of righteous nobility. No one wants to imagine this, but that is what a pogrom is. That is often who takes part in it: the young, the self-righteous, and the angry. Pogroms aren’t always started by students, but given those characteristics often applying to students, it should not be shocking how often they have played a part in the past, especially when enabled by authority figures.

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I recently spoke of the deceptively (and disturbingly) simple forces that undergirded the unimaginable slaughter that took place in and around the Independent State of Croatia, most clarified by the story of the Bosnian town of Kulen Vakuf where over 2,000 Muslim men, women, and children were killed in the bloodlust-filled month of September of 1941. As the historian Max Bergholz writes in his brilliant microhistorical monograph covering this story, Violence as a Generative Force:

[A] convergence of differing agendas and mutually beneficial incentives can be sufficient to compel a certain number of people toward persecuting and committing violence against their neighbors. “Ethnic conflict” thus quickly became a dominant axis for local conflict during the spring and summer of 1941 because the new [Independent State of Croatia] authorities offered clear incentives—which were especially attractive to local residents previously at the margins of economic, social, and political life—to act out pre-existing social conflicts, and to initiate new ones, through an ethnic key. The evidence suggests that pre-conflict political dispositions along an ethnic axis were far less important in driving behavior than one might assume. “Ethnic conflicts,” therefore, have to be made at the micro level through vigorous work in the present; they do simply reflect macro level cleavages, or emerge logically and naturally from pre-existing cultural differences, or even antagonisms along such lines. They are, in short, highly contingent, even in societies in which many people are perceived to be nominally of different ethnicities.

This helps explain why something like a pogrom of any kind against any group of people can spin so wildly out of control and descend into the realm of ghastly humiliation, rape, mutilation, and murder; it’s not because of the ideology held by the perpetrators as much as it is the opportunity to settle petty grievances and frustrations, as well as seek some kind of material or even social gain. That extremely important social gain is illustrated even more broadly and profoundly by Christopher Browning’s legendary work, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, in which he determines through extensive primary source documentation that most of the vast amount of killing committed by the Nazis’ Ordnungpolizei Police Battalion 101 was done for the sake of social acceptance. As the celebrated historiographer Sarah Maza concisely summarizes:

The 80 to 90 percent of men who carried out mass murder, despite recoiling from the task and having the option of refusing, did so out of conformism, respect for authority, and fear that they would be rejected by their brethren should they refuse to take on their share of an unpleasant duty. They did not especially want to shoot Jews, but they wanted even less to be shunned by the comrades and superiors who at this point made up their entire world. Browning’s conclusions are thus less about the “banality of evil” than about the chilling effects of group conformity.

In other words, the ideology that seemingly drives violent mobs is both a pre-hoc and post-hoc justification for base-level brutishness and simplistic hatred and, often, material and social gain. As much as a belief may seem to matter (and it does to a degree, don’t get me wrong), it’s rarely what actually causes people to behave like human-shaped beasts.

This is why, as baked into ideologies—from National Socialism to modern-day De-colonialism—as anti-Semitism is, it is not a belief system. It is, to use my terminology from a moment ago, a type of base-level brutishness and simplistic hatred that just so happens to be so documented, it takes on the appearance of a belief system. It at least appears to be a feature of radical political movements, rather than a movement in and of itself. This explains why there seems to be so much diversity in who expresses and commits hatred against Jews, which we have been seeing play out on a near-global scale throughout the month of October 2023. And the fact that it seems to be coming from ostensibly “normal” people speaks to both what Max Bergholz referred to as “violence as a generative force” and to just what makes pogroms so fundamentally terrifying. It is not the uniformed SS officer, or even the keffiyeh-wearing Islamist thug brandishing an AK-47, that is destroying your property, threatening and intimidating you, raping your sister, murdering your parents: it is your neighbors. It is people you know, maybe even people you like; people you never, not in a trillion years, imagine saying what they’re saying, doing what they’re doing. If there is a pop cultural comparison one could use, I suppose it could be to zombies, but at least zombies look like undead monsters. Imagine The Walking Dead (back when it was good, at least), but instead of the rotting, shambling corpses, just imagine people you know doing what the zombies did to your favorite characters, and then you might—might—have a good idea of what makes a pogrom so terrifying. And yet, it all becomes even more terrifying when you realize that the people we love to believe are being trained to be the most moral and rational among us—that is, young adult students—almost always have a significant part to play in such horrible violence.

I’ve already spoken and written about the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, more than once. However, more can be said about it than simply its role in galvanizing public support toward Zionism in the early 20th century, or even the barbaric violence itself. I’ve mentioned, at least in passing, about how the pogrom that claimed the lives of 49 Jews and injury of hundreds more began, but I think it’s important for us to dive a little bit more into the details of this pogrom’s origins. As I’ve said before, this pogrom began with groups of students. However, these students were doing more than just taunting the Jews: they were inciting post-Easter service drunken revelers against them. Historian Steven J. Zipperstein provides a much closer view of how the Kishinev pogrom started in his book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History:

By 2:00 p.m., the crowd had thickened, with some now much drunker. Many witnesses later reported that in the square were students from the local Russian Orthodox seminary, some in uniform, inciting the crowd to turn on Jews. Trial witnesses insisted that the students were joined by dozens of men sporting the festive red shirts favored by workers. In the first reports appearing in Western newspapers, the riot was described as an attack by workers; testimony later given in court indicated that these “workers” were most likely rabble-rousers close to Krushevan’s circle who were disguised so as to leave the impression that workingmen were turning on the Jews.

Zipperstein is careful to ask the important questions following this description, including “How decisive were the provocations of seminary students spotted by so many at the riot’s start, and of those in the Bessarabets circle?” It’s a smart move to ask these questions because nothing, in the case of mass violence, is monocausal. However, it’s certainly true that the Orthodox seminary students were taking advantage of the situation presented to them and were saying the things they were saying, and apart from some ten-year-old children harassing Jews before the agitation started, the students were the first in that massive throng to make things about the Jews. And indeed, there are examples of students directing the mob that would destroy Jewish property and, eventually, Jewish lives. For example, Zipperstein writes that “the office of Bessarabets had its windows stoned because a radical student misdirected the mob to it, claiming it was the property of Jews.” There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the students clamored for the murder of Jews, but within two hours of the chaos they helped inspire, “Death to Jews!” was echoing across Kishinev. However, it’s impossible to see students as being innocent of the bloodlust, however performative. As Zipperstein recounts, on the morning following the first night of the two-day pogrom, “one of the students encountered a Jew standing in front of his house with a terrified look on his face, and the student stopped to say, ‘Why weep? Tomorrow we’ll murder all of you.’”

As we covered in the last episode of History Impossible, the Kishinev pogrom, while significant for its role in signal-boosting the Zionist project and giving it a deeply moral dimension, was not the only pogrom to occur in the Russian Empire during the first few years of the 20th century. It also wasn’t even the deadliest. That dubious honor goes to the pogroms of Odessa in 1905, in which over 400 Jews were murdered by mobs of Russians, Ukrainians, and Greeks over the course of four days. The macro-level causes of this pogrom included Russia’s loss of the Russo-Japanese War—the biggest humiliation experienced by a supposedly modern and civilized European power to an Asiatic one—as well as the October Manifesto we discussed in the last episode/post of History Impossible about the Israel-Palestine conflict’s root causes. The violence that preceded the pogrom as part of the 1905 revolution took on a student-led dimension in Odessa during the summer of that year. In fact, many Jewish students were involved in the unrest of 1905. However, this is not to say the Jews of Odessa were behind anything; it is more to demonstrate that they would become the scapegoat for the unrest against whom reactionaries and authorities would turn their ire come October. Young radicals—among whom there were Jews—would also become the victims of this ire, but it was the Jews who ultimately were saddled with the blame thanks to a tragic confluence of circumstances.

However, it’s important to first set the stage. Historian Robert Weinberg writes at length about this in his contribution to the collection Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, explaining as follows:

On June 20th […] virulently anti-Semitic, four-page broadside entitled Odesskie dni appeared. The tract blamed the Jews […] for the recent disorders and the tragedy at the port.

Accusing the Jews of fomenting the unrest and enlisting the support of unwitting Russians, the author of the broadside stated that Jews initiated the shootings on the 14th and 15th of June and were responsible for setting fire to the port. The tract ended with a call to hold the Jewish community of Odessa collectively responsible for the destruction and demanded that Jews compensate Gentiles who suffered property damage and personal loss. In addition, Odesskie dni called for the disarming of all Jews and suggested a general search of all Jewish apartments in the city. Failure to carry out these proposals, the tract concluded, would make it “impossible for Christians to live in Odessa” and result in the take-over of Odessa by Jews.

While Odesskie dni did not call for acts of anti-Jewish violence, its appearance underscores the tense atmosphere existing in Odessa and highlights how in times of social unrest and political crisis ethnic hostility could come to the fore and threaten further disruption of social calm. In the week or so following the massive disorders of mid-June, scattered attacks against Jews were reported as anti-Semitic agitators tried to stir up Gentiles into a pogromist mood. Moreover, the belief that Jews were responsible for the June unrest was evident in the reports of some government officials. Gendarme chief Kuzubov wrote that the instigators of the disorders and arson were “exclusively Jews” and Count Aleksei Ignatiev, in his report on the disorders in Kherson and Ekaterinoslav provinces, also accused Jews of setting fire to the port but did not furnish any hard evidence or substantiation. Though no pogrom occurred in June, the sentiments expressed in both Odesskie dni and official reports indicate the emotionally charged atmosphere of Russian-Jewish relations in Odessa and the extent to which government officials, who in their search for simple explanations and unwillingness to dig deeper into the root causes of the social and political turmoil engulfing Odessa, were prepared to affix blame to the Jews.

Jews found it difficult to dispel the accusations expressed in Odesskie dni. While many reports of Jewish revolutionary activity were exaggerations or even fabrications, Jews were behind some though certainly not all - of the unrest in Odessa. During the summer the police arrested several Jews for making and stockpiling bombs. Jews also figured prominently among the 133 Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries either considered politically unreliable, arrested or exiled after the June Days. In addition, a leaflet distributed throughout the city, apparently by a Bundist organization, urged Jews to arm themselves, struggle for civil and political freedom, and overthrow the autocracy. Jews also helped organize rallies at the university and direct student strikes and public demonstrations. Like others throughout the Empire, Odessa's university became the locus of anti-government activity after August when the Tsar granted administrative autonomy to Russia's universities, thereby removing these institutions from the jurisdiction of the police. Jewish youths, students, and workers filled the ranks of the crowds that attended the rallies at the university in September and October, and Jews actively participated in the wave of work stoppages, demonstrations, and street disorders that broke out in mid-October. On October 16th, a day of major disturbances, 197 of the 214 persons arrested were Jews. Moreover, Jews eagerly celebrated the political concessions granted in the October Manifesto, seeing them as the first step in the civil and political emancipation of Russian Jewry.

These events confirmed many high-ranking police and other officials in the belief that Jews were a seditious element. As we have seen, many government officials blamed Jews for the June unrest. In doing so they were following a tradition of accusing Jews for fomenting trouble in Odessa. […] Such attitudes, along with the legacy of discrimination against Russian Jewry and governmental tolerance and at times sponsorship of anti-Jewish organizations and propaganda, signaled to anti-Semites that authorities in Odessa would probably countenance violence against Jews. When combined with economic resentments and frustrations as well as timeworn religious prejudices, the perception that Jews were revolutionaries provided fertile ground for a pogrom. To those residents of Odessa alarmed by the opposition to the Tsar and government, Jews were a convenient target for retaliation.

And retaliation did indeed occur a few months later. And among the forefront of that retaliation? “Patriotic student groups,” as Weinberg writes, who “consolidated their ranks” along with reactionary militant organizations like the Black Hundreds, who all began to face off against the pro-Revolution anti-Tsarist faction. After demonstrations escalated on October 18th to the point where a young boy was killed—likely by a member of the Revolutionary faction—things quickly spiraled out of control. While Weinberg is careful and correct to point out that both sides “were itchy for confrontation and ready to instigate trouble,” it was the pro-Tsarist student groups and reactionaries who started screaming “Beat the Yids” and “Death to the Yids,” despite the fact that their opponents were not uniformly Jewish by any measure. This is important to note because, as noted earlier by Weinberg, 197 of 214 people who were arrested on October 16th were Jews; however, this has less to do with the make-up of the crowds and more to do with the authorities either letting the subsequent pogroms occur or even taking part themselves. This was the same song, and much louder second verse to Kishinev. While many Jews had formed self-defense leagues and managed to keep things from getting worse than they ultimately did, it did very little to stop the carnage that did occur as the violence spread outward throughout Odessa, where rape, pillage, and murder were allowed to happen. The British Consul to Odessa, Charles Stewart Smith, witnessed all of this and it is according to his account that we see evidence of the city governor’s complicity in the massacre. Instead of using the police to disperse the demonstrations, Smith reported to the British Foreign Office that “It is quite clear that the late disorders were prepared and worked by the police who openly superintended the work of destruction, looting and murder.”

The story of the Odessa pogroms might seem a little less clear-cut than the story of the Kishinev pogrom, thanks to the backdrop of the First Russian Revolution and the other macro-causes I mentioned earlier that led to mutual violence from two radical groups. However, the fact that the Jews were, as they often were, scapegoated for the violence starts to clarify the trend we’re seeing here. Like Kishinev—and indeed seemingly like many pogroms and threats made against Jews both then and now—it was radical young people, often including students, who incited, encouraged, and even participated in grotesque violence against Jews, only to be enabled by the authorities that could have otherwise stopped them. More to the original point I discussed, these were regular people—both students and otherwise—who engaged in the sickening violence that characterized early 20th century Russia; these were Kishinev’ and Odessa’s Jews’ neighbors, co-workers, perhaps even friends or friendly acquaintances. But circumstances aligned and the “world’s oldest hatred” was permitted to manifest. And manifest, as we’ve seen, it did.

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We should not downplay the role students played in these events, especially because they were downplayed almost immediately. As Steven Zipperstein explains, the role students played in the Kishinev pogrom was almost immediately downplayed, perhaps thanks to the connection the seminaries had to the Tsarist government. Similarly, while the violence that occurred in Odessa was dispersed across many different groups, students—this time pro-Tsarists—again played a role in making it happen. This forces us to ask:

Why students?

That’s the real million dollar question I’ve been trying to tackle. Unfortunately, the historian is probably not capable of answering it, not without the help of clear and demonstrable psychological explanations (and even those, much as I’m loath to admit, have their own limitations). When we’re talking about student radicals, we’re talking about a couple of things. The first is young people. That part is actually relatively easy to address, since there were plenty of pogroms where being a student was less of an obvious correlation with violence. For example, there was the infamous Bialystok pogrom of 1906, which involved mostly the Black Hundreds again, which was largely made up of young people (and young people who saw students as the enemy). There were also pogroms in the wake of the First World War, first in Lviv in 1918 after the Polish-Ukrainian War of that year, and the second in Kyiv in 1919, both mostly carried out by young people, but this time mostly by soldiers thanks to the heightened militarization that went hand in hand with the Great War and the second Russian Revolution of 1917. With these later pogroms, it is less surprising that violence was the language of the mob—these were young people who had marinated in violence for the previous decade. They were still these Jews’ neighbors, but they were far from “regular” people anymore, at least in the context of peacetime. Nevertheless, they fit the mold: young people.

So that half-answers the question. Young people tend to be more impulsive and thus more likely to be violent, and this is especially the case when they have been exposed to and taken part in violence already. However, this doesn’t apply to the Orthodox seminary students in Kishinev or the pro-Tsarist patriotic student groups in Odessa. Why did these students come to believe it was acceptable to not just scapegoat Jews, but to encourage their outright destruction? I’m not sure I have the answer. I’m not even sure if what I’m seeing, both in the early 20th century and today in 2023, is merely a correlation, or something deeper. I think it is reasonable to point out the correlation and suggest that perhaps there is something going on with young people in institutions where a more radical approach to life is often promoted, if only intellectually. Does it mean that anti-Semitism is a fundamental part of a higher education, both at a Russian Orthodox seminary in 1903 or in a cultural studies department in 2023? No. I’m not willing to go that far. But something in both of those contexts is creating an intellectual incentive to see Jews as rational targets for their rhetoric, if not their violence. What is clear is that there is something about radical politics that correlates with anti-Semitism, and radical politics correlates with young people, and oftentimes, students. Maybe the correlational chain is overstated here, but I’m having trouble seeing it that way.

What is also clear is that these students and academics, however singled out some individuals among them have been (including in this very essay), are acting as mobs, or, if we’re being more charitable, as groups. There is no doubt that this raises the stakes and, unfortunately, makes the likelihood of mass violence rise. Many people intuit this, but it’s actually supported by social science. In his brilliant 2021 book covering the history of mass delusions, The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups, financial theorist and neurologist William J. Bernstein writes the following:

Not only do people respond more to narratives than to facts and data, but preliminary studies demonstrate that the more compelling the story, the more it erodes our critical-thinking skills. This research suggests, in addition, an inherent conflict of interest between the suppliers and consumers of opinion: the former wish to convince and will devise the most compelling narratives possible, whereas the latter, if they are rational, should intentionally avoid those narratives and rely only on data, facts, and analytical discipline. Closely related to our preference for compelling narratives is the human tendency for self-deception. Since humans are adept at detecting the “tells” that others are lying, the ability to deceive oneself eliminates the tells, and so makes one a better deceiver. Throughout history, relatively few of the protagonists of religious mass delusions were the con men they seemed to skeptical outsiders, but rather the sincerely self-deceived victims of their own delusions.

Later in the book’s conclusion, Bernstein points out the human capacity for mimicry as a means to adapt, often on an evolutionary scale, is the baseline that allows for these aspects of human psychology (that is, our bias toward narrative and our tendency for self-deception). He makes use of what he calls one of “the most spectacular examples of aberrant moral contagion” to illustrate and summarize this point, in which he writes the following:

When historian Laurence Rees interviewed Nazi death camp guards and administrative personnel near the end of their lives, he found them more open about their work than they had been decades before. He was stunned to find that, rather than evil robots who blindly followed orders, these Germans, almost to a man and woman, were normal-appearing, intelligent individuals who considered themselves ethical participants in a worthy enterprise, namely, ridding the world of Jewish vermin. Like junior executives at an elite firm, they competed and innovated to complete their horrific tasks with maximum efficiency. Still, there were limits to the Germans’ peer-driven inhumanity, particularly when it came to machine-gunning thousands of Jews at a time, which produced psychological distress even among hardened SS troops. Consequently, the most “efficient” death camps at Sobibór, Belźec, Treblinka, and Birkenau (Auschwitz) relied on the labors of non-German prisoners for the dirtiest work, and required only relatively small numbers of German personnel—approximately twenty at Belźec, for example, at which six hundred thousand were murdered.

It is hard to avoid the dark conclusion that if enough of our peers deem genocide desirable, many, if not most, of us are capable of it. Those who still think that German exceptionalism was a major factor in the Holocaust should consider the behavior of English officials on the German-occupied channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey, who willingly cooperated in sending their Jewish residents to the camps. In the words of one former Nazi official, “The trouble with the world today is that people who have never been tested go around making judgments about people who have.” Or, more succinctly, one should never underestimate the human tendency toward mimicry, and especially of how the everyday beneficial mass delusions that help businesses and whole societies function smoothly can rapidly mutate into fraudulent or genocidal mass delusions.

This rings more eerily true than it “should,” but it’s also beyond vital to understand about human nature. The window dressing always changes, but the deeply-held motives never do. This is why, in order to illustrate this, I often point out the similarities modern political movements—especially the radical ones and especially the ones that supposedly eschew god, either according to their doctrines or their adherents themselves—and religious movements of the past. Religious mania is something us moderns understand as something dangerous. Political mania, though? That seems to always hit a snag based on the political orientation of the person doing the observing or critiquing (see also: the selective interpretations of the George Floyd riots of 2020 or what I think we can call the “Trump phenomenon”; sorry guys, I gotta say “it’s both”). Hence, the religious characterization, while in my opinion accurate, is also more useful for people to understand what is at stake.

As secular as American society essentially is and as supposedly materialistic the concerns of the pro-Palestinian camp are, it is hard for the historical-minded (and the religiously-skeptical) among us not to see a religious mania element here. During the Black Death, as we’ve covered on History Impossible, there was a rabid obsession with Jews as the source of all ills, especially from the group of radical Christians known as the Flagellants. These people would go from town to town, preaching extreme penitence by whipping themselves in an orgiastic fervor, both titillating and inspiring the onlookers they developed. After their performance, Jews often faced their wrath as blood libellants, Christ-killers, and the source of the pestilence that was ravaging all of Europe. The specifics of the rhetoric are always different, but the tenor and zeal is often the same and I find it increasingly difficult not to see throngs of pro-Palestinian activists deeply and meaningfully resembling the Flagellants in their own perverse way. They have yet to start kicking down the doors of local Jews, and maybe they never will, but their resemblance should give the rational among us more than a little pause. Especially when we allow for the reality of the religious mania comparisons to sink in.

Mercifully by 2023 and heading into 2024, our own pestilence that is COVID-19 is essentially in the rearview mirror, though its effects will likely linger for some time to come. Our politics were already polarized before the pandemic and they have become even more so in the years that have followed it, with foreign proxies doing most of the work, whether it was the Russo-Ukrainian War or, now, the Israel-Hamas War. However, this new war is different; not because it involves the Middle East, and not even because, like the War on Terror that kicked off in 2001, it involves radical Islam and jihad. It’s different because it involves Jews. Whether or not a Jew is a Zionist or even an outright anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian peace activist—see also the pro-Palestinian peace activists who were slaughtered on the West Bank on October 7th—the Jews, as a people, have clearly been made a target by the most radical among us. And as we know, the most radical among us tend to exist in universities. And while we also know that mass violence tends to be rooted in petty grievances and material gain, we know that the ideological justifications—the window dressing and the veneer of respectability—for such mass violence comes from radical politics. Are we going to continue pretending that the ideology of “decolonization”—an actual geopolitical process that ended over six decades ago, it should be noted—didn’t reveal itself in 2023 for what it was? Are we going to continue pretending that it has not been a moral disaster ever since it left the confines of the academy? Are we going to continue to pretend that, if we’re really being honest, it is not the true intellectual heir of applied Jew hatred, the mantle previously held by the National Socialists of Germany?

I certainly hope not. I may believe in the right to read, study, and believe whatever we want, especially without fear of reprisal from the state. But I would hope that after 2023, it would become obvious that world’s oldest hatred hasn’t gone anywhere, and that it’s even more obvious who is trafficking in it, and that is even more obvious still, that it seems to incubate in a very particular place.

1. It’s worth mentioning that an account claiming to be the girl in this video is insisting she said “cunt” and not “kike.” Honestly, I’ve tried watching and listening multiple times looking for the word “cunt,” but the way her mouth moves and the little we actually hear suggests an “i” sound rather than an “uh” sound. It feels silly to adjudicate something so small, but in the interest of not jumping the gun, I wanted to note this. I will not be following up with this, except maybe over on X if clearer evidence comes to light than protestations from someone with every reason to lie.

2. While it didn’t involve any violence, the most chilling event of early November was the sign pasted in Brooklyn outside an Orthodox synagogue—not a Zionist organization’s headquarters or a dispensationalist Christian church, or even the Israeli consulate—that overtly claimed “Settlers are the problem” (one must wonder what the poster’s suggested “Solution” might be). This is to say nothing of the smattering of videos of young people—interestingly many women—tearing down posters of the kidnapped Israeli hostages being held by Hamas.