Outcomes

Yet in another sense the outcome of the Comité’s work on Schwarzbard’s behalf left all of the Jewish defense agencies with cause for anxiety. To be-gin with, the affair clearly exposed the inability of those organizations – all of them elite bodies that promoted a pragmatic, interest-based approach to politics rooted in a rational calculation of resources and a search for alliances within an international order based upon the rule of law³²² – to tame popular urges or even to mobilize them effectively in pursuit of ends they considered desirable. The October 1926 attempt by Louis Marshall and the American Jewish Committee to do so appears to have placed them at odds with most of the Jewish world,³²³ including the Schwarzbard Defense Committee, which

had concluded; Defense Committee to Schechtman, 8 February 1928, ibid. It is not certain whether those payments covered attorneys’ fees or other expenses that Torrès incurred in the course of preparing for the trial. For examples of fundraising appeals, see Defense Committee to Copernik, Jewish Club, Shanghai, 18 January 1927, ibid.;

Defense Committee to J. Krimsky, 21 April 1927, YIVO, RG80/445/37744–37745 (Document 53).

321 Comité des Délégations Juives, November 1927, CZA, A126/52/22 (Document 71).

322 The Comité des Délégations Juives and the American Jewish Congress both repre-sented themselves at the time of their establishment as organizations representing the authentic voice of the Jewish people, in contrast to the Alliance israélite uni-verselle, the Joint Foreign Committee, and the American Jewish Committee, which were portrayed as organizations of so-called notables without true popular support.

By the mid-1920s, however, both bodies had come to favor the quiet, behind-the-scenes negotiating style for which they had earlier criticized the notables. Witness the December 1925 warning of Marvin Lowenthal, the American Jewish Congress’s delegate to the Comité des Délégations Juives: “Negotiation without publicity […]

would always seem preferable when a private organization is trying to deal with a Government. The government can then formulate a policy without offending na-tionalist passions. Is this that terrible thing, ‘secret diplomacy’?” Lowenthal to Amer-ican Jewish Congress, 22 December 1925, CZA, A405/73. On the defense organiza-tions’ general approach to politics, see Engel, Manhigim yehudim, passim.

323 See, for example, the reportage Anonymous, Untitled, in: Haynt, 6 December 1926; Anonymous, Untitled, in: Haynt, 30 January 1927; Anonymous, Untitled, in:

felt compelled to depart from its preference for behind-the-scenes work and to dissent publicly in order to avoid a similar judgment.³²⁴ Compelled by Marshall’s statement to expose its own strategy to public debate, the Defense Committee found itself increasingly put upon to explain and to justify that strategy to recalcitrant representatives of the Jewish press.³²⁵

Parizer haynt, 27 January 1927. Marshall’s statement was quoted at the trial by the attorney representing Petliura’s brother, César Campinchi, who employed it as proof that Schwarzbard has actually done a disservice to his coreligionists; TT, 26 October 1927, 16–18 (YIVO, RG80/494/40652–40654). Evidently anticipating such use, sev-eral Jewish newspapers, along with the Schwarzbard Defense Committee in Paris, requested that he revise his statement so as to forestall this possibility. In response, Marshall wrote to Peter Wiernik, editor of the New York Yiddish newspaper Morgen zhurnal (and a close associate of Marshall in the social welfare work of the Ameri-can Jewish Joint Distribution Committee). Wiernik did not publish Marshall’s letter, warning him that it “would arouse considerable resentment.” P. Wiernik to L. Mar-shall, 27 October 1927, AJA, MS Coll. 359 (Louis Marshall), box 144 (Document 66).

His associate did, however, tell Joseph Barondess, head of the Schwarzbard Defense Committee in New York (who had conveyed to Marshall the Paris Committee’s re-quest), that “if his statement would have been published, Mr. Marshall would have exposed himself to the severest possible criticism and enmity of the Jewish people the world over.” J. Barondess to S. S. Wise, 9 November 1927, AJHS, Stephen S. Wise, box 88 (Document 75). Marshall replied to Wiernik with a resounding reaffirmation of his position; L. Marshall to P. Wiernik, 29 October 1927, AJA, MS Coll. 359 (Louis Marshall), box 144 (Document 67). Cf. L. Marshall to Ivri Anochi, Esq., 29 October 1927, ibid. – a response to a letter by an unnamed “Scribe of Jewish Student Body”

who charged that Marshall’s “name is to be associated for all time with the defense of Petlura.”

324 Prior to the issue of a formal statement to the press via Torrès (above, n. 298), several key figures in the Defense Committee, including Motzkin and Genrikh Sliosberg, wrote privately to Marshall imploring him to repudiate his declaration. L. Motzkin to L. Marshall, 30 January 1927, CAHJP, P243/4 (Document 44); G. [H.] Sliosberg to L. Marshall, 5 February 1927, ibid. Sliosberg’s letter is of particular interest, because earlier he had written to Margolin expressing dissent from the work of the Defense Committee and noting that “in any case this crime would be recognized as commit-ted under extenuating circumstances.” G. Sliosberg to A. Margolin, 15 September 1926, AJC, B22 F4 (Russia: Margolin, A. 1924–1928). Margolin passed the letter on to Marshall in support of his plea for action to keep the Jewish press in check; see Document 41. Evidently Sliosberg felt pressure to dissociate himself from Marshall.

See also L’opinion d’un homme politique juif galicien sur Petlioura et sur l’affaire Schwarzbard, YIVO, RG80/453/38196–38197.

325 See, for example, Defense Committee to Editorial Board of Nasz Przegląd, Warsaw, 1 February 1927, CAHJP, P243/4.

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Growing publicity also forced it to present its case in the general Eu-ropean press, encumbering its ability to avoid public confrontations with Ukrainian spokesmen.³²⁶ Indeed, pressure from below appears over time to have led the Committee to a position that effectively precluded avoidance of a severe rupture in Jewish-Ukrainian relations.³²⁷ Initially the Committee had hoped to portray Petliura’s responsibility for the pogroms as at most indirect, noting that he had indeed issued orders to his troops to refrain from an-ti-Jewish violence. Its contention was not that Petliura had ordered pogroms, as Motzkin testified before the examining magistrate in July 1926, or even that he consented to them, but merely that “he tolerated them for […] five or six months” before speaking out against them.³²⁸ Evidently it hoped to avoid casting any greater aspersions upon Petliura’s character and legacy than were necessary to present the story of Ukrainian Jewish suffering and to secure Schwarzbard’s acquittal.

Following Marshall’s pronouncement, however, its line began to change.

Committee member Vladimir Tiomkin told a meeting of the London Coun-cil to Aid Schwarzbard’s Defence that had been called to protest Marshall’s statement, “I safely and conclusively affirm that Petlura was the man respon-sible for those terrible massacres in the Ukraine.”³²⁹ The Committee itself now began actively to search for witnesses who would testify that Petliura had issued explicit instructions to murder Jews.³³⁰ Within a short time it

lo-326 Above, n. 312.

327 Not only the Committee was moved by such pressure. Shortly after the assassination Vladimir Jabotinsky had written emphatically that “Petliura […] was not what we call a ‘pogromshchik’” – a statement frequently quoted in subsequent months by Ukrain-ian spokesmen. Vladimir Jabotinsky, Di "Krim"-kolonizatsye [The Colonization of Crimea], in: Morgen zhurnal, 4 June 1926. On the eve of the trial, in contrast, he de-clared no less emphatically that “the responsibility for the pogroms falls upon him.”

Vladimir Jabotinsky, Petliura i pogromy [Petliura and the Pogroms], in: Poslednie novosti, 11 October 1927. The latter article appeared also in Haynt, Vladimir Jabo-tinsky, Petlyura un di pogromen [Petliura and the Pogroms], in: Haynt, 16 October 1927.

328 “Déposition du Monsieur Motzkin,” 17 July 1926, YIVO, RG80/427/37037 (Docu-ment 29). Cf. L. Motzkin to A. Margolin, 17 July 1926, CAHJP, P243/4 (Docu(Docu-ment 28).

329 Mr. Vladimir Tiomkin’s Speech, November 1926, YIVO, RG80/453/38188–38190.

The meeting chair concluded that on the basis of “the facts as told here by Mr.

Vladimir Tyomkin […] we are firmly convinced that Petliura was wholly responsi-ble” (emphasis added).

330 Defense Committee to Schwarz, Jerusalem, 9 November 1926, CAHJP, P243/3; M.

Lowenthal to S. S. Wise, 30 November 1926, AJHS, Stephen S. Wise, box 91 (Docu-ment 43).

cated three: Hirsch Zekcer, a Jewish member of a committee formed under Bolshevik rule that had investigated the February 1919 events in Proskurov, who claimed to have seen a secret telegram from Petliura directing local com-manders “to suppress powerfully and unconditionally by force of arms all efforts of the Jewish population [in support of] a Bolshevik uprising so that no traitorous Jewish hand in Podolia will dare to revolt against independent Ukraine;” Henryk Przanowski, an ethnic Pole employed by the delegation of the Danish Red Cross in Kiev, who told of a personal audience he had had with the Ukrainian leader in Proskurov during which the town’s military gov-ernor, the notorious Otaman Semesenko, entered and reported that he had carried out a pogrom “according to the order of the commander-in-chief;”

and Leon Bienko, a Ukrainian of Polish origin, who while serving as secretary to a Ukrainian military tribunal had been privy to conversations among the soldiers that convinced him that they understood attacks upon Jews to have been commanded by Petliura himself.³³¹ Although Committee investigators identified discrepancies, inaccuracies, or other difficulties in their accounts, the Committee nevertheless brought the witnesses into contact with the ex-amining magistrate and arranged visas for them to come to Paris to testify at the trial.³³² In the end these witnesses did not take the stand; Torrès, whose aim was to obtain a favorable verdict, not necessarily to expose all details of what had transpired in Ukraine in 1919, did not regard their testimony as crucial for his purpose. But it appears clear that from the end of 1926 the Committee had decided to charge Petliura not with the minimum but with the maximum responsibility for the pogroms, in conformity with the image that prevailed among the Jewish public at large.³³³

331 Details in Tcherikower, Di ukrayner pogromen, 145–149. For Zekcer’s principal testi-mony see Moe pokazanie k protsesu Shvartsbarda [My Testitesti-mony at the Schwarzbard Trial], YIVO, RG80/439/37548–37556. For Przanowski see Zayavlenie Genrikha Pshanovskavo [The Statement of Henryk Przanowski], YIVO, RG80/431/34268–

34269. Bienko sent written testimony to Torrès; L. Bienko to H. Torrès, n. d., YIVO, RG80/441/37616–37621. See also the “corrections” to his testimony, 2 December 1926; YIVO, RG80/466/38833–38835.

332 See the visa list attached to French Foreign Minister to Keeper of the Seal, French Ministry of Justice, 26 September 1927, AN, Ministère de la Justice, 1538 A 1926. Re-garding the Committee’s hesitations about features of their testimony, see, inter alia, Defense Committee to I. Gruenbaum and A. Hartglas, Warsaw, 16 November 1926, CAHJP, P243/3 (containing a request to Bienko to “correct” his testimony at eight points); Defense Committee to H. Zekcer, 18 April 1927, CAHJP, P243/4.

333 The point was made at the trial in the testimonies of Sliosberg, Tiomkin, and Tche ri-kower. TT, 24 October 1927, 115–124, 181 (YIVO, RG80/491/40373–40382, 40435);

25 October 1927, 22–30 (YIVO, RG80/492/40461–40469).

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That decision effectively eliminated any possibility that the trial would proceed with minimum disruption to the relations between Ukrainians and Jews. The notion that Petliura was a particularly bloodthirsty Jew-hater who had been personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds and thousands of Jews, and that for that reason his killer should not be held accountable for his action, was a version of history that even the most adamant Ukrainian advocate of an alliance with Jews could not swallow. Indeed, Schwarzbard’s explanation for his deed effectively portrayed Petliura and the government he headed not as victims but as victimizers whose moral capital had yielded not constructive state building but mass murder; when Jewish leaders endorsed it, they robbed the Ukrainian national movement of its sole remaining asset in its struggle for independence.

To be sure, Jewish spokesmen offered their Ukrainian counterparts a compromise, much as Ukrainian leaders had offered Jews a way to avoid the adverse consequences of their situation by branding Schwarzbard a Bolshevik agent and disclaiming any Jewish connection with him. Motzkin put the offer this way:

“We are not interested in Schwarzbard’s fate; we are interested in one question only: will humankind suffer along with us when it learns that tens of thousands of innocent human beings were cut to pieces, brutally raped, maimed, that an entire people became aware that it was to be ex-terminated and not even a single human voice would be raised against that possibility, or perhaps even against the fact. Before everything else we want the Ukrainians to suffer along with us. We want them, more than us, to support our demand that those guilty of such horrors, directly or indirectly, must themselves be condemned and shunned. […] How can the Ukrainians be silent in the face of those hecatombs of Jewish victims that covered the entire Ukraine? I still hold out the hope that in the near future Ukrainian representatives will shout in unison with the Jews against the guilty ones and will not try to wipe away the impression that will naturally be aroused by all of the sworn testimonies at the trial.”³³⁴ The message was clear: disavow Petliura, acknowledge that he was responsi-ble for the pogroms and that he deserved to be called to account for them, and Jews would work to make certain that the stain that would attach to him thereby would not extend any further over the Ukrainian people.³³⁵ But 334 Above, n. 304.

335 Polish Sejm Deputy Ozjasz Thon from Kraków, leader of the Zionist Federation of West Galicia, summed up this approach facetiously at a joint meeting of the Comi té des Délégations Juives and the American Jewish Congress in August 1926: “Our

Ukrainian leaders were no more prepared to cut loose their national martyr than Jews were to cut loose theirs – and the Jewish press emphatically figured Schwarzbard as a martyr who had sacrificed himself on the altar of his peo-ple’s collective honor.

Thus the pragmatic politics of alliance that had characterized the be-havior of both Jews and Ukrainians in the international arena and in their relations with each other in recent years now gave way to a romantic poli-tics of memory and national pride, in which popular passions figured less as an encumbrance to realistic decision-making by elites than as a resource for elites to exploit in confrontations with adversaries. For Jews, Schwarzbard’s status as the supreme symbol of resistance to oppression continued to fuel spirits during the Hitler era, when, until Schwarzbard’s death in 1938, his public speeches energized Jewish audiences throughout the world.³³⁶ In con-temporary Israel he continues to be honored as the bearer of a heroic legacy.

Streets called Ha-Nokem (The Avenger) in several Israeli towns are named in his memory. In 1967 his remains were brought from Capetown, where he had passed away while on a lecture tour, to Moshav Avihail, a settlement near the Mediterranean founded by veterans of the Jewish Legion in the First World War. There he was reinterred near the burial place of those veterans in a public ceremony featuring a speech by then Minister-Without-Portfolio (later Prime Minister) Menachem Begin. His gravestone reads: “Scholem, the son of Haya and Yitshak Schwarzbard, avenger of the Jewish blood spilled in the pogroms of Ukraine.”³³⁷

For Ukrainians the move from pragmatism to romanticism found a rather different expression. The Ukrainian insistence upon a nefarious So-viet hidden hand controlling the assassin had found resonance more or less

program is simple: damn Petlura, save Schwarzbard, and whitewash the Ukrainian people.” M. Lowenthal to American Jewish Congress, 7 August 1926, AJHS, Stephen S. Wise, box 91.

336 As did his imaginary ones. See the speech placed in his mouth by the playwright Alter Kacyzne; Kacyzne, Shvartsbard, 152–155 (Document 76). The relevance of Schwarzbard’s deed and the debate surrounding it for understanding Nazi attitudes and actions toward Jews had actually been foreshadowed in the months leading up to the trial. See B. Sendrowicz, Der „Figaro“ für Petljura: Eine Kampagne des Par-fumeurs Coty gegen Schwarzbart und das Judentum, in: Wiener Morgenzeitung, 24 May 1927, 2 (Document 55).

337 Cf. the inscription on a street sign the Israeli city of Beersheva: “The Avenger (Scholem Schwarzbard) Street: 1886–1938. Writer and avenger of the blood of Ukrainian Jewry.

In 1926 in Paris he killed Petliura, the leader of the Ukrainian pogromists. In his trial, which turned into an indictment of the pogroms, he was acquitted.”

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exclusively among European right-wing nationalists, a fact that must have suggested to many Ukrainians that their national interests were best served by alliance with those circles instead of with the left-wing forces to which the likes of Shapoval, Vynnychenko, and even Petliura himself had earlier been attracted. Schwarzbard’s deed and his acquittal thus demanded a fun-damental political realignment. Indeed, the meetings that led proximately to the 1929 formation of the right-wing Organization of Ukrainian Nation-alists, which consciously employed violence and assassination as a strategic political tool, can be traced in significant measure to anger within Ukrai-nian circles in Poland over the more centrist UkraiUkrai-nian National Democrats’

ongoing encouragement of Jewish participation in a second minorities bloc in the wake of Schwarzbard’s trial.³³⁸ Some segments of this group would eventually collaborate with Nazi Germany at different stages of the Second World War. From 25 to 27 July 1941, Ukrainian police in the service of the recently-completed German occupation of Lwów were joined by mobs of Ukrainian peasants from nearby villages in brutal attacks upon Jews in the city streets and in their homes, in a fashion reminiscent of the pogroms of two decades previous. Upwards of 2,000 Jews were killed over the course of three days. The events were presented at the time as an act of revenge for the death of a Ukrainian national hero on the fifteenth anniversary of his mur-der. They have been known ever since as “the days of Petliura.”³³⁹