The early 20th century was a moment when hostility to recently-emancipated Jewish communities was on the rise in many European states, and when simultaneously the budding Zionist movement was offering Jews a vision of an alternative future in their ancient historic homeland.
The most violent persecution took place in the Russian (Tsarist) empire. Before Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen began their exterminatory work in 1941-2, most Russian Jews lived in the ‘Pale of Settlement’, the territories acquired by the empire in the late 18th century from the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. (These lands include the modern lands of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine-Crimea and Moldova). The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881 set off a wave of anti-Jewish riots (‘pogroms’) in hundreds of Jewish-inhabited towns and villages. These pogroms increased in violence, culminating in massacres in Kishinev in Bessarabia (now Chisinau, Moldova) in 1903 and 1905, and in Odessa (now in Ukraine) in 1905. The latter two each claimed over 400 lives and the destruction of over 1,600 properties.
Two prominent nationalist Irishmen, born within a few years of each other, came in contact in different ways with the Jewish victims of these pogroms. Their different responses provide us with two radically opposed templates for an Irish relationship with the Jewish people, particularly Zionist Jews.
JOHN DEVOY (1842-1928) was born in Co. Kildare and grew up in Dublin. As a youth he joined the separatist Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), popularly known as the Fenians, whose goal was to stage an armed uprising to break Ireland’s union with Great Britain and set up an Irish republic. Having also joined the British army, by the age of 23 he was the Fenians’ chief secret organiser within the army garrisons in Ireland, tasked with subverting the loyalty of Irish troops and recruiting them to the Fenians. He was soon arrested, tried for treason and sentenced to 15 years penal servitude.
In 1871, the Liberal government of William Gladstone commuted his sentence to exile. Devoy was sent to the US, where he settled in New York and became a journalist working for the New York Herald. He also joined one of the many separatist Irish-American organisations, the Clan-na-Gael. He would spend the rest of his long life building it into the American franchise of the IRB, while financing terrorist attacks in Great Britain.
The pogroms set off waves of Jewish emigration from Russia to western Europe and the US. By 1905, New York and other eastern cities were teeming with newly arrived Jewish immigrants who mixed with recent arrivals of many other nationalities, including Irish, Poles and Italians. National narratives of all kinds came into contact. It seems that Devoy was not inclined to allow the record of Irish historical oppression to be eclipsed by a rival Jewish chronicle of persecution.
Other alternatives were emerging at this time for Russian Jews seeking escape from their dire predicament. Since 1881, the first Aliyah (wave of immigration) of about 35,000 Jewish immigrants had travelled from eastern Europe to settle on purchased tracts of land in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, the ancestral Jewish homeland. The land was already showing the improvements in agricultural productivity these settlers had brought. Further progress in this direction was promised by Theodore Herzl’s Zionist movement, which had just held its sixth Congress in Basel, Switzerland in August 1903.
From the Jewish perspective, Devoy’s importance lies in his editorship of the newspaper Gaelic American (New York), which he purchased in 1903. From the start, he adopted a bitterly hostile and prejudiced attitude to the Jewish people, not only to those arriving in the US as victims of the pogroms but to world Jewry as a whole.
A few months earlier, news of the severe pogrom in Kishinev had gone around the world. The pogrom, fuelled by a blood libel circulated following the murder of a small boy, had started on Easter Sunday, 6 April, when 49 people were killed, 424 injured, about 600 women raped and approximately 700 homes and 600 shops damaged. Several thousand gentiles were involved in the rioting; some 800 were arrested, of whom over 100 were tried for robbery and murder, the rest for minor offences.
Two years later, in October 1905, just before news of a second and much worse pogrom at Kishinev, Devoy disparaged Zionism editorially:
‘Like the Israelites who skipped out of Egypt with all the plunder of the Egyptians they could conveniently carry off, to look for a country where they could establish themselves, their modern descendants are casting about for some spot on the earth where they can erect anew the standard of their race with its three-ball attachment [i.e. the sign of the pawnbroker] as a sign that they are ready to lend back to the countries of the Goyim the money of which they have looted them. But they do not hanker after national independence and responsibility… As to the Zionist desire to have a national home without national responsibility, it does not seem likely to be gratified…’ (GA, 7 October 1905).
For his Irish-American readership, he pushed a particularly rancid blend of antisemitism and anglophobia: ‘The British have shown themselves so ready to… go about the world slaughtering weaker people and destroying free communities in order to put them at the disposal of the plunderers of the universe that the partnership just meets the object of the Semites. The British will do the murdering and the Jew will gather the booty…’ (GA, 7 October 1905)
The well-known tendency of antisemites to indict Jews on contradictory charges featured in Devoy’s writing. Having blamed them for the excesses of finance capitalism, he rounded on them for the mass disturbances of 1905 (often called ‘the First Russian Revolution’) – ‘the revolutionary violence formented [sic] by the Jews in Russia, England and here [the US]. (GA, 25 November 1905).
Receiving reports of the second Kishinev pogrom, he alleged that Jews were trying to exploit ‘the so-called massacre’ to ‘involve this country [the US] in nefarious designs against the Russian government and people… [They are] the most ignoble race that fate has planted on the earth’. He claimed that ‘police records showed that 82% of crimes against morality and property are done by Jews; of 72 pickpockets arrested, 65 were Jews, mostly from Poland and Russia; 90% of prostitutes are Russian and Polish Jewesses.’ (GA, 30 December 1905).
In January, he was still claiming the casualty figures of the ‘so-called massacres’ in Kishinev had been inflated upwards from the low hundreds in ‘the lying reports published in London… The Rabbi [Moses Gaster] with the truculent arrogance and cunning of his race and his oriental imagination, insisted upon massacring his race-fellows by thousands, in accordance with the tactics of the yellow press here…’ (GA, 6 January 2006). [The currently accepted figure is above 400].
Turning to Jewish attitudes to Ireland, he alleged that Jews in the United Kingdom ‘have been ‘the consistent and bitter enemies of the rights of Ireland and of its people’. This was refuted not only by the record of Jewish philanthropy during the 1840s famine, but by the large number of Jews in the Liberal and Labour parties who were allies of John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party and its push for Irish Home Rule. (GA, 30 December 1905).
Most shockingly of all, Devoy outdid even most antisemites of his day in prefiguring the Nazi rhetoric of Der Stürmer with his version of what historian Daniel Goldhagen calls ‘eliminationist antisemitism’:
‘The Jews are destined to be the parasites of the human race until, in their insatiable greed, they have absorbed the life blood of all the nations, who must then perish, or to save their existence must then turn around and destroy them.’ (GA, 7 October 1905).
Finally, a small but telling example of Devoy’s prejudices on display during one of his many quarrels with fellow-nationalists. Éamon de Valera (born in New York of an Irish mother and Spanish father) had the revolutionary credentials to become taoiseach (prime minister) and later president of an independent Ireland. As far as is known, he had no Jewish heritage. But Devoy thought otherwise. On a fundraising tour of the US in 1919-20 during the war of independence, the two clashed. The latter would later reminisce: ‘This half-breed Jew has done me more harm in the last two years than the English have been able to do during my whole life’.
At a time when nationalists of some nations, such as the Czechs and the Italians, showed sympathy with the national aspirations of the Jewish people, Devoy pioneered the toxic blend of republicanism and antisemitism that now holds sway in Ireland. In the fevered atmosphere of Israelophobia that has taken over its politics and media since the Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023, Devoy would no doubt feel comfortably at home, even if many politicians have yet to match his levels of venom.
MICHAEL DAVITT (1846-1906) was born on a small farm in Co. Mayo, on the impoverished western Irish seaboard, in the midst of the Great Famine. His family suffered eviction and moved to Lancashire where he worked as a labourer from the age of 9. Having lost an arm in a cotton mill accident at age 11, he was educated with the help of a philanthropist and went to work in the post office. He joined the IRB in 1865 and took part in a failed raid for guns on Chester Castle in 1867. A fulltime IRB organiser from 1868, he was convicted of arms trafficking in 1870. Sentenced to 15 years for treason felony, he was paroled in 1877.
In 1879, as a pragmatic Fenian open to collaboration with agrarian reformers and parliamentarian campaigners for Irish Home Rule, Davitt helped to launch the Irish National Land League in 1879, with the parliamentarian leader Charles Stewart Parnell as president, with the aim of winning radical land reform measures for Irish tenant farmers from the UK government.
Davitt’s closeness to parliamentarians led to his expulsion from the Fenian Supreme Council in 1880. His activities over the succeeding decades were centred on agrarian agitation and, later, on parliamentary activity. He resigned his Irish seat in the House of Commons in 1899 in protest at the launch of the second Boer War, and from then on lived off his earnings as a freelance journalist. He received several commissions from the newspapers of the Randolph Hearst group.
In May 1903, Davitt was asked by Hearst’s London office to go to Kishinev to investigate the recent pogrom and try to assign responsibility. His suitability for the role lay in his reputation as a defender of human rights along with his Catholicism, which ensured he would not be perceived as biased in favour of the Jewish community. Nor would he be seen as anti-Russian: if anything, his anti-British sympathies would have inclined him towards Russia in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war.
The pogrom, fuelled by a blood libel circulated following the murder of a small boy, had taken place over 3 days starting on Easter Sunday, 6 April (see part 1 for details).
The Russian Tsarist government officially denied that a pogrom had taken place. But two Hearst newspapers, the New York American and the New York Journal, both circulating in a city with many Russian Jews, publicised the event for almost two weeks and called for official protests to the Russian government. Hearst himself ran a fundraising campaign in aid of the victims.
Davitt’s approach to the pogrom and its Jewish victims could not have been more different from that of Devoy. Before his departure he researched the topic of Russian Jewry as thoroughly as possible, both from wide reading and from meeting with informants. He left Paris by rail on 14 May and, travelling via Constantinople and Odessa, arrived at Kishinev eight days later. The city was a pleasant, prosperous-looking town of about 125,000 people with a Jewish community that made up 43 per cent of its population. Now, however, some 10,000 of these inhabitants had fled the city.
His stop at Odessa had enabled him to interview several of the refugees, some prominent Russian merchants and the US consul. From Count Shuvalov, former Russian ambassador to Berlin, Davitt heard the official antisemitic line that blamed the Jews for their own fate: they were accused of engaging in commercial sharp practice and of swindling the ignorant peasants. His enquiries revealed to him the various layers of responsibility for what had happened at Kishinev. Despite the presence of 10,000 government troops, no attempt had been made to quell the riots until the end of the second day; the only police intervention was to disarm the few Jews who had tried to defend their homes and families. Jewish women who fled to the police seeking protection were turned away with sneers and threats. No official post mortems were carried out on victims and the police obstructed efforts to photograph the bodies.
The anti-Jewish blood libel had been whipped up by Krushevan, the editor of the local newspaper and a virulent antisemitic activist. The Bessarabian governor and vice-governor, the latter another antisemite, had done nothing to stop the violence. (Later that year Krushevan would publish the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book detailing a Jewish plot to rule the world that would become favoured reading of Hitler and has enjoyed renewed sales recently.)
Davitt took statements from eyewitnesses and compared them with the testimony of two Christian doctors and other government functionaries. He interviewed recovering wounded, inspected the scenes of the rioting and photographed 44 new graves at the Jewish cemetery. At the Jewish hospital, he interviewed all the doctors who had attended the victims. Aware that rape victims might be unwilling to talk to him, he enlisted the help of local rabbis and conducted enquiries via two Christian women. In one house where four Jews had been murdered, he picked up a child’s copybook on which a man had wiped his bloody hands. (The copybook is still among Davitt’s papers in Trinity College Dublin; the house was later immortalised by the Ukrainian writer Vlodymyr Korolenko in his short story ‘House No. 13: an episode in the massacre of Kishineff’.)
Davitt was not one to idealise his subjects. Having been present during Ireland’s Land War at harrowing evictions where tenants had resisted violently, Davitt was disgusted by the failure of most of the Jewish husbands and sons at Kishinev to resist the rioters in similar manner, calling them “contemptible cowards… miserable poltroons”. It was a character defect that Zionists were convinced would end only when Jews were masters in their own homeland. (The Jewish writer Hayyim Bialik also castigated it in his poem ‘The City of Slaughter’. Self-defence units would soon be formed throughout the Russian Pale).
In total, Davitt spent eight days in Kishinev. From Berlin, where he stopped on his way home, Davitt sent a 14-page telegram detailing his findings. His conclusion? “What I learned and saw in that city will haunt me to my dying day.”
His newspaper articles, photographs and speeches received wide circulation. His photographs were among the world’s first pictures of such atrocities and entered global consciousness. The result was protest demonstrations in European and American cities. Washington resolved to send a petition to the Tsar, but when the Russian Foreign Ministry announced it would refuse to accept it, it was officially ‘not sent’.
Davitt made three calls, based on his articles: (i) that the Russian government publicly refute the allegations of Jewish ritual murder (the blood libel), which he called a ‘murder-making legend’, and compel its clergy to read it from the altar – (this was never done); (ii) that the governments of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Romania prohibit the publication of the blood libel; (iii) that a conference of leading western European Jews be convened to work out solutions for the problems of the Russian Jews.
Davitt also campaigned for support and aid for the many (40-50) orphaned children of those murdered, and highlighted the plight of the girls and women, married and unmarried, who had been raped and whose marital prospects under Jewish religious law were thus endangered.
Davitt’s meticulous investigations and emotional engagement with the subject went beyond the bounds of journalistic necessity. They put to shame the almost complete indifference shown by the Irish political class to the appalling slaughter inflicted by Hamas pogromists on their Israeli victims 120 years later. In particular, his sensitivity to the impact on female rape victims stands in stark contrast to the disgrace of the National Women’s Council of Ireland which had no comment on the rape, torture and genital mutilation of Israeli women on 7 October 2023 but instead marked the first anniversary with a call for sanctions against the Jewish state.
However, his work received little or no notice in the Irish or Irish-American press, for reasons we know only too well. As Davitt wrote to his fellow- agrarian radical and home ruler, Richard McGhee: “The Jew, as you know, is not a favourite subject with some classes of Irishmen. Liberty and justice are the prerogatives of ourselves…” The exception was the small Irish Jewish community, which sent its appreciation to Davitt’s wife.
With his Kishinev experience fresh in his mind, Davitt was bound to make vigorous objection to the campaign that began in Limerick in 1904 for a boycott of city’s Jewish community initiated by a series of sermons preached by the Redemptorist priest Father John Creagh. His letter to the Freeman’s Journal (18 January 1904) protested “as an Irishman and a Catholic against this spirit of barbarous malignity being introduced into Ireland”.
Davitt held no hope that life for Jews in Russia would improve in the near future, given the three factors on which he blamed the pogroms: the blood libel, economic rivalry between gentiles and Jews, and Russian legislation that made large sectors of the economy, such as land ownership, unavailable to them. His hope lay elsewhere.
Davitt’s biographer, Carla King, writes:
‘Once again, he called upon the Tsar to deny the blood libel, but his ultimate solution was a Zionist one. He urged the Russian government to assist the Zionist plan and suggested that wealthy Jews should provide the costs of emigration for their brethren, the purchase of suitable land in Palestine and of obtaining rights of settlement and guarantee of protection from the Turkish gov. Recalling his own trip to Palestine in 1885 he expressed the view that Jews would be able to thrive there.’
Further reading:
Carla King, Michael Davitt after the Land League: 1882-1906 (UCD Press, 2016).
Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (2018).
— (See also review of Zipperstein in Times of Israel, 9 April 2018).
Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London, 1967).
The Gaelic American, volumes for 1903-1906, on microfilm in National Library of Ireland.
By Dermot Meleady.
