Does history repeat itself? Residents in Midwood, a predominately Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, may have thought so on the morning of Nov. 11. They awoke to flashing red lights, billows of smoke and the sound of sirens. Vandals had set three cars on fire and spray-painted swastikas and antisemitic graffiti on sidewalks and benches just one day after the 73rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, when the Nazis ransacked thousands of Jewish homes and businesses in Germany, torched synagogues and shipped 30,000 Jews to concentration camps. The incident was followed by more graffiti in the same neighborhood only five days later.
The vandalism in Brooklyn also evokes the brutality of pogroms in Russia during the late 1800s. Many Jews in this neighborhood are descended from survivors of those pogroms; the vandals knew that their indented victims would fully understand the meaning and power of the graffiti.
The perpetrators worked quietly in the dead of night to avoid the police. This is, at least, one positive difference: In 19th century Russia, vandals took to the streets with the support of the police and the military. A witness to an 1882 pogrom in Kiev wrote: “At noon, the air echoed with wild shouts, whistling, jeering, hooting, and laughing . . . The destruction of the Jewish homes began. Windowpanes and doors began to fly about, and shortly thereafter the mob, having gained access to the houses and stores, began to throw upon the streets absolutely everything that fell into their hands . . . The sound of broken windowpanes and frames, the crying, shouting and despair on the one hand, and the terrible yelling and jeering on the other, completed the picture.”
Jews in earlier times reacted to that violence in ways that are familiar to modern victims of hate crimes. Armed resistance was not a realistic option for a tiny minority in a hostile nation. For many, emigration was a safer response. Hundreds of thousands of Jews left Russia in the late 1800s and early 1900s for America. German Jews in the 1930s had a more difficult time leaving the country. By then, many nations, including the US, had tough laws that sharply limited immigration.
Many Jews also tried to alert the world to their plight. During the pogroms in Russia in the 1880s, a small group of Orthodox Jews in Lithuania managed to collect hundreds of bits of information about the violence in southern Russia. Little by little, they put the pieces together. The group’s leader, Rabbi Yischak Elhanan Spektor, detailed the findings in a letter to prominent Jews in other countries.
In England, this letter reached Baron Nathaniel Rothschild. He shared the information with the Times of London. Two articles about the pogroms appeared in the Times on Jan. 11 and 13, 1882. The beginning of the first article suggests the power of the story the rabbi wanted told: “Men ruthlessly murdered, tender married women the prey of a brutal lust that has also caused their death, and young girls violated in the sight of their relatives by soldiers who should have been the guardians of their honor, these have been the deeds with which the population of southern Russia has been stained since last April.”
In the paragraphs that followed, the reporter identified where pogroms had taken place, what crimes had been committed and the number of victims. Wherever possible, he humanized the story. He used the victims’ names and provided the kind of details that would bring the victims to life. Readers were not told that “a child” was thrown from a window; they were told that the child was the 3-year-old son of Mordichai Wienarsky.
At the end of the final article, the Times urged readers to take action to prevent 3 1/2 million human beings from perishing “because they are Jews.” The story prompted demonstrations in nations around the world, including the US. The rabbi’s letter turned a local crisis into an international, interfaith effort to save a people. By the 1930s, growing antisemitism throughout Europe and the United States made such appeals more difficult but still not impossible.
This history reveals how important it is that leaders and ordinary citizens speak out against hate crimes whenever they occur, whether in Russia in 1882, Germany in 1938 or Brooklyn in 2011.
This history also raises an important question: What causes antisemitism to rise more at some times than at others? Although there are no simple answers to this question, we do know that antisemitism and other hatreds tend to increase during periods of great economic, social and political stress. But that spark turns into an inferno when good people do nothing.
Prevention of hatred requires education. James Baldwin once wrote that “history is not something you read about in a book, nor is it something in the past.” In his view, “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”
The more we know about antisemitism and other hatreds, how they evolve and why they persist, the more likely we are to overcome them.
Phyllis Goldstein is the author of “A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism,” out next month from Facing History and Ourselves.