Steven Zipperstein, “Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History” (2018) (read aloud by Barry Abrams) – “My grandmother brought that pendant with her from RUSSIA, from a POGROM, JEFFREY!” I think it was the first season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” where Susie shouts that at Jeff after a foster child lifts a beloved family heirloom from their home. The name “Kishinev” doesn’t come up, but historian of Eastern European Jewish life Steven Zipperstein attributes the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 as the event that lodged the word “pogrom,” and certain ideas of what the word constitutes, into historical consciousness, well beyond the Moldovan backwater where it occurred.

Why this massacre, and not others, Zipperstein asks? Why did the Kishinev pogrom become this tipping point, that figures from Vladimir Jabotinsky to W.E.B. Du Bois would attach many (often more or less fanciful) meanings to? There’s an extent to which Zipperstein undermines his own point when he says that Kishinev helped lead to a false impression that pre-1917 Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement was wall-to-wall pogroms, while also asking why this one pogrom would be elevated above others… but such are the risks of this kind of cultural history. Really, any amount of pogroms other than zero is the wrong amount, as I’m sure Zipperstein would agree. And we don’t really get why Kishinev became the flashpoint for world awareness of the brutality of Russia, towards its Jewish inhabitants and towards its people in general, other than the usual answer- concatenations of historical circumstances, actors with agendas shooting their respective shots. 

The facts of the case are that one day, in 1903, Moldovan Christian inhabitants of the provincial city of Kishinev, sparked likely by an interaction between Moldovan children hassling Jewish adults and the Jewish adults rebuking them, formed mobs and attacked Jewish homes and businesses. Something like forty-three Jews were killed. Zipperstein’s investigation leaves the realm of the frankly ticky-tacky – wondering why they tagged Kishinev with the massacre, when really it all happened within a few blocks, is not that interesting of a question, in my opinion – when he gets into the process of making Kishinev and pogrom household words. It was basically a matter of contingency that as many people came to Kishinev as they did to investigate the pogrom. Zipperstein focuses on two. Hiayim Bialik came to Kishinev because his (at the time) small and beleaguered group of religious Zionists sent him to report on it. Michael Davitt, an Irish nationalist journalist who had a habit of pissing people off (more than usual for Irish nationalists, even), also made his way to Kishinev to write a report for the famously sensationalist Hearst newspaper empire. 

Davitt and especially Bialik’s writings from Kishinev had a profound impact on how the world would understand what happened there, and what it all meant, for Jews, for Russia, for Europe, for people the world over. This was a time when relations amongst disparate and unequal communities that lived with each other were under strain all over the world, and people were looking for answers. 

Probably the most notable cluster of agendas and answers hung around Kishinev were those related to Zionism, and particularly to Zionism’s depiction of the Jews of the diaspora. Cartoonist Eli Valley’s “Diaspora Boy and Israel Man” comics have only begun to explore (after decades of complicit silence in the Jewish community) this dynamic, and arguably, the poem that Hiayim Bialik produced after his extensive investigation of the pogrom, “In the City of Slaughter,” is the paradigmatic example of Zionist hatred for Diaspora Jews- for, that is, Jews like themselves, at least for those who partook of the dynamic before the first generation raised in Israel. Much of the emotional weight of the poem lies on the image of Jewish women being raped by Moldovan gentile men while Jewish men – husbands, brothers, sons, fathers – hid. This, and numerous other images of Jewish passivity, were pounded into the heads of Zionist youth from the day Bialik published the poem to the present: “In the City of Slaughter” was a standard in the Israeli literary curriculum, something like how American schoolkids are expected to memorize the Gettysburg Address, in Zipperstein’s telling. The solution to this supposed weakness and failure of Jewish manhood, in the Zionist worldview, was to start over again in Israel… and, the unsaid part, find their own people, the Palestinians, to ride roughshod over, to harden themselves through oppressing. We have seen what that means, more and more clearly as the years progress. 

From Bialik’s own notes – he was a meticulous notetaker – we know that in at least some instances, Jewish men in Kishinev did flee the mobs and leave women relatives behind (the audiobook producers made the peculiar choice to allow the voice actor to read a block quote from one of these women’s descriptions of her experience in a kind of weepy, lightly-Yiddish-accented, womanly-pitched voice, which I wish they had not done). We also know that the woman he drew much of his imagery for his central scene of sexual assault told him, explicitly, that her husband fought her attackers until he was beaten unconscious, and that she fought, too, none of which shows up in the poem or in Zionist imagery of Diasporic Jewish weakness. Neither did Bialik, or most other reporters from Kishinev, discuss how Jews organized for self-protection. There were whole neighborhoods where neither the mobs, nor the police who protected them, could enter, because there were armed and organized Jews protecting them- and organized basically ad hoc, too. Riots are some of the more chaotic, “dynamic” situations you’re ever going to encounter, so it’s hardly a surprise that different people and groups of people break in radically different ways. Anyone trying to tell the story is trying to impose order on a basically chaotic event. You can – we are compelled to – come up with something. But in that chaos is also opportunity. What began as an attempt to alter linguistic politics – “In the City of Slaughter” was a major advance for secular(-ish) Hebrew poetry, as opposed to Yiddish or gentile-language Jewish writing – turned into a major node into the self-definition of a whole people and their history, and a pretty dark one. 

The impact on the world outside of the Zionist movement was also interesting, though perhaps less revelatory than Zipperstein argued. This is roughly the Michael Davitt half of the story, though the man’s writings don’t loom over how Americans, Europeans et al reacted to Kishinev the way that Bialik’s poem does over Zionist understandings of Jewish identity, gender, and violence. Davitt was an odd duck, no one’s idea of a philo-Semite, possessed of some strange race ideas but the kind that wouldn’t go much of anywhere, given that one of them was a burning hatred of the English, who more or less ruled the roost at the time. Davitt was writing for the Hearst papers (he might have been blackballed from most papers, including Irish ones, closer to home, for being annoying and weird), and said papers did what they did and sensationalized the crimes committed there- accounts of hundreds or thousands dead, streets run red with blood, etc etc. This wasn’t Davitt’s faults – whatever else he was, he was a very thoroughgoing reporter – but Hearst will do his thing. 

The contrasts between reality and perception here are, to my mind, less stark and less revelatory than that between the world depicted in “In the City of Slaughter” and the actual Kishinev pogrom. Yes, papers reported an inaccurate number of dead, but 43 dead, thousands assaulted, many of them raped, and hundreds of homes and shops burnt is no picnic. You could argue that the attention paid to Kishinev gave ammunition to antisemites. One of the lead antisemites of Kishinev, who arguably had more of a hand than anyone in creating the atmosphere that led to the pogroms, was also one of the writers of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious anti-semitic forgery that lays down the ways that Jews supposedly manipulate most of modern life to the detriment of gentiles. The contrast between the reality of Kishinev – which of course antisemites downplay well past what the record will support – versus the reporting, and the upswell of condemnation for Czarist authorities, seemed to many anti-semities to justify their antisemitism- obviously, the Jews run the media, why else would everyone be so up in arms about a few dead shopkeepers, Moldovans will Moldovan, etc. etc. I mean… I don’t think Zipperstein accepts this logic, but to be honest, entertaining it at all, pretending that what anti-semites do and say and really anything that Jews do have a straightforward one-to-one relationship, is an odd read to me. Though, you have to figure that media-unsavvy provincial weirdos like the Kishinev anti-semitic publishers must have been thrown for a loop by this early example of the power of global mass media…

Similarly, it’s intriguing how the reporting from Kishinev helped inspire both black and Asian activists in the US – Chinese groups were the first non-Jewish groups in the US to donate to victims of Kishinev, and the founders of the NAACP cited Kishinev as an inspiration (that must have calmed the nerves of anti-semites!) – but maybe not the mind-blower Zipperstein presents it as. There are important differences between the lynch law that many people of color and immigrants faced in the US at the time, and the pogroms of the Pale of Settlement… but there were also some important similarities! And it kind of seems like solidarity is a good thing to build? Zipperstein doesn’t condemn it. I’m not sure what he’s doing with it. Maybe, as a historian who has immersed himself deeply in the life of Eastern European Jews in the centuries before the Holocaust, Zipperstein can’t help but rue the ways in which much of global culture has reduced that whole life to what happened at Kishinev, making it the central image of a whole way of life for millions of people. I get that. I guess I’m an organizer more than a historian of Jews and Judaism, so to me, it’s a step in the right direction… anyway, this is a pretty good book with some odd turns. ****

Hans Jonas, “The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity” (1958) – It’s a commonplace, and a true one, that a lot of the tropes we assign to villains in fiction coincide with stereotypes that Christians often hold of Jews: sneaky, treacherous, cunning, possessed of a combination of physical weakness and ugliness with danger and a certain allure. I’d add another set of villainy-tropes that map onto an essentially religious divide, and these are associated with Gnosticism, or anyway, European culture’s memory of Gnosticism. Secret cults, underground in both social and geological senses, dedicated to esoteric (but not overly complicated, so as to overwhelm the reader!) belief systems at odds with orthodoxy, intimations of weird sex and other lifestyle practices, convinced something is essentially wrong with the world and, moreover, that maybe we ought to act accordingly… we see plenty of all that in bad guys in fiction, film, comic books, etc.

We don’t know that much about Gnosticism because its opponents, the Christian Church (this was before it split off into Catholic and Orthodox branches and well before the Reformation), eradicated pretty much all Gnostic groups from the face of the Earth. For centuries, most of what we “knew” about them came from whatever inquisitors chose to jot down about their victims before destroying them. About a decade before philosopher Hans Jonas began writing this book, the Nag Hammadi corpus, discovered by archaeologists in Egypt, had started filtering out, providing us with almost all of the direct primary sources on Gnosticism we have. Seeing as Nag Hammadi was just one respectable cache of documents, it was a huge find but not comprehensive. We’re still missing a lot, texts but also, crucially, context to a lot of what we do have about Gnosticism. 

Arguably, the whole category of “Gnosticism” is more of an artifact of orthodox Christian persecution, the ideas and practices they lumped together as they proscribed them, than of anything having to do with the beliefs of those they persecuted. Indeed, the literature these days seems to be in a place where they almost regard the term “Gnostic” as more trouble than it’s worth, a lump where there ought to be splits (admittedly, I get this impression mostly from one (1) podcast, but hey, I’m a modernist). 

Well… I gotta admit… there is a part of me that thinks that the “reception history” of the Gnostics is almost more important than whether or not they were truly a unitary group. Note, I do think it’s important to try to understand what they actually believed. But… they’re gone. Gone, gone, gone. All those sects with all those odd and vaguely sinister-sounding names – Valentinians, Basilideans, Sethites, Marcionites, Manicheans, on and on – are gone, and even if some internet weirdos say they’re going to adopt their beliefs, get the band back together again, it’s not the same. In most respects, Gnosticism is more important as a shadow of Christianity than it is in its own right. 

Hans Jonas was a student of Heidegger’s in pre-WWII Germany, one of a group of Jewish students of the loathsome dwarf master and who went on to big careers, including Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse (I read a book by a skillful but pedantic intellectual historian yelping about how they were illiberal, illiberal all, tainted by the master! “Well, duh! Who cares?” It was the nineties, or anyway the eternal nineties of the liberal mind…). He left when the Nazis took power, swore he’d only come back to Germany as part of an army to defeat them- and lived up to his promise as part of the Jewish Brigade in the British army. He may have denounced Heidegger, but he didn’t denounce all of the dimensions of the philosophical explorations Heidegger called for, encouraged his students towards. 

Practically speaking, this means that Jonas makes much broader analyses than is common in ancient history today, and one gets the idea was becoming common back then, too. Thank god! Yes, there’s a need for the cautious, carefully source-bound histories that are now de rigeur, the more so the further you get from the presence. But there are readability and relevance questions involved, and history that’s too tightly tied to primary sources — especially when there’s not a lot of them in a given area, and some of them of indirect relevance — risks turning into pointless antiquarianism.

In my mind, that impassioned but rigorous — really, more impassioned and rigorous, in the best of this sort of work, the two don’t detract from each other — multidimensional analysis that characterizes the best German (and German-inspired) historical thought is probably the best approach we moderns can take to the history of Gnosticism (outside of straight up fiction approaches, maybe). Jonas begins with a discussion of the Greek Mediterranean in which Gnosticism arises, a meeting place of cultures from India to Spain and which participants reached well beyond. Among other things, the Greek Mediterranean became the cockpit where competing ideas not just about religious content, but what religious form — what religion constitutes, how it regulates action and thought — would look like for vast swathes of the human planet going forward.

Christianity was one product of this setting. So too was its shadow, Gnosticism (Gnosticism deserves to be seen as Christianity’s shadow, much more than the bad joke of Satanism, half of which is just misappropriated, garbled Gnostic ideas and tropes anyway), even as Gnostic movements would become important in places well away from the Mediterranean. Beyond whatever errors antiquarians might ding him for, Jonas comes closest to intellectual traps when he ascribes ideas as uniquely belonging to given cultures- this a Greek idea, this Persian, that Babylonian, etc. But by and large, he avoids essentializing, which you’d fucking well better in the insane stewpot of peoples and cultures that was the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East at the time. Rather, better to think of these ideas as forms, structures of thought molded in given environments that came into contact with each other, combined, re-formed.

Then we get that favorite German intellectual pastime: classification. We go through the various Gnostic subgroups based on their attitudes towards where their central concern — error, imperfection, evil — comes from. Persian-inflected Gnosticism, like Manichaeism, which understands evil as primordial, a darkness always coexisting with good, what Jonas sees as Syriac Gnosticisms which hold that a germ of imperfection comes from iterative layers of creation by increasingly imperfect spiritual creators, Marcion’s Christian-ish Gnosticism, etc etc. 

Jonas doesn’t stint from showing off what primary sources were available, giving us bits of Gnostic poetry, scripture, and lore from Nag Hammadi or from Christian polemicist accounts. And what lore it is! Alongside the questions the Gnostics asked — pretty fundamental ones that Christian apologists, to my mind, really don’t answer that well — it’s the lore that has attracted such figures as Jorge Luis Borges, whose essay on Basilides the False probably helped launch more interest in Gnosticism than any other document of the twentieth century. What Jonas calls “Syriac Gnosticism” especially had colorful, strange, uncanny stories attached, made all the more dreamlike by how fragmentary they, and our knowledge of their contexts, are and is. Multiple layers of creation guarded by the spawn of a blind idiot god, where you needed to memorize thousands of passwords to let your soul ascend to its true home beyond anything like the ken of this world; the incarnation of Wisdom as a woman tempted into creating a fallen material world out of a desire to imitate her impossibly remote, perfect father, only to fall further and further into the world’s degradation (including incarnations as Helen of Troy and as a Tyrian sex worker) who must be rescued and restored to free humanity from this false, wicked world…

Because, let’s face it- how the Gnostics fit in to the world of late antiquity, what happened to them, all the ins and outs and specifics… they’re important, no doubt, and we should encourage work that is more granular than what Jonas does, attentive to material culture, linguistic analysis, etc etc, stuff that Jonas either didn’t have access to or care to do in his broad analysis of Gnosticism. But unless we’re gonna invent time travel any time soon, those gritty details are less important for the general historical writer than the things the Gnostics represent. There’s the aspect where they represent the dark, the shadowy, the other, the villainous, all those tropes we talked about earlier… but there’s also a way in which they articulate, arguably more than any other cultural force in western, maybe in human, history something important. Common to all Gnostic faiths is the idea that this world is not our home- that there is something essentially wrong not (just) with people, but with Creation. Christianity puts original sin on a lady, an apple, and a snake- Gnostics ask the obvious question: why ladies, snakes, apples, etc., if an all-powerful all-good being had a say in the matter? Why any of this? Something stinks. 

To me, this suspicion is an ineradicable part of the human inheritance. We can imagine other worlds, and we can reflect on this world, and we can see gaps between the two, for better and for worse. Gnosticism is, whatever else it is as a specific phenomenon of Mediterranean antiquity, the expression of that gap… and you can argue that Christianity was the channeling of the thoughts that result from the gap into a set of channels that various people understood as theologically and, dare I say it, socially and politically acceptable, shutting off dangerous lines of enquiry. It’s way too much of a stretch to attribute real revolutionary potential to Gnosticism. As it existed, it seemed to oscillate between ascetic withdrawal and hedonistic excess. Google contemporary Gnostics and you’re in the world of new age nonsense, a notch or two away from QAnon, complete with online grifters- and there was always a carnival barker element to Gnosticism, as seen in the career of Simon Magus. 

Amusingly, one major right-wing thinker of the twentieth century, Eric Voegelin, did try to attribute the rise of more or less every ideology to the left of, say, Alexis de Tocqueville, to a sub rosa embrace of Gnosticism! But pay any sustained attention to what actually successful revolutionaries are like, and you don’t see much Gnosticism there- which, indeed, seems to disappoint some of my more… aesthetically-inclined friends. For the revolutionary, like it or not, we’re stuck with this world. And part of this world are the feelings and thoughts Gnosticism expressed, and a truly ruthless criticism of all existing has to take it into account. You’ll find few better ways to take it on board, in my opinion, than reading Jonas. *****

Marcia Chatelain, “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America” (2020) (read aloud by Machelle Williams) – This is a fucker of a sad story. If there’s one thing I’m not going to moralize about, it’s eating “bad” food. I actually think fast food is a good concept with godawful externalities in terms of ecological damage, labor practices, and health. I don’t think whatever kind of vaguely-elven/hobbit-ish “slow food” vision some people have for a better food world should be the only one available in a better future (and how many farm-to-table, slow food type restaurants also have terrible labor practices?). And I think people have the right not to optimize for physical or mental health- they have the right to pursue experiences that might harm them, up to and including eating unhealthy food.

People have the right to eat unhealthy food- but they also have the right to healthy, wholesome food, and McDonalds, and other fast food companies, are what many black communities in this country have instead of that. Fast food is so ubiquitous it can fool us into thinking it’s always been there- I’ve lost count of the number of medieval fantasy novels I’ve read where the author treats eating at a roadside inn as structurally similar to Denny’s, if not quite up to McDonald’s speed and efficiency. The most relevant differences between the fast food giants that grew to prominence in the US after WWII and other eateries were that fast food chains were labor-intensive, highly standardized enterprises, run by out-of-town corporate giants but dependent on local buy-in, from customers, workers, and key to the growth of McDonald’s and other chains, franchisees. 

Drop something like that in the cities that were soon to roil and burn with discontent and there was bound to be an interesting situation. Black communities had a bifurcated response to McDonald’s at first. Most McDonald’s franchises, early on, went into suburbs and other areas black people often didn’t or couldn’t go. McDonald’s obeyed the usual segregation customs, and at least once dozens of sit-in participants were trapped and brutalized in a southern McDonald’s. But, and this is a dynamic that historians of consumer capitalism have identified elsewhere, there was one special appeal that chains like McDonald’s had for black customers: unless something went wrong, culpably wrong, with the process, when you ordered something at McDonald’s, you got the same thing, at the same price, everyone else got. This is a similar logic to why black customers were early adopters of packaged food and chain supermarkets- you weren’t going to get cheated buying a box of corn flakes like you would be by a racist small shop owner who has to weigh you out your flour or whatever. 

Moreover, once McDonald’s got somewhat less racist, both black entrepreneurs and the Chicago-based company saw another appealing facet to establishing the chain in black communities. It did not take that much money, in the grand scheme of things, to buy a McDonald’s franchise, and the company would help you set up, without banks or whoever else involved. McDonald’s quickly noticed that franchises with black owners often did better in black neighborhoods than if they were owned by white people. Moreover, in the wake of the ideological conflicts within the black freedom struggle and the exhausting round of riots, assassinations, and recrimination that happened around the same time, McDonald’s lucked into an ideological fad- black capitalism was, for a little while, on everyone’s lips, even people like Ishmael Reed, who should have known better. 

Richard Nixon knew what he was doing when he promoted black capitalism as a solution to black America’s woes, even as the fulfillment of “black power.” It’s a placeholder idea, a vacuous non-concept that can still effectively stand in for where an idea might otherwise be, if no one kicks the tires (not unlike a McDonald’s meal is a placeholder for something better, come to that). Nobody — not Nixon, not such movement veterans as Floyd McKissick who embraced the concept — articulated how, exactly, you were going to get black capitalism without a critical mass of capital in black hands, without some kind of massive redistribution program. That wasn’t on the table. What was on the table was a certain amount of grant money, much of which went to businesses who could prove they were promoting black business ownership and job growth. In a period of deindustrialization, McDonald’s, with its franchise model (you’re hardly going to franchise steel manufacturing plants), was poised to take advantage, massively increasing its footprint in black America and posing as a community investor.

McDonald’s proved skillful at playing the cultural games that grew in importance in the late twentieth century as the possibilities for material change receded. In this, an earlier investment paid off- those black franchisees, some of whom moved into senior corporate positions, proved vital to McDonald’s efforts to adapt. This involved both learning marketing targeted at black people and figuring out how to defuse challenges from local community organizations who either wanted a bigger slice of the profits McDonald’s was extracting or else keep the company out in general. McDonald’s was also helped by the times- it “fit right in there,” as Sam Elliott put it in another nineties classic, The Big Lebowski. Vague aspirationalism, cheap products produced by increasingly globalized supply chains and taylorized workforces from the farm to the cash register, relying on people not to look too close… the eighties and nineties, despite some academic trends, poor times for close criticism.

Really, it was just sad to watch these communities, with leaders who had struggled so hard and done so much during the course of the black freedom struggle, reduced to slinging slogans about burger restaurants, whether they’re good or bad or whatever. It’s sad to see the hopes people invested in black franchising, and not just McDonald’s either- a chain named after Chicken George, from “Roots,” was in fact black owned and was doing pretty good… before it got poleaxed by market changes. That’s what happened to the numerous chains opened up by black celebrities during the black capitalism fad, too, when they weren’t just vaporware to begin with. That’s what the kind of deep fundament of capital that established — read, white — firms have, their relationships across the web of capitalism from banks to suppliers to media, can get you. McDonald’s could afford to screw up everything from its initial introduction of chicken sandwiches to avoiding lawsuits for discrimination, because they’re established and backed by other established players. None of these black enterprises had that. Black capitalism can’t replace black power because you need power to do capitalism. 

And so, McDonald’s grew omnipresent in black America. As black communities continued their slide into immiseration, fast food places are often the only places to affordably feed a family with the kind of time people scrambling to make a living have, so the worse things got, the more McDonald’s was in demand. A franchisee conman who got his start using black pride sloganeering to boost his McDonald’s franchises stood behind Bill Clinton as he signed the welfare reform bill, further cheapening McDonald’s labor pool and encouraging people to spend their dwindling food budget there, in case the ironies involved were too subtle. 

It’s sad, but also hard to blame the individual black people involved. Capitalism in general, and consumer companies like McDonald’s in particular, does everything it can to obscure what actually makes the machine go, to impersonate natural forces or acts of god. And anyone who knows anything about the struggles of the sixties knows the profound exhaustion that came after a decade of fighting seemed to fall short of tangible goals. You can’t blame drowning people for scrabbling at any kind of driftwood they can lay their hands on. And it’s not like the opposition — Chatelain begins the book with the kind of sneering, “junk food” criticism of fast food that misses a lot of the point — was great, either, immersed in whatever spell seemed to stop Americans, especially but not exclusively white ones. from taking anything structural into account until, maybe, 2010 or so in their understandings of the world. All in all, a discouraging picture, well painted. ****’