Question of the Pogroms’ in a Paris Courtroom in the 1920S: the Trial of Sholem Schwartzbard
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Draft - do not cite or quote without author's permission The ‘Question of the Pogroms’ in a Paris Courtroom in the 1920s: the Trial of Sholem Schwartzbard Alexandra Garbarini Writing about the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, Hannah Arendt recalled two murder trials from the 1920s in Europe.1 In 1921, Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian man allegedly living as a student in Berlin, assassinated the former Ottoman Minister of the Interior, Talaat Pasha, for his responsibility in the expropriation, deportation, rape, and extermination of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire under the cover of World War I.2 Five years later in Paris, a Ukrainian Jewish man who had recently become a naturalized French citizen, Sholem Schwartzbard, shot and killed the Ukrainian nationalist leader, Simon Petlyura. Schwartzbard sought justice for the destruction of property, rape, and murder of tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews during the years of the 1 Arendt referred to the Tehlirian and Schwartzbard trials in order to sharpen her critique of the Israeli state’s kidnapping of Eichmann and conduct of that trial. In Arendt’s view, the state of Israel had misunderstood the nature of the crime that had been committed against the Jewish people by Nazi Germany. Acting on the basis of its misunderstanding, it had lost sight of the principle that the authority of the court pertained to the law, not to history or morality. “The purpose of a trial is to render justice, and nothing else,” which in her view meant “to weigh the charges brought against the accused, to render judgment, and to mete out due punishment.” Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1994 [1963]), 253. A decade later, two book-length treatments of the Schwartzbard trial were published: Meir Kotik, Mishpat Shvartsbard [in Hebrew] (Haderah: Mifale neyar Haderah, 1972); Saul S. Friedman, Pogromchik: The Assassination of Simon Petlura (New York: Hart Publishing Company, 1976). Now, the sine qua non for the history of the Schwartzbard trial is David Engel’s volume, which contains an analysis of the political significance of the trial as well as the transcription and translation of seventy-six documents relating to the trial. David Engel, ed., The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard, 1926-1927, A Selection of Documents (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016). On the Tehlirian trial, there are several popular accounts: Justicier du genocide arménien: le procès de Tehlirian; Edward Alexander, A Crime of Vengeance: An Armenian Struggle for Justice (New York: Free Press, 1991); Rolf Hosfeld, Operation Nemesis: Die Türkei, Deutschland und der Völkermord an den Armeniern (Köln: Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2005); Eric Bogosian, Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015); Jacques Derogy, Les vengeurs arméniens: Opération Némésis (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard/Pluriel, 2015); Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy, Sacred Justice: The Voices and Legacy of the Armenian Operation Nemesis (New York: Routledge, 2017). The one scholarly treatment is Stefan Ihrig, Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), chaps. 10 and 11. 2 The facts of the biography of Soghomon Tehlirian are still being contested. See Robert Fisk, “My conversation with the son of Soghomon Tehlirian, the man who assassinated the organiser of the Armenian genocide,” The Independent, 20 June 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/robert-fisk-armenian-genocide-conversation- son-of-soghomon-tehlirian-mehmet-talaat-pasha-a7091951.html. 1 Draft - do not cite or quote without author's permission Russian Civil War.3 Both were acquitted. Almost four decades later, Arendt was still struck by the power of these two political assassinations and subsequent trials. These two men had committed murder to cast themselves in the role of justice-seekers. When they submitted to standing trial, their acts of murder took on larger significance than mere acts of vengeance. Tehlirian and Schwartzbard had reaffirmed the importance of the law, Arendt insisted, while challenging the particular laws and legal frameworks that had failed to bring the parties responsible for such large-scale acts of violence to justice.4 In Arendt’s account, the power of the Tehlirian and Schwartzbard trials resided in the “irreducible risk” these two men had run in standing trial. In neither case was the trial’s outcome a foregone conclusion, unlike the conviction of Eichmann. The Tehlirian and Schwartzbard trials were, thereby, instantiations of “political justice,” as theorized by Otto Kirchheimer in his work that appeared the same year that Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem.5 They took the form of legitimate show trials, performances of justice with transformative potential for the legal and political frameworks in which they occurred and for the victim groups in whose name the defendants spoke. A central aspect of the destabilizing character of these trials was the carnivalesque reversal of roles at play in each.6 Tehlirian and 3 Entry "Schwartzbard (Samuel), 30-09-88, Smolensk (Russie), NAT, 16-01-25, 1009-25," Ministère de la Santé Publique et de la Population, Liste Alphabétique des Personnes ayant acquis ou perdu la Nationalité par Décret (Naturalisations, Réintégrations, Libérations des Liens d'Allégeance, etc.), Années 1921 à 1930, Lettres S à Z, Tome VIII (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1949), p. 159, Archives de Paris. For a biography of Schwartzbard, see Kelly Johnson, "Sholem Schwarzbard: Biography of a Jewish Assassin” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012). 4 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 265-67. 5 Otto Kirchheimer, Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 1; Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 266. On the surface, it would seem that Kirchheimer’s central Problematik leads in a direction different from that presented by the Tehlirian and Schwartzbard trials. Kirchheimer explored how an independent judiciary can function at times to buttress, and at other times to undermine constitutional democracies. As will be discussed below, however, these two political assassination trials, in different ways, presented opportunities to their respective defense counsel and judges to buttress the exercise of governmental power in Germany and France when that power proved vulnerable. Schwartzbard’s defense attorney, Henri Torrès, in particular, used the Schwartzbard trial to legitimate French Republicanism, thereby extending the symbolic role that Jews have long occupied in French national debates. 6 Natalie Zemon Davis, drawing on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Victor Turner, offered a reading of carnival in sixteenth-century France as carrying the potential to subvert existing political and social structures: “the structure of the carnival form can evolve so that it can act both to reinforce order and to suggest alternatives to the existing order.” Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 123, 103. 2 Draft - do not cite or quote without author's permission Schwartzbard, who spoke in the name of the victims, became the accused; whereas Talaat and Petlyura, who in the public imagination bore a primary responsibility for the atrocities, became the victims. The trials thus adjudicated crimes in a double sense: they brought forward, for public airing, in the space of the courtroom and on the pages of hundreds of newspapers read across the world, the mass violence inflicted on the Armenians and the Jews, while simultaneously bringing the acts of political assassination committed by Tehlirian and Schwartzbard to a jury trial.7 These courtroom dramas would determine the fate of their defendants, but the risk inherent to these trials extended far beyond these two men. They called into question European and even global political, legal, and cultural norms. What’s significant is that Arendt did not remember only one of the trials. Almost forty years later, the trials of the Armenian and Jewish political assassins remained linked in her mind. Arendt’s discussion of the two trials in Eichmann in Jerusalem is evidence that memory of the Tehlirian trial -- and the suffering of Armenians that had inspired the act that Tehlirian carried out -- had not been forgotten, contrary to conventional wisdom.8 Paired in Arendt’s memory, they were also paired at the time, and intentionally so, by Schwartzbard’s defenders inside the courtroom and outside. Equating the trials became part of the defense strategy to plea for Schwartzbard’s acquittal.9 Yet the trials’ structural similarities have obscured important differences in terms of the political contexts in which the trials unfolded, 7 The clippings files relating to the Tehlirian trial at the Bibliothèque Nubar in Paris, France, and, relating to the Schwartzbard trial at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (hereafter: CAHJP) in Jerusalem, Israel, contain articles from hundreds of newspapers from across Europe, the regions of the former Ottoman Empire, North America, and South America. On the Tehlirian trial, see the following files at the Bibliothèque Nubar : Procès Soghomon Tehlirian; Coupures de la Presse (Journaux 1921 Janvier-Juillet); Coupures de Journaux (Massacres-Déportations). On the Schwartzbard trial,