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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.

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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.

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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, see CAHJP, P243/5-32, Collection of the Committee for the Defence of Shalom Schwartzbard, Paris, Clippings files, 1926-1927. 8 Arendt’s reference is also evidence that this ongoing awareness extended beyond Germany and into the postwar years. On German memory of the Armenian massacres during the Third Reich, see Ihrig, Justifying Genocide; Wolf Gruner, “’Peregrinations into the Void?’ German Jews and their Knowledge about the Armenian Genocide during the Third Reich,” Central European History 45 (2012): 1-26. 9 References to the Tehlirian trial appear in notes in the papers of the Schwartzbard Defense Committee, YIVO, RG 80, Folder 478, folios 39210-39220. Also in: Letter from Motzkin to Klee, in which Motzkin asked Klee to share his memories of the Tehlirian trial and, in particular, how the defense of Tehlirian was conducted, CAHJP, P243/2.

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their legal implications, their treatment of the figure of the witness and of victim testimony.10

Some of those differences were apparent to commentators at the time; others only emerge upon careful analysis of the trials with new questions in mind. Ultimately, the following discussion of the two trials in successive chapters seeks to bring out the distinct characteristics of each while demonstrating how they became linked in the collective memory of mass atrocity and the consequences of that linkage for understandings of mass violence that emerged from the courtroom dramas.

In both cases, I have eschewed investigating why Tehlirian and Schwartzbard committed the assassinations. Their motivations and personal stories, both fascinating topics in their own right, are not under discussion here.11 In the case of Tehlirian, several decades later he admitted to having been a part of an Armenian underground cell called Nemesis, whose mission it had been to track down and kill Turkish officials who had been tried in absentia for the role they had played in carrying out the Armenian Genocide but who had managed to evade being brought to justice. At the time of his trial in Berlin, no one suspected that he had ties to such a network nor was he accused of political motives; it was taken at face value that he was a solitary figure, a survivor of the genocide, who had decided to take justice into his own hands.12 Ironically, with Schwartzbard, evidence of conspiracy never materialized yet suspicions that he acted at the behest of the Soviet Union emerged immediately and have never entirely disappeared.13 For the purposes of this study, what is

10 The seminal text on testimony in the decades after the Holocaust is Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 11 Both men later wrote and published their memoirs. Soghomon Tehlirean, Verhishumner [Remarks] (Gahirē: Husaber, 1953); Sholem Shvartsbard, In krig -- mit zikh aleyn [At War With Myself] (Chicago: Verlag Ceshinsky, 1933); Sholem Shvartsbard, In’m loyf fun yorn [Over the Years] (Chicago: M. Ceshinsky, 1933). Excerpts of Schwartzbard’s writing have been compiled in a French edition: Samuel Schwarzbard, Mémoires d’un anarchiste juif (Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2010). 12 Hosfeld, Operation Nemesis; Ihrig, Justifying Genocide, 227, 263. 13 Such suspicions featured prominently in the coverage of the investigation and trial, especially among Ukrainian leaders and right-wing French journalists, as the Action Française reporter commented: “Schwartzbard, juif fanatique, a-t-il été seulement un instrument aux mains des Soviets? C’est ce qui se dit partout.” N. Sant-Andrea, “L’assassinat du general Petlioura,” L’Action Française, 3 June 1926. Engel, The Assassination of Symon Petliura, esp. 31-35.

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more important is how these two assassinations and trials were understood by others and less how the two men who stood accused of murder understood their actions.

The trials occasioned the public airing of the archival activism of Aram Andonian and

Elias Tcherikower.14 It would have been daunting enough for the German and French attorneys who knew little about the Ottoman Empire and Ukraine to familiarize themselves with those respective geographies and histories in short order. That research project was all the more daunting for outsiders since knowledge of the genocidal violence recently inflicted on Armenians and Jews had only recently begun to be acquired and consolidated. In that context, the knowledge possessed by Andonian and Tcherikower proved invaluable. They helped the defense attorneys prepare their respective cases. Tcherikower also served as a key witness in the Schwartzbard trial. What was more, the extensive collections of documents, salvaged in no small measure by these men, were put to new use in the trials both in their unpublished and published forms. It was thanks to the documents having been smuggled out to France and Germany that they were available for use in the trials. (Ironically, the sites of the trials and the archival collections were reversed: Andonian and the collections pertaining to the Armenians were in Paris, whereas Tcherikower and the pogrom materials were at that time in Berlin.) In both cases, the independence of the archives from state authorities who sought to control how the interlocking series of events would be narrated proved highly significant.15

The Tehlirian and Schwartzbard trials offer a unique opportunity to analyze public opinion about mass violence, the status of victims, and the evolution of testimonies in the

1920s.16 These two trials took place in courts in which the verdict was reached by a jury and

14 [Discussed in previous chapters.] 15 An appreciation of the importance of the autonomy of the archives influenced European Jews who sought to document Nazi crimes, and in particular, Tcherikower’s friend and protegé, Zosa Szajkowski. See Lisa Moses Leff, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), chap. 4. 16 Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, 14.

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not by a panel of judges. Twelve male Berlin residents and twelve male Paris residents were responsible for adjudicating enormously consequential political, legal, and moral questions of the day. Questions about the legal definition of mass atrocities in international law, the responsibility of leaders and states for state-organized violence, and the appropriate instrument for addressing such matters had divided diplomats and jurists at the Paris Peace

Conference. Just a couple of years later it fell to ordinary citizens of the two leading antagonists in the war to listen to both the testimonies of witnesses and the arguments of lawyers about the perpetration of atrocities during wartime, and to reach a verdict. Public opinion, personified in jurors, entered these Berlin and Paris courtrooms; public opinion, represented by journalists’ accounts of the trials, spilled out in a torrent of print that touched readers across Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the world. People debated the meaning of such acts of justice-seeking in the heart of two European capital cities, thousands of miles away from the massive violence that had provoked them. They wrestled with the meaning of such violence, of the suffering of others, for their own societies and for the

“civilized world” as a whole.

[A chapter on the Tehlirian trial precedes the chapter on the Schwartzbard trial and goes here.]

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The Muting of Victim Testimony: Torrès the Ventriloquist

Listening to victims of the pogroms tell their stories was supposed to be a central feature of the Schwartzbard trial. Of the close to eighty people, almost all men, who appeared on the list of witnesses prepared by the defense, approximately half were eyewitnesses of various sorts, “that is to say,” as Henry Torrès, Schwartzbard’s defense attorney, explained in his plaidoirie, “people [des hommes] who suffered from the pogroms in their flesh.”17

Ultimately, however, victims did not figure as “bearers of history” in the Schwartzbard trial, as they would later in the Eichmann trial.18 Only nine witnesses of any sort testified for the defense, and of those nine, only two could be categorized as victims.19 On the seventh day of the trial, in consultation with the attorneys for the civil party, Torrès made the dramatic move to renounce calling the remainder of the witnesses.

The renunciation of the witnesses by the defense was shocking and yet not surprising.

Shocking, to start with, because the Schwartzbard defense committee had expended considerable effort and expense to locate witnesses and to bring them to Paris. It had enlisted assistance from contacts in Jewish organizations around the world to select “victim- witnesses” who would be, in the words of the defense committee’s minutes, “interesting” and

“able to testify usefully.”20 Among those selected, a few traveled from as far away as New

17 The rest of the defense witnesses Torrès divided into two categories: “people [des hommes] who, in all fields, represent the genius of France in its most radiant and highest form,” and “some fifteen of Schwartzbard's comrades, Jewish volunteers of the Great War.” Schwartzbard Trial Transcript [hereafter: STT], YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 496, Folio no. 40704. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 18 Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, 87. 19 The nine defense witnesses, in the order in which they appeared in the trial: Langevin; Ruben Grinberg, a native of Proskurov and a Red Cross worker; Moïse Goldstein; Haya Grinberg, a medical student at the time of the pogroms and native of Proskurov who was visiting her family at the time of the pogrom in Proskurov, in February 1919; Henry Sliosberg, a jurist and head of the Central Aid Committee for Jewish Victims of the War and the Pogroms; Vladimir Tiomkin, former chair of the Jewish National Assembly in Ukraine; Elias Tcherikower; Leo Motzkin; and Jacques Kafra/Safra. Five of these nine were members of the Schwartzbard Defense Committee (Goldstein, Sliosberg, Tiomkin, Tcherikower, Motzkin). 20 Minutes of the meeting of the “Schwarzbard Defense Committee. Paris, 13 September 1926,” Document 35; and “Typewritten Report,” Schwarzbard Defense Committee, Paris, 7 October 1926, Document 37; both in Engel, The Assassination of Symon Petliura, 227-28, 237-42.

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York and Buenos Aires, though even the witnesses coming from Warsaw and Vienna needed visas from the French government and funds to pay their travel expenses in order to come for the trial.21

There was another dimension to the shock produced by the renunciation of witnesses.

A short update on the aftermath of the trial in l’Univers Israélite reported that “the brusque ending of the trial displeased those who had wanted all the horrors of the pogroms to be rolled out in the Cour d’Assises.” In a similar vein, a front-page article in the German Jewish newspaper, Israelitisches Familienblatt, expressed that “The trial has brought the horrors to light enough to vindicate Schwartzbard, but still not enough to expose the pogrom in all its savagery before the eyes of Europe.”22 A journalist for the Yiddish daily, Pariser Haynt, went so far as to put Torrès on the spot, asking him to justify his having refused victims their chance to speak publicly about their experiences.23 The main justification was, of course, that

Torrès had secured Schwartzbard’s acquittal.

However, the trial had never just been about Schwartzbard. Torrès portrayed himself, in the months leading up to the start of the trial, “[a]s the defender, of not only Schwartzbard but also – and that in particular – of Jewish rights, which cannot be separated from human rights.”24 In an open letter to Louis Marshall that was printed in the Yiddish press, Torrès had promised: “The act of Schwartzbard, reviving a sentiment which had become less poignant in course of time, has rekindled the interest of the civilized world in the suffering Jewish population, has brought to life numerous witnesses who procured innumerable proofs which

21 On visas, see Letter, “Ministère de l'Intérieur, Direction de la Sûreté Générale, Service Central des Passeports,” to “Monsieur le Préfet de Police (Cabinet),” 1 Oct. 1927, File BA 2024 (PETLURA or PETLIURA Simon), APP. On raising funds and the financial burden of transportation costs for witnesses, see especially “Schwarzbard Defense Committee to Joseph Krimsky,” Paris, 21 April 1927, Doc. 53; in Engel, The Assassination of Symon Petliura, 305-06. 22 Segel, Israelitisches Familienblatt, 3 November 1927, p. 1. 23 [J.M.], “Autour de Schwartzbard,“ L’Univers Israélite, 4 November 1927, p. 202. 24 “Reply of Henri Torrès to Louis Marshall,” Paris, 14 February 1927, Doc. 46; in Engel, The Assassination of Symon Petliura, 278. This open letter was published in the New York Yiddish-language newspaper, Morgen zhurnal.

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will all be brought before the French court.”25 The witnesses who were supposed to speak at the trial were to play a critical role in consolidating the wider political significance of the trial. In this, Torrès had appeared to be in full agreement with the members of the

Schwartzbard defense committee, whose mission was captured by its president, Leo Motzkin, in the following terms: “the Committee has had one aim and endeavor only: to lay bare at the coming trial the whole truth about the tragic events that took place in the Ukraina in 1919 and

1920 and to supply Counsel for the defence with all the available evidence.”26 The story of the pogroms of 1919-1921 would finally capture the attention of non-Jews. “I have forty victims,” Torrès proclaimed during the trial, and the Jewish public and activists alike had expected that those victims would finally get to speak about their experiences – and be listened to.27

The testimonies of witnesses in the courtroom were to have become the impetus to stimulate political change on the world stage. In a memorandum Motzkin prepared in the final weeks leading up to the Schwartzbard trial, he anticipated “the impression that will naturally be aroused by all of the sworn testimonies at the trial.” Motzkin assumed that victim testimonies would have a considerable emotional impact on spectators in the courtroom and readers of the trial’s newspaper coverage. He looked forward to the dawning of a new political order inspired by the non-Jewish public’s newfound emotional engagement with the victims of the pogroms: “Personally I would hope that this trial would have a cathartic effect and that it would produce a rallying cry for a worldwide struggle against the possibility of all pogroms, against the possibility that the pogroms will be examined via cold-hearted analysis devoid of human feeling. We do not wish thereby to cause any sort of wall of separation

25 “Reply of Henri Torrès to Louis Marshall,” Paris, 14 February 1927, Doc. 46; in Engel, The Assassination of Symon Petliura, 278. 26 Letter, “Leo Motzkin to Louis Marshall,” Paris, 30 January 1927, Doc. 44; in Engel, The Assassination of Symon Petliura, 272. 27 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 490, Folio no. 40155.

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between Jews and non-Jews but on the contrary, to bring about a new code of conduct among nations.”28 He expressed the hope that the testimonies of the witnesses would galvanize public opinion to condemn pogroms, and that such a condemnation would result in the overturning of the existing order in which pogroms were still tolerated or even promoted.29

Perhaps an additional, though largely unacknowledged, aspect of the shock engendered by Torrès’ renunciation of witnesses was psychological in nature. Anna Hájková has analyzed how, for survivors of the Holocaust, “after the profound powerlessness of the persecution, bearing testimony of the crime was a critical moment of agency.”30 Indeed, in the Eichmann trial, as Lawrence Douglas described, “a number of witnesses testified that they had lived in anticipation of precisely the day when they would be called to tell their story in a court of law.” What transpired in that courtroom, Douglas argues, was the transformation of survivors’ “narratives of horror into legal evidence.” In the process, survivors attained “a degree of closure to the traumatic memories.”31 Traumatic memories that facilitated justice took on new meaning for trauma sufferers. It seems possible that pogrom victims likewise longed for their chance to take the witness stand and testify. The fact that, in advance of the Schwartzbard trial, pogrom victims presented themselves to representatives of the Schwartzbard defense committee as wanting to serve as witnesses in the trial suggests that they, too, regarded the possibility of telling their stories and aiding the

28 Leo Motzkin, Memorandum, “A Note on the Schwarzbard Affair,” Paris, September 1927, Doc. 59; in Engel, The Assassination of Symon Petliura, 335. The reference to not wanting to “cause any sort of wall of separation between Jews and non-Jews” was intended for Ukrainians in the hope that a reconciliation between Ukrainians and Jews would be possible after Schwartzbard’s trial. 29 Recent critiques of humanitarianism analyze the ways in which efforts to arouse compassion for victims can undermine more thoroughgoing political transformations. A particularly cogent discussion of this position is Miriam Ticktin, “Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2016): 255-271. 30 Anna Hájková, “What Kind of Narrative is Legal Testimony? Terezin Witnesses before Czechoslovak, Austrian, and German Courts,” in Rethinking Holocaust Justice: Essays Across Disciplines, ed. Norman J. W. Goda (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 90. On the importance to victims of telling their story in the context of trials as a means of regaining agency, see as well Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, 31-32. 31 Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 162.

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defense of Schwartzbard as a “critical moment of agency.” The renunciation of defense witnesses denied victims the chance to have their particular experiences acknowledged in a public hearing. Prior to the lawyers’ closing arguments, just two of the trial’s seven days had been to devoted to hearing defense witnesses, and only two of the defense witnesses who testified were victims.

Yet as shocking as Torrès’ renunciation of defense witnesses appears to have been, a careful reading of the trial transcript reveals that Torrès repeatedly foreshadowed just such an eventuality. Beginning on the first day of the trial, references to the large number of defense witnesses slated to testify became increasingly frequent. They served initially as a way for

César Campinchi, attorney for the civil party32, to reproach the defense for trying to transform the trial of Schwartzbard into the trial of Petlyura. By the third day, Torrès raised the possibility, if the testimonies of the witnesses for the prosecution and the civil party continued to drag on, that he would have to renounce hearing the defense witnesses, “in order not to take up too much of the jurors’ time.” To which Campinchi rejoined: “The civil party has called thirty-two witnesses, you have called more than eighty; I understand that you are already considering renouncing a number of these witnesses!”33 The specter of the defense renouncing witnesses was the object of a heated exchange between Torrès and Campinchi on the fifth day, as Torrès lamented: “I will be forced to renounce hearing the victims, who will not give lectures, but who will say: ‘I was there, I saw massacres, I was beaten, I was wounded by a soldier sporting the regular uniform of Petlura’s [troops].’ I will not be able to have them testify anymore! What a shame!”34 Thereupon, the presiding judge Flory reminded

32 To be precise, Campinchi was the attorney for the brother of Petlyura, who filed a civil suit against Schwartzbard for wrongful death. In trials conducted by the Cour d’Assises in all the départements of France, criminal charges are decided alongside the claims of civil parties. Furthermore, the verdict and sentencing of the Cour d’Assises cannot be appealed. For an introduction to the workings of the Cour d’Assises for readers familiar with the Anglo-American legal system, written at the time of the Schwartzbard trial, see Robert Ferrari, “The Procedure in the ‘Cour d’Assises’ of Paris,” Columbia Law Review 18, no. 1 (Jan. 1918): 43-62. 33 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 488, Folio no. 39839. 34 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 490, Folio no. 40154.

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Torrès that “there are still eight days,” and to which Campinchi replied dismissively, “Don't worry, we'll hear from your witnesses,” while simultaneously discounting the value of their testimonies: “[Your witnesses] can be divided into two categories: Parisians who will come to give lectures and deposit treasures of eloquence that they cannot leave elsewhere, and then, a series of witnesses, twenty or twenty-five in total, who will come to say: ‘I lost an arm, a leg or a parent.’ But in advance, I will grant you that there were pogroms. No one is denying that.”35 On the sixth day, the defense began to call its witnesses to testify, yet already at the end of that day, early in the testimony of the veteran Russian Zionist leader and member of the Schwartzbard defense committee, Vladimir Tiomkin, Torrès interrupted to ask him to get straight to the point. By way of explanation, Torrès, in essence, apologized to Tiomkin through a translator: “The witness [i.e., Tiomkin] comes weighed down with the subject, full of memories that are directly related to this case, but I am afraid, given the number of horrors he has witnessed and the tragic episodes in which he has been immersed, that he may tell us about them all, and unfortunately, we are already cruelly saturated.”36 At the end of the next day, the seventh day of the trial, Torrès renounced hearing the rest – that is, the vast majority

-- of the defense witnesses.

Why did Torrès do it? And what does this tale of the renunciation of witnesses, of the

“trial of the pogroms” as a promise unfulfilled, reveal? On the face of it, Torrès must have sensed that piling on atrocity stories would not gain the jury’s sympathy. It might, in fact, have had the opposite effect. Even a defense witness expressed awareness of this possibility.

When Elias Tcherikower testified at the trial, he expressed his reluctance to get into too much detail: he did not want to “strain the court’s attention.”37

35 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 490, Folio no. 40155. 36 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 490, Folio nos. 40430-31. 37 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 492, Folio no. 40473.

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Beyond the tedium it might produce, elaborating at length about the ways in which

Jews were tortured and killed might be perceived as indecent, as a further violation of the victims. In his 1922 account of his work as chair of the American commission sent to Poland to investigate pogroms in 1919, Henry Morgenthau cut short his description of the pogroms in Pinsk and Vilna with the explanation: “Giving harrowing details will not remedy the situation, and might be misconstrued and do harm to those suffering people. Hence, I have abstained.”38 In a similar vein, Torrès twice mentioned – and at some length during his closing argument – his restraint in opting, in particular, not to show photographs taken in the aftermath of pogroms: “I do not want to exploit the horror in this trial, any more than I will exploit the hundreds and hundreds of photographs I have here, taken after the pogroms of

Zhytomyr, Ovruch, Proskurov. In one of those photographs, we recognize the unfortunate girl you heard the day before yesterday, who is leaning over an injured child. I will not show them to you, I will not paint a picture of these horrors; you know them.”39 Torres was signaling to jurors that he did not want to indulge in gratuitous displays of violence. What historian Stefan Ihrig refers to as “atrocity pornography” had long been a feature of press accounts, particularly of Armenian massacres in the Ottoman Empire beginning in the 1890s.

Gruesome accounts of torture, rape, and murder made such reports hard to read and contributed to their appearing less than plausible.40 Without a doubt given its prevalence,

“atrocity pornography” was familiar to all newspaper readers in the 1920s. Against this backdrop, Torrès’ discretion was to be taken as a sign of his good judgment, further enhancing the credibility of the narrative the defense was presenting of the pogroms and

Petlyura’s responsibility.

38 Henry Morgenthau, All in a Life-Time (Garden City and New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1922), 371. 39 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 496, Folio no. 40718. 40 Stefan Ihrig, Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 2016), 45.

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Beyond Torrès’ motivations for doing so, however, the renunciation of witnesses constituted something more: the muting of the victims. Notwithstanding the difference in tone and attitude betrayed by Torrès and Campinchi in their characterizations of victim testimony, they reveal a shared perception of how little victim testimony had to contribute to knowledge and understanding of the pogroms. Torrès’ ‘I was there, I saw massacres, I was beaten, I was wounded by a soldier sporting the regular uniform of Petlura’s [troops],’ and

Campinchi’s ‘I lost an arm, a leg or a parent,’ both represent victim testimony as if its content was already well-known -- and this at a time in the trial, in which no victims had yet testified.

Both attorneys represented victim testimony as if its main features were all-too-predictable: victim testimony consisted of first-person narratives that conveyed experiences of violence and loss. As Torrès said in his plaidoirie with respect to his having decided not to exhibit the photographs, “I will not show them to you, I will not paint a picture of these horrors; you know them.” The history of the pogroms, the history of the Civil War in Russia, Ukrainian history as a whole, were all recognized as being endlessly complex and foreign to the French courtroom actors. And yet it was taken for granted that the “horrors” were all already known.

For the attorneys, the question of victim testimony was knowledge, not acknowledgement. Knowledge was assumed to be “something that I can do once and then be done with it,” as Veena Das theorizes.41 By contrast, acknowledging victims’ experiences necessitated granting them the power of speech and listening carefully to what they had to say. In renouncing the remainder of the defense witnesses, Torrès ultimately retained for himself the privilege of speech, of communicative performance, and with it, control over the representation of truth.42 The trial was full of empty vessels: dozens of victims who did not testify; hundreds of photographs that no one looked at; thousands of documents that no one

41 Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 6-7. 42 Marco Jacquemet, Credibility in Court: Communicative Practices in the Camorra Trials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6.

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read – all of which Torrès evoked repeatedly. Indeed, Torrès’ ventriloquism became one of the leitmotifs of his plaidoirie. He referred to what jurors would have heard from witnesses he did not call to testify; he read aloud a section of a letter written by a witness who did not testify. Torrès spoke in their stead.

For Torrès, the very presence of victims in the courtroom constituted a declaration of truth. Their physical presence declared “I was there.” Campinchi discounted even that contribution of victim testimony. Since “no one is denying” the fact of the pogroms, he alleged, then the presence in the courtroom of those who had seen and escaped the pogroms merely corroborated a fact that was no longer in dispute.

What mattered most was not the content of victims’ testimony but the fact of their existence. In the Schwartzbard trial, the acceptability of authorized individuals -- Torrès most of all -- to speak in place of victims moved from the pages of document volumes to the trial’s center stage.

“She is the voice of the entire Jewish population that has been the victim of massacres”: Victim Testimony as Collective Individual

Among the eight witnesses who testified for the defense on days six and seven of the trial, two testified in their role as eyewitnesses and victims. They were a twenty-nine-year old woman named Haya Grinberg, a native of Proskurov, and a forty-six-year old man and native of Kiev whose name appears variously as Jacques Kafra or Safra. According to newspaper accounts, both testimonies, but particularly Grinberg’s, injected intense emotions into the courtroom. The preceding days had been marked by the verbal sparring (and, on one occasion, in fisticuffs) that frequently erupted between Torrès and Campinchi. On the day

Grinberg testified, journalists for the Jewish and the mainstream French press commented on

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the different atmosphere in the courtroom. “The witnesses of the day are sounding another bell,” wrote one journalist.43

Grinberg’s testimony stood out in terms of its content and character. “Petite, chubby, reasonably pretty, with very dark hair cut very short,” Grinberg was depicted in a sympathetic light in L’Avenir as “exactly the type of student we have all encountered in the corridors of the Sorbonne or in Luxembourg.”44 In 1919, Grinberg had been a medical student. At the time of the February pogrom in Proskurov, she happened to be home visiting her family. She was supposed to depart Proskurov to go sit for exams when the soldiers began attacking Jewish residents on the streets and in their homes. Grinberg stayed on in

Proskurov to help care for pogrom victims. Her grandparents’ house was converted into a makeshift hospital, protected by the flag of the Danish Red Cross. She felt grossly unqualified to act as nurse and assistant to the doctor, yet she allowed herself to be pressed into service. Under the circumstances, she felt she had no choice.

Grinberg’s was the only testimony to bridge the distance between the “there” of

Proskurov, of Ukraine, and the “here” of the courtroom, of France. Grinberg transformed the victims from an undifferentiated mass of “foreign” people into individuals with names and stories. One of the first victims, Grinberg told the courtroom, was another young woman,

“Miss Wartemberg, a friend of mine, who just on Friday had been quizzing me on anatomy.

She was killed by a bullet fired by a soldier [haidamak] on horseback passing by her window.” Grinberg recounted what she herself saw and also what others saw and recounted to her. She became a medium for their stories: “Voilà, for example, Miss Kisis, a young girl of nineteen. Eight members of her family were wounded: her father in the head; her little brother, who is seven years old, wounded in the back; another was wounded in the neck;

43 C.G., “Les débats du procès à la Cour d’Assises,” Menorah, 1 November 1927, p. 265. 44 R.G., “L’assassinat de Petliura. Samuel Schwartzbard devant les jurés de la Seine,” L’Avenir, 25 October 1927, p. 3.

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another in the temple and in the arm. Her [Miss Kisis’s] right breast was pierced with deep holes, and it was only thanks to Dr. Golvief's skillful surgery that breast amputation could be avoided. She said that the first victim from her house was her mother. One of the soldiers

[haidamak] threw himself on her, screaming: Long live our father Petlura! He threw himself on her with his sword and killed her.”45 Unlike sensationalistic newspaper accounts of the pogroms in which bodily dismemberment formed the climax of the story, Grinberg brought into focus the technical virtuosity of the doctor alongside the savagery of the soldiers, conjuring for listeners a more complex image of the population of Proskurov.

Grinberg’s testimony bound atrocity to the intimate spaces of her grandparents’ house turned hospital. As soon as she entered her grandparents’ house, the doctor put her to work.

“I saw in front of me little girls of twelve and fourteen years old, whom he indicated to me to send directly to the hospital in Semps[?]. Next to them, a three-year-old boy who remained mute; I put him on a small table in the kitchen, and all my caresses couldn't get a word out of him.” Perhaps the young girls had been raped, Grinberg did not say, but she did tell the court that one of the girls died two days later. She also added that the little boy still had not said a word at the end of that first day. These were heart-wrenching stories about traumatized and injured children. Her moving first-person testimony spilled out from the spaces of her hometown into the Paris courtroom.

For the first time in the trial, Grinberg brought the trauma of the pogroms to life. The pogrom victims became recognizable human beings, not just violated bodies and dismembered body parts. It was the first time that Schwartzbard cried during the trial, as several newspapers recounted; he “hid his face in his hands” and wept.46 What’s more, she shared her own trauma with the courtroom. Tears streamed down her face, and she spoke in a

45 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 491, Folio nos. 40342-344. 46 Georges Delaine, “Le Crime de Schwartzbard. Les témoins de la défense ne parlent plus que des pogroms,” Comoedia, 25 October 1927, p. 1 ; R.G., “L’assassinat de Petliura. Samuel Schwartzbard devant les jurés de la Seine,” L’Avenir, 25 October 1927, p. 3.

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quiet voice as she described with indelible detail the fate of individuals whose wounds she tried to dress, whose suffering she tried to alleviate.47 In the process she relived the scenes of violence and reexperienced in the present tense her helplessness and grief. With each story, she repeated: “I cannot forget.” The cries of that three-week old baby who had been thrown on a spike; the little boy of five who could not open his jaw to take a drink water and died of his wounds; the fourteen-year-old girl driven crazy with grief who threw herself on her mother’s dead body: “I cannot forget all these memories that are as if always before me.” The memories were so raw, she admitted, “even now, after eight years, I cannot remember all of that without shaking.” Her inability to alleviate the victims’ suffering was a recurrent theme:

“I cannot forget that little child who was always crying and that I couldn't treat; I was in my very first year of medical school. I was unable to do anything that would help.”48 Another memory that stood out for her was of the horse-driven carts filled with corpses, with a hand or an arm, a leg or a head protruding. She was haunted as much by memories of the grotesque as by the individual sufferers.

Grinberg expressed more and more identification with the Jewish victims of the pogrom over the course of her testimony. Initially she portrayed herself more as standing apart from those who had been brutalized and for whom she stood as caregiver and witness.

Hers had been a narrow escape. When on the first day of the pogrom three haidamaks approached their house, her father hid the family in the cellar, and they managed to escape physically unharmed. She recalled her father saying that the worst thing that could happen to a young girl was to be raped. During the course of her testimony at the Schwartzbard trial, however, she came to refer to herself as at one with the Jewish pogrom victims. She told the courtroom: “All of our sufferings, you cannot imagine them.” And again: “You cannot

47 On the sound of her voice and her tears, Henri Espu… [unreadable], “Le Procès Ukrainien Aux Assises. Pour essayer de démontrer la responsabilité de Petlura on l’a comparé à… Titus !” L’Echo de Paris, 25 October 1927, p. 1. 48 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 491, Folio nos. 40345-352.

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imagine how we have suffered.”49 Grinberg’s choice of pronouns pulled her and other Jews’ experiences together as one. It was her listeners in the courtroom who stood apart from them.

Reynaud, the prosecutor50, and Campinchi tried to blunt the impact of Grinberg’s testimony. Before she had even begun to speak, Reynaud attempted to discredit the testimony she was about to give. He referred to her views on Petlura’s role in the pogroms as “personal opinion,” as views that “seemed to me to be based on nothing at all.” To which Torrès retorted with indignation: “Miss Grinberg, who is a medical student, who treated Proskurov's wounded, comes here to testify; if you find that her opinion is not based on anything!”51

Subsequent to this exchange and after Grinberg had timidly gotten underway, Reynaud again interjected to discount the contribution of her testimony to the trial. Her “tragic account of the events” bore little relevance for determining the “responsibility” of Petlyura for the pogroms, and it was the latter issue, “that’s the whole trial.” Relative to the topic of Petlyura’s responsibility, all Grinberg had to contribute was “public rumor!”52 Campinchi chimed in, reminding the jurors of the suspect character of emotion and victim testimony:

If we let ourselves be moved -- and I am as moved as you are, at least I was just now and am a little less so now -- by all those who were maimed or wounded and have barely escaped the massacre or lost their children and parents in it, it will do credit to our hearts but not our minds. There is only one possible topic of discussion here: the justification of a criminal act. Did the helpless man who was shot [i.e., Petlyura] have on his hands the blood of the oppressed harmless Jew? […] Asking a victim for proof is difficult! But asking her to testify about what she doesn't know is too much.

Campinchi warned jurors not to let themselves be swayed by “that tone of sincere lamentation that we have heard, the story of these abominable scenes of massacre known as

49 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 491, Folio nos. 40349-352. 50 The avocat général at the French Cour d’Assises is not strictly the equivalent of a prosecutor. As much as the avocat général is responsible for presenting the case against the accused, they are also, as the representative of society and the state in the courtroom, there to plead for the most just verdict. In rare cases, that can mean pleading for acquittal if the avocat général remains unconvinced of the accused’s guilt. See entry on “L’avocat general,” accessed 2 October 2018, http://www.courdassises.fr/l-avocat-general.html. 51 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 491, Folio no. 40341. 52 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 491, Folio nos. 40352-354.

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pogroms.”53 Knowledge and emotion were incompatible in his formulation. This binarism appeared frequently, sometimes equating “becoming emotional” with “being Jewish.”54

Victim testimony was about stirring emotion, or worse, about Jews stirring emotion, not about establishing factual knowledge.

Campinchi poured additional scorn on Grinberg’s testimony during the two days that remained in the trial. His tone became increasingly derogatory as he insisted that she knew nothing about Petlyura, “like all those of her race.”55 Thirty-five years later, in 1962, the contempt with which Grinberg was treated still smarted. In a piece reflecting with hindsight on the Schwartzbard trial’s significance, the French Socialist politician and leading activist for the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, Daniel Mayer, recalled Grinberg’s description of “the dead bodies, the dying, the injured, the maimed,” and that “throughout her testimony, two men who had testified the day before and remained in the courtroom, general Chapoval and

Mr. Choulgine, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the provisional government of Petlyura, were smiling!”56 In 1962, Mayer had not forgotten her testimony, nor those smiles.

The means by which Reynaud and later Campinchi denigrated Grinberg’s testimony revealed the depths of their suspicion of what she had to say for its having come from a woman, a Jew, and a victim. The different treatment of women’s testimony has been documented by scholars in other contexts.57 In the case of the Schwartzbard trial, in no other

53 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 491, Folio nos. 40359-360; 40357. 54 In his 1934 novel, Mihail Sebastian attributes such a perspective to an antisemitic French friend of the Romanian Jewish main character. In a conversation that the two conduct, standing in front of a painting by Marc Chagall in a Paris art gallery owned by one of the leading French Jewish art dealers of the interwar years, the French friend expresses how disappointed he is by the other’s defense of Chagall’s work, which betrays “a Jewish way of looking at the world that distorts the proportions of nature, disturbs its symmetry, attacks its reality.” He was “grieved to see you [his Romanian Jewish companion] becoming emotional, which is synonymous with being Jewish.” Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years, trans. Philip Ó Ceallaigh (London: Penguin Books, 2016 [1934]), 177. 55 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 492, Folio no. 40551. 56 Daniel Mayer, “Les Informations du Centre d'Études,” no. 257, 31 October 1962, p. 3, LICRA Archives, Paris, France. 57 Hájková, “What Kind of Narrative is Legal Testimony? Terezin Witnesses before Czechoslovak, Austrian, and German Courts,” 85-89; TK

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instance did the attorneys treat a witness so dismissively. Not even Jacques Safra, another

Jewish victim who testified about the murder of his son by soldiers loyal to Petlyura in Kiev in 1919, was the object of such derision. When Safra had concluded the story of his son’s arrest and execution on the false accusation of being Bolshevik -- when he had finished describing how he had found his son’s body abandoned in the street “eaten by dogs,” and how he had fantasized about exacting a revenge worse than death on Petlyura, “to inflict such revenge on him that he would remember it all his life” – Campinchi, with some sympathy, characterized Safra as a father who had lost a son.58 Strikingly, Safra rejected such a portrayal, insisting rather: “I am not here as a father, but as a man, for all of us.” Safra insisted on the broader significance of his testimony and of the history of the pogroms.

To counter the attempts to undermine the value of victim testimony, a different argument in its defense was launched in the courtroom. As much as the dismissals, the counter-arguments reveal the status accorded victims and victim testimony. Far from being personal stories of individual suffering that were emotional and limited in perspective, the victims were sharing stories that bore a moral character on behalf of humanity as a whole.

This was the view expressed by Safra. And on a similar note but with a key difference,

Torrès summarized the significance of Grinberg’s testimony in the following terms: “She is the voice of all the Jewish populations who have been victims of massacres and of Ukrainian officers.”59 Torrès’ defense of the importance of Grinberg’s testimony paradoxically fed the idea of the particularity of Jewish history as a history of persecution, especially at the hands of non-Jewish Ukrainians. Nevertheless, if not the voice of humanity as Safra ventured,

Grinberg’s testimony in Torrès’ rendering carried more weight than the voice of a single and singular victim. She, too, represented the collective individual.

58 Numerous French newspapers printed in boldface as a sub-heading Safra’s description of “le cadavre de mon fils rongé par les chiens.” See, for example, C.G., “Le Procès des Pogromes Ukrainiens,” Menorah, 1 November 1927, p. 268. 59 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 491, Folio no. 40369.

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As metonym, Grinberg, the singular victim, signified the plural, just as her hometown of Proskurov was the part that came to represent the whole of the pogroms. Torrès turned the spotlight on Proskurov early on in the trial. In response to a challenge from Albert Willm, the lawyer for the civil party: “You were saying to me a moment ago: locate the debate in time and space. Here I am: Proskurov, February 1, 1919.” Indeed, the Schwartzbard trial helped to fix Proskurov as the symbol of the pogroms in collective memory. As a French journalist writing about the Schwartzbard trial after the verdict stressed, after elaborating on the massacre of Jews in Proskurov: “what happened in Proskurov also happened in many other towns and villages.”60

Tcherikower remarked on the repeated references to Proskurov with some consternation during his testimony at the trial, “We often talk here about Zhitomir and

Proskurov, but why are we not talking about hundreds of other places where even crueler and more horrible pogroms were carried out?” He proffered that, without wanting “to strain the court’s attention, he could list dozens of names and the precise indication of the units in question.”61 Indeed, thanks to the work of Tcherikower and subsequent historians, it has been established that Proskurov was the site of but one of the approximately 1500 pogroms that were carried out between 1918 and 1920 in more than 1300 locales in Ukraine. The extent of the violence is usually conveyed in terms of the number of Jews killed, somewhere between

50,000 and 200,000 according to different estimates. But when one also considers estimates of 200,000 people seriously injured; an untold number, perhaps tens of thousands, of women raped; more than 50,000 women widowed; and as many as 300,000 children orphaned, the extent of the devastation comes into clearer focus. Without a doubt, the pogrom that began on

February 15, 1919, in Proskurov was one of the deadliest. It is estimated that 1,650 Jews

60 Rodolphe Tonnellier, "Terre d'Epouvante : Les progromes [sic] d'Ukraine," n.d. ; newspaper clipping, Folder: Ukraine, Cote: F delta rés 798/64, Fonds Ligue Internationale des Droits de l'Homme (LDH), BDIC. 61 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 492, Folio no. 40473.

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were killed in Proskurov in four hours.62 Nonetheless, to Tcherikower, the attention being paid to Proskurov was disproportionate to its significance in the overall history of the pogroms in Ukraine. By contrast, for Torrès, Proskurov did not overshadow but rather illuminated other pogrom stories. Throughout the trial, through documents and witnesses, not least the appearance of Grinberg on the witness stand, Torrès amplified the events in

Proskurov, transforming them into metonym.

Victim testimony had to represent the collective experience, not the individual’s story. The significance of what Grinberg had to say did not reside in its particularity.

Grinberg’s story as the story of one individual, as the story of one pogrom victim, only mattered if it could stand in for the whole experience of the pogroms. She became the collective individual.63 Mass violence was understood as a story of repetition.

The Innocence of Pogrom Victims

Against the collectivity of the victims stood Schwartzbard. He was their foil. Whereas

Tehlirian had personified the Armenian victims’ trauma and where such trauma could lead,

Schwartzbard represented a different emotional constellation. Torrès cast Schwartzbard, not as a part of, but rather apart from the Jewish victims. The compassion for the victims elicited by Grinberg in her description of the innocent victims was ultimately overshadowed by far more ambivalent representations of the victims, which emerged in the portrayal of

Schwartzbard by his defenders. Moreover, in the contrast drawn between Schwartzbard and

62 Oleg Budnitskii, Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920, trans. Timothy J. Portice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 216-18. On sexual violence against women as a central dimension of the pogroms, see Irina Astashkevich, “The Pogroms in Ukraine in 1917-1920: an Alternate Universe (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2013). 63 There is a marked shift from a focus on collective experience in these pogrom testimonies to the focus on individual experience in the early testimonies of the Shoah. Sharon Kangisser Cohen discusses how Holocaust survivors, in their early testimonies, focused on the “I” and “my” individual story, and how only in later Holocaust testimonies does the communal story come into view. See Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Testimony & Time: Holocaust Survivors Remember (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Press, 2014),107.

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the Jewish pogrom victims, and in the outright expression of xenophobia mixed with antisemitism by the three attorneys seeking Schwartzbard’s conviction, the extent of anti-

Jewish sentiment in France at that time became apparent.

Rather than as a victim of mass violence driven temporarily mad by his own suffering and grief, Torrès cast Schwartzbard as an individual moral actor, a soldier and veteran, no more virtuous and no less honorable than the average French man who had served in the

French army during the war. Shining a spotlight on his military service for France, characterizing him as “an admirable hero like all French soldiers without distinction of origin or religious denomination,” Torrès thereby assimilated him. “Schwartzbard knows only one nation: the France he served, for which he fought.” Torrès insisted on Schwartzbard’s shared identity with other Frenchmen, in general, and with other French Jews, in particular, “for there is neither for Schwartzbard, nor for me, nor for others, any ‘Jewish nationality’.” By such means did Torrès skillfully navigate the question of Schwartzbard’s identity and character. From a foreign Jew, Torrès transformed him into a French citizen, soldier, and patriot. When Schwartzbard killed Petlyura, he did so out of his attachment to “the unhappy

Jews, his brothers by race [my emphasis].” Thus, he had in no way betrayed his allegiance to the French nation, to which he had been naturalized just two years prior, in 1925.64

Despite what Torrès might have intended to accomplish, to frame Schwartzbard in such terms reinforced anti-Jewish stereotypes. He was drawing from -- while seeming to contradict -- a deep well of assumptions about Jews’ competing loyalties, about Jewish particularity and French universalism, and also about Jews’ degradation.65 Those assumptions had been inscribed in the annals of French history when the French revolutionaries debated

64 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 496, Folio nos. 40704-05, 40709. 65 Echoing the prevalent European Enlightenment discourse on Jews, Torrès proclaimed, “Par un geste magnifique, la Révolution française a voulu que dans son premier écrit, les Juifs fussent placés dans l’égalité et dans un état de dignité comparable à celui des autres peuples et des hommes civilisés.” STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 496, Folio no. 40735.

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Jewish citizenship in the French National Assembly in 1789 and ultimately granted all Jews in France their emancipation in 1791 on the condition that they renounce communal autonomy.66 Torrès made direct reference to that debate from the era of the Revolution and to the legacy of Jewish emancipation in France. It had induced French Jews’ “debt of gratitude” and testified to “the instinct of the French people […] to grant freedom, justice, courage and dignity to man, to all men and consequently to Jews.” This drafting of Schwartzbard as

“French” and accentuating of Schwartzbard’s French military record recalled long-standing negative Jewish traits whose presumed existence worked simultaneously to elevate the ideals of French Republicanism.

The casting of Schwartzbard as French soldier and moral actor removed

Schwartzbard from the Ukrainian Jewish population. Yet in the process, the otherness and passivity of the Ukrainian Jewish population was reinscribed. Torrès depicted that population in the following, unfavorable terms:

During this pogrom, the unfortunate Jews being massacred displayed the terrible passivity of this type of Ukrainian Jew who, huddled in these ghettos, waiting for some mystical deliverance from the Messiah, has never known how to counter a weapon with a weapon, a will to murder with a will to resist. These unfortunate Jews, then, are gathered in the village square; they are made to sing, in derision; the beards of the elderly are cut off; women are forced to undress. And the Cossacks arrive and strike in the crowd, shouting: "Glory to the Ataman Kozyr-Zyrko." And the unfortunate wounded [people], who do not want to be killed in the horror of this massacre, still lift up their trembling arms and also shout, to beseech their torturers, before rendering their last whimper: "Glory to the ataman Kozyr-Zyrko," who had them killed! All those victims flowed back into Odessa. Schwartzbard is one of the people who comes forward to provide paramedic care for the victims. In 1920, he returns to France.67

Torrès made the pogrom victims, not the perpetrators, the target of his opprobrium. Though the victims’ innocence remained unquestioned, Torrès represented their helplessness in terms of a “terrible passivity” and cowardice. He was hardly the first to do so. Hayyim Nahman

66 For an account of these debates that dates, more or less, from the period of the Schwartzbard trial, see I. H. Hersch, “The French Revolution and the Emancipation of the Jews,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 19, no. 3 (April 1907): 540-65. 67 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 496, Folio no. 40719.

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Bialik’s epic poem about the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, “In the City of Slaughter,” written in

Hebrew and also published at the time in Yiddish translation, was surely the most famous literary expression of such a view, but it had found expression already before Bialik in various Jewish political movements of the turn of the century.68 In Torrès’ portrayal, again, the conduct of Jewish residents of the shtetls of eastern Europe appears pathetic and even shameful. Its shamefulness stemmed from its alleged origin: a longstanding pattern of behavior rooted in messianic longing. Torrès undermined the victims’ dignity, and

Schwartzbard was clearly made to stand apart from them. With his ties to France, he emerged here as a humanitarian figure and, eventually, as a justice-seeker.

Hannah Arendt would later recall this maneuver as a precedent to that undertaken by

Attorney General Gideon Hausner in the Eichmann trial: “just as at that time [i.e., during the

Schwartzbard trial] it was the accused and his lawyer who spoke in the name of the victims, and who, incidentally, even raised the point about the Jews ‘who had never defended themselves.’” Arendt restated, uncritically, the juxtaposition that Torrès had drawn between the victims as passive figures and Schwartzbard as moral actor. Quoting Georges Suarez on the Schwartzbard trial but extending it also to Tehlirian, Arendt argued that, “in both cases it was felt that their gesture ‘signified that their race had finally decided to defend itself, to leave behind its moral abdication, to overcome its resignation in the face of insults.’”69 In the dramatic setting of the Paris court, Torrès had reinvigorated for an audience different from

Bialik’s the accusation against Jews of physical and moral weakness.

The fact of the French audience introduced a new element into a familiar archetype.

Indeed, part of what’s striking and potentially original in Torrès’ redeployment of this image of Jewish passivity are the implications he drew for France and the “civilized world.” Unlike

68 Alan Mintz, “Kishinev and the Twentieth Century: Introduction,” Prooftexts 25, no. 1-2, Special Issue: Kishinev in the Twentieth Century (Winter/Spring 2005): 1-2; Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (New York: Liveright Publishing Co/W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), 119. 69 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 266.

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Arendt, who expounded on the significance of Schwartzbard’s and Tehlirian’s “gesture” for

Jews and Armenians, Torrès related it most of all to the French people. Just as emancipating the Jews during the Revolution testified to French Republican ideals, so too would identifying with Schwartzbard in his role as justice seeker reconsecrate those ideals.

Speaking directly to the jurors, Torrès enjoined, “Today, gentlemen, you are responsible for the prestige of our nation and the thousands of human lives that depend on France’s verdict.”70 At stake was more than abstract principles; lives were on the line. But the reverse was also true: at stake were more than the lives of Jews from a territory far removed from

French soil. Torrès exalted the jurors to “share France’s instinct for that which is noblest, greatest and purest,” to guarantee that “once again, in this tribunal, with you, the voice of

France will rise, free and fair.” Recalling the political ideals of French Republicanism and expressing those ideals with a confidence that had been shaken by the First World War,

Torrès imbued the trial with universal significance: “And so, dear Jury members, the

Schwartzbard trial, taking on a scale and resonance that it could not have had elsewhere than in this Chamber, is in accordance with the purest French instincts since it embraces the ideas of this great Revolution of which no living man can say that he is no more or less the son.”71

Even before Schwartzbard assassinated Petlyura, Torrès had been speaking out publicly about the broader implications of violence against Jews. He took to the podium at public meetings organized by the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, alongside Léon Blum,

Victor Basch, and Leo Motzkin, among others, to spread awareness of the antisemitic violence in Romania. He worried that “the politics of violence and megalomania is a menace

70 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 496, Folio no. 40738. 71 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 496, Folio nos. 40734-35, 40737.

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for the European peace.”72 Far from the concern of a minority, the Jewish cause was necessarily a European cause.

Not just Torrès but also the attorneys seeking Schwartzbard’s conviction insisted that nothing less than French identity and human lives were on the line. They gave voice to conflicting positions about whether and how France might reclaim its status as defender of the rights of the oppressed and the values of Republicanism. Repairing the French nation and preserving the peace emerged in “the trial of the pogroms” as paramount considerations.

Campinchi, Reynaud, and the other attorney for the civil party, Albert Willm, all pleaded with the jury to convict Schwartzbard in order to protect France. They did not deny the scale of the pogroms and the senselessness of the violence. Reynaud declared that civilization itself had been called into question by the pogroms. In his plaidoirie, Reynaud reflected on the meaning of such violence:

When we contemplate the stories that have been told to us here, gentlemen, we have only one thought: to raise our eyes to heaven. But, alas! The sky remains dark and God does not answer. There are such moments when the word "civilization" appears to us as a word devoid of meaning, as an empty concept, as a ghost that we will never be able to touch and hold onto. That's what I want to tell you about the pogroms, any man who has something human in him, thinks like us.73

Initially, Reynaud was suggesting that such violence provoked a fundamental questioning for all human beings about human nature and the notion of civilization itself. He did not seem to be advancing the view that the pogroms were evidence of the existence of a divide separating the barbarism of the perpetrators of the pogroms from the civilization of the French.

Ultimately, however, he reinscribed such civilizational logic. Civilization did not unite all human beings. There was an inside and an outside, and the threat to civilization

72 Communiqué, "La terreur blanche en Roumanie. Un meeting de la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme," [1927]; Letter, [letter writer and addressee unidentified]. 11 January 1927, announcing "un grand meeting de protestation contre les violences antisémites en Roumanie" organized by LDH; Letter, from Henry Torrès to Henri Guernut, 7 January 1926: all in untitled Folder, Cote: F delta rés 798/42, Fonds LDH, BDIC. The quotation comes from the letter Torrès wrote to Guernut. 73 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 495, Folio no. 40667.

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came not from within but from without. France itself was vulnerable. France’s vulnerability did not stem from French people potentially succumbing to their own base instincts, but rather from France allowing increasing numbers of foreigners to act out their propensity to violence on French soil. He insisted that France needed to protect itself. Reynaud joined

Willm and Campinchi, who in their respective plaidoiries preceding Reynaud’s had also worked strenuously to argue for the justice of convicting Schwartzbard in order to defend

France from its infiltration by foreigners.74

Schwartzbard may have been a naturalized French citizen, but to Reynaud, Willm, and Campinchi, he remained a foreigner. He was “un naturalisé,” a category of its own, distinct from citizens, “and who, as such, ought to have a certain consideration, a certain respect for us, and who should not violate the laws of our hospitality.” In Reynaud’s formulation, naturalized citizens remained guests. Schwartzbard’s military record in the war had not transformed his status. The boundary between “we,” the French, and “foreigners” was fixed to cast out Schwartzbard.

Just as Schwartzbard was not assimilated into the French people, nor did

Schwartzbard’s killing of Petlyura ultimately bear significance for anyone other than Jews and Ukrainians, according to Reynaud. The pogroms no longer bore any universal significance:

Ah! we have had enough, dear jurors, we have had enough of these murders that are committed in France, as if in an enclosed field where people come to resolve quarrels whose real cause escapes us, without the slightest concern for the disturbances and unrest thus brought to our territory. We say to you, Distinguished Foreigners: “Yes, broad French hospitality, yes, but leave us alone with your crimes. Go and commit them elsewhere, go and commit them in a foreign country, which you do not do, which you do not have the courage to do, because, as I said recently, in foreign countries, you find courts martial that do not pardon you and that do not have the

74 Just two months before the Schwartzbard trial, in August 1927, a new naturalization law had gone into effect that shortened the requisite number of years of residency in France from ten to three for those immigrants seeking French citizenship. See Ralph Schor, L’Opinion française et les étrangers en France, 1919-1939 (Paris, 1985).

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broad feelings of tolerance and humanity that honor the French Jury, but that sometimes constitute a singular danger for France.”75

Reynaud did not share Torrès’ high esteem for French Republican values stemming from the

Revolution. Such ideals were doing harm to France, he insisted. At stake was the security and freedom of those he defined as truly French. In a similar vein, Willm warned the jurors:

“terrorist attacks […] are putting the security of our streets in constant danger, are creating a situation that will soon no longer permit our fellow citizens to move about freely in Paris.”76

The worry about foreigners being “terrorists” linked up with a debate about immigration, which had become heated in France in the years surrounding the Schwartzbard trial. Anxieties centered most of all around the economic competition for jobs, but also touched on foreign influences on French politics, society, and culture.77 The feeling of insecurity was amplified by worries about the spread of Bolshevism. Just two months before the trial, the Soviet ambassador, Christian Rakovsky, had been expelled from France after he had officially announced his support of world revolution and the overthrow of capitalist democracies.78 Schwartzbard’s open anarchist sympathies rendered him all the more suspect.

The accusation that Schwartzbard had acted as a Bolshevik agent obviously played into these anxieties. At the same time, that accusation denied the legitimacy of the claim that he had acted out of a constellation of human emotions – pain, suffering, and a desire for vengeance – that rendered him a universally comprehensible figure.79

75 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 495, Folio nos. 40698-99. 76 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 493, Folio no. 40619. 77 Gérard Noiriel, Immigration, antisémitisme et racisme en France (XIXe-XXe siècle) (Paris, 2007); Noiriel, Le creuset français. Histoire de l’immigration, XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris, 1988). 78 In so doing, he contradicted his own discussion of “The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia,” that appeared in Foreign Affairs 4, no. 4 (July 1926): 574-84. On the Rakovsky affair, see Alfred Erich Senn, “The Rakovsky Affair: A Crisis in Franco-Soviet Relations, 1927,” Études Slaves et Est-Européennes / Slavic and East- European Studies 10, no. ¾ (Fall-Winter 1965/66): 102-17. 79 The depiction of Schwartzbard in such terms, as a “Shakespearean character” who did what “we all would have done,” appears in the testimony of one of the eyewitnesses to the assassination itself, an Englishman identified as Mr. Smith. STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 487, Folio no. 39666. Another witness, the eminent Russian Jewish attorney Henry Sliosberg, made a similar point, insisting that Schwartzbard’s action was regrettable but comprehensible without the need for him to have been a Bolshevik agent. Sliosberg added

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Patent expressions of antisemitism accompanied the xenophobia articulated in the courtroom. Such pronouncements take on even more significance when we consider the setting and speakers in question. The stress laid on Schwartzbard’s untrustworthiness, not merely as a foreigner, but especially as a Jew, introduced an especially sinister note into the trial discourse. Willm’s instrumentalization of antisemitism in his plaidoirie was unabashed, despite his political distance from the Action Française (or even the French Right), which embraced antisemitism as a central component of its monarchist nationalism.80 The same could be said of Campinchi, who was an active member of the left-of-center Radical Socialist

Party.81

Willm and, to a lesser extent, Campinchi lent their rhetorical gifts to disseminating a host of antisemitic tropes that worked to undermine claims of Jewish innocence. Willm spoke of the “mobilization” of Jews around the world in support of Schwartzbard’s defense, seeing it as proof of Jewish conspiracy, of the fact that “this great Jewish nation […] pursues through the centuries and in all countries its messianic dream of universal domination.” Jews were Bolsheviks, “the Russian revolution was, for the most part, a Jewish work.” Jews were disproportionately represented in the ranks of Cheka agents. Even more damning was

Willm’s accusation that “among these Cheka directors were Jewish women, very often crueler than men.” Far from innocent victims, then, Jews had brought the pogroms on

that Jews were offended by the fact that Ukrainians would not admit that a Jew could act out of vengeance, as if it denied them their humanity. STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 491, Folio no. 40404. 80 Willm (1868-1944) was a native of Alsace whose family had relocated to Brest after the German annexation. Active in the fields of journalism, law, and politics, he represented the socialists when he was elected as a deputy for two terms in the Chamber of Deputies between 1906 and 1914. In his official biography for the French National Assembly, he is hailed as “an ardent, devoted and faithful defender of socialist principles; but also as a talented parliamentarian, with a deep knowledge of legal and economic issues, passionate about justice and freedom.” Albert Willm (1868-1944)," accessed 27 May 2019, http://www2.assemblee- nationale.fr/sycomore/fiche/(num_dept)/7423. 81 Campinchi was a native of Corsica and a war veteran, like Torrès. In the 1930s, he would go on to pursue a political career: he was elected to serve as a deputy in the Chamber of Deputies and appointed to ministerial positions in five successive governments, including under Léon Blum. In 1940, Campinchi refused to support the signing of the armistice and would have been tried in Riom were it not for his premature death as a result of illness in 1941. “César Campinchi (1882-1941),” accessed 27 May 2019, http://memoire.avocatparis.org/avocats/autres-avocats-combattants/391-cesar-campinchi-1882-1941.

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themselves: “We add -- and if our witnesses had been heard to the end we would have clarified this point -- we add that it must be recognized that, in different circumstances, very often it was the sole attitude of the Israelites which caused pogromist movements.” Sympathy for Jewish suffering was further attenuated, Willm suggested, by the presence among Jews of an “atavism which manifests itself in two ways: there is no history crueler than the history of the Jewish people, there is no people who has been marked by so many acts of repression and extermination; there is no other people who has pushed further than that of Israel what I would call the virtuosity of lamentation.”82 The attorneys were moving away from

Schwartzbard’s individual crime, from blaming the assassin, to blaming the victims of the pogroms and their fellow Jews. The prosecuting attorneys were moving beyond the act of one individual in order to “try” the collective.

Campinchi turned such formulations into expressions of stereotypical Jewish attributes. In so doing, arguably, he reinforced the representation of Jews as foreigners and as a group unto themselves. In Campinchi’s plaidoirie, Jewish conspiracy became “solidarity,” even “fraternal devotion,” in the face of which “pity gives way to admiration.” Yet he also had recourse to negative stereotypes of Jews, depicting them as emasculated foreigners: “I can only cry with you Jews, who have come from far away countries in the East, and who, with your rabbis’ beards, your gold eyeglasses and your false voice because it was shouting indignation, pronounced the pain of your race, evoking this tragic past.”83 Of the three attorneys who sought Schwartzbard’s conviction, Campinchi expressed the least outright antipathy toward Schwartzbard and Jewish pogrom victims. Nevertheless, his dismissive treatment of the victims and denigration of the value of victim testimony throughout the trial, combined with his recourse to antisemitic stereotypes, reveal the limits of sympathy.

82 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 493, Folio nos. 40577-78, 40582-83, 40597-98. All these quotations are from Willm’s plaidoirie. 83 STT, YIVO, Tcherikower archives, File no. 493, Folio nos.

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The question of the innocence of pogrom victims implicated France directly. What was France’s humanitarian responsibility? Torrès sought to convince jurors that, with an acquittal, France would reaffirm its ideals and its mission to share those ideals with humanity. Reynaud and Willm, in particular, insisted that it was time for France to turn inward even if that meant effectively renouncing its “civilizing mission”.84

Miriam Ticktin has argued that when people are not regarded as “innocent,” they are

“ungrievable,” deemed unworthy of “humanitarian compassion.” According to the unstated assumptions that guide the humanitarianism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, “the quintessential humanitarian victims bear no responsibility for their suffering.”85 Torrès,

Reynaud, Willm, and Campinchi, in different ways and to varying extents, called into question the innocence of the Jewish pogrom victims. The attorneys represented the pogrom victims as bearing some measure of responsibility for their victimization. Reynaud and

Willm were flagrant in the aspersions they cast on Jews and on Schwartzbard. Yet even

Torrès cast the pogrom victims as passive and pathetic. In seeking to elevate Schwartzbard, he reaffirmed the victims’ powerlessness in a context in which passivity was not equated with innocence.

84 In the Third Republic, the French "civilizing mission" had incorporated into its ideology a humanitarian mission. Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, and Dominic Thomas, “Introduction: The Creation of a Colonial Culture in France, from the Colonial Era to the ‘Memory Wars,’” in Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, ed. Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, and Dominic Thomas, trans. Alexis Pernsteiner (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), 9. 85 Ticktin, “Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders,” 257, 260-61; citing Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).

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