A Murder in Lemberg - The Book Report
Having achieved old age, I’ve thrown myself into reading. I’m trying to make up for a lifetime of not reading. It’s a convenient hobby. Long wait at the doctor’s office – no problem if I have a book. Screwed up connection at an airport – more time for my book. Accompany my wife to umpteen stores while she looks for the perfect bathmat – well, you get it.
But as much time as I spend reading, I spend even more time looking for books to read. I dawdle at libraries, browse bookstores, scroll endlessly through Amazon. I just picked up something at one of those take-a-book leave-a-book stands. If any of you ever invite me into your homes, the first thing I’ll ask is “where is your bookshelf?” Well, maybe the bathroom comes first – did I mention the bit about achieving old age? In any event, the throne is a time-honored location for reading, reading, and more reading.
And, of course, I’ve become quite the denizen of our shul’s library, where many treasures await to be found. Not too long ago, I stumbled upon “A Murder in Lemberg”. I was unimpressed at first – it looked like an Agatha Christie novel, and that’s just not to my taste. Then I glanced at the subtitle: “Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History”, and I grew intrigued. Turns out the book was written by a scholar named Michael Stanislawski, with whom I have a single degree of separation. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. But way cool!
The book describes the 1848 murder of a Reform rabbi by Orthodox Jews in the Austrian Galacian city of Lemberg, which is now known as Lviv in the war-torn country of Ukraine. When I read that in the blurb on the back cover, two things occurred to me. First, my life depended on reading this book. Second, doesn’t this sound a little bit like the assassination of Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin of Israel?
I don’t know if the author spent any time thinking about my existence, but he surely drew a straight line from the murder of Rabbi Abraham Kohn to that of that of Itzhak Rabin two centuries later. With all that sinat chinam (baseless hatred) in the Second Temple times, plenty of Jews were killed by plenty of other Jews. But this was virtually unheard of in the centuries of the Diaspora. Some informers betrayed fellow Jews who were hiding from the Czar’s draft, and these traitors were disposed of. Still, Jews killing Jews because of internal Jewish disputes? That was not how it was done. Sue them in rabbinical court, sure. Push for their excommunication, fine. Spread nasty rumors about their yichus (lineage), absolutely. But assassination? Not so much.
It was a time of considerable upheaval for Jews all over Europe. For centuries, Jews had suffered from various levels of persecutions and disabilities. There were restrictions on where Jews could live, what occupations they could pursue, special taxes they had to pay, censorship of prayer books and religious writings, blood libels, and pogroms. Nonetheless, as the Middle Ages gave way to Modernity, there were some encouraging changes. The Enlightenment, turbocharged by the invention of the printing press and the French Revolution, spread all sorts of new ideas throughout the continent, including Emancipation of the Jews. Which was great! Except, maybe not.
Yes, there was progress, but there was also backsliding. Jewish residency restrictions might be eased someplace, only to be reinforced after a subsequent change in political leadership. Ghetto walls were torn down, then re-erected a few years later. Promises were made to eliminate special taxes, and as often as not, these promises were forgotten. University admissions were made more accessible, as well as entry into the professions, which was certainly good for the Jews. But as my grandfather used to say, “If it’s good for the Jews, it’s bad for the Jews.” The better the Jews did, the more it inflamed Gentile jealousy.
But the Gentiles were not the only resistance to change. The Jewish world was governed by regional councils which dominated Jewish life, both for better and for worse. These councils were controlled by wealthy Jewish families and by the scholarly caste of rabbis. Like any other entrenched interests, these tended to be protective of their prerogatives.
Given the poverty and oppression that most Jews had to live with, some found the Rabbinic world of rote ritual to be spiritually unsatisfying. As we’ve discussed previously, this was at least partially responsible for the Sabbatean and Chasidic movements. We can only imagine the chaos and competition that erupted in shuls across Europe. The Sabbateans were adding all sorts of strange prayers to the liturgy, and the Chasidim dropped the Ashkenazic nusach altogether in favor of the Sephardic nusach. And worse than that, the Chasidim came up with their own rules for knife sharpening. If that doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, just remember what Deep Throat said: “Follow the money.” Meaning there were a lot of angry kosher butchers on either side of the divide, as well as the rabbis who collected supervisory fees.
For what it’s worth, there was something similar in the more recent past. In 1987, Aaron Rubashkin and a group of Lubavitchers opened Agriprocessors, a kosher slaughterhouse in rural Postville, Iowa. They did extremely well, although there were tensions with the local gentile population, and Rubashkin went to jail for illegally exploiting immigrant labor. It’s a fascinating story, and I’m leaving out all sorts of details, but none of this would have happened if the Lubavitcher had not rejected Satmar slaughtering practices. I don’t know if this was due to a dispute about knives, but it did open an enormous market for Agriprocessors to supply.
But back to the Middle Ages.
The Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, had lost some steam by the middle of the nineteenth century, but it was still making waves.. Although this movement of free thinkers did contain some assimilationists, it’s very wrong to think of them that way. The revival of Hebrew as a modern language started in Haskalah circles, and that was hardly assimilationist. The Maskilim looked at the Jewish world and saw destitution and ignorance. They pushed for Jews to improve themselves by exposure to, gasp, secular studies like mathematics, science and even, double gasp, grammar. The Maskilim wanted the shtetl Jews to forget their superstitious beliefs about demons and dybbuks and join the modern world. And stop speaking that ridiculous Yiddish and learn proper German!
No surprise here: the rabbis hated Haskalah.
As poor as Jews were, there was great agitation to get rid of the special taxes for Jews, such as for kosher meat and Shabbat candles. You might think that this was something all Jews could agree on, but you’d be wrong. The local authorities would contract out these collections to Jewish tax farmers. Some of this money would go to support Jewish institutions and pay salaries, but significant amounts stayed in the pockets of the already wealthy tax farmers. Nice work if you can get it.
And finally, we come to the Jewish Reform movement. Now, the Reform movement as it exists today is very different from that of Rabbi Kohn’s time. The Breslau Conference, which probably marks the formal start of the Reform movement, was only two years before Rabbi Kohn was killed. Like the Haskalah, they were more open to the world around them. They opposed practices like paying for shul honors. There was more emphasis on the universalistic messages of the prophets. Sermons were delivered in the vernacular on a variety of topics, and not just Talmudic discourses that might have been inaccessible to less educated congregants. They were certainly more traditionally observant than most of us sitting here.
The progressive, reform-minded rabbis did question some practices that had long taken hold in the Jewish community. Rabbi Kohn had written about mourning rituals, which he claimed were not only post-Biblical, but post-Rabbinic. Things like tearing clothes at funerals, sitting on low stools, and not shaving for thirty days were mere folk customs that were “different from, and alien to, the Zeitgeist of German-speaking Jewry in the nineteenth century.” He also insisted that other rules, like “not wearing leather on Yom Kippur and not playing music on Shabbat and holidays (were) halachically not binding and inappropriate to modern sensibilities.” Even so, Stanislawski could not find any evidence that Kohn abolished any of these practices. But he did let his wife go around with her head uncovered.
So just imagine the welcome that awaited him in Lemberg when he was asked to lead the newly constructed Reform Temple.
Stanislawski writes that “it would be misleading to depict the Jews of Lemberg…as divided into two groups, the traditionalist and the modernists”, and indeed, I am unable to keep track of the many factions. One of the groups he identifies were the “extreme traditionalists” who didn’t want a hint of Chasidism or the Haskalah to encroach on their environs. These included the wealthiest Jews in town, who controlled record-keeping and tax collection. Remember those tax farmers I mentioned?
This group was led by Rabbi Jacob Orenstein, who excommunicated Jews suspected of reading any of the nasty secular literature. There was a report that fifty men who were “suspected of Enlightenment tendencies” were forced to divorce their wives, although it is not clear that this really happened. Still, it’s easy to imagine these tensions leeching into family life. How many men must have said to their sons-in-law: “take your filthy Spinoza and get out of my house!”
Given our own upbringing under the First Amendment this may be hard to picture, but some of the excommunicated appealed to the government, which forced Rabbi Orenstein to announce in a sermon, and right after the Torah reading no less, that secular studies were in fact permitted by Jewish law.
A second group that Stanislawski describes are the Chasidim, who then as now must have been pretty much in their own world. This was a small group in Lemberg. They were just as opposed to the Haskalah and modernism as Rabbi Orenstein’s followers, but no doubt resented how they were marginalized by the traditional power structure.
There were also “moderate traditionalists” who were open to some of the ideas of the Haskalah and were opposed to kosher meat and Shabbat candle taxes, and there were “moderate modernists”, who encouraged secular education in modern Jewish schools, “but did not support any changes to Jewish ritual or synagogue practice.” There was probably a lot of overlap between these last two groups.
Next were the “extreme modernists” who pretty much wanted to burn it all down. The community would be organized along more democratic lines, the Orthodox rabbis would lose much of their control of Jewish life, traditional Jewish garb would be banned, Jewish women would not be allowed to cover their hair, and worst of all, a modern rabbinical seminary would be established in Lemberg to produce progressive rabbis.
The final group Stanislawski mentions are the poor, who might not have shown any interest in these issues but were mostly concerned with putting food on the table.
With all this garden variety Jewish discord, it’s easy to imagine how Rabbi Kohn could have blended into the maelstrom of Jewish life in Lemberg. Sure, many of the locals hated everything he stood for, but that wasn’t especially new under the sun. Then, something happened which made an explosion inevitable.
Pause for dramatic effect…
On May 3, 1847, the government appointed Rabbi Kohn as the District Rabbi of Lemberg, the “officially recognized Chief Rabbi of the Jewish community.”
Oy.
In modern day Israel, being an officially recognized rabbi means having an actual budget and a certain amount of clout. Fine. But in the modern-day Diaspora? Not so much. Our rabbis might be asked to serve on some government advisory board, give a convocation at the opening of a legislature, and maybe even serve as a grand marshal at some small municipal parade.
Make no mistake, though. In nineteenth century Lemberg, this was a five alarm shande.
The richest Jews of the community had already been sending petitions to the government denouncing Rabbi Kohn. Kind of recalls Marjorie Taylor Greene moving for Biden’s impeachment the day after he was inaugurated.
And what were the rabbi’s ostensible flaws? Well, he was an unlearned Jew; he desecrated the Shabbat; he ate unkosher food; he “tore the curtain off the Holy Ark and stomped on it.” If you believe any of that, could I interest you in buying the Pulaski Skyway?
Oh, and as District Rabbi, Kohn controlled the “metrical books” of the Jewish community, which were used to oversee taxation of the Jewish community. Ironically, Kohn was now in charge of collecting the very taxes he was working to eliminate.
Even without the benefit of Twitter and Facebook, the incitement against Rabbi Kohn swiftly reached a dangerous level. They didn’t have doxing back then, but there was no need. One time, some Orthodox Jews beat up Kohn while he was walking home from work. Shortly thereafter, a mob surrounded his apartment building and smashed the windows with stones, all while the leaders of the Orthodox community were shouting encouragement from the nearby rooftops. Rigged appointment! Stop the steal! Wait… I think I have my notes messed up. In any event, Kohn asked the police not to intervene. He just couldn't imagine that he was unsafe around the Jews.
On a more peaceful note, there was an attempt to pay off Kohn to just leave the city. When this failed, one of the leaders of the Orthodox community said: “We therefore have to find another way to get rid of Kohn, and the only solution is to heed the Talmud’s law that one can kill a heretic with poison.” I guess they hadn’t considered “second amendment solutions.”
On September 6, 1848, an Orthodox Jew came into the Kohn’s kitchen to light a cigar on the stove. This would not have drawn any attention since there were many apartments in the building, and it was just not that unusual for folks to walk in and out. Before leaving, this visitor poured a vile of arsenic into the soup pot boiling on the stove. That evening, immediately after eating dinner, Rabbi Kohn’s entire family fell sick. Doctors were called – most of the family recovered, but Rabbi Kohn and his infant daughter died.
Rabbi Kohn’s funeral was attended by “representatives of the state and district authorities, the kahal, the synagogue board, and thousands of people…but not a single Orthodox Jew in a long coat was to be seen.” Not content to let Kohn rest in peace, elements of the Orthodox community threatened to desecrate the sacred space and disinter the remains. You may remember that when Itzhak Rabin was buried, some of our more traditionally minded brethren stepped forward to urinate on the grave.
An autopsy confirmed that Rabbi Kohn had died of arsenic poisoning. There were witnesses who later testified that Abraham Ber Pilpel was the man at the stove, and others who saw him running down the street shortly thereafter. Pilpel left Lemberg that day, and when he returned about a week later, he went straight to the barbershop to have his beard and sidelocks cut off. Perhaps he got hit with a sudden urge to assimilate.
He was arrested, along with some Orthodox leaders who were accused of orchestrating the murder.
I’m now going to quote a passage from Professor Stanislawski’s book at some length:
“One of the unanswered – and still basically unanswerable – questions hovering over this entire matter and its later ramifications is why the Orthodox majority of Lemberg Jews did not oppose the taxes and resent the wealth of the tax-farmers, garnered out of their pockets? We can only speculate that as in many other circumstances in the past and present, ‘the masses’ do not always – or even usually – act in their own self-interest, especially when such self-interest conflicts with traditional religious and social structures that are not only familiar, but ratified, and at times even sanctified, by their religious and political leaders.”
Can we relate this to our own day? For sure! As Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but if often rhymes.”
You may have heard about Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”. In it, Frank argues that many Americans, and poor white Republicans in particular, do in fact consistently vote against their own economic interests. No matter what Fox News has to say, the large tax cuts enacted by Republican politicians are skewed to wealthy special interests, and do not reach the pockets of the voters who put them in power. But, you know, “Guns, Gays, and G-d!” Who doesn’t love a good culture war?
And leaving aside the money, what was so dangerous about Haskalah literature that made it an excommunicating offense just to read any of it? Cults have always felt threatened by outside information, or better, fake news. At one extreme, an abused wife might be cut off from family or friends and end up dead because of it. Less dangerously, someone caught in the Qanon vortex might merely empty out retirement savings to buy survivalist supplies.
And how can I be sure I’m getting all the objective news that I need? I read from a wide variety of sources, albeit mainly from the lamestream media. There are journalists that I avoid, both left and right wing, because I just don’t trust what they say. But am I missing something? Perhaps Hillary really is trafficking in and then cannibalizing children.
But back to Lemberg. Stanislawski was convinced that Pilpel did in fact poison Kohn. It’s also clear that there was an honest to goodness conspiracy inside the Orthodox community. Of course, the leaders who were arrested all claimed that they were just exercising freedom of speech, and they had no control over how anyone would react to it. Isn’t that what Rudy said?
I’m probably not the first person to say this, but words matter. Before Rabin was murdered, the disgusting incitement against him was quite commonplace on the right side of the Israeli political and religious spectrum. Netanyahu and other members of the opposition had been called on to tone it down, but to no avail.
And what do we see in the good old U.S. of A? When Trump calls the free press “the enemy of the people”, he is borrowing rhetoric from Josef Stalin. His more recent ravings of his opponents as vermin and immigrants poisoning the blood of this country echoes Hitler and Mussolini.
History does indeed rhyme.
When Stanislawski first started writing this book, he was surprised at the dearth of written material on this subject, and even noticed “an element of cover-up in some treatments of the story.” The most widely consulted source about this incident was, not surprisingly, the “Encyclopedia Judaica”, which noted that the Rabbi had died of food poisoning, and that leaders of the Orthodox community were arrested, but then released due to “lack of evidence.” This might have been the end of his research, except that he was able to get his hands on “the entire police and court records regarding the assassination of Rabbi Abraham Kohn.”
But before we go to the videotape, let me talk just a bit about the endless partitions and repartitions of Ukraine and Poland. It is entirely bewildering. A few weeks ago, when I was relating the story of our late friend Michael Kessler, I placed him in Ukraine, when I should have said Poland. Or the other way around. Whatever. But I was and still am grateful for the correction.
These changes in administration very much impacted the trials of Rabbi Kohn’s murderers. Initially, the political leadership was sympathetic to the modernizing trends in Europe, and it looked like the guilty parties would be held accountable. But then, the old regime came back to power, and the entire matter was dropped.
So, if you’re ever on trial, and can delay things until after the counterrevolution or maybe the next election, you might be in good shape.
In conclusion, let me just say, er… um… uh…
Now, go and study.
