A Jew in a Court-room: The newspaper Moskovskiye Vedomosti on Arkady Kovner Process

Abstract

In 1875, Arkady Kovner, journalist, bank clerk and later in his career a civil servant in Congress Poland, forged a payment order for 168000 rubles from St. Petersburg Loan and Account Bank to the Moscow Merchant Bank. In the article, I focus on rhetorical, discursive and ideological issues of the process media coverage. Tracing court reports published in Moskovskiye Vedomosti, I analyse antisemitic prejudices with which the text is saturated and which dehumanise the person in the dock. The prosecutor as well as the reporter explain every single Kover’s step–not only in his professional, but also private life–through egoism, malice, contempt for acknowledged social values and generic predisposing to criminal activities. Kovner as a real person is substituted with a literary image of a Jew – an natural materialist interested exclusively in profiteering off the native population. The substitution results in the negation of Kovner’s explanations, when they contradict the conventional interpretative frame. The process and its media coverage show a desire for common ground between an assimilating Jew and Russian society. The Kovner process is far away from any politics, thus in this case we see how popular anti-Jewish sentiment affect the interpretation of how Jews act, think and feel.