The Poet in Hell: H. N. Bialik and the Cultural Genealogy of the Kishinev Pogrom

Abstract

The Hebrew Bible locates in the image of the city the site of its fundamental ambivalence toward the fruits of culture.2 The prophets imagine Jerusalem both as earthly paradise and as the scene of Israel's corruption; the Temple is at once God's house and the locus of faith that in the absence of social justice becomes anathema, a cult dedicated to the worship of human artifice.3 The biblical Jerusalem is always teetering on the edge of a moral and physical precipice; the city destroyed becomes the city purged of sin. Ravaged, its lost glory is all the more evident. The dialectic continually reasserts itself in post-biblical evocations of the urban diaspora as both haven and hell. Violence against medieval and modern hypostases of Jerusalem imaginatively re-located to the German Rhineland in the era of the Crusades and then again to the Ukrainian periphery of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Chmielnicki rebellion redeems with blood. Literature, liturgy and ritual close the historical gap between these events to create a seamless tradition of beautiful death for the collective sanctification of the Holy Name.4 Time and again, it seems, Jews die in cities so that the Jewish