Theodore Roosevelt Praises Jewish Leader During Kishinev Pogrom Crisis

In the spring of 1903, one of the most shocking antisemitic massacres of the modern era unfolded in Kishinev, then part of the Russian Empire. Triggered by a false blood libel accusing Jews of murdering a Christian child, violent riots erupted across the city. For three days, mobs attacked Jewish homes and businesses while local authorities largely stood aside. Dozens of Jews were murdered, hundreds wounded, and entire neighborhoods devastated.

According to an eyewitness report published in New York’s Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward, for three days Russians, and neighboring Romanians, unimpeded by local civil or military authorities, “armed with knives and machetes… broke into Jewish homes, where they began stabbing and killing, chopping off heads and stomping frail women and small children.” The violence left 50 Jews dead, ten times that wounded, and some 1500 Jewish homes and businesses, looted. The rabidly antisemitic Russian Minister of Internal Affairs, Viacheslav Konstantinovich Plehve – thought to have had a guiding hand in the massacre – announced that the Jews had been taught a needed lesson. (And the dead boy? Authorities had established, weeks before the pogrom, that he had died of bruises and stab wounds – which, in time, were revealed to have been inflicted by his uncle, in a dispute over money.)

News of the barbaric attack traveled widely.

Simon Wolf, a German-born American Jew who had, since Lincoln, been the de facto representative of American Jewry, took it upon himself to organize the national response. He wished to present a petition of protest to the Czar not, he said, as a Jewish effort, but an American one – and so enlisted yet another president whom he had, over his long career as a Washington D.C. lawyer and Republican activist, befriended.

He took this idea to President Theodore Roosevelt who, in response, made first an eloquent speech celebrating “the debt due to the Jewish race” and decrying the Russian outrage – and then got behind the effort to present the petition, officially, to the Imperial Russian Government. This was done in July, by the American Embassy in St. Petersburg.

The Czar, however, declined to receive or consider the 13,000 signatory petition – and yet, inasmuch as it had, be virtue of its diplomatic presentation, become an official state document, it was duly, and proudly, deposited in the National Archives. Wolf was, at every step of the American response to the barbaric pogrom, instrumental. That it went as far as it did, in fact, was largely owing to him.

Here President Roosevelt, in assisting Wolf with a naval appointment during this fraught period, says as much:

“Please have Mr. Simon Wolf in to go over this case with you. Mr. Wolf is as good an American citizen as is to be found on this continent, and if this can properly be done I should like it. Please have him in to talk with you.”

Wolf, not incidentally, wrote a book entitled The Presidents I Have Known – From 1860-1918. This letter is included in it.

See this item on the Shapell Manuscript Foundation website, here.