The 120-Year Old Zionist Poem Still Being Used to Smear the Diaspora and Justify Atrocity

Hayim Nahman Bialik’s “The City of Slaughter” has an ugly legacy

Image: Hayim Nahman Bialik by Avraham Soskin

For months, Zionists have been justifying the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by insisting that Israelis and Jewish people must be strong and remorseless in prosecuting the war/committing war crimes. “We are not the Jews of trembling knees,” the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt declared as the assault on Rafah escalated. Lahav Harkov, the Senior Political Correspondent for Jewish Insider boasted “We are not Jews with trembling knees.” In January, Jerusalem Post columnist Ben Freeman, insisted at a Stand With Israel rally, “We are not Jews with trembling knees.”

And in a Jerusalem Post editorial, Zvika Klein evoked the 1982 words of  Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin in a meeting with then head of the Senate Foreign Relation Committee Joe Biden: “I am not a Jew with trembling knees.”

You can find lots of other examples on social media; Zionists, individually and as a group, want to let you know that they are not those Jews. Which raises the question, who are the Jews whose lower extremities wobble? If the good, strong Jews are over here, who are the weak, worthless Jews over there?

The answers aren’t exactly counterintuitive or surprising. Still, it’s useful to look at the history of the phrase to understand the ways in which praise of Zionist strength and militarism are inseparable from contempt for Jewish diaspora victimization. Those who suffer are framed as contemptible—which makes the brutalization of your enemy a moral imperative, and even a joy.

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In the City of Slaughter

The phrase Jews “with trembling knees” comes from a 1904 Hebrew verse by Russian Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik. The poem was called “In the City of Slaughter,” and it commemorated the 1903 Kishinev Easter pogrom in Russia, in which 49 Jewish people were killed and 1500 homes were gutted. Christians also committed mass rapes of Jewish women.

Jewish writing on the atrocities of the Holocaust tends to express solidarity with victims and dwell on grief, sadness, and the breakdown of meaning. Paul Celan’s enigmatic, agonized “Death Fugue” (trans Pierre Joris) is one example.

Black milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it darkens to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
he writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he whistles his dogs to come
he whistles his jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth
he commands us play up for the dance…

Bialik, however, takes a different tack in memorializing the earlier atrocity. He does not stand with the victims. Rather, he deliberately separates himself from them so he can judge and condemn not primarily the Christian attackers, but the Jews who were attacked.

The long poem (translated by Israel Efros) opens with a gothic description of blood and slaughter, calibrated to evoke maximum disgust and horror.

Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead….

The poem works up to its most wrenching scene; Russian Christians raping Jewish women while Jewish men watch helplessly.

Descend then, to the cellars of the town,
There where the virginal daughters of thy folk were fouled…
In that dark corner, and behind that cask
Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers,

Peering from the cracks,
Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath
The bestial breath,
Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood!...

Crushed in their shame, they saw it all;
They did not stir nor move;
They did not pluck their eyes out;
They beat not their brains against the wall!
Perhaps, perhaps, each watcher had it in his heart to pray…

Bialik means you to be disgusted and repelled by the sexual violence. But even more, he dwells on the helplessness and cowardice of the men. Rather than fight back, he says, they merely “pray.”

This is not, I hope it’s clear, an accurate account of what happened in Kishinev. Bialik did extensive research in the city for the Jewish Historical Commission in Odessa, and interviewed numerous survivors. However, historian Steven J. Zipperstein says that when it came time to write his poem, Bialik mostly ignored his own research in favor of sensationalism and ideological exhortation. Records of the pogrom show that Jewish people resisted and fought back. There’s certainly no indication that Jewish men hid in safety while women were sexually assaulted.

Bialik’s invidious tall tales aren’t just false; they’re antisemitic. He’s leaning into stereotypes which frame Jewish men as weak and unmanly, and as obsessed with dry legalism rather than with honor. He even suggests that Jewish men, after seeing their loved ones raped, rushed to their Rabbis to ask if the sexual assaults made women impure under Jewish law.

The Cohanim sallied forth,
To the Rabbi's house they flitted:
Tell me, O Rabbi, tell, is my own wife permitted?
The matter ends; and nothing more.
And all is as it was before.

It is at this point, following vile smears of the victim of the assault, that Bialik introduces the phrase “trembling knees” to contrast the supposedly complicit, cowardly Jewish men of Kishinev with an older tradition of Jewish warriors.

Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs
The privies, jakes and pigpens where the heirs
Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees,
Concealed and cowering,the sons of the Maccabees!

He then goes on to compare Jewish victims to animals.

The scurrying of roaches was their flight;
They died like dogs, and they were dead!

Again, the comparison of Jewish victims to roaches and dogs explicitly echoes antisemitic rhetoric, and is intended to dehumanize. Bialik encourages readers to feel not sympathy for the victims, but repulsion and disgust. He says as much towards the end of the poem

And thou, too, pity them not, nor touch their wound;…

For since they have met pain with resignation
And have made peace with shame,
What shall avail thy consolation?
They are too wretched to evoke thy scorn.
They are too lost thy pity to evoke

Bialik becomes the poet of Zionist contempt for Jewish victims

Zipperstein called Bialik’s “In the City of Slaughter” “the most influential poetic work written in a Jewish language since the Middle Ages.” It became, according to The Jewish Star, a powerful rallying cry for “a Zionist ethos that sought to mold a strong new Jew who would not go to his slaughter like a lamb.”

Again, Jewish people did not go to their slaughter like lambs. Like most people targeted for violence, they generally resisted where and when they could. Bialik’s central accusation, that Jewish men watched in cowardice and indifference as Jewish women were raped, is a disgusting calumny that he juxtaposes with explicit antisemitic smears. Yet, this ugly attack on Jewish victims of violence was a central inspiration for the Zionist movement, and Zionists continue to evoke it today, legitimizing the violence in Gaza by sneering at Jewish victims of violence in the diaspora.

Proponents of Israel often insist that Israel is necessary to provide refuge and safety in case governments in the diaspora turn on Jewish populations. There are various problems with this argument (Israel’s government did not do a good job of keeping Jewish people safe on 10/7, for starters).  But I think it’s worth pointing out that Bialik—who again is frequently evoked by Zionists today—is not really concerned with safety or with refuge. He is not nearly as concerned with preventing future violence as he is concerned with preventing future dishonor.

The central horror of Kishinev is not the violent atrocities, but the (antisemitic) fantasy that Jews with “trembling knees” failed to fight back and die with dignity. Zionists who evoke that phrase aren’t offering protection to Jews in the diaspora. They are expressing disdain for the diaspora, and promising to be strong to spite both their enemies and those other, disgusting, cockroach-like, weak, non-Zionist Jews.

This obsession with strength, honor, and virility as virtue also I think helps explain why Israeli soldiers seem so eager to film themselves torturing and humiliating Gazans, and why so many in Israel seem fine with their army inflicting horrific mass death on Palestinian children (14,000 killed, 12,000 wounded according to a recent count.)

If your main goal is not to be viewed as a Jew with “trembling knees,” if the state myth of the new militant Jew is predicated on a loathing of weakness, then victims are by definition disgusting and worthy only of scorn and hatred (“pity them not” as Bialik says.)

 The eradication of weak enemies today is part of a project of erasing the (stereotypical, fantasized) weak diaspora Jew of history. When Zionists say they are not “Jews with trembling knees” they are reiterating that Zionist violence against Palestinians is continuous with, and inspired by, loathing of Jewish people who suffered in the past.

Contra Bialik and his Zionist heirs, the Jewish people of Kishinev targeted by Russian Christians were not weak (though they were undoubtedly, and understandably frightened.) Nor were they responsible for the violence that targeted them, just as Palestinian civilians—men, women, and children—are not responsible for the violence Israel has inflicted on them. Our disgust should be directed at the murders, not at those they murdered. And Jewish people should not justify genocide and war crimes now by suggesting, with Bialik, that Jewish victims of genocidal violence in the past got what they deserved.