Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

On Easter Day, April 6, 1903, a violent mob attacked the Jewish population of Kishinev, killing forty-nine people and wounding hundreds. During two days of bloody massacre, about a third of the city was destroyed, leaving hundreds of Jewish families destitute, their meager belongings smashed, broken, torn, or stolen. Hospitals were overwhelmed with injured men, women, and children. Fluff and feathers from torn pillows covered the streets of Kishinev as if snow had fallen in the middle of a sunny spring. It clung to puddles of blood and dirt, settling on the trees and the rubble scattered across the streets. The Kishinev pogrom would be followed by several others, some even surpassing it in brutality, but it would remain etched in the memory of generations as a turning point in Jewish history and the history of the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe. The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 again evoked the memory of Kishinev, supporting the historians’ claim about the pogrom’s lasting significance. The two events differ in their context and their scale: the carefully orchestrated terrorist operation carried out by the Gazan invaders equipped with advanced weaponry stands in stark contrast to the violence perpetrated by a mob of men and teenagers who brutally killed their neighbors and acquaintances using stones, clubs, metal pipes, and axes. Still, it is not unusual for a shocking event to trigger memories of past shocks and traumas despite all the differences. The common threads in this comparison are a deep understanding of the tragedy’s historical importance and an intensely felt need to uncover the truth about its causes. In the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7 and the conduct of the Israeli operation in Gaza, the avalanche of facts, coupled with a striking deficit in crucial details, created a sense of pervasive uncertainty. Everything seemed open to challenge. The most rudimentary and incontrovertible facts were thrown into doubt. There were even claims that the atrocity never took place. Particularly unsettling were the efforts to cast doubt on the suffering of civilians — Palestinians and Israelis — caught in the crossfire of the conflict, as though the trauma inflicted by war was not self-evident and required proof.  One does not have to be a trained historian to imagine that the crisis of credibility, the collapse of trust, that we experience today is not new, and that any tragedy creates room for contestation. Once upon a time it seemed that the catastrophes of the twentieth century had taught people to suspend their doubts in the face of the testimonies of victims and survivors, yet the ongoing wars in Ukraine, and in Israel and Gaza, show that this skill is easy to unlearn. The search for the solution to the political crisis in the Middle East often stumbles upon arguments about facts, throwing us back to the moment in 1903, when palpable anxiety about empirical truth pervaded the post-pogrom city of Kishinev.  Weeks after the pogrom, rain washed away the dirty fluff and feathers from the pavements. Shops remained closed, and people were paralyzed by fear of another attack, but the city was animated with a sudden influx of visitors. Amid the fear-stricken ruins, outsiders — journalists, writers, lawyers, and investigators — were busy collecting evidence and attempting to construct the stories of the event. Michael Davitt, an Irish journalist writing for American newspapers, spent several days in Kishinev interviewing government officials, visiting the sites of violence, and trying to obtain from “the living witnesses of the outrages an account of what they saw and experienced.” In the fall of 1903, Davitt’s dispatches from Odesa and Kishinev were collected in a volume called Within the Pale — an eye-opening account of the life of Jews in the tsarist Empire, explaining the sources and the outcomes of the Kishinev catastrophe. A short while later, in June 1903, the young Hebrew poet Hayim Nachman Bialik came on a mission from the Jewish Historical Commission in Odesa to collect evidence for a documentary book on the Kishinev pogrom. The testimonies of the pogrom’s survivors that he recorded remained unpublished until 1991. Instead Bialik wrote The City of Slaughter, a grand, wrathful, and influential poem. Around the