French law mandated that the court also assess civil damages against Schwartzbard and, adding insult to injury to Petlura’s supporters and sympathizers, the jury awarded damages of just one franc each to the widow of the slain general and his brother.
The world press published detailed accounts of the case, and divergent assessments of the assassination coincided with the political sympathies and antipathies of the various newspapers. Among those celebrating the verdict was Maxim Gorky, the famous pro-Jewish Russian novelist, who wrote that “Anti-Semitism is a feeling unknown to the population of Russia, it having been caused by the policy of the Czarist government. The same was true of the Petlura regime. Petlura’s assassination will prevent new massacres.”
As Russian history subsequently established, Gorky was seriously mistaken in this regard, but that is a discussion for another day.
The Jewish response to the verdict was joyous and triumphant. Pro-France demonstrations took place in Tel Aviv, with marchers carrying “vive la France” signs. In Jerusalem, a group representing the Jewish Command Council brought greetings of appreciation from the Jerusalem community to the French Consul General. A number of Jewish delegations in France sent flowers to Torres’s home, and Schwartzbard’s able defender was invited to the United States to address a meeting of the American Jewish Congress (an invitation which, probably due to public pressure, was later rescinded).
The apologist Federation of Ukrainian Jews in the United States took an interesting tack: “Acquitting Schwartzbard, the French court has also acquitted the Ukrainian people of the accusation made by the Petlura defense against the Ukrainians. From now on, it will be known: Petlura was guilty in the pogroms, but not the Ukrainian people.”
In other words, Petlura had apparently single-handedly carried out the Jewish massacres in Ukraine and, by his own hand, murdered over 50,000 Jews. Such nonsense was, perhaps not surprisingly, echoed by the socialist Jewish Daily Forward, which argued that Petlura’s defenders had tried but failed to “take the guilt from him and place it entirely on the good name [sic] of the Ukrainian people.”
But the Orthodox Jewish Daily News got it right, cutting to the heart of the issue:
“The verdict means that Schwartzbard is not a murderer. He is a goel ha’dam [literally, “redeemer of blood”] of an unfortunate race…. [A conviction] would have been a declaration that one committed pogroms and remained a gentleman, if one is only clever enough not to draw the knife himself. The verdict has proven that he who encourages pogroms is himself a murderer…”
Others saw a stark miscarriage of justice. To this day, assessments of Schwartzbard, the assassination, the trial, and the verdict differ dramatically, and antagonistic positions are particularly evident in contrasting studies by Ukrainian and Jewish historians.
After his acquittal, Schwartzbard became a strong Zionist and wished to emigrate to Eretz Yisrael, then under the British Mandate, but the British authorities, without explanation, repeatedly refused him a visa. He traveled around the world helping to organize Jewish defense organizations and during a 1934 visit to the United States he complied with the request of a New York attorney, Ashley T. Cole, for an autograph dated “le 3/V 1934,” which is exhibited on this page. Eighteen days later, on May 21, 1934, a “Sholom Schwartzbard Farewell Concert” was held at Town Hall in New York; a ticket from that celebrated event is also shown here.
Schwartzbard was a prolific writer who often composed Yiddish poetry under the pen name Baal-Chalomot (The Dreamer). His works include a volume of poems, Troymen un Virklikhkayt (“Dreams and Reality”), which described World War I on the western front; Krif mit Zikh Aleyn (“At War with Myself”); and an autobiography, Inem Loyf fun Yorn (“In the Course of Years”). He died in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1938 and was buried in the largest public funeral ever held there.
