Sample text for The Orientalist : solving the mystery of a strange and a dangerous life / Tom Reiss.
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THE ORIENTALIST PART 1
Chapter 1
Revolution
Lev Nussimbaum was born in October 1905, the moment when the tolerant, haute capitaliste culture of Baku began to fall apart. On October 17, Czar Nicholas II promised his people a constitution, a false promise designed to short-circuit a growing call for revolution, and across the country rioting, looting, and murder were the order of the day. In Baku, the Cossacks rode through the streets attacking citizens, ostensibly to restore order, while Azeris and Armenians turned their cosmopolitan city into a medieval war zone. Elegant villas were besieged if their occupants were of an ethnic or religious group that inflamed a particular mob.
Like many writers born in the last years of a dying empire, Lev would idealize the world that finally collapsed just after his fifteenth birthday, its inhabitants running for their lives, leaving dinner on the table. Lev looked back on Baku as a place whose benevolence stemmed from the antiquity and relative weakness of the authority that ruled it. He would spend his life opposing the revolutionaries who swept away the complex web of the old religions and empires and replaced it with their new, totalizing creeds. For Lev, the forces of revolutionary political change would always be remembered as “a raging madness into which the city fell, the grimaces the people suddenly wore instead of faces. Everything infernal, everything animal, everything dull-witted that human nature is capable of stood written in these grimaces. It was as though the movable features of the face, once forcibly subdued, had now likewise attained their true freedom and now were clothed only by dull-witted, animal, “free” expressions. . . . Bolshevism began with the transformation of the human face into a grimace.
The city of Baku has no record of the birth of Lev Nussimbaum in its files. Nor, for that matter, do the cities of Tiflis, Kiev, Odessa, or Zurich. Lev suggested in one of the many accounts he published of his early life, this one in a Berlin newspaper in 1931, that he was actually born noplace:
Born in . . . ? Already here the problematic nature of my existence begins. Most people can name a house or at least a place where they were born. To this place, or to this house, one makes pilgrimages in one’s later years in order to indulge in sentimental reminiscences. In order to indulge in such reminiscences I would have to make a pilgrimage to the carriage of an express train. I was born during the first Russian railroad strike in the middle of the Russian steppes between Europe and Asia, when my mother was returning from Zurich, the seat of the Russian revolutionaries, to Baku, the seat of our family. On the day of my birth, the czar proclaimed his manifesto in which he granted the Russians a political constitution. On the day of my arrival in Baku the city was engulfed in the flames of Revolution, and the slaughtering of the mob. I myself had to be brought to my father in a water trough, whereupon my father wanted to throw me out together with my nursemaid. So began my existence. Father: an industrial magnate in the oil industry; mother: a radical revolutionary.
In this version of his birth story, Lev is in every way smack in the middle of the historic upheaval that formed his life, and in his many accounts of his family and origins, he would never deviate from these basic facts.*
And as absurd as it sounds, the story may actually be true. Some of it is echoed by other independent sources, including Lev’s German governess, Alice Schulte. Frau Schulte composed her memories of Lev in a neat, careful hand in the 1940s, in the convent in northern Italy where she went to live after watching the boy she had followed around her entire life become a hunted man. She seemed to feel an obligation to put the facts of his confusing life in some order, but the document is frustratingly brief, and as Frau Schulte was buried in a pauper’s grave near the convent in 1958, she cannot elaborate on it.
Lev’s first book, Blood and Oil in the Orient, lays out the founding myths he would return to—the personal history linking him to the history of the Caucasus. Lev introduces his father, Abraham, promenading in front of the local prison, “an oriental sheepskin cap on his head and in his hand a rosary of amber, without which no one can get along in Baku.” His father’s sun-darkened features, which Lev elsewhere attributed to an evenly mixed racial heritage of Turkic and Persian aristocracy, betrayed “the facial expression, imperturbable, weary, and yet eager for activity, of an Oriental who has transferred the old traditions of command to the social life of the young oil-city.” In this account, his father buys his mother (“a very young girl with dark eyes . . . a member of the Bolshevist party of Russia”) out of the imperial prison, where she is awaiting deportation as a political agitator, then promptly marries her and brings her into his harem. Lev’s mother, in turn, takes over the house and dispatches the harem.
The idea that Abraham Nussimbaum was a Muslim aristocrat of Persian and Turkic heritage—or anything other than a Jew of European background—was a deliberate part of Lev’s self-creation. The elder Nussimbaum was, in fact, born in Tiflis, now Tbilisi, the official capital of the Russian-administered Caucasus, on August 24, 1875. (His birth certificate does exist.) He was an Ashkenazic Jew whose parents had come to the Caucasus from Kiev or Odessa, the great Jewish centers within the Pale of Settlement, outside of which Russia’s Jews were not allowed to travel or work (although many bribed their way out to other parts of the empire). The Pale consisted of areas that had fallen under the waning Polish
Commonwealth—primarily Belorussia, Lithuania, and western Ukraine—until they were forcibly annexed by Catherine the Great in 1772, 1793, and 1795.* Along with millions of Orthodox and Catholic Slavs, nearly half a million Jews now became subjects of the expanded Russian Empire. Until the absorption of the Polish territories, the Russian Empire had had practically no Jews, and it was uniquely ill-equipped to handle this new addition to its ethnic and religious mix. The official Russian solution to the Jewish question became to restrict all Jews to the same Polish provinces where Catherine the Great had acquired them—the so-called Pale. Effectively, this created the largest ghetto in history, a vast geographic prison for the new “Russian” Jews. The territories that comprised the Pale were provincial, anti-Semitic, and prone to food shortages and other economic crises.
Russia was already a land of such wild religious fervor that even its Orthodox rulers were considered heretics by a large percentage of its people: the “Old Believers”—the millions of apocalyptic fundamentalists who objected to the minor changes in Russian church ritual made in the seventeenth century to bring it closer in line with standard Greek Orthodox practice. The Old Believers were so upset that the changes could complicate their eternal salvation that they staged vast rebellions against the czar’s “legions of the Antichrist” and burned themselves alive by the thousands in protest (though there were still an estimated 13 million of them when Lev was born).
Still others became “Judaizers,” Christians who decided to renounce Christ, follow only the Old Testament, and keep the Sabbath on Saturday, along with sundry other Jewish customs, while not considering themselves Jews. Aided by the more mainstream Trans-Volga Hermits, the Judaizers brought Russian Orthodoxy as close as it ever came to a reformation—and caused a reaction that barred real Jews from Russia for the next three hundred years. When Czar Ivan III took a liking to the Judaizers, they were invited to Moscow, where they managed to convert so much of the court nobility in the last decades of the fifteenth century that traditionalists felt the need to counter the trend through selective burnings at the stake. The Orthodox clergy also prevailed upon the czars to ban the Jews, who were thought to have started the whole “Judaizing” heresy; the ban took effect in the mid-1500s, which is why the empire had such a peculiar absence of Jews when it acquired the Pale in the late 1700s. Like Freemasonry—with which it was closely associated, especially after Russian Masons adopted the Kabbalah and began electing “Cohens” to their temples—Judaism was simply considered too explosive and contagious a faith to be allowed inside Russia.
Russia’s ongoing religious crises added urgency to the official desire to convert its vast new Jewish population. In 1817, Czar Alexander I personally founded the Society of Israelite Christians but had less luck defeating Judaism than he’d had defeating Napoleon; gentile serfs and merchants in areas bordering the Pale even showed disturbing new signs of “Judaizing.” Religion was still so anarchic and volatile a force in Russia that when Czar Alexander died in 1825, while visiting the Black Sea, many Russians insisted that he had not really died but had secretly become a wandering “fool-in-Christ” traveling the country under the name Fedor Kuzmich. The nineteenth century was filled with schemes, hatched by both the czar and his revolutionary opponents, for dealing with the “alien” element, the Jews. The schemes grew more violent during the course of the century. In the 1820s, Count Pestel, a freethinking noble, suggested giving the Jews an independent state in Asia Minor and deporting them there en masse. But by the end of the century, Constantine Pobedonostsev, chief adviser of the last two czars, was suggesting that Russia’s “Jewish problem” should be solved by thirds: a third should emigrate, a third should embrace Christianity, and a third should die of starvation. The Okhrana, the czarist police, forged a document that became known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a supposed plan for the Jewish takeover of everything through the promotion of global revolution. During the aborted revolution of 1905, pogroms swept Russia that shocked the world.
In this vast anti-Semitic empire, the Caucasus was a rare oasis. Here, the Jews were merely a minority among minorities, and an ancient and rather admired one at that. Jews had fled here from the destruction of the Second Temple, in a.d. 70, and Azerbaijan had absorbed remnants of the Babylonian exile, who fled to the highlands north of Baku during the Islamic conquest of Persia. Even the Judaizers, Russia’s non-Jewish Jews, found sanctuary here and settled the jungle lands on the Iranian-Azeri border. In the eyes of the Muslim khans who ruled much of the Caucasus, the Jews’ position as People of the Book raised them a notch above the Zoroastrians and the various pagan sects.
Ashkenazic Jews from the Pale clandestinely left for the Caucasus—a few days’ journey across the Black Sea—throughout the nineteenth century. The pace picked up once the oil boom got started in earnest after 1870. It is likely that Lev’s grandfather migrated from the Pale to Tiflis in the 1850s or ’60s, and that his father left Tiflis for Baku in the early 1890s. Lev never revealed anything about this part of his past, but Abraham Nussimbaum may have regarded Baku much as did his contemporary Ossip Benenson, another Ashkenazic Jew who got rich there on oil. Benenson’s daughter Flora recalled that shortly after his marriage in the 1880s, her father broke away from his family in the Pale because “he had his sights on faraway Caucasus, a realm which in the nineteenth century formed part of every young Russian’s romantic dreams . . . [but he] was no ro- mantic; it was the gambler in his strain that sent him so remote from his roots.”
Flora Benenson grew up in the same social milieu as Lev. As fellow millionaires in a city with a small Jewish population, the Benensons and the Nussimbaums probably knew each other. Abraham Nussimbaum grew rich as the so-called oil commissioner of Baku, a kind of legal middleman who also owned wells, but Baku oil made the Benensons one of the richest families in Russia. In 1912 it allowed them to buy a mansion in St. Petersburg within sight of the czar’s palace. Flora’s recollections of her family’s first Passover celebration in St. Petersburg, however, contrast starkly with the interethnic Christmas party young Lev would attend later that year. She recalled that on the evening of their seder, “just as all was ready, our butler led a delegation of servants to Mother’s boudoir. They had done all their work, he said, and were now leaving the house. ‘We cannot serve a meal while you consume the blood of a Christian child,’ the butler informed Mother. ‘We shall return tomorrow.’ ” This was the difference between the other cities of the Russian Empire and Baku. Pale or no Pale, with enough money, a Jew could live wherever he chose in the czar’s empire. Only in the Caucasus could he forget the stigma of being a Jew, and the most cosmopolitan and tolerant place in the Caucasus was Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku.
The Persian word for fire is azer, and since ancient times Azerbaijan’s abundance of oil and natural gas, which led whole hillsides to naturally explode into flame, made it the center of Zoroastrianism, Persia’s ancient pre-Muslim religion. Every religion known to man has found haven in the region. While Rome was still killing Christians, two kingdoms on Azerbaijan’s borders, Armenia and Georgia, became among the first countries to officially convert to Christianity. When the Muslim armies swept out of Arabia in the eighth century, some of the fiercely independent Christians, Zoroastrians, and pagans of Azerbaijan adopted Muhammad’s faith, but many did not. Islam merely joined the babel of religions in the area. When the crusader knights were driven out of Palestine three centuries later, they found a new home in the hills of Azerbaijan, where they established kingdoms that still existed and shocked anthropologists in the early twentieth century. Eventually, as its culture developed alongside that of Persia, Azerbaijan became the only Muslim country besides Iran to be officially Shiite—revering a line of saintly martyrs stretching back to Ali, the Prophet’s nephew and son-in-law. The Azeri khans frequently seized the throne of Persia itself; from the sixteenth century on, the great Persian dynasties were ruled by ethnic Azeris.
Russian influence swept into the region in the early nineteenth century, as the czar’s armies conquered the Caucasus, and the Azeris broke with conservative Shiites of Iran and became “Europeans.” Umm-El-Banu Asadullayeva, who left Baku in 1922 and wrote her memoirs in Paris under the name Banine, recalled that in her own “fanatic Muslim family,” the women cared mainly for clothes and jewelry, furniture from Paris and Moscow, and gambling (her father, a farmer, became a millionaire when oil was found under his fields). Her aunts, “fat, bearded brunettes,” smoked, gossiped all day long, and “played poker with a passion that was unequaled.” She dryly summed up the atmosphere in the turn-of-the- century Baku of her childhood:
Gambling is forbidden in the Koran—all of Baku played cards and huge sums of money changed hands. Strong alcoholic drinks, such as Vodka and Cognac, replaced wine, which was condemned by the Prophet, under the pretense that these beverages were not technically forbidden. The reproduction of the human face was likewise prohibited—photographers were nevertheless swamped by customers. Muslims allowed themselves to be photographed in profile, or from the front, standing before a painting of a park, or a draped curtain.
The oil boom in the United States began with the first gusher in Pennsylvania in the 1850s, but in Baku it had been on for two thousand years. Baku oil had lit the temples of Zarathustra, and Marco Polo described it as a mainstay of silk route traders. But for nearly two millennia, the perpetual flood of black gold had excited the passions of no one but the Zoroastrians, who made Baku the center of their cult. Stoic bands of emaciated, fire-worshipping monks traveled from as far as India to sit out their lives in fire fortresses, starving so that they might receive the pure nourishment of the eternal flames. For the rest of the population, crude oil was a perpetual muddy sludge in which the city’s few thousand residents made their living; it poisoned the soil, sending the locals out to colonize the steppes and mountains and jungles of Azerbaijan—no other country has more climate zones in as small an area—in search of ground uncontaminated by crude.
The waters of the Caspian itself often caught fire when the sludge on it became too thick. “I have memories of the flaming waves,” wrote one emigrant recalling her childhood in Baku, “lighting up the night as the vapours exploded into a thousand fires.” Until the nineteenth century, oil had been used mainly in patent medicines, and almost everyone continued to believe that it had health-giving properties. Some Caucasian tribes worshipped oil as a divine element in itself. The vapors, it was thought, had spared Baku from the Black Plague.
On his tour of the Caucasus in the 1850s, Alexandre Dumas marveled at the anachronistic citizens of Azerbaijan, who had the free spirit and bravery of his legendary musketeers; he wrote in his diary that “entering Baku is like penetrating one of the strongest fortresses of the Middle Ages.” That was all soon to change. In the mid-nineteenth century, when kerosene made from petroleum began to replace expensive whale oil, the Age of Illumination began. Kerosene was suddenly the world’s most valuable commodity, and the forces that made Rockefeller and Standard Oil were unleashed in Baku.
The Baku gushers, called “fountains,” were of a size and power that had never been seen before. With nicknames like Wet Nurse and Golden Bazaar, they raged out of control, small wild volcanoes of oil. They turned the beaches of Baku black, and the shore of the Caspian was soon so thick with wooden and alabaster derricks in certain places that one could not see ships approaching. The first Baku fountain, struck in June 1873, shot oil into the air uncontrollably for over four months before its owners managed to tame it, and a few dozen million barrels of oil ran into the sand. For a few months, this single fountain caused the price of oil to plummet, and two years later, it was still powerful enough to send a nine-foot-thick column forty feet into the air.
By 1901, Baku was supplying half the world’s oil. It became an international city overnight, and the local Azeris were soon outnumbered by Russians, Georgians, Ossetians, and others from the four corners of the earth. Between 1856 and 1910, Baku’s population grew at a faster rate than that of London, Paris, or New York. The Nobel brothers, who dominated the industry in the first decades, invented the concept of the tanker to handle the demand for Baku oil in the Far East, appropriately naming their first tanker Zoroaster. They made the bulk of the family’s fortune in Azeri oil, though brother Alfred’s invention of dynamite is more famous.
The oilmen came in all stripes—Swedes and Jews and Poles and Armenians—but the dominance of big foreign groups like the Nobels and Rothschilds didn’t last long. By the turn of the century, half of the tanker business and much of the production was in local hands. So-called oil barons arose from both the peasantry and the feudal aristocracy—anyone who dug a hole in the ground and got lucky. (The Nobels tried whenever possible to buy out these new oil barons, along with smaller producers. According to documents in the Baku archives, Abraham Nussimbaum sold the Nobels most of his wells in 1913, on the eve of the Great War, a highly opportune business decision.)
The new oil millionaires became great philanthropists, determined to turn their city from a provincial backwater into the finest Islamic city in the world—a showcase of the possibilities of the positive merger of East and West. As the representative local group, the Muslim oil barons felt the most obliged to make showy public statements with their new wealth. They took grand tours of Europe and hired architects to build copies of the mansions, museums, and opera houses they had seen, all in an attempt to anchor their city in the Occidental future rather than its Oriental past. While some Azeri Muslims were outraged by the education of women or their appearance onstage or in an office building, Baku benefited from having been so long at the crossroads of East and West that people were used to new fashions and change.
Equal parts Dodge City, medieval Baghdad, industrial Pittsburgh, and nineteenth-century Paris, fin de siècle Baku was the last great city built before the First World War spoiled the dream that the West could keep expanding forever in a grand civilizing pageant. It was a place of fantastic extremes of wealth and poverty, where gas lights and telephones made a stark contrast to camel caravans and emaciated Zoroastrian monks. The city’s wild and clashing history came to a head at the turn of the cen- tury, when it was the “Wild East” frontier of Europe, the world’s greatest oil-boom town. A British visitor at the time wrote, “One might almost fancy oneself in an American city out west. There is the same air of newness about everything, the same sanguine atmosphere. Everyone is hopeful.”
Yet by 1905, the entire Russian frontier was bathed in blood, as the empire entered the first of its revolutions. The unrest reached from the coast of Korea to St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt, and Baku was not spared. The revolution came, as many do, on the heels of a disastrous war, one of the bloodiest in history. The czar’s advisers had dreamed up the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War in part as a means of diffusing revolutionary tension, by acquiring, via quick victory, an injection of patriotism as well as some much-needed timber concessions on the Korean coast. Instead, the Russians experienced total defeat. The catastrophe in the Far East—against a people the czar called “little, short-tailed monkeys”—made the Russian Empire look fragile and moribund. As the war’s losses sank in—in addition to the hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, practically the entire Russian Navy was sunk by the Japanese fleet—years of left-wing terrorism and czarist oppression collided in a year of uprisings, ethnic cleansing, and generalized breakdown.
The semi-destroyed Russian military was in no position to quash the unrest. The only part of the vast czarist navy that had not been sunk by the Japanese was the famous Black Sea Fleet, and on its main battleship, the state-of-the-art Potemkin, the sailors rioted in the spring of 1905 and shot their officers. All around the Black Sea and the Caspian, public order broke down. While the staggering numbers of Russian dead, machine-gunned on the icy hills of Manchuria and the Korean peninsula, showed the new lethality of war, the revolutionary terrorism and pogroms that arrived inside Russia that year showed the new brutality of politics—and both foreshadowed what horror might be born through the mediums of modern mass violence.*
In the year that followed Lev’s birth, approximately thirty-six hundred government officials were killed or wounded by terrorists—and this all after the revolutionary crisis had been subdued by the czar’s promise of constitutional reform. Acts of terrorism became so common during Lev’s childhood that many Russian newspapers introduced special sections devoted solely to printing daily lists of political assassinations and bombings throughout the empire. The political violence of revolution mixed with religious and racial violence. While most historians no longer believe that the czar’s government planned and directed the pogroms, it is clear from his letters that Nicholas and his advisers applauded them, since he believed that the revolution was a Jewish plot and that the pogroms helped fight it, as well as encouraging “traditional values” in the population. But the two types of violence and upheaval merely fed off each other. Nearly seven hundred pogroms occurred in the two weeks following the czar’s October 17 announcement promising a constitution.
Every manner of thug, bigot, bandit, and terrorist descended on Baku because the city was the great juggernaut, the capitalist frontier. Bolshevik gangs attacked from the left, raiding banks and treasuries to finance their new movement. The czar’s Cossacks attacked from the right, to put down the uprisings.
Thirty-five years later, as he lay dying, Lev would reflect again and again on how “blood flowed the day of my birth over the European-style paving stones of the streets. . . . Houses went up in flames and Cossacks on little, long-maned horses flew through the city.” In the rest of the Russian Empire, Jewish blood was flowing in the streets, but in Baku, the blood Lev “remembers” at his birth was mostly Armenian. The Armenians had lived in relative peace and prosperity in the ethnic mix of Azerbaijan for hundreds of years, fulfilling the role Jews played elsewhere as traders and moneylenders; some of the richest oil barons were Armenian. But as the old balance collapsed, this industrious minority bore the full brunt of the emerging chaos.
Some of the most vivid recollections of these events came from a young Armenian woman, Armen Ohanian, who survived the riots as a girl and wrote about her experiences for Asia, “the American Magazine on the Orient.”* She describes how the Cossacks were called in to restore order after days of rioting, causing the carnage in Baku’s streets that formed the specter of Lev’s birth year (and was the reason his pregnant mother would have been sent to Switzerland only to be stranded in a train carriage outside Baku on her return). She recalls:
Thousands of dead lay in the streets and covered the Christian and Mussulman cemeteries. The odor of the corpses stifled us. Everywhere women with mad eyes were seeking their children, and husbands were moving the heaps of rotting flesh.
In the hallway we were met by a manservant. “The Czar has given them a constitution!” he said. His stiff lips fascinated me. “Everyone is free to do as he likes. That is why—that is why—the Cossacks are burning the quarter.” . . . The whole city was in flames and even the waves of the Caspian Sea, covered with oil from the burning wells, spit fire like a dragon.
Thus the Cossacks celebrated the constitution the czar gave Russia after his defeat.
The revolution was eventually contained, and for a brief time it seemed that the autocratic, unwieldy empire of the czars might actually be able to reform itself. But the massacres and chaos of 1905 were to find their fatal amplification in the catastrophe of the First World War. Eventually, the czarist regime would fall to an even greater tyranny, and among its unsung losses was the unpredictable, interethnic capitalist dynamo on the Caspian, where “everyone is hopeful.”
* The significance of the events on his birthday would haunt Lev his entire life, but he couldn’t be sure what day that was. Sometimes he gave the date as October 20, but he also said late October, or even early November; his father told him October but also seemed unsure of the day. Adding to the confusion is the fact that Russia’s traditional, pre-1917 Julian calendar differed from the modern Gregorian calendar by eleven days. Thus, Lev could, in a sense, have been born in October and November. No wonder he once said that he celebrated his birthday in New York for an entire week.
* What began as a limited landgrab by the monarchs of Russia, Prussia, and Austria became a full-scale dismemberment in the 1790s, after the Poles, inspired by the winds from France, abolished their monarchy and drafted a constitution. Czarina Catherine led the charge for eliminating Poland’s “contagion of democratic ideas.” From the perspective of the post-1939 era, Catherine’s solution—the armed dismemberment of Poland, with German armies smashing in from the west, Russians from the east—seems like a kind of eighteenth-century dry run for the Hitler-Stalin pact.
* The Russo-Japanese War showed how machine guns could kill thousands in a matter of hours, forcing soldiers to dig into trenches and charge over them, in waves, to their deaths. Millions died at Verdun and Ypres as their officers relearned the lessons already drawn from the Battle of Mukden, which had shocked journalists and generals alike at the time. But even by 1914, the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War had been relegated to a footnote.
* One of the great magazines of the 1920s and ’30s, Asia fed the public appetite for news of “the Orient” that was such a force in those decades. Asia published the top writers of the day—John Dos Passos covered the Palestine question in the wake of the Balfour Declaration—but it featured mainly the voices of people like this Armenian girl, as well as British ambassadors and Indian revolutionaries, Ottoman butlers and Siberian industrialists. Even as it catered to the romantic fascination with “the East,” Asia belied notions of
Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: Said, Kurban, Authors, German 20th century Biography