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My Yidishe Murder The 1876 Case of Pesach Rubenstein, Hasidic Slasher edward portnoy In December 1875, a Jewish immigrant from Russian-ruled Poland murdered his lover in a field in Brooklyn by slashing her throat with a cigar knife. The press had a field day and the explosion of articles that followed the story, from the discovery of the body through the trial and to the death in prison of the defendant , was eagerly provided by dozens of newspapers from New York to California . These hundreds of articles regaled their readers with the lurid details of the “Jew murderer,” Pesach Rubenstein. Occurring as it did before the great wave of Jewish immigration in 1881, the episode eludes Jewish historiography, which has paid little attention to the life of Yiddish-speaking Jews in the United States before 1881, in spite of the huge press response it received at the time. Nonetheless, the case represented, at the time, the most significant interface between Jews and the American media in the history of the country. The few English-language Jewish newspapers that existed in 1876 when the Rubenstein trial began made a serious effort to ignore a story that had been splashed over every front page of virtually every newspaper in the country. The Yiddish press, comprising only a few newspapers, acted quite differently. Understanding the trial’s place as central to the Jews of the country, they dedicated entire issues to it. Why such a marked difference between the attitude of English-language Jewish editors and Yiddish editors? The Yiddish press constituted a new phenomenon, not only in 1870s America but also in general.1 The first Yiddish newspaper in the Russian Empire, which controlled the Pale of Settlement, the largest Jewish population in the world, had been permitted to publish only in 1862, and by 1868 it ceased to exist .As a newspaper,this publication provided few genuinely newsworthy items, yet it succeeded greatly as a birthplace for modern Yiddish literature. As a re- 200 E d w a r d P o r t n o y sult, many of the Pale’s Jews would end up seeing their first real Yiddish newspapers only after having emigrated to America. In postbellum America, the number of Yiddish speakers was slowly increasing , but without a precedent for Yiddish periodicals, no attempts were made to publish any. As early as 1870, a need for a Yiddish newspaper in New York became apparent. Edited and published by Y. K. Bukhner, Di yidishe tsaytung was the first Yiddish newspaper in America. Whether Bukhner’s idea or instigated by outside sources, its financing came from Tammany Hall in order to convince Yiddish-speaking immigrants to vote for them.2 The advent of Di yidishe tsaytung represented the first indication that Yiddish culture would function in the United States on the basis of commercial interests, rather than intellectual and didactic. Di yidishe tsaytung, ostensibly a weekly, was not particularly well run: extant issues indicate that approximately five years transpired between the publication of issue 1 and issue 15. A weekly, it was not. Moreover, Y. K. Bukhner, its publisher, editor,and writer,was too cheap to pay to have the newspaper typeset and, as a result, it was handwritten and lithographed instead. Newer Yiddish newspapers that appeared in its wake were professionally typeset and more closely resembled publications of the general press of the period.3 There was, however, something interesting and unusual about issue 15 of Di yidishe tsaytung, which appeared in March or April 1876. The use of engraved images dealing with the Rubenstein murder case marked this issue, and the case, as something different. Still a novelty in the nascent Yiddish press of the nineteenth century, these engravings had already been published in Englishlanguage periodicals dealing with the case. The four striking and somewhat lurid images in that issue, particularly one of a horrified man being shown the body of a half-naked and apparently dead woman by police, represented a new visual experience for Yiddish publications. Common in popular pulp magazines such as the Police Gazette, this type of imagery was very unusual for the Yiddish press of any place or any preceding period. It was the first known instance of the Yiddish press borrowing from “murder pamphlets,” a type of popular pamphlet literature that described, in lurid language and image, the tales of well-known killers, victims, trials, and, more often than not, executions.4 The...

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