Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (27 page)

Not only was this author mindful tha t guilt for a rape devolves upon the female victim-a lifetime of observation led also to this conclusion: "This is far Worse in this Respect than an Indian War, for I Never heard nor read of their Ravishing of Women Notwithstanding their cruelty to their captives."

On New Year's Day,
1
777, General George Washington issued a special order to his Continental Army forbidding the "plundering of any person": ". . . it is expected that humanity and tenderness to women and children will distinguish brave Americans, contending for liberty, from infamous mercenary rav agers, whether British or Hessians." Washington's army was not rape-free and there were executions for this crime (see page 31) , but as might be expected, the pattern of sexual abuse was imposed by the aggressor army fighting on foreign soil. That same January the Continental Congress appointed a committee to look into irregular conduct on the part of King George's army and in April the committee issued its report.

The report was divided into four sections: devastation of country and destruction of property; inhumane trea tment of pris oners; savage butchery of those incapable of resistance; and the abuse of women. Part Four, the abuse of women, was written with great delicacy.

The committee had authentic information of many instances of the most indecent treatment and actual ravishment of married and single women; but such is the nature of that most irreparable injury that the persons suffering it, though perfectly innocent, look upon it as a kind of reproach to have the facts related and their names known. Some complaints were made to the commanding

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officers on this subject, and one affidavit made before a justice of the peace, but the committee could not learn that any satisfaction was ever given, or punishment inflicted, except that one soldier in Pennington was kept in custody for part of a day.

Attempting a political analysis, the committee concluded that these abuses reflected the attitude of a soldiery "towards a people whom they have been taught to look upon, not as freemen defend ing their rights on principle, but as desperadoes and profligates who have risen up against law and order in general and wish the subver sion of society itself. This
.
is the most charitable and candid man ner in which the committee can account for the melancholy truths which they have been obliged to report."

The Continental Congress ordered the printing of six thou sand copies of the committee report ( two thousand in German ) for distribution among enemy soldiers, but historians are uncertain that this proviso was ever carried out. As a matter of fact, the committee had far more than one affidavit at its disposal. In the county of Hunterdon, New Jersey, a justice of the peace named Jared Saxton collected six affidavits in a two-day period. Each incident of rape had taken place in Hunterdon County "sometime in December last past," most of the abuses involved three or more soldiers who came to the house saying they were looking for rebels, and at least two of the women were dragged off to the British encampment for further assa ults. Each of the victims ( Mary Campbell, five months' pregnant; Abigail Palmer, thirteen years old; the sisters Elizabeth and Sarah Cain; Mary Phillips, a widow; and Rebekhah Christopher ) was illiterate and signed her deposi tion with her mark.

Mary Campbell's affidavit was fairly typical:

New Jersey Mary Campbell wife of Daniel Campbell Hunterdon County in the County aforesaid being Sworn

on the Holy Evangelists of Almighty God Deposeth and saith that sometime in December last past, a num ber of Soldiers belonging to the King of Great Britain's Army came to the House of her Father, where she the Deponent then was, when one of the Soldiers asked her to go to the Door
&
said he wanted to speak with her, which she Refused
&
told him he might speak to her in the House if he had anything to say, when Two of them Seized hold of her Arms
&
dragged her out of the

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House to an old Shop near the Dwelling House, Broke open the Door
&
pulled her in against all her cries
&
Intreaties
&
Swore if she did not hold her Tongue they would Run her thro with a Bayonet; her mother also plead with them
&
Intreated of them not to use her Daughter in such a Base
&
Cruel manner, but to no purpose. But finally three of said Soldiers Successively had Knowl edge of the Body of this Deponent, she being five months
&
up wards Advanced in her Pregnancy at that Time
&
further this Deponent Saith not.

Sworn Before me March the
22
Day
1
777—

Jared Saxton, one of the Justices Assigned to keep the Peace in
&
for the said County of Hunterdon

her

Mary m Campbell mark

As members of a scapegoat minority, Jewish women were historical victims of rape during the fearful pogroms in Poland and Russia or wherever they happened to live. The Cossack revolt of 1648 under the leadership of the Hetman Bogdan Chmelnitzky was significant to Ukrainian nationalism but it was a memorable disaster for the Ukrainian Jews, who were known to the Cossacks as the people who collected the rent for the hated Polish absentee landlords. ( Jews, who were not allowed by law to own land, had been forced into a disagreeable role as agents of commerce.) Chmelnitzky's Cossacks rode through the tiny villages and gave vent to their nationalism by raping Jewish women and maiming and killing others of both sexes, including children, who happened to cross their path.
·

Chmelnitzky's pogroms were replicated in the Ukraine in 1881-1882, where again the issue for the peasants was the presence of the Jewish rent collectors, and periodically thereaf ter: 1891-1892, 1903-1906 and 191<)-1920. Each wave had its own set of ideologi cal circumstances, each wave raised the slogan "Beat the Jews" as a rallying cry for God and country, and each wave featured the rape of Jewish women. The Czarist government was not without com plicity, for with its existence threatened by revolution, "Beat the Jews" became a strategic divertisement from its own repressions.

A writer, Ande Manners, has noted that the early pogroms ((had a desultory, amateurish quality: a few hundred feather beds

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slashed; houses and shops looted; several dozen people killed; here and there, a few skulls fractured, broken limbs, and girls and women raped." The slashing of feather beds had a double signifi cance, she tells us. Besides being symbolic of the good married life-the soft mattresses were the dowries of Jewish brides-"occa sionally apprehensive parents rolled up their pretty young daugh ters in them, to conceal the girls from predatory, lustful Cossacks." Other hiding places were pickle barrels-the opera singer Beverly Sills's mother was hidden in one during a pogrom-and mounds of earth or sand. ( Similar hiding places were used by Southern blacks when the KKK was riding.) Later pogroms were characterized by all-out murder, but rape was not abandoned as a tactic.
It
became a prelude to murder, forgotten in the horror of the larger act.*

The wave of pogroms that began in 1919 took place amid the general confusion ( and umbrella ) of the Russian Revolution, dur ing the bitter civil war between the Whites and the Reds. Rowdy volun teers from Denikin and Kornilov's White Army, for whom "Beat the Jews" had long been the answer to everything, including, now, the Communist menace, had a field day of wanton destruc tion. Reports from the Russian Red Cross and from Zionist organi zations have furnished the documentation. (The Soviets were concerned about the plight of the Jews, but not overly so; they were waging a revolution. Their advice was "Join the Red Army!") According to a Red Cross report, a typical pogrom on a small Jewish shtetJ went like this: "The gang breaks into the township, spreads all over the streets, separate groups break into the Jewish houses, killing without distinction of age and sex everybody they meet, with the exception of women, who are bestially violated before they are murdered."

The Red Cross meticulously reported on some Jewish refugees from Ladyshenka, "where an ordinary, simple pogrom took place": "On July 9th, a peasant brought to the Jewish hospital in Uman the last two Jews from Ladyshenka. . . . These were two young

.

* Assaults on Jewish women during the pogroms had their geographic parallel during this period of time in the massive rape of Armenian women by the Turks in
1895
and
1915,
as part of a continuing Turkish effort to destroy the Armenian people. See the account by Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Mor genthau's Story, Doubleday,
1918.

i
.

.

RIOTS, POGROMS AND REVOLUTIONS
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Jewish girls, frightfully beaten and bruised, one with her nose cut off and the other with her arms broken. They are both in Kiev now and both suffer from venereal disease."

A Zionist group reported from Kremenchug: "No sooner had the Volunteers entered the
.
town than destruction commenced .

. . . All houses, without exception, were plundered. Three hun dred and fif ty cases of rape have been registered; neither children of
2
2
nor old women of 60 were spared. Af ter they had been ravished, the little girls were thrown down the water-closets."

A report from Fastov, where six hundred were killed and twelve hundred were wounded: "The soldiers threw themselves upon the girls under age with a perfectly brutal f ury and ravished them before the very eyes of their parents, powerless to interfere. Some particularly atrocious scenes took place in the courtyard of the synagogue where the Jews had sought refuge. The courtyard was covered with the bodies of women, children, old men, and young girls who had been ravished. Many people became insane." Some anti-Bolshevik Jews in Ekaterinoslav sent an urgent,

obsequious appeal to General Denikin:

The tired and oppressed Jews are longing for order and peace. Inasmuch as the large majority of the Jewish population belong to the bourgeoisie, they have been impatiently waiting for the Volun teer Army to redeem them from the proletarian dictatorship. With joy they greeted the oncoming armies and were prepared to help them with money and men. But to our great misfortune, the Jews were disappointed in their hopes . . . . We understand full well that in an occupation there usually occurs unpleasantness, but to our great regret we must say that what is taking place is not an infrequent occurrence in scattered places but occurs systematically wherever the Volunteer Army enters. Especially violent were the outbreaks in Ekaterinoslav, where all the Jewish houses in four streets were plundered and outrages committed upon hundreds of Jewish girls and many Jews killed. The pogrom in Ekaterinoslav is still in progress . . .

Ideology was never absent. A Jewish witness to a pogrom in Kharkov was told by a marauder, "All this is the fault of your Trotsky."

Periodic rape of Jewish women by hostiles sorely taxed the rabbinical concept that a married woman who was raped became

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an adulteress who was unfit to return to her husband's bed. Prag matism eventually won out. Since the Jewish people were spread throughout the Diaspora and lived under other nation's laws, rab binical law could not really be enforced. But defilement of women had and continues to have a deep psychological hold on the minds of men who have traditionally viewed women as "their" women. This attitude is hardly restricted to Jews; it is quite universal. Divorce af ter rape is not uncommon.

I t is reasonable to conjecture that the reputation for unbridled sensuality that has followed Jewish woman throughout history ( Rebecca as opposed to Rowena; Henry Miller's frequent reference to "thick Jewish cunt") has its origins in the Jewish woman's historical experience of forcible rape, and is a projection onto them of male sex fantasies. In this respect, Jewish women and black women have a common bond: the reputation for lasciviousness and promiscuity that haunts black women in America today may be attributed to the same high degree of historical forcible rape.

Sartre's famous quote about Jewish women in
Anti-Semite
and Jew, written at the close of World War
II,
is a poetic insight into this phenomenon: "There is in the words 'a beautiful Jewess' a very special sexual signification, one quite different from that contained in the words 'beautiful Rumanian,' 'beautiful Greek,' or 'beautiful American,' for example. This phrase carries an aura of rape and massacre. The 'beautiful Jewess' is she whom the Cos sacks under the czars dragged by her hair through the streets of her burning village. And the special works which are given over to accounts of flagellation reserve a place of honor for the Jew ess . . ."