Exhibited above is a “Wanted” circular for the apprehension and arrest of Mike Zeff:
A Jew about 17 years old, light complexion, sandy hair, 5 feet, seven inches, weight 135 pounds. Left here about December 12, with a brown horse, 15 years old, weight about 900 lbs. Knee sprung. Bob sleigh with wagon box painted brown. Peddling Mackinaw Jackets and underwear. Arrest and wire.
Green Bay, December 27, 1893
M.H. Nolan, Chief of Police
When I purchased this document, my first thought was to wonder why it was necessary for such a detailed physical description of the alleged perpetrator (and the purloined horse!) to include his Jewishness and whether this was an unabashed manifestation of antisemitism; i.e., all Jews are dishonest horse thieves, and here’s yet another. As my research yielded no contemporary late-19th century examples where a horse thief was described as Christian or Protestant, it is almost certain that Chief Nolan exhibited an antisemitic animus. (Of course, antisemites would argue nonsensically that there was no such description because all Christians were fine and upstanding members of society who would never stoop to stealing a horse.)
I have not found anything else to suggest that Chief Nolan, a Democrat and a devout Catholic, was an antisemite, although he was almost certainly a man of his time who reflected the prevailing contemporary social more. His parents were natives of Ireland who immigrated to the United States in 1841; settled in the Sheboygan woods, where Nolan was born; and built a farm and became very wealthy. Nolan began working on his parents’ farm before taking off for two years of travel and working assorted jobs and then settling for good in Green Bay in 1882. After being given command of the city’s fire department and its Engine House No. 2, he was transferred to the police force, where he served four years as a subordinate before being appointed police chief in 1893.
During the period following the Civil War, horse thievery was a well-organized industry throughout Wisconsin notwithstanding the best efforts of local constables and the federal government to deter the “underground railroad” transporting stolen horses, an operation comparable to the passage of runaway slaves from the South during and before the Civil War period. One result of this failure is the founding of various anti-horse thief societies that proved immensely popular. Unlike many of the western states, the Wisconsin clubs devoted considerable effort to apprehending these thieves and bringing them to justice – such “justice” often including lynching without bothering with the niceties of laws and court proceedings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these societies did, indeed, significantly reduce the incidence of horse thievery. As evidenced by our exhibit, posters were displayed and telegrams were broadly distributed describing both the thief and the stolen horse in great detail and as accurately as possible.
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One of the most infamous horse thieves in Jewish history was the little-known Berko Margolis (1812-?), a prominent and wealthy resident who owned a home, shop, and tavern in the Pusalotas ghetto. He was arrested for horse thievery in 1836, when he was sentenced by the Vilnius Criminal Court Chamber to flogging (15 strokes); in 1840, when he was sentenced to 15 strokes; and again, at the end of 1840, when he received 35 strokes.
On August 11, 1841, four horses were stolen from peasants by one person dressed in Christian clothes and two Jews, one of whom escaped by swimming across the river and disappearing on the other side. The peasants found their steed and returned to the tavern, where they found Berko in wet clothes. They accused him of being the Jewish thief who swam across the river, but he denied the allegation, claiming that he had gone to market to purchase cucumbers and found the prices too high; decided to take a dip in the river on his way home and left his clothes on the bank, where some girls passing by found them and threw them in the river; and returned to the tavern in wet clothes, planning to spend the night there. The peasants took him to the police station but, with Berko denying any knowledge of the stolen horses, he was released, but the panic surrounding stolen horses added to the public fear of Berko and his gang.
In February 1842, Berko was rearrested, along with other members of his gang, after it was discovered that he and his accomplices – who included his father, Gilel Margolis, and his brothers Leyba and Girsh Wolf (and later his mother, Beylia) – had stolen up to 1,500 (!) horses. While landlords were pleased to pay ransom to Berko for their horses, the peasants were left without the ability to plow their sparse lands. With these arrests, there was broad public belief that the Berko threat had been stopped – but their belief was to be proven mistaken.
When Berko was interrogated by Chief of Police Dobrovolsky after his arrest, he said that he had knowledge of about 100 men who had been omitted from a 1834 list of criminal perpetrators in the Pusalotas kahal (Jewish community). He was visited by the Jewish elders of the kahal, who chastised him for his report to the Police Chief; threatened to ruin him; but later suggested that he try to escape, promising to help him in that effort. In March 1842, Berko succeeded in escaping.
After two weeks of being hidden by kahal leaders, they brought him to the road to Smilgiai and dumped him there but, amid rumors that he was being assisted by the officials of the local police and the court, he escaped again and horses started disappearing soon after. He was caught and arrested on July 2, 1842, when the Court Clerk Bavblevsky, en route to Vilnius, noticed two carts with five Jews going in the opposite direction, recognized one of them as Berko, and forcefully took him into custody.
Berko’s lawyer, Snarsky, advised him to escape again, but Berko, explaining that escape was impossible because he was in chains, expressed hope that the military chief would grant him an audience. Snarsky disagreed and promised to help him to escape. Police Investigator Pikturno urged Berko to give false testimony and, when he refused to answer any questions and demanded that he be interrogated only in the presence of gendarme Officer Miller, he was shackled and given no food. When, despite his repeated complaints, nothing changed, an escape was arranged, presumably by Snarsky and others, and Berko climbed out the loosened window of his cell. After a series of travels, holding various jobs in various places, and undertaking various efforts to have his parents and family released, Berko was apprehended with two stolen horses and he was finally brought to trial in Vilnius in January 1843.
Denying all charges, Berko alleged wrongdoing by the civil and municipal authorities, including police on the take, providing several specific examples, and that he was arrested only when he refused to pay graft. He further alleged that Chief of Police Dobrovolsky and other police officers in the district had received annual payments from all the kahals and that this was the reason why the authorities failed to investigate crimes by the leaders of the kahal. (In fact, it was well known then – and now – that Russian police operated through a system of graft and bribes – and threats and murder if the graft wasn’t paid.) The trial court found that Berko was guilty of stealing horses and, as he already had a criminal record, was sentenced to 50 strokes and recruitment into the army – but if not found suitable for the army, he would be exiled to Siberia.
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Another intriguing story about a Jewish horse thief is the story of the son of Reb Chaim in the early 19th century shtetl of Czernovitz, as told by Rabbi Hersh Tzvi Weinreb. The son, who was indeed not only a horse thief, but also a public Sabbath violator, gambler, womanizer, and all-around lowlife, was able to withstand every attempt to have him expelled from the shtetl because of his father, Rav Chaim Tirar of Czernovitz (1871-1949), one of the earliest chassidic masters and the revered author of Be’er Mayim Chaim, an important commentary on the Pentateuch.
One year, however, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the townspeople decided that they had enough, and they approached the three most influential citizens of the town, Yankel, the chief of the City Council, Berel, the shamash of the synagogue, and Moshe, the cantor, demanding that they confront the Rav to demand that his son be banished from the kahal. The three decided that, given the overwhelming sentiment of the Jews of the shtetl, they had no choice but to comply and, arriving at the Rav’s home, they advised his Rebbetzin apologetically that the matter was of such importance that they had to interrupt the Rav’s erev Yom Kipper spiritual preparations. She invited them to take a seat in the anteroom adjacent to the rabbi’s modest study and advised them that the Rav would come out to greet them upon completion of his prayers.
Because of the thin wall between the anteroom and the Rav’s study, Yankel, Berel, and Moshe were able to overhear their rabbi’s prayer:
Oy, dear Father in Heaven, Yom Kippur, the day You sit in judgment, is almost here. I beseech You to have mercy upon the leaders of our little community. First, there is Yankel. He is in a position where he is tempted daily to take bribes, and he frequently submits to these temptations. Secondly, there is Berel, who regularly dips into the tzedakah pushka, thereby stealing alms from the poor. There is also Moshe. I can’t even bring myself to speak about his many misdeeds, any one of which would disqualify him from serving as our cantor. I know that You, dear G-d, have good reason to expel them from this world and could justifiably punish them severely.
But remember, dear G-d, that I, too, have a son who has failed me in so many ways. I have good reason to disown him and chase him from my home. I have not done so because I am a merciful father. Yankel, Berel, and Moshe are Your children, and if I can show mercy to my child, then surely You, the most Merciful One, must pardon them.
The upshot was that the horse thief remained in the shtetl with no further protest from anyone, and Reb Chaim recorded this story poignantly in his masterwork, Be’er Mayim Chaim. And the ethical lessons are obvious: first, keshot atzmecha, v’achar kach keshot acheirim (“carefully scrutinize your own conduct before daring to question the conduct of others”); and, second, the potential always exists for even the greatest sinner to repent.
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Jewish horse thieves have been the subject of several great works of Jewish literature. For example, Yosef Meir Opatowski’s (AKA Joseph Opatovsky) A Roman fun a Ferd Ganev (“A Novel about a Horse Thief,” 1912) was based on the author’s boyhood acquaintance with an unusual Jewish thief who made a living by smuggling horses across the border from Poland to Germany and who was killed while defending fellow Jews against their hostile neighbors. But my favorite tale of a Jewish horse thief is Sholem Aleichem’s generally unknown Moshkeleh Ganev (“Moshe the Thief”), which he serialized in twenty episodes in a Warsaw Yiddish daily before it was published in book form in Warsaw (1913) and, after Aleichem’s death in 1914, in Kiev (1927). The Moscow edition (1941), published at the apex of the Stalinist period, notably included a four-page glossary that explains all the Hebrew words.
Inexplicably, Moshkeleh Ganev was omitted from the 28-volume Complete Works of Sholem Aleichem and has been largely forgotten, a particularly strange development given Aleichem’s high estimation of the book, both for its own sake and as a seminal inspiration for his writing in general. As he wrote about the book in 1903: “I now feel as if I’ve been born anew, with new – brand new – strength. I can almost say that now I’ve really begun to write. Until now I’ve only been fooling around.” (Emphasis in the original.) According to Curt Leviant, who rediscovered Moshkeleh Ganev and translated it into English in 2021, the work may have been excluded from Aleichem’s collected works because his editors and/or family considered it to be unrepresentative of his work and legacy.
From the very beginning of the book, whose opening lines quickly and sharply evoke the underworld of thieves and criminals who inhabit the outer fringes of Jewish life, Aleichem demonstrates his commitment to capturing the world of the peasantry and the lower classes of society:
Non-Jews called him Moshke. Jews stretched out his name to “Moshkeleh” and then added the nickname ganev, or “thief” – for that’s what he was, a ganev. Which means, he earned his livelihood by thievery.
But when it came to stealing, the only thing he stole was horses. In thieves’ lingo, one doesn’t say, “I stole a horse.” Rather, when speaking of their work, horse thieves say, “I shot a bird,” or “I freed it from the stable,” or “whistled it out of the shed,” or “I fiddled it out of a gypsy,” or “whipped it out of a waggoner.” That’s the jargon of horse thieves…
Moreover, the words “horse thief” were never articulated either. However, someone who had a great love, or amour, for horses – a man like that was called an “amateur.” And Moshkeleh Ganev was a great lover of horses. He adored horseflesh. Since childhood, his daily fare had been riding a horse, flying like arrow out of bow, jumping madly over hill and dale, into forests and across streams. His acquaintance with horses came via his father, Yoineh the Prophet, a lifelong horse thief.
Sorry! Not a thief, but a “prophet.” You know what a prophet is? Among horse thieves, horse dealers, and coachmen, a prophet is a know-it-all, a man who always gets it right.
Moshkeleh is a horse thief whose father, Yoineh, is also a horse thief descended from a long line of horse thieves. Nonetheless, Yoineh wants his son to have a traditional Jewish education but, from his earliest youth, the lad chose to follow his love of horses rather than his cheder rabbanim; in one dramatic scene, Moshkeleh’s tutor advises Yoineh that he will die before his son ever learns how to recite the Kaddish.
Moshkeleh is a hardened criminal always ready to fight; as Aleichem describes him, “If tall stature, broad shoulders, sturdy legs, and a big head of curly black hair makes one handsome, then one can say that our hero was a handsome young man.” He not only defeats Ivan Kurka – AKA “the Goliath of Zlodeyevke,” a brute who would viciously beat Jews in a murderous rage when he was drunk, which he always was – with a single blow, but he also entirely transforms Kurka’s conduct and the two become “bosom pals.” Moshkeleh is also portrayed as clever, crafty, professional in his chosen line of “work” and as an anti-hero and a thief with a heart of gold who is always willing to protect his fellow Jews of Mazepevke, notwithstanding that they ostracized him and deemed him unworthy of marriage to their precious daughters.
Moshkeleh is recruited by Chaim Chosid, an earthy tavern owner and purveyor of questionable alcohol (he regularly used inferior raisins rather than grapes) in the town of Mazepevke, to bring back Tsireleh, his passionate and starry-eyed daughter who ran his tavern until she eloped to a monastery with Maxim Tchubinski, a liquor tax collector whom she met at the tavern. Adding to the pain of her family, she left her home on the first night of Passover, after the seder, after her drunk family retired for the evening:
It was a warm, dark night. Stars were hidden behind murky clouds. They did not want to witness a Jewish girl abandoning her father’s house on such a holy night. A soft drizzle was falling, warm tears trickling from the sky, weeping for the tragedy that had befallen Chaim Chosid and his family. Still completely oblivious to what had happened, they slept the sweet sleep of happy, sincerely pious Jews on that holy festival, the most joyous of all the holidays.
Chaim Chosid turned in desperation to Moshkeleh after his wife’s failure to make any progress with the civil or Christian authorities to get her daughter out of the monastery. Unknown to her parents, however, Moshkeleh is in love with Tsireleh, which drives the narrative and creates much of the drama in the story.
At the end of the novel, the story takes a sudden and dramatic turn when, in the month of Elul before the High Holy Days, the narrative is taken up by Henekh, the cantor/shochet who, while traveling in search of a cantorial position, discovers Moshkeleh and Tsireleh, carrying a child in her arms, among a procession of prisoners being exiled to Siberia. (The comparison with the “Anatevka” scene at the end of Fiddler on the Roof is unavoidable). In the final lines of the novel, Henekh, who is struck mute – “like a pillar of salt” – by the wretched and forlorn scene he beholds, rides away in his horse-drawn coach and, along with the Cantor, the reader is left to contemplate the intentionally undescribed fate of the couple.
Moshkeleh’s courtship of the lovely Tsireleh is both strange and unexpected, but Aleichem makes sense of the romance through his brilliant portrayal of life through the eyes of the small-town horse thief. (Again, the story inevitably evokes reader comparisons to Aleichem’s far better known Tevye and Fiddler on the Roof stories because the descriptions of town life and the conversational narrative are so similar.) Aleichem makes clear that Moshkeleh’s love for her is total and unbound; he describes the romance emerging “without any exchange of words” and tells us that “if among the Mazepevke Jews, one could find someone truly in love, with a love that was pure, holy, and sincere, one without any hidden motives, and without any hope – it was Moshkeleh Ganev.”
Most intriguingly, Aleichem portrays Tchubinski, one of the very few non-Jewish characters in his oeuvre – and a Russian government official to boot – sympathetically and as a man whose love for Tsireleh is deep and authentic. Although her family is pained by Tsireleh’s running off with a non-Jew – much as Tevye is wounded by his daughter, Chava, running off to marry Fyedke – Aleichem assigns no greater blame to Tchubinski than to Tsireleh, who made the informed decision to follow her heart and to leave with him. As several commentators have noted, unlike much of literature at the time – and, one could argue, contemporarily – one of the salient features of Moshkeleh the Thief is the absence of villains; rather, the dynamic that drives the story is clashing desires amongst sincere and earnest protagonists, where even the horse thief is a reprobate rapscallion for whom the reader roots.
The rebelliousness so central to Tsireleh’s character had manifested itself long before she met Tchubinski at her father’s tavern; in fact, the young strong-minded girl, determined to live her life differently, had rejected the very idea of marrying a “suitable man from a suitable family”; scorned the traditional role of “subservient Jewish wife”; and became pregnant and assumed domesticity without benefit of marriage or a husband. Nonetheless, she falls in love with Moshkeleh, who whisks her away at the last moment with an almost magical leap from the walls of the monastery (readers who remember the end of The Graduate will relate). As such, unlike Chava in the Tevye stories, she does not intermarry and, at the end of the day, her commitment to her faith prevails – through the enduring love of Moshkeleh.
Finally, Aleichem devotes an entire chapter insisting that the story is true in every respect and not a work of fiction. Of course, one is left to wonder whether Moshkeleh Ganev is factual or is merely a literate device employed by the author.
Prior to Moshkeleh Ganev, Aleichem had never devoted a full-length work to the Jewish lower class and, in fact, the short novel was a groundbreaking first for Yiddish literature. Up to that point in time, Yiddish writers had avoided seedy and unsavory characters and eschewed stories involving violence and the seamy side of life, but Moshkeleh – his tale of a rowdy, uneducated horse thief rejected by proper society – broke the mold by addressing aspects of Eastern European Jewish life that had heretofore remained unexpressed. Moreover, Moshkeleh Ganev was the predicate for other great Yiddish novelists, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Asch, to examine morally complex and sometimes ambiguous characters.
Ironically, and unknown to Aleichem, Anton Chekhov, the Russian playwright and physician universally considered one of the greatest writers of all time, praised precisely this kind of realistic storytelling when, a few years earlier, he wrote to a friend, “To depict horse thieves in seven hundred lines, I must all the time speak and think in their tone and feel in their spirit.”
