The Hep-Hep riots in Frankfurt, 1819. On the left, two peasant women are assaulting a Jewish man with pitchfork and broom. On the right, a man wearing spectacles, tails, and a six-button waistcoat, "perhaps a pharmacist or a schoolteacher,"^[1] holds another Jewish man by the throat and is about to club him with a truncheon. The houses are being looted. A contemporary engraving by Johann Michael Voltz.

A pogrom (Russian: погро́м) is a form of violent riot, a mob attack directed against a minority group, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes and properties, businesses, and religious centers. It originally and still typically refers to 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews, particularly in the Russian Empire.^[2][3]

Infamous pogroms include the Odessa pogroms, Warsaw pogrom (1881), Kishinev pogrom (1903), Kiev Pogrom (1905), Białystok pogrom (1906), Lwów pogrom (1918), and Kiev Pogroms (1919). The most infamous pogrom in Nazi Germany was the Kristallnacht of 1938, in which at least 91 Jews were killed, a further 30,000 arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps,^[4] over 1,000 synagogues burned, and over 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged.^[5][6]

Notorious pogroms of World War II included the 1941 Farhud in Iraq, the Iaşi pogrom in Romania – in which over 13,200 Jews were killed – and the Jedwabne pogrom in Poland. Post World War II pogroms included the 1945 Tripoli pogrom, the 1946 Kielce pogrom, and the 1947 Aleppo pogrom.

Attacks against non-Jews that have been described as pogroms including the 1966 anti-Igbo pogrom against Igbos in southern Nigeria, and the 1920 Shusha pogrom, 1988 Sumgait pogrom and Kirovabad pogrom, in which ethnic Armenians were targeted.

Etymology[link]

The word pogrom originally derives from the Russian verb громи́ть (Russian pronunciation: [ɡrɐˈmʲitʲ]), "to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently" (in perfective, taking the form погроми́ть). Henry Abramson writes that "the etymological roots of the term pogrom are unclear, although it seems to be derived from the Slavic word for 'thunder(bolt)'... The first syllable, po-, is a prefix indicating "means" or "target". The word therefore seems to imply a sudden burst of energy (thunderbolt) directed at a specific target..."^[7] German scholar Werner Bergmann writes that the word's "international currency dates back to the anti-Semitic excesses in Tsarist Russia during the years 1881-1881."^[8] The word pogrom may have come into English (and, according to Abramson, European languages as well) from the Yiddish word פאָגראָם as a loanword from Russian.^[9]

Usage[link]

According to Encyclopædia Britannica, "the term is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, [and] the first extensive pogroms followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881,"^[3] and the Wiley-Blackwell Dictionary of Modern European History Since 1789 states that pogroms were "were antisemitic disturbances that periodically occurred within the tsarist empire."^[10] However, the term is widely used to refer to many events which occurred prior to the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire. Historian of Russian Jewry John Klier writes in Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882 that "By the twentieth century, the word 'pogrom' had become a generic term in English for all forms of collective violence directed against Jews."^[2]

The term is also used in reference to attacks on non-Jewish ethnic minorities, and accordingly some scholars do not include antisemitism as a defining characteristic of pogrom. Reviewing its uses in scholarly literature, historian Werner Bergmann proposes that pogroms be "defined as a unilateral, nongovernmental form of collective violence initiated by the majority population against a largely defenseless ethnic group, and occurring when the majority expect the state to provide them with no assistance in overcoming a (perceived) threat from the minority,"^[11] but adds that in western usage, the word's "anti-Semitic overtones" have been retained.^[8] Historian David Engel supports this, writing that "there can be no logically or empirically compelling grounds for declaring that some particular episode does or does not merit the label [pogrom]," but he offers that the majority of the incidents "habitually" described as pogroms took place in societies significantly divided by ethnicity and/or religion where the violence was committed by the higher-ranking group against a stereotyped lower-ranking group, and with the belief that the law of the land would not be used to stop them.^[12]

Klier writes that "when applied indiscriminately to events in Eastern Europe, the term can be misleading, the more so when it implies that "pogroms" were regular events in the region and that they always shared common features. In fact, outbreaks of mass violence against Jews were extraordinary events, not a regular feature of East European life."^[2] Use of the term to refer to events in 1918-19 in Polish cities including Kielce, Pinsk and Lwów was specifically avoided in the 1919 Morgenthau Report (preferring "excesses"), whose authors argued that the term pogrom was inapplicable to the conditions existing in a war zone and required the situation to be antisemitic in nature rather than political,^[13][14][12] and media use of the term pogrom to refer to the 1991 Crown Heights riot caused public controversy.^[15][16][17]

Pogroms against Jews[link]

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Roman[link]

Philo witnessed and described the Alexandrian pogroms against Jews in Alexandria in 38 CE.

Medieval[link]

Massive violent attacks against Jews date back at least to the Crusades such as the Pogrom of 1096 in France and Germany (the first "Christian" pogroms to be officially recorded), as well as the massacres of Jews at London and York in 1189–1190.

During the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain, beginning in the 9th century, Islamic Spain was more tolerant towards Jews.^[18] The 11th century, however, saw several Muslim pogroms against Jews; notably those that occurred in Cordoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066.^[19] In the 1066 Granada massacre, the first large pogrom on European soil, a Muslim mob crucified the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred about 4,000 Jews^[20] In 1033 about 6,000 Jews were killed in Fez, Morocco by Muslim mobs.^[21][22] Mobs in Fez murdered thousands of Jews in 1276,^[23] and again, leaving only 11 alive, in 1465.^[23][24]

In Europe in 1348, because of the hysteria surrounding the Black Plague, Jews were massacred by Christians in Chillon, Basle, Stuttgart, Ulm, Speyer, Dresden, and Mainz. By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed.^[25] A large number of the surviving Jews fled to Poland, which was very welcoming to Jews at the time.^[26]

In 1506, after an episode of famine and bad harvests, an enormous pogrom happened in Lisbon, Portugal,^[27] in which more than 500 "New-Christian" (forcibly converted Jews) people were slaughtered and/or burnt by an angry Christian mob, in the first night of what became known as the "Pogrom of Lisbon" or "Lisbon's great massacre of 1506".^{[citation needed]} The killing continued for almost a week, almost eliminating the entire Jewish or Jewish-descendant community residing in that city. Even the Portuguese military and the king himself had difficulty stopping it. The event is today remembered with a monument in S. Domingos' church.

Tens of thousands of Jews were massacred by Cossacks in Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648–1657,^[28] and thousands more during the Koliyivshchyna in 1768-1769.

19th century[link]

Pogroms against Jews known as the Hep-Hep riots began on August 2, 1819 in Würzburg, Germany and soon reached as far as regions of Denmark, Poland, Latvia and Bohemia. Many Jews were killed and much Jewish property was destroyed.^[29]

The 1821 Odessa pogroms marked the start of the nineteenth century wave of pogroms in the Russian empire, with further pogroms in Odessa in 1859. However, the period 1881-1884 was a peak period, with over 200 anti-Jewish events occurred in the Russian Empire, notably Kiev, Warsaw and Odessa.

There were pogroms too in the nineteenth century in the Arab and Islamic worlds. There was a massacre of Jews in Baghdad in 1828.^[30] There was another massacre in Barfurush in 1867.^[30] In 1839, in the eastern Persian city of Meshed, a mob burst into the Jewish Quarter, burned the synagogue, and destroyed the Torah scrolls. This is known as the Allahdad incident. It was only by forcible conversion that a massacre was averted.^[31]

The Damascus affair occurred in 1840, when an Italian monk and his servant disappeared in Damascus. Immediately following, a charge of ritual murder was brought against a large number of Jews in the city. All were found guilty. The consuls of England, France and Austria as well as Ottoman authorities, Christians, Muslims and Jews all played a great role in this affair.^[32]

Early 20th century[link]

Russian Empire[link]

There were several waves of pogroms throughout the Russian Empire.

See Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire.

Outside Russia[link]

Pogroms spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Anti-Jewish riots also broke out elsewhere in the world.

• In the 1911 Tredegar riot in Wales, Jewish homes and businesses were looted and burned over the period of a week, before the British army was called in by then-Home Secretary Winston Churchill, who described the riot as a "pogrom".^[33]
• In the Lwów pogrom (1918), 72 Jews were killed and 443 injured by Polish troops, militia and civilians.^{[34][35][36][37][38]}
• In the Americas, there was a pogrom in Argentina in 1919, during the Tragic Week^[39]
• In 1919, pogroms were reported in several cities in Poland.^[40]

During the Holocaust[link]

Pogroms were also encouraged by the Nazis, especially early in the war before the larger mass killings began. The first of these pogroms was Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, often called Pogromnacht, in which at least 91 Jews were killed, a further 30,000 arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps,^[4] over 1,000 synagogues burned, and over 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged.^[5][6]

A number of pogroms occurred during the Holocaust at the hands of non-Germans. Perhaps the deadliest of these Holocaust-era pogroms was the Iaşi pogrom in Romania, in which as many as 13,266 Jews were killed by Romanian citizens, police, and military officials.^[41]

On 1–2 June 1941, the two-day Farhud pogrom in Iraq, in which "rioters murdered between 150 and 180 Jews, injured 600 others, and raped an undetermined number of women. They also looted some 1,500 stores and homes".^[42][43]

In the city of Lwow, some Ukrainian police along with occupying Nazis organized two large pogroms in June–July, 1941, in which around 6,000 Jews were murdered,^[44] in alleged retribution for the collaboration of some Jews with the Soviet regime and the large number of communists who happened to be of Jewish descent (see The Lviv pogroms controversy (1941)).

In Lithuania, some Lithuanian police led by Algirdas Klimaitis and the Lithuanian partisans — consisting of LAF units reinforced by 3,600 deserters from 29th Lithuanian Territorial Corps of the Red Army^[45] engaged in anti-Jewish pogroms in Kaunas along with occupying Nazis. On 25–26 June 1941 about 3,800 Jews were killed and synagogues and Jewish settlements burned.^[46]

During the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941, some non-Jewish Poles burned at least 340 Jews in a barn-house (final findings of the Institute of National Remembrance) in the presence of Nazi German Ordnungspolizei. The role of the German Einsatzgruppe B remains the subject of debate.^{[47][48][49][50][51][52]}

After World War II[link]

After the end of World War II, a series of violent anti-Semitic incidents occurred throughout Europe, particularly in the Soviet-liberated East, where most of the returning Jews came back after liberation by the Allied Powers, and where the Nazi propagandists had extensively promoted the notion of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy (see Anti-Jewish violence in Poland, 1944–1946 and Anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe, 1944–1946). Anti-Jewish riots also took place in Britain in 1947.

In the Arab world, there were a number of pogroms which played a key role in the massive emigration from Arab countries to Israel.

• Anti-Jewish rioters killed over 140 Jews in the 1945 Tripoli pogrom.
• The 1945 Cairo pogrom marked the start of a series of violent acts against Egypt's Jews.
• Half of Aleppo's 10,000 Jews left the city in the wake of the 1947 Aleppo pogrom.
• The 1947 Aden pogrom brought to an end the existence of Aden's almost two-thousand-year-old Jewish community.
• The 1948 Oujda and Jerada pogrom and 1954 Petitjean pogrom were pogroms in Morocco.^[53]

The 1991 Crown Heights Riot in Brooklyn, New York has been referred to as a "pogrom" by persons such as Rudy Giuliani^[54] and the New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal.^[55]

Influence of pogroms against Jews[link]

The pogroms of the 1880s caused a worldwide outcry and, along with harsh laws, propelled mass Jewish emigration. Two million Jews fled the Russian Empire between 1880 and 1914, with many going to the United Kingdom and United States.

In reaction to the pogroms and other oppressions of the Tsarist period, Jews increasingly became politically active. Jewish participation in The General Jewish Labor Bund, colloquially known as The Bund, and in the Bolshevik movements, was directly influenced by the pogroms. Similarly, the organization of Jewish self-defense leagues (which stopped the pogromists in certain areas during the second Kishinev pogrom), such as Hovevei Zion, led to a strong embrace of Zionism, especially by Russian Jews.

Pogroms against other ethnic targets[link]

Diverse ethnic groups have suffered from these targeted riots at various times and in different countries. The term "pogrom" has been used in the general context of violence against various ethnic groups. Werner Bergmann proposes that "[b]y the collective attribution of a threat, the pogrom differs from forms of violence, such as lynching, which are directed at individual members of a minority, while the imbalance of power in favor of the rioters distinguishes pogroms from other forms of riot (food riots, race riots, or 'communal riots' between evenly matched groups), and again, the low level of organization separates them from vigilantism, terrorism, massacre and genocide".^[56]

• In 1920, the Shusha pogrom was directed at Armenians in Nagorno-Karabagh
• The Istanbul riots of September 6–7, 1955 (sometimes known as the "Istanbul pogrom") killed over a dozen people, and greatly accelerated the emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey. Other ethnic minorities were also targeted — 500 stores in the Jewish quarter were damaged or destroyed.^[57]
• In the 1966 anti-Igbo pogrom Igbos in Nigeria were targeted
• In 1988, Armenians in Azerbaijan were targeted in the Sumgait pogrom and Kirovabad pogrom.
• In 1989, after bloody pogroms against the Meskhetian Turks by Uzbeks in Central Asia's Ferghana Valley, nearly 90,000 Meskhetian Turks left Uzbekistan.^[58][59]
• The Pogrom of Armenians in Baku occurred in 1990.
• In Egypt, the rise in extremist Islamist groups such as the Gama'at Islamiya during the 1980s was accompanied by attacks on Copts and on Coptic churches; these have since declined with the decline of those organizations, but still continue.^[60] The police have been accused of siding with the attackers in some of these cases.^{[61][Need quotation to verify]}
• In May 2008, there were pogroms against migrants across South Africa that left almost 100 people dead and up to 100,000 displaced.^[62]
• Although Iraqi Christians represent less than 5% of the total Iraqi population, they make up 40% of the Iraqi refugees now living in nearby countries, according to UNHCR.^[63][64] Massacres, ethnic cleansing, and harassment has increased since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.^[65]
• Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has used the term "pogrom" twice in recent history to describe attacks against Palestinian Arab civilians perpetrated by Israeli settlers. The first usage was in reference to a group of West Bank settlers from Yitzhar who attacked a Palestinian village in September 2008.^[66] The second usage described an incident which occurred in December 2008, wherein Hebron settlers lashed out at Palestinians in that city in response to the eviction of a settler group from a disputed building by Israeli security. Olmert opined, "As a Jew, I was ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire at innocent Arabs in Hebron. There is no other definition than the term 'pogrom' to describe what I have seen".^[67]

See also[link]

• Ethnic cleansing
• Mass murder
• Genocide
• Race riots
• Communal violence

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, The myth of the Jewish world conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. (Serif, London, 1996)[1]
• Dekel-Chen, Jonathan, et al. eds. Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Indiana University Press; 2011) 220 pages; scholars examine pogroms of the late 1800s and early 1900s in Poland, Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Crimea, and Siberia.
• Horvitz, Leslie, and Christopher Catherwood, eds. Encyclopedia of War Crimes And Genocide (Facts on File Library of World History, 2006)
• Shelton, Dinah, ed. Encyclopedia of genocide and crimes against humanity (Macmillan Reference, 3 vol. 2005)
• Thackrah, John, ed. Encyclopedia of terrorism and political violence (1987)