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Pogrom

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Pogrom

Plundering the Judengasse, a Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt am Main, on 22 August 1614.
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.
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An early reference to a "pogrom" in The Times, December 1903. Together with the New York Times and the Hearst press, they took the lead in highlighting the pogrom in Kishinev (now Chişinău, Moldova) and other cities in Russia.[2] In May of the same year, The Times' Russian Correspondent Dudley Disraeli Braham had been expelled from Russia.[3]

A pogrom is a violent riot aimed at massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews. The term originally entered the English language to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement in present-day Ukraine and Belarus). Similar attacks against Jews at other times and places also became retrospectively known as pogroms. The word is now also sometimes used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish ethnic or religious groups.[4][5][6][7][8]

Etymology

The Russian word pogrom (погро́м, pronounced ), is a noun derived from the verb gromit' (громи́ть, pronounced ) meaning "to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently".[9] It is used in English and many other languages as a loanword, possibly borrowed via Yiddish (where the word takes the form פאָגראָם pogrom).[10] Its widespread international currency began with the anti-Semitic excesses in the Russian Empire in 1881–1883.[11]

Events that were originally called pogroms

Russian Empire

The 1821 Odessa pogroms marked the start of the nineteenth century wave of pogroms in the Russian empire, with further pogroms in Odessa (now in Ukraine) in 1859. However, the period 1881–1884 was a peak period, when over 200 anti-Jewish events occurred in the Russian Empire, notably Warsaw pogrom (1881), Kishinev pogrom (1903), Kiev Pogrom (1905), and Białystok pogrom (1906), and, after the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Lwów pogrom (1918) and Kiev Pogroms (1919).

During the Civil War period in Ukraine

Many pogroms accompanied the post-1917 period of the Russian Civil War: an estimated 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews were killed throughout the former Russian Empire; the number of Jewish orphans exceeded 300,000. In his book Two Hundred Years Together, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn provides these numbers from Nahum Gergel's 1951 study of the pogroms in Ukraine: out of an estimated 1,236 incidents of anti-Jewish violence, 887 mass pogroms occurred, the remainder being classified as "excesses" not assuming mass proportions. Of the pogroms in Ukraine, about 40% were perpetrated by the Ukrainian People's Republic forces led by Symon Petliura, 25% by the Ukrainian Green Army and various Ukrainian nationalist gangs, 17% by the White Army, especially the forces of Anton Denikin. A further 8.5% of Gergel's total figure is attributed to pogroms carried out by men of the Red Army – although these pogroms were not sanctioned by the Red Army leadership, and where Red Army troops had perpetrated pogroms, the Bolshevik high command subsequently disarmed entire regiments and executed individual pogromists to deter further outbreaks.[12][13] The Ukrainian People's Republic of Symon Petliura did also issue orders condemning pogroms and attempted to investigate them.[14] But it lacked authority to stop violence.[14] In the last months of its existence it lacked any power of creating social stability.[15]

There were exceptions, however, as related by author and future Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin. On May 15, 1919, Bunin wrote in his diary,
Members of the Red Army in Odessa led a pogrom against the Jewish population in the town of Big Fountain. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky and the writer Kipen happened to be there and told me the details. Fourteen comissars and thirty Jews from among the common people were killed. Many stores were destroyed. The soldiers tore through the night, dragged the victims from their beds, and killed whomever they met. People ran into the steppe or rushed into the sea. They were chased after and fired upon – a genuine hunt, as it were. Kipen saved himself by accident – fortunately he had spent the night not in his home, but at the White Flower sanitorium. At dawn, a detachment of Red Army soldiers appeared 'Are there any Jews here?' they asked the watchman. 'No, no Jews here.' 'Swear what you're saying is true!' The watchman swore, and they went on farther. Moisei Gutman, a cabby, was killed. He was a dear man who moved us from our dacha last fall.[16]

Gergel's overall figures, which are generally considered conservative, are based on the testimony of witnesses and newspaper reports collected by the Mizrakh-yidish historiche arkhiv, which was first based in Kiev, then Berlin and later New York. The English version of Gergel's article was published in English in 1951 in the YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science titled "The Pogroms in the Ukraine in 1918–1921"[17]

Later and earlier pogroms

Outside Russia

Jewish Cemetery, Samuel Hirszenberg (1892) - Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme

Pogroms spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe. On Holy Saturday of 1389, a pogrom began in Prague that led to the burning of the Jewish quarter, the killing of many Jews, and the suicide of many Jews trapped in the main synagogue; numbers of the dead are uncertain but the best estimates are four to five hundred men, women, and children, of the approximately 750 Jews who lived in Prague at that time.[18] 72 Jews were killed and 443 injured by Polish troops, militia, and civilians in Poland in the 1918 Lwów pogrom.[19][20][21][22][23] The following year, pogroms were reported in several cities in Poland.[24]

Anti-Jewish riots also broke out elsewhere in the world.

In 1904, in Ireland, the Limerick Pogrom caused several Jewish families to leave the town.

During 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".[25]

In 1919, in the Americas, there was a pogrom in Argentina, during the Tragic Week.[26]

In 1929, Jews were massacred in Hebron and Safed in the British Mandate of Palestine.

The first pogrom in Nazi Germany was Kristallnacht, often called Pogromnacht, in which at least 91 Jews were killed, a further 30,000 arrested and incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps,[27] over 1,000 synagogues burned, and over 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged.[28][29]

During World War II, the Nazis also encouraged pogroms by local populations, especially early in the war before the larger mass killings began, for two reasons: first, every Jew killed by locals meant one fewer that would have to be killed by the Germans, and second, the pogroms helped make the local populations share responsibility for the killings.[30] One pogrom took place on 8 October 1939, carried out by the local Germans on the occasion of Joseph Goebbels's visit to Łódź.[31]

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.[32]

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".[33][34]

In the city of [35] 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[36] 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.[37]

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.[38][39][40][41][42][43]

After World War II

After the end of World War II, a series of violent anti-Semitic incidents occurred throughout Europe, particularly in the Soviet-occupied 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, Anti-Jewish rioters killed over 140 Jews in the 1945 Anti-Jewish Riots in Tripolitania. Following the start of the 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine, a number of anti-Jewish events occurred throughout the Arab world, some of which have been described as pogroms. In 1947, half of Aleppo's 10,000 Jews left the city in the wake of the Aleppo riots, while other anti-Jewish riots took place in British Aden and the French Moroccan cities of Oujda and Jerada.[44]

Usage

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",[4] and the Wiley-Blackwell Dictionary of Modern European History Since 1789 states that pogroms "were antisemitic disturbances that periodically occurred within the tsarist empire."[5] 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."[6] Abramson wrote that "in mainstream usage the word has come to imply an act of antisemitism", since whilst "Jews have not been the only group to suffer under this phenomenon ... historically Jews have been frequent victims of such violence".[9]

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,"[7] but adds that in western usage, the word's "anti-Semitic overtones" have been retained.[11] 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 against whom they expressed some complaint, and with the belief that the law of the land would not be used to stop them.[8]

There is no universally accepted set of characteristics which define the term pogrom.[8][45] 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."[6] Use of the term to refer to events in 1918–19 in Polish cities including antisemitic in nature rather than political,[8][46][47] and media use of the term pogrom to refer to the 1991 Crown Heights riot caused public controversy.[48][49][50] In 2008, two separate attacks in the West Bank by Israeli Jewish settlers on Palestinian Arabs were characterized as pogroms by then Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert.[51][52]

Werner Bergmann (Professor of Sociology at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the vigilantism, terrorism, massacre and genocide".[53]

List of events

This is a list of events for which one of the commonly accepted names includes the word "pogrom".
Date Pogrom Name Alternative Name(s) Deaths Description
38 Alexandrian pogrom (name disputed)[1] Alexandrian riots Aulus Avilius Flaccus, the Egyptian prefect of Alexandria appointed by Tiberius in 32 CE, may have encouraged the outbreak of violence; Philo wrote that Flaccus was later arrested and eventually executed for his part in this event. Scholarly research around the subject has been divided on certain points, including whether the Alexandrian Jews fought to keep their citizenship or to acquire it, whether they evaded the payment of the poll-tax or prevented any attempts to impose it on them, and whether they were safeguarding their identity against the Greeks or against the Egyptians.
1066 Granada pogrom 1066 Granada massacre 4,000 Jews A mob stormed the royal palace in Granada, which was at that time in Muslim-ruled al-Andalus, assassinated the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred many of the Jewish population of the city.
1096 1096 pogroms Rhineland massacres 2,000 Jews Peasant crusaders from France and Germany attacked Jewish communities in the three towns of Speyer, Worms and Mainz. They were the first Christian pogroms to be officially recorded.
1113 Kiev pogrom (name disputed)[2] Kiev revolt Rebellion sparked by the death of the Grand Prince of Kiev, in which Jews connected to the prince's economic affairs were among the victims
1506 Lisbon pogrom Lisbon Massacre 500 New Christians After an episode of famine and bad harvests, a pogrom happened in Lisbon, Portugal,[58] 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 "Lisbon Massacre". The killing occurred from 19 to 21 April, 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.
1563 Polotsk pogrom (name disputed)[3] Polotsk drownings Following the fall of Polotsk to the army of Ivan IV, all those who refused to convert to Orthodox Christianity were ordered drowned in the river Dvina
1821–1871 First Odessa pogroms The Greeks of Odessa attacked the local Jewish community, in what began as economic disputes
1881–1884 First Russian Tsarist pogroms 2 Jews A large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept through south-western Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine and Poland) from 1881 to 1884 (in that period over 200 anti-Jewish events occurred in the Russian Empire, notably the Kiev, Warsaw and Odessa pogroms)
1881 Warsaw pogrom 2 Jews (Included above) Three days of rioting against Jews, Jewish stores, businesses, and residences in the streets adjoining the Holy Cross Church.
1902 Częstochowa pogrom 14 Jews A mob attacked the Jewish shops, killing fourteen Jews and one gendarme. The Russian military brought to restore order were stoned by mob.
1903–1906 Second Russian Tsarist pogroms 2,000+ Jews A much bloodier wave of pogroms broke out from 1903 to 1906, leaving an estimated 2,000 Jews dead and many more wounded, as many Jewish residents took arms to defend their families and property from the attackers. The 1905 pogrom against the Jewish population in Odessa was the most serious pogrom of the period, with reports of up to 2,500 Jewish people killed.
1903 First Kishinev pogrom 47 Jews (Included above) Three days of anti-Jewish rioting sparked by anti-semitic articles in local newspapers
1904 Limerick pogrom (name disputed)[4] Limerick Boycott None An economic boycott waged against the small Jewish community in Limerick, Ireland, for over two years
1905 Second Kishinev pogrom 19 Jews (Included above) Two days of anti-Jewish rioting beginning as political protests against the Tsar
1905 Kiev Pogrom (1905) 100 Jews (Included above) Following a city hall meeting, a mob was drawn into the streets, proclaiming that "all Russia's troubles stemmed from the machinations of the Jews and socialists."
1906 Siedlce pogrom 26 Jews (Included above) An attack organized by the Russian secret police (Okhrana). Anti-semitic pamphlets had been distributed for over a week and before any unrest begun, a curfew was declared.
1909 Adana pogrom Adana massacre 30,000 Armenians A massacre of Armenians in the city of Adana amidst the Countercoup (1909) resulted in a series of anti-Armenian pogroms throughout the district.
1911 Tredegar pogrom (name disputed)
South Wales[5] 		Tredegar riots None Jewish shops were ransacked and the army had to be brought in
1914 Anti-Serb pogrom in Sarajevo Sarajevo frenzy of hate 2 Serbs Occurred shortly after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.[62]
1918 Lwów pogrom (name disputed)[6] Lemberg massacre 52–150 Jews, 270 Ukrainians During the Polish-Ukrainian War over three days of unrest in the city, an estimated 52–150 Jewish residents were killed and hundreds injured, with widespread looting carried out by Polish soldiers, as well as lawless civilians, and local criminals. Two hundred and seventy more Ukrainians were killed during this time as well. The Poles did not stop the pogrom until two days after it began. The independent investigations by the British and American missions in Poland stated that there were no clear conclusions and that foreign press reports were exaggerated.
1918-1919 Guba City Pogrom 3,000-10,000 Massacre of Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan by Armenians.[65]
1919 Kiev Pogroms (1919) 60+ A series of Jewish pogroms in various places around Kiev carried out by White Volunteer Army troops
1919 Pinsk pogrom (name disputed)[7] Pinsk massacre 36 Jews Mass execution of thirty-five Jewish residents of Pinsk in April 1919 by the Polish Army, during the opening stages of the Polish-Soviet War
1919–20 Vilna pogrom (name disputed)[8] Vilna offensive 65+ Jews and non-Jews As Polish troops entered the city, dozens of people connected with the Lit-Bel were arrested, and some were executed
1929 Hebron pogrom (name disputed)[9] Hebron massacre 67 Jews During the 1929 Palestine riots, sixty-seven Jews were killed as the violence spread to Hebron, then part of Mandatory Palestine, by Arabs incited to violence by rumors that Jews were massacring Arabs in Jerusalem and seizing control of Muslim holy places.
1936 Przytyk pogrom (name disputed)[10] Przytyk riot 2 Jews and 1 Polish Some of the Jewish residents gathered in the town square in anticipation of the attack by the peasants, but nothing happened on that day. Two days later, however, on a market day, as Jewish historians Martin Gilbert and David Vital claim, peasants attacked their Jewish neighbors.
1938 November pogrom Kristallnacht 91 Jews Coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria, carried out by SA paramilitary forces and non-Jewish civilians. Accounts from the foreign journalists working in Germany sent shock waves around the world.
1940 Dorohoi pogrom 53 Jews Romanian military units carried out a pogrom against the local Jews, during which, according to an official Romanian report, 53 Jews were murdered, and dozens injured
1941 Iași pogrom 13,266 Jews One of the most violent pogroms in Jewish history, launched by governmental forces in the Romanian city of Iaşi (Jassy) against its Jewish population
1941 Antwerp Pogrom 0 One of the few pogroms of Belgian history. Flemish collaborators attacked and burned synagogues and attacked a rabbi in the city of Antwerp
1941 Bucharest pogrom Legionnaires' rebellion 125 Jews and 30 soldiers As the privileges of the paramilitary organisation Iron Guard were being cut off by Conducător Ion Antonescu, members of the Iron Guard, also known as the Legionnaires, revolted. During the rebellion and pogrom, the Iron Guard killed 125 Jews and 30 soldiers died in the confrontation with the rebels.
1941 Tykocin pogrom 1,400–1,700 Jews Mass murder of Jewish residents of Tykocin in occupied Poland during World War II, soon after Nazi German attack on the Soviet Union.
1941 Jedwabne pogrom 340 Jews The local rabbi was forced to lead a procession of about 40 people to a pre-emptied barn, killed and buried along with fragments of a destroyed monument of Lenin. A further 250-300 Jews were led to the same barn later that day, locked inside and burned alive using kerosene
1941 Pogrom in Krnjeuša 240 Croats An organized attack in the territory of the Catholic parish of Krnjeuša in northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina, carried out by Serb Chetniks against the local Catholic Croat population
1941 Lviv pogroms 4,000–8,000 civilian prisoners and 5,000 Jews Massacres of civilian prisoners by Soviet forces prior to evacuation, followed by massacre of Jews by German and other forces. Subject of a protracted controversy
1946 Kunmadaras pogrom 2 Jews A frenzy instigated by the crowd's libelous belief that some Jewish people had made sausage out of Christian children
1946 Miskolc pogrom 2 Jews Riots started as demonstrations against economic hardships and later became anti-Semitic
1946 Kielce pogrom 38–42 Jews Violence against the Jewish community centre, initiated by Polish Communist armed forces (LWP, KBW, GZI WP) and continued by a mob of local townsfolk.
1955 Istanbul pogrom Istanbul riots 13–30 Greeks Organized mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul's Greek minority. Accelerated the emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey (Jews were also targeted in this event).[68][69]
1966 1966 anti-Igbo pogrom A series of massacres directed at Igbo and other southern Nigerian residents throughout Nigeria before and after the overthrow (and assassination) of the Aguiyi-Ironsi junta by Murtala Mohammed.
1983 Black July 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom 400–3,000 Tamils Over seven days mobs of mainly Sinhalese attacked Tamil targets, burning, looting and killing
1984 1984 anti-Sikh riots 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom 8,000 Sikhs In October 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi, and other parts of India, Sikhs in India were targeted
1988 Sumgait pogrom 26+ Armenians and 6+ Azeris Mobs made up largely of ethnic Azeris formed into groups that went on to attack and kill Armenians both on the streets and in their apartments; widespread looting and a general lack of concern from police officers allowed the situation to worsen
1988 Kirovabad pogrom 3+ Soviet soldiers, 3+ Azeris and 1+ Armenian Ethnic Azeris attacked Armenians throughout the city
1989 1989 Bangladesh pogroms Attacks against Bengali Hindus, apparently as a reaction to the laying of the foundation of Ram temple adjacent to the disputed structure in Ayodhya
1990 Baku pogrom 90 Armenians, 20 Russian soldiers Seven-day attack during which Armenians were beaten, tortured, murdered and expelled from the city. There were also many raids on apartments, robberies and arsons
1991 Crown Heights pogrom (disputed)[11] Crown Heights riot 1 Jew and 1 non-Jew A three-day riot that occurred in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. The riots incited by the death of the seven-year-old Gavin Cato, unleashed simmering tensions of the Crown Heights' black community against the Orthodox Jewish community. In its wake, several Jews were seriously injured; one Orthodox Jewish man, Yankel Rosenbaum, was killed; and a non-Jewish man, allegedly mistaken by rioters for a Jew, was killed by a group of African-American men.[72][73]
1991 Mława pogrom Five days of rioting in which a mob attacked Roma residents of the Polish town of Mława causing hundreds to flee in terror
2002 Gujarat pogrom 2002 Gujarat violence 790–2,000 Muslims and 254 Hindus Inter-communal violence in the Indian state of Gujarat which lasted for approximately three days with the state government accused of supporting or even instigating the riots
2004 March pogrom 2004 unrest in Kosovo 8 ethnic Serbs and 11 ethnic Albanians Over 4,000 Serbs were forced to leave their homes, 935 Serb houses, 10 public facilities and 35 Serbian Orthodox church-buildings were desecrated, damaged or destroyed, and six towns and nine villages were ethnically cleansed according to Serbian media
2013 2013 Burma anti-Muslim riots anti-Rohingya pogrom Rohingya Muslims Muslims called the Rohingyas were targeted in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar.[74]

See also

References

Explanatory notes

  1. ^ Sandra Gambetti: "A final note on the use of terminology related to anti-Semitism. Scholars have frequently labeled the Alexandrian events of 38 C.E. as the first pogrom in history and have often explained them in terms of an ante litteram explosion of anti-Semitism. This work deliberately avoids any words or expressions that in any way connect, explicitly or implicitly, the Alexandrian events of 38 C.E. to later events in modern or contemporary Jewish experience, for which that terminology was created. ... To decide whether a word like pogrom, for example, is an appropriate term to describe the events that are studied here, requires a comparative re-discussion of two historical frames—the Alexandria of 38 C.E. and the Russia of the end of the nineteenth century. That wide and delicate topic cannot be addressed here and will be the subject of future research."[54]
  2. ^ John Klier: "upon the death of the Grand Prince of Kiev Sviatopolk, rioting broke out in Kiev against his agents and the town administration. The disorders were not specifically directed against Jews and are best characterised as a social revolution. This has not prevented historians of medieval Russia from describing them as a pogrom."[55][56]
    [57]
  3. ^ John Klier: "Russian armies led by Tsar Ivan IV captured the Polish city of Polotsk. The Tsar ordered drowned in the river Dvina all Jews who refused to covert to Orthodox Christianity. This episode certainly demonstrates the overt religious hostility towards the Jews which was very much a part of Muscovite culture, but its conversionary aspects were entirely absent from modern pogroms. Nor were the Jews the only heterodox religious group singled out for the tender mercies of Muscovite religious fanaticism."[55]
  4. ^ Israeli ambassador to Ireland, Boaz Moda'i: "I think it is a bit over-portrayed, meaning that, usually if you look up the word pogrom it is used in relation to slaughter and being killed. This is what happened in many other places in Europe, but that is not what happened here. There was a kind of boycott against Jewish merchandise for a while but that’s not a pogrom."[59]
  5. ^ William Rubinstein: "London-based sources, especially the press, Jewish and non-Jewish, consistently exaggerated the resemblance of the Welsh riots to Russian 'pogroms'. ... The Western Mail's 'London Letter' pointed this out on 28 August 1911, when it stated that 'both the Government and the Jewish leaders think that the Jewish press is betraying an unnecssary amount of alarm, and that it would have been better advised to have treated the attacks upon Jews and their property in Wales as part of a general attack upon persons and property'. Perhaps the most cogent letter on this subject came from Bertam Jacobs, a Welsh-born London barrister who wrote to the South Wales Argus. ... Jacobs pointed out the absurdity of likening the South Wales riots to the Russian pogroms, noting the crucial differences between the two, especially the fact that no Jew was physically assautled, no private house belonging to a Jew was set up, no anti-Semitic cries or slogans were heard, and, especially, no synagogue was attacked."[60][61]
  6. ^ David Engel: "the repeated protests of some scholars that what happened in Lwów in November 1918 was not, strictly speaking, a “pogrom”"[63]
    Norman Davies: "The so-called pogrom in Lwów, in November 1918, turned out to be a military massacre where three times more Christians died than Jews."[64]
    antisemitic in nature rather than political.[46]
  7. ^ Carole Fink: "What happen in Pinsk on April 5, 1919 was not literally a "pogrom" – an organized, officially tolerated or inspired massacre of a minority such as has occurred in Lemberg – but rather a miliary execution of a small, suspect group of civilians. ... The misnamed "Pinsk pogrom", a plain, powerful, alliterative phrase, entered history in April 1919. Its importance lay not only in its timing, during the tensest moments of the Paris Peace Conference and the most crucial deliberations over Poland's political future: The reports of Pinsk once more demonstrated the swift transmission of local violence to world notice and the disfiguring process of rumor and prejudice on every level."[66]
    Norman Davies: "The so-called pogrom in Pinsk in March 1919 turned out to be work of a panicky lieutenant, whose order to executre thirty-five suspected Bolshevik infiltrators was described by a US investigator as 'fully justified by the circumstances'"[64]
  8. ^ Norman Davies: "Press reports in the West of 'Pogroms in Poland', though accepted by Jewish commentators, were repeatedly discredited by the investigations of independent British and American observers....the pogroms in Wilno in April 1919 and again in October 1920 were occasioned by the Red Army's hasty retreats, and by military reprisals against suspected collaborators."[64]
  9. ^ Tom Segev: "The murder of Jews in Hebron was not a pogrom in the historic sense. ... Unlike attacks on the Jews of Eastern Europe, the authorities did not initiate the Hebron riots, and the police did not simply stand aside ... most of Hebron's Jews were saved because Arabs hid them in their homes."[67]
  10. ^ David Engel: "similar claims [that] the killing of two Jews and one Pole in the townlet of Przytyk in March 1936 [was not, strictly speaking, a “pogrom”], which became the subject of a similar bit of semantic legerdemain and ongoing argument in Poland and beyond in 2001"[63]
  11. ^ Media use of the term pogrom to refer to the 1991 Crown Heights riot caused public controversy.[50][70] For example Joyce Purnick of The New York Times wrote in 1993 that usage of the word pogrom was "inflammatory"; she accused politicians of "trying to enlarge and twist the word" in order to "pander for Jewish voters".[71]

Citations

  1. ^ Amos Elon (2002), The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743–1933. Metropolitan Books. ISBN 0-8050-5964-4. p. 103.
  2. ^
  3. ^
  4. ^ a b "Pogrom", Encyclopædia Britannica. "pogrom, (Russian: "devastation," or "riot"), a mob attack, either approved or condoned by authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority. The term is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries."
  5. ^ a b
  6. ^ a b c John Klier (2011). Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882. Cambridge University Press. p. 58."By the twentieth century, the word "pogrom" had become a generic term in English for all forms of collective violence directed against Jews. The term was especially associated with Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, the scene of the most serious outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence before the Holocaust. Yet 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."
  7. ^ a b For this definition and a review of scholarly definitions see Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan, International handbook of violence research, Volume 1 (Springer, 2005) pp 352–55 online
  8. ^ a b c d Anti-Jewish Violence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History. Edited by Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal "No doubt many will contend that history suggests the need for a serious attempt to clarify what a pogrom is or is not. In the event, however, no such clarification is possible, for "pogrom" is not a pre-existing natural category but an abstraction created by human beings in order to divide complex and infinitely varies social phenomena into manageable units of analysis. As a result, in the absence of universal agreement concerning the specific behaviours to which the word refers or of some supreme authority to whom the power of definition has been delegated, there can be no logically or empirically compelling grounds for declaring that some particular episode does or does not merit the label. "Engel states that although there are no "essential defining characteristics of a pogrom", the majority of the incidents "habitually" described as pogroms "took place in divided societies in which ethnicity or religion (or both) served as significant definers of both social boundaries and social rank, ... involved collective violent applications of force by members of what perpetrators believed to be a higher-ranking ethnic or religious group against members of what they considered a lower-ranking or subaltern group, ... appliers of the decisive force tended to interpret the behaviour of victims according to stereotypes commonly applied to the groups to which they belonged, ... perpetrators expressed some complaint about the victims' group, ... [and] a fundamental lack of confidence on the part of those who purveyed decisive violence in the adequacy of the impersonal rule of law to deliver true justice in the event of a heinous wrong."
  9. ^ a b A prayer for the government: Ukrainians and Jews in revolutionary times, 1917–1920, Henry Abramson "The etymological roots of the term pogrom are unclear, although it seems to be derived from the Slavic word for "thunder(bolt)" (Russian: grom, Ukrainian: hrim). 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. A pogrom is generally thought of as a cross between a popular riot and a military atrocity, where an unarmed civilian, often urban, population is attacked by either an army unit or peasants from surrounding villages, or a combination of the two. Early instances of this phenomenon in the Russian Empire were described using various terms (here in Russian): demonstratsii, gonenie, draky, besporiadki (demonstrations, persecution, fights, riots). Pogrom, however, has been the most effective in entering European languages, perhaps through Yiddish usage. Jews have not been the only group to suffer under this phenomenon, but historically Jews have been frequent victims of such violence. In mainstream usage, the word has come to imply an act of antisemitism."
  10. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, Dec. 2007 revision.
  11. ^ a b International handbook of violence research, Volume 1 (Springer, 2005) "The word "pogrom" (from the Russian, meaning storm or devastation) has a relatively short history. Its international currency dates back to the anti-Semitic excesses in Tsarist Russia during the years 1881–1883, but the phenomenon existed in the same form at a much earlier date and was by no means confined to Russia. As John D. Klier points out in his seminal article "The pogrom paradigm in Russian history", the anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia were described by contemporaries as demonstrations, persecution, or struggle, and the government made use of the term besporiadok (unrest, riot) to emphasize the breach of public order. Then, during the twentieth century, the term began to develop along two separate lines. In the Soviet Union, the word lost its anti-Semitic connotation and came to be used for reactionary forms of political unrest and, from 1989, for outbreaks of interethnic violence; while in the West, the anti-Semitic overtones were retained and government orchestration or acquiescence was emphasized."
  12. ^ Nora Levin The Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917: Paradox of Survival NYU Press, 1991, ISBN 0-8147-5051-6, ISBN 978-0-8147-5051-3, p.43
  13. ^ "Pogroms". The Jewish Virtual Library. 2009. Retrieved 5 September 2009.
  14. ^ a b Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation, Oxford University Press (2007), ISBN 978-0-19-530546-3
  15. ^ History of Ukraine - The Land and Its Peoples by Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Toronto Press, 2010, ISBN 1-4426-4085-5 (page 537)
  16. ^ Ivan Bunin, Cursed Days: A Diary of Revolution, May 2/15, 1919. Page 141.
  17. ^ Henry Abramson, Jewish Representation in the Independent Ukrainian Governments of 1917–1920, Slavic review, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Fall, 1991), pp. 542–550
  18. ^ Barbara Newman The Passion of the Jews of Prague: The Pogrom of 1389 and the Lessons of a Medieval Parody Church History 81:1 (March 2012), 1-26
  19. ^ Joanna B. Michlic (2006). Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present. University of Nebraska Press. p. 111. "One of the first and worst instances of anti-Jewish violence was Lwow pogrom, which occurred in the last week of November 1918. In three days 72 Jews were murdered and 443 others injured. The chief perpetrators of these murders were soldiers and officers of the so-called Blue Army, set up in France in 1917 by General Jozef Haller (1893–1960) and lawless civilians".
  20. ^ Herbert Arthur Strauss (1993). Hostages of Modernization: Studies on Modern Antisemitism, 1870–1933/39. Walter de Gruyter. p. 1048. "In Lwow, a city whose fate was disputed, the Jews tried to maintain their neutrality between Poles and Ukrainians, and in reaction a pogrom was held in the city under auspices of the Polish army"
  21. ^
  22. ^ Marsha L. Rozenblit (2001). Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I. Oxford University Press. p. 137. "The largest pogrom occurred in Lemberg [= Lwow]. Polish soldiers led an attack on the Jewish quarter of the city on November 21–23, 1918 that claimed 73 Jewish lives".
  23. ^ Zvi Y. Gitelman (2003). The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe. University of Pittsburgh Press. p. 58. "In November 1918, Polish soldiers who had taken Lwow (Lviv) from the Ukrainians killed more than seventy Jews in a pogrom there, burning synagogues, destroying Jewish property, and leaving hundreds of Jewish families homeless."
  24. ^
  25. ^ Neil Prior. "History debate over anti-Semitism in 1911 Tredegar riot". BBC News, 19 August 2011.
  26. ^
  27. ^ "World War II: Before the War", The Atlantic, June 19, 2011. "Windows of shops owned by Jews which were broken during a coordinated anti-Jewish demonstration in Berlin, known as Kristallnacht, on Nov. 10, 1938. Nazi authorities turned a blind eye as SA stormtroopers and civilians destroyed storefronts with hammers, leaving the streets covered in pieces of smashed windows. Ninety-one Jews were killed, and 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps.
  28. ^ Michael Berenbaum, Arnold Kramer (2005). The World Must Know. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. p. 49.
  29. ^ Gilbert, pp. 30–33.
  30. ^ Fischel, Jack (1998). The Holocaust, Greenwood Publishing Group, p. 41. ISBN 978-0-313-29879-0
  31. ^ "Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team" ", 1940–1944The Lodz Ghetto"
  32. ^ Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania (RICHR) submitted to President Ion Iliescu in Bucharest on 11 November 2004.
  33. ^ "The Farhud", Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
  34. ^ Julia Magnet. "The terror behind Iraq's Jewish exodus", The Daily Telegraph, April 16, 2003.
  35. ^ Holocaust Resources, History of Lviv.
  36. ^ Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland's Holocaust, McFarland & Company, 1997, ISBN 0-7864-0371-3, Google Print, p.164.
  37. ^
  38. ^
  39. ^ A communiqué regarding the decision to end the investigation of the murder of Polish citizens of Jewish nationality in Jedwabne on 10 July 1941 (Komunikat dot. postanowienia o umorzeniu śledztwa w sprawie zabójstwa obywateli polskich narodowości żydowskiej w Jedwabnem w dniu 10 lipca 1941 r.) from 30 June 2003.
  40. ^ By Joshua D. Zimmerman, Rutgers University Press – Publisher; pp. 67–68Contested memories.
  41. ^ By Richard S. Levy, ABC-CLIO – Publisher; p. 366Antisemitism.
  42. ^ Alexander B. Rossino, Polish "Neighbors" and German Invaders: Contextualizing Anti-Jewish Violence in the Białystok District during the Opening Weeks of Operation Barbarossa, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Volume 16 (2003).
  43. ^ Jan Tomasz Gross, "Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland", Penguin Books, Princeton University Press, 2002.
  44. ^ Bostom, Andrew G. (Ed.) 2007. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History.
  45. ^ Bergmann writes that "the concept of "ethnic violence" covers a range of heterogeneous phenomena, and in many cases there are still no established theoretical and conceptual distinctions in the field (Waldmann, 1995:343)" Bergmann then goes on to set out a variety of conflicting scholarly views on the definition and usage of the term pogrom.
  46. ^ a b
  47. ^ Neal Pease. "'This Troublesome Question': The United States and the 'Polish Pogroms' of 1918–1919." In: Mieczysław B. Biskupski, Piotr Stefan Wandycz, page 60. Ideology, Politics, and Diplomacy in East Central Europe. Boydell & Brewer, 2003, p.72
  48. ^
  49. ^
  50. ^ a b Crown Heights: Politics and Press Coverage of the Race War That Wasn't, Carol B. Conaway, Polity, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 93–118
  51. ^ "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."Settlers attack Palestinian village
  52. ^
  53. ^ Heitmeyer and Hagan, International handbook of violence research, Volume 1 pp 352–55
  54. ^ The Alexandrian Riots of 38 C.E. and the Persecution of the Jews: A Historical Reconstruction" (pp. 11–12)
  55. ^ a b Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, edited by John Doyle Klier, Shlomo Lambroza, pages 13 and 35 (footnotes)
  56. ^ Klier also writes that Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath has advanced a strong argument against considering the Kiev riots of 1113 an anti-Jewish pogrom. Pereswetoff-Morath writes in "A Grin without a Cat" (2002) that "I feel that Birnbaum's use of the term "anti-Semitism" as well as, for example, his use of "pogrom" in references to medieval Rus are not warranted by the evidence he presents. He is, of course, aware that it may be controversial."
  57. ^ George Vernadsky, Kievan Russia, Yale University Press, 1 Apr 1973, p94
  58. ^ "Portugal". Source: Encyclopaedia Judaica.
  59. ^ Limerick Leader, Saturday 6 November 2010, Jewish envoy says Limerick pogrom is 'over-portrayed'
  60. ^
  61. ^
  62. ^
  63. ^ a b Anti-Jewish Violence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History. Edited by Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal "the repeated protests of some scholars that what happened in Lwów in November 1918 was not, strictly speaking, a “pogrom”— or similar claims about the killing of two Jews and one Pole in the townlet of Przytyk in March 1936, which became the subject of a similar bit of semantic legerdemain and ongoing argument in Poland and beyond in 2001"
  64. ^ a b c In God's Playground, Volume II, p192, Norman Davies writes in relation to events in Lviv (1918), Pinsk (1919) and Vilnius (1919-20): "Press reports in the West of 'Pogroms in Poland', though accepted by Jewish commentators, were repeatedly discredited by the investigations of independent British and American observers. The so-called pogrom in Lwów, in November 1918, turned out to be a military massacre where three times more Christians died than Jews. The so-called pogrom in Pinsk in March 1919 turned out to be work of a panicky lieutenant, whose order to executre thirty-five suspected Bolshevik infiltrators was described by a US investigator as 'fully justified by the circumstances'; the pogroms in Wilno in April 1919 and again in October 1920 were occasioned by the Red Army's hasty retreats, and by military reprisals against suspected collaborators."
  65. ^ Mideast Dispatch Archive
  66. ^ Defending the Rights of Others:The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938, Carole Fink, 2006, p185
  67. ^ One Palestine Complete
  68. ^ Steven K. Baum, Shimon Samuels. Antisemitism Explained. University Press of America. 2011. p. 174.
  69. ^ "Istanbul love story". The Post and Courier. April 10, 2011.
  70. ^ The Jewish Week, August 9, 2011 "A divisive debate over the meaning of pogrom, lasting for more than two years, could have easily been ended if the mayor simply said to the victims of Crown Heights, yes, I understand why you experienced it as a pogrom."
  71. ^
  72. ^
  73. ^
  74. ^

Further reading

Core topics
Antisemitism and
Related topics
Religious antisemitism
Antisemitic laws, policies
and government actions
Antisemitic websites
Organizations working
against antisemitism
Locations
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