pogrom

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. A contemporary engraving by Johann Michael Voltz.

A pogrom is a form of riot directed against a particular group, whether ethnic, religious, or other, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes, businesses, and religious centers. The term was originally used to denote extensive violence against Jews – either spontaneous or premeditated – but in English it is also applied to similar incidents against other minority groups.

Etymology

The word "pogrom" (Russian: погром) came from the verb громить, Russian pronunciation: [ɡroˈmʲitʲ] "to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently". It seems to have come into English via Yiddish.^[2]

Pogroms against Jews

Ancient

There were tensions between Hellenism and Judaism following the conquests of Alexander the Great, see for example the Maccabean Revolt of 167 BC. Particularly disputed were circumcision and antinomianism.

There were antisemitic riots in Alexandria under Roman rule in AD 38 during the reign of Caligula.^[3][4]

Evidence of communal violence against Jews and Early Christians, who were seen as a Jewish sect, exists dating from the second century AD in Rome. These riots were generally precipitated by the Romans because Jews refused to accept Roman rule over Palestine^{[citation needed]} and early Christians were seen as a Jewish sect that proselytized actively. It should be noted that Romans were generally quite tolerant of other religions, yet they conducted several wars against the Jews, see Jewish-Roman Wars, and, before the Edict of Milan, persecuted Christians.

Massive violent attacks against Jews date back at least to the Crusades such as the Pogrom of 1096 in France and Germany (the first 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 ninth century, Islamic Spain was very welcoming towards Jews.^[5] The eleventh century, however, saw several Muslim pogroms against Jews; those that occurred in Cordoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066.^[6] In the 1066 Granada massacre, a Muslim mob crucified the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred about 4,000 Jews.^[7] In 1033 about 6,000 Jews were killed in Fez, Morocco by Muslim mobs.^[8][9] Mobs in Fez murdered thousands of Jews, leaving only 11 alive, in 1465.^{[10][citation needed]}

In 1348, because of the hysteria surrounding the Black Plague, Jews were massacred in Chillon, Basle, Stuttgart, Ulm, Speyer, Dresden, Strasbourg, and Mainz. By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed.^[11] A large number of the surviving Jews fled to Poland, which was very welcoming to Jews at the time.^[12]

In 1543, Martin Luther wrote On the Jews and Their Lies, a treatise in which he advocated harsh persecution of the Jewish people, up to what are now called pogroms. He advocated that their synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes razed, and property and money confiscated.^[13][14]

Jews and Poles were also massacred during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks in 1648–1654,^[15] as well as in the following century during the Koliyivshchyna.

Russian Empire

The victims, mostly Jewish children, of a 1905 pogrom in Yekaterinoslav (today's Dnipropetrovsk).

The term pogrom as a reference to large-scale, targeted, and repeated antisemitic rioting saw its first use in the nineteenth century.

The first pogrom is often considered to be the 1821 anti-Jewish riots in Odessa (modern Ukraine) after the death of the Greek Orthodox patriarch in Istanbul, in which 14 Jews were killed.^[16] Other sources, such as the Jewish Encyclopedia, indicate that the first pogrom was the 1859 riots in Odessa.

The term "pogrom" became commonly used in English after a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept through south-western Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine and Poland) in 1881–1884 (in that period over 200 anti-Jewish events occurred in Russian Empire, notably the Kiev, Warsaw and Odessa pogroms).^[17]

The trigger for these pogroms was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, after which rumours were spread blaming "the Jews."^[18] The extent to which the Russian press was responsible for encouraging perceptions of the assassination as a Jewish act has been disputed.^[19] Local economic conditions are thought to have contributed significantly to the rioting, especially with regard to the participation of the business competitors of local Jews and the participation of railroad workers, and it has been argued that this was actually more important than rumours of Jewish responsibility for the death of the Tsar.^[20] These rumours, however, were clearly of some importance, if only as a trigger. Contrary to rumour, fourteen of the fifteen assassins were born into Christian homes, and one of their close associates, Gesya Gelfman, was born into a Jewish home. Nonetheless, the assassination inspired "retaliatory" attacks by Christians on Jewish communities. A much bloodier wave of pogroms broke out in 1903–1906, leaving thousands of Jews dead and many more wounded, as the Jews took to arms to defend their families and property from the attackers. The 1905 pogrom of Jews in Odessa was the most serious pogrom of the period, with reports of up to 2,500 Jews killed.^[21]

Home at last by Moshe Maimon.

A 1909 pogrom of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire claimed tens of thousands of lives, as Armenian and Christian property was burned en masse.^[22]

Historians such as Edward Radzinsky inform that many pogroms were incited by authorities, even if some happened spontaneously,^[23] supported by the Tsarist Russian secret police (the Okhrana). Those perpetrators who were prosecuted usually received clemency by Tsar's decree.^[24]

Even outside these main outbreaks, pogroms remained common; there were anti-Jewish riots in Odessa in 1859, 1871, 1881, 1886 and 1905 in which thousands were killed in total.

The 1903 Kishinev pogrom, (also known as the Kishinev Massacre), in present-day Moldova killed 47-49 persons. It provoked an international outcry after it was publicized by The Times and the New York Times. There was a second, smaller Kishinev pogrom in 1905.

A pogrom on the 20th of July 1905, in Yekaterinoslav (present-day Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine), was stopped by the Jewish self-defence group (one man in the group killed). On July 31 there was the first pogrom outside the Pale of Settlement in the town of Makariev (near Nizhni Novgorod), where a patriotic procession led by the mayor turned violent. In Kerch, the mayor ordered the police to fire at the self-defence group, and two fighters were killed (one of them — P.Kirilenko, a Ukrainian who joined the Jewish defence group). The pogrom was conducted by the port workers, actively aided by a group of Gypsies apparently brought in for the purpose.

After the publication of the Tsar's Manifesto of October 17 1905, pogroms erupted in 660 towns mainly in the present-day Ukraine, in the Southern and Southeastern areas of the Pale of Settlement. In contrast, there were no pogroms either in present-day Poland or Lithuania. There were also very few incidents in Belarus or Russia proper. There were 24 pogroms outside of the Pale of Settlement, but those were directed at the revolutionaries rather than Jews.

The greatest number of pogroms were registered in the Chernigov gubernia in northern Ukraine. The pogroms there in October, 1905 took 800 Jewish lives, the material damages estimated at 70,000,000 rubles. 400 were killed in Odessa, over 150 in Rostov-on-don, 67 in Yekaterinoslav, 54 in Minsk, 30 in Simferopol - over 40, in Orsha — over 30.

In 1906 the pogroms continued: January — in Gomel, June — in Belostok (ca. 80 dead), in August — in Seldce (ca. 30 dead). The police and the military personnel were among the perpetrators. By 1907 the pogroms subsided, as the American administration became overwhelmed by a large influx of immigrants, and pressured the central Russian government to take action.

Many pogroms accompanied the Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing Russian Civil War: an estimated 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews were killed in the atrocities throughout the former Russian Empire; the number of Jewish orphans exceeded 300,000.

Outside Russia

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

• In 1927, there were pogroms in Oradea (Romania).
• In the Americas, there was a pogrom in Argentina in 1919, during the Tragic Week[1][2]

In the Arab world, there were a number of pogroms which played a key role in the massive emigration from Arab countries to Israel. These occurred during rising tensions and violence in Palestine as Jews tried to secure a homeland there.

• In 1945, anti-Jewish rioters in Tripoli, Libya killed 140 Jews.
• The Farhud pogrom in Iraq killed between 200 and 400 Jews.

There is also said to have been a Limerick Pogrom, in Ireland in the late nineteenth century. This pogrom was less violent than the others. Although it involved campaigns of intimidation, it chiefly took the form of an economic boycott against Jewish residents of Limerick.

During the Holocaust

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 Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed, up to 200 Jews were killed and some 30,000 Jewish men and boys were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

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.^[25]

In the city of Lwow, Ukrainian nationalists organized two large pogroms in June-July, 1941, in which around 6,000 Jews were murdered,^[26] in alleged retribution for the collaboration of some Jews with the previous Soviet regime (see Controversy regarding the Nachtigall Battalion).

In Lithuania, Lithuanian nationalists 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,^[27] engaged in anti-Jewish pogroms in Kaunas. Between 25 and 26 June 1941 about 3,800 Jews were killed and synagogues and Jewish settlements burned.^[28]

During the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941, Polish gentiles murdered between 400 to 1,600 Jews (estimates vary) in a burning barn-house. The degree to which Nazi Germans, who controlled the village, participated in the massacre remains the subject of debate among historians, whether the cause be internal versus their Polish neighbors, or cause of the Nazis'^[29]. The guidelines for such massacres were formulated by Reinhard Heydrich, who ordered to induce pogroms on territories occupied by Germany.^[30] The village was previously occupied by the Soviet Union, (see Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact) and some members of the Jewish community were subsequently accused of collaboration with the Soviet occupiers.

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 (see anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe, 1944–1946).

Influence of pogroms

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 naturally to a strong embrace of Zionism, especially by Russian Jews.

Modern usage and examples

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Diverse ethnic groups have suffered from similar targeted riots at various times and in different countries. In the view of some historians,^[31] the mass violence and murder targeting Black people during the New York Draft Riots of 1863 can be defined as pogroms, though the word had not yet entered the English language at the time. The same could be said of the Asiatic Vespers of 88 BC (massacre of Roman citizens and other foreigners in Asia Minor),^[32] the Boudica's revolt in 60-61 AD,^[33] the massacre of foreigners in Guangzhou in 878,^[34] the St. Brice's Day massacre (killing of Danes in England) in 1002, the Sicilian Vespers (massacre of French inhabitants of Sicily) in 1282,^[35] the Chinese massacre of 1871 in Los Angeles, California, the Batak massacre by Bashi-bazouks in 1876, and of the killing of Koreans in the wake of the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake in Tokyo, Japan, after newspapers printed articles saying Koreans were systematically poisoning wells, seemingly confirmed by the widespread observation of wells with cloudy water (a little-known effect after a large earthquake).

In a burst of sectarian violence in Mount Lebanon in 1860, the Druze massacred more than 10,000 Christians, mostly Maronites,^[36] An uprising in Damascus resulted in the destruction of the Christian quarter and the massacre of many Maronite Christians.^[37] The Armenian Massacres of 1894-1896, refers to the massacring of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, with estimates of the dead ranging from 80,000 to 300,000,^[38] and at least 50,000 orphans as a result.^[39]

The 1955 Istanbul Pogrom

In the 1955 Istanbul Pogrom, ethnic Greeks were attacked and overwhelmed by ethnic Turkish mobs. In the years leading up to the Biafran War, ethnic Igbos and others from southeastern Nigeria were victims of targeted attacks. The term is therefore commonly used in the general context of riots against various ethnic groups.^{[citation needed]} Other examples include the pogroms against ethnic Armenians in Sumgait in 1988 and in Baku, in 1990, both of which occurred in Azerbaijan.

The Zanzibar Revolution of January 12, 1964 put an end to the local Arab dynasty. As many as 17,000 Arabs and Asians were massacred by the descendants of black African slaves, according to reports, and thousands of others were detained and their property either confiscated or destroyed.^[40][41][42]

Anti-Chinese sentiment in Southeast Asian countries is often a result of a very different economic position between the Chinese and the indigenous majorities. This has led to violence, such as the May 13 Incident in Malaysia in 1969. During the Indonesian killings of 1965–66, in which more than 500,000 people died,^[43] local Chinese were killed in some areas, and their properties looted and burned as a result of anti-Chinese racism on the excuse that Aidit had brought the PKI closer to China.^[44][45] The Jakarta Riots of May 1998 were pogroms targeted against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. Businesses associated with Chinese were burnt down, women were raped, tortured and killed.^[46] Fearing for their lives, many ethnic Chinese, who made up about 3–5% of Indonesia's population, fled the country.

One million Armenians fled Turkey between 1915-1923 to escape pogroms.

Sikhs have also experienced a pogrom in India, most notably those occurring in November 1984 when India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh guards acting in the aftermath of Operation Bluestar. In these 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots, Sikhs were killed in pogroms led by government loyalists, with the government allegedly aiding the attacks by furnishing the mobs with voting lists to identify Sikh families.^[47] The current Congress party leader, Sonia Gandhi, officially apologized to the Sikh community in 1988 for the pogrom and began reconciliation efforts, as well as efforts to provide justice for the victims, the most notable being the Nanavati commission.

In Sri-Lanka, in 1983, state sponsored anti-Tamil riots killed as many as 2,000 people, mainly in the capital city of Colombo, and helped trigger the 30 year civil war. More than 300,000 people, mostly Tamils, were displaced. Seeking a safe haven, hundreds of thousands of Tamils sought refuge in South India and western countries.

Over 500,000 Hindus, belonging to a community called Kashmiri Pandits, have also experienced a pogrom in the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir when they were systematically targeted by the Pakistan-supported Islamist jihadists and driven out of the Kashmir Valley in 1989. They continue to live as internally displaced persons in transit camps in southern Hindu-majority portion of the state as well as in other parts of India, in spite of sporadic efforts to rehabilitate them.

Acts of ethnic and religious violence in India,^[48] such as the 1968 violence against South Indians in Mumbai, 2002 Gujarat violence, 2007 Orissa violence and the 2008 attacks on North Indians in Maharashtra, tend to occur as the root causes of violence often run deep in history, religious activities, economic imbalance and politics of India.^[49][50]

In 1989, after bloody pogroms against the Meskhetian Turks by Uzbeks in Central Asia's Ferghana Valley, nearly 90,000 Meskhetian Turks left Uzbekistan.^[51][52] In the summer of 1990 an anti-Russian rioting engulfed Tuva's urban areas, leaving scores dead. Thousands of ethnic Russians reportedly fled Tuva in the wake of the 1990 ethnic disturbances.^[53][54] Pogrom of Armenians in Baku in January 1990 forced almost all of the 200,000 Armenians in Baku to flee to Armenia.^[55] Following the breakup of the Soviet Union ethnic clashes have been infrequent but, sometimes serious.^[56] The Kyrgyzstan's 2005 Tulip Revolution turned into anti-Russian pogrom in Bishkek.^[57][58] In 2007, ethnic Kurds in South Kazakhstan suffered arson attacks which continued for three days.^[59][60]

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.^[61] The police have been accused of siding with the attackers in some of these cases.^[62]

During the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, a disputed territory within the United Kingdom, many pogroms took place. The most violent have taken place in the city of Belfast when unionist rioters attacked the small Nationalist housing estate known as the Short Strand (Irish: An Trá Ghearr). Three unionists and one nationalist were killed by gunfire here, on the 27th of June 1970 during the "Battle of St. Mathews".

In 1999, after NATO troops took control of the Serbian province of Kosovo, the non-Albanian population, including all Jews, Christians and Muslims of non-Albanian ethnicity, of the capital Pristina was driven from their homes by ethnic Albanians and their property sacked and demolished, while NATO forces stood back and refused to intervene.^[63][64]

On 17 October 1999, at approximately 12:00 noon, members of the radical Basilist sect, led by Basili Mkalavishvili, an excommunicated Georgian Orthodox Church priest, interrupted the Christian meeting of a congregation of 120 Jehovah's Witnesses held in the "Giza" building, in Tbilisi-Gldani and viciously attacked many of the individuals who were in attendance. Men, women and children were physically attacked.^[65] Since 1999 to 2003 there were over 100 attacks and related incidents in Georgia. The houses of some Jehovah's Witnesses were burned. The victims have filed more than 800 criminal complaints.^[66]

In November 2004, Chinese authorities have admitted that inter-ethnic rioting gripped part of central Henan province. Henan's riots are said to have started with a traffic accident, and escalated with Hui and Han Chinese gangs attacking and burning villages of the opposing community.^[67] In 2006, rioters damaged shops owned by Chinese-Tongans in Nukuʻalofa.^[68] Chinese migrants were evacuated from the riot-torn Solomon Islands.^[69]

In November 2004, several thousand of the estimated 14,000 French nationals in Ivory Coast left the country after days of anti-white violence.^[70] In May 2008, there were pogroms against migrants across South Africa that left almost 100 people dead and up to 100,000 displaced.^[71]

In recent years, anti-Arab attacks by Jewish mobs in Israel have been described as pogroms by peace activists, Israeli press, and Israeli officials^[72]. Israeli Prime minister Ehud Olmert harshly criticized Yitzhar settlers who launched a revenge attack in a Palestinian village in the West Bank. A Palestinian youth was killed and eight Palestinians were injured. It was not the first time the settlers had harassed the neighbouring villagers. "This phenomenon of taking the law into their own hands and of brutal and violent attacks is intolerable... There will be no pogroms against non-Jewish residents," said Olmert.^[73] On December 7, 2008, Olmert again used the term "pogrom" while denouncing a group of Jewish settlers residing in a disputed building in Hebron who had clashed with Palestinians of the city during and after being evicted from the building by Israeli forces: "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."^[74]

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.^[75][76] Massacres, ethnic cleansing, and harassment has increased since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.^[77] Furthermore, the Mandaean and Yazidi communities are at the risk of elimination due to the ongoing atrocities by Islamic extremists.^[78][79]

The 2009 Gojra riots were anti-Christian pogroms that erupted in Gojra, Pakistan, in 2009 where Muslim mobs slaughtered eight Christians over Pakistan's theocratic practices of blasphemy laws.

See also

References