In the 1880s outbreak, thousands of Jewish homes were destroyed, many families reduced to extremes of poverty; women were sexually assaulted, and large numbers of men, women, and children injured in 166 towns in the southwest provinces of the Empire (modern Ukraine). The new Tsar Alexander III blamed the Jews for the riots and issued a series of harsh restrictions on Jews. The series of pogroms continued for more than three years with at least tacit inactivity of the authorities.
An even bloodier wave of pogroms broke out in 1903-1906, leaving an estimated 2,000 Jews dead, and many more wounded. The New York Times described the First Kishinev pogrom of Easter, 1903:
"The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia (modern Moldova), are worse than the censor will permit to publish. There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Orthodox Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, "Kill the Jews," was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 [Note: the actual number of dead was 47-48[3]] and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes [sic] were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews." [4]
Some historians believe that some of the pogroms had been organized[5] or supported by the Tsarist Russian secret police, the Okhranka. Such facts as the alleged indifference of the Russian police and army were duly noted, e.g., during the three-day First Kishinev pogrom of 1903, as well as the preceding inciting anti-Jewish articles in newspapers, suggesting to some that pogroms were in line with the internal policy of Imperial Russia. There is also evidence which supposedly suggests that the police knew in advance about some pogroms, and chose not to act. Members of the army also actively participated in pogroms in Bialystok (modern Poland) (June 1906) and Siedlce (modern Poland) (September 1906). The most violently anti-Semitic movement during this period was the Black Hundred, which actively participated in the pogroms.
Even outside of these main outbreaks, pogroms remained common — there were anti-Jewish riots in Odessa in 1859, 1871, 1881, 1886 and 1905 in which hundreds were killed in total.
The root cause of the pogroms was the economic exploitation of the Russian peasantry by Jews:
The tsarist authorities attempted to keep Jews apart from the Russian peasants because they believed Jews exploited the peasants economically and corrupted them with alcohol. Jews were often in the position of managing peasants for Russian aristocrats and in lending money and providing alcohol to them as innkeepers. Stereotypes of Jews as prominent in the liquor trade, usury, prostitution, and criminal activity were hardly figments of anti-Semitic imaginations.
Rather than being planned by the government, as asserted by historians such as Simon Dubnow, anti-Jewish pogroms were spontaneous uprisings in opposition to Jewish economic domination facilitated by the liberalization of the 1860s. Indeed, the government abhorred outbreaks of mass violence as a sign of popular discontent and in some areas was quite effective at preventing it. The government’s response to the pogroms of 1881 was to place limits on Jewish economic activities in order to protect the peasants, to make it more difficult to move out of the Pale of Settlement, and to impose quotas of around 10 percent on Jewish admission to universities.[6]
During the Revolution and the Civil War
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. In his book 200 Years Together, Alexander Solzhenitsyn provides the following numbers from Nahum Gergel's 1951 study of the pogroms in the Ukraine: out of estimated 887 mass pogroms, about 40% were perpetrated by the Ukrainian forces led by Symon Petliura, 25% by Ukrainian Green Army and various Ukrainian nationalist gangs, 17% by the White Army, especially forces of Anton Denikin, and 8.5% by the Red Army.
Outside of Russia
Pogroms spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe, and anti-Jewish riots broke out elsewhere in the world. In 1918 and throughout the Polish-Bolshevik War there were sporadic pogroms in Poland. In 1927, there were pogroms in Oradea, Romania. In the Americas, there was a pogrom in Argentina in 1919, during the Tragic Week.
In the Arab world there were a number of pogroms, which played a key role in the massive emigration from Arab countries to Israel. In 1945, anti-Jewish rioters in Tripoli, Libya killed 140 Jews, and the Farhud pogrom in Iraq killed between 200 and 400 Jews.
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 business were destroyed and up to 200 Jews were killed.
The deadliest pogroms during the Holocaust occurred at the hands of non-Germans, for example the Jedwabne pogrom of 1941, in which Polish citizens killed about 380 (the minimum number confirmed by Instytut Pamięci Narodowej's investigation) to 1,600 (according to Jan Tomasz Gross's book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland) Jews, with little to no German assistance. In the city of Lvov, Ukrainian nationalists allegedly organized two large pogroms in June-July, 1941 in which around 6,000 [1] Jews were murdered, in apparent retribution for the collaboration of many Jews with the previous Soviet regime. In Lithuania, Lithuanian nationalists (led by Klimaitis) engaged in anti-Jewish pogroms for similar reasons as well, on the 25th and 26th of June, 1941 (after the nazi German troops had entered the city), killing about 3,800 Jews [2] and burning synagogues and Jewish shops[citation needed]. 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[citation needed].
Even after the end of World War II, there were still isolated pogroms, the most notable being the Polish Kielce pogrom of 1946, in which 40 Jews were killed. The Kielce pogrom was a major factor in the flight of Jews from Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War.
The history of anti-Semitism lists a number of anti-Jewish pogroms in various countries.
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, 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. The General Jewish Labor Union, colloquially known as The Bund, and Jewish participation in the Bolshevik movements were directly influenced by the pogroms. Similarly, the organization of Jewish self-defence leagues (which stopped the pogromists in certain areas during the second Kishinev pogrom) such as Hibbat Zion led naturally to a strong embrace of Zionism especially by the Russian Jews.
Modern usage and examples
Other ethnic groups suffered this kind of targeted riots, at various times and in different countries. In the view of some historians, the mass attacks on and random killing of blacks 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. In the 1955 Istanbul pogrom, ethnic Greeks were attacked by an overwhelming Turkish mob. In the years leading up to the Biafran War, ethnic Igbos and others from southeastern Nigeria were victims of targeted attacks. The use of the term is therefore commonly used in the general context of riots against various ethnic groups, for example in the case of ethnic Armenians in Sumgait in 1988 and in Baku in 1990 (Azerbaijan).
A modern example of a race riot qualified by some as a pogrom is the August 1991 events in Crown Heights, Brooklyn (Crown Heights Riot). The 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi are generally considered to be a pogrom against the Sikh community in Delhi.
Modern examples of pogroms against other nationals include anti-Caucasian (see Caucasophobia) actions of Russian racist skinheads:
Examples of other events that happened in modern history and are sometimes called pogroms:
Pogroms in Arts & Literature
Pograms are often depicted in literature, and in American literature have been somewhat converted into novels against general mob rule. For example, the actions of the posse in The Ox-Bow Incident (a novel set in the Wild West) are both reactionary and illogical, and share a strong resemblence to pogram mob stories from Eastern Europe.
In 1903, Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik wrote the poem In the City of Slaughter[3] in response to the Kishinev pogrom.
Elie Wiesel's Trial of God depicts Jews fleeing a pogram and setting up a fictitious "trial of God" for His negligence in not assisting them against the bloodthirsty mobs. In the end, it turns out that the mysterious stranger who has argued as God's advocate is none other than Lucifer.
In James Joyce's epic Ulysses, the second chapter (aka the Nestor chapter) ends with the anti-semitic, anti-Catholic, pro-colonial and cruel headmaster, Mr. Deasy running after the young teacher, Stephen Daedalous. The headmaster breathlessly asks Stephen, "Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews....And do you know why?" When Stephen asks why, the headmaster replies, "Because she never let them in." While the headmaster's comments indicate that the Irish had prevented Jewish immigration, this was not so; Ireland had never had formal policies against Jewish immigration, but the lack of Jewish immigrants (as well as the constant emigration) is explained by the constant poverty faced by the island in the centuries before the Celtic Tiger. In fact, for centuries, Hebrew remained one of the most popular languages to learn in Ireland, due to both the numbers of priests and nuns that came from Ireland and the strong religious devotion of the Irish people as a whole (Hebrew would have been used to study the Old Testament in its original form).
A pogrom is one of the central events in the play Fiddler on the Roof.
Footnotes
- ^ Norman Davies (1996). Europe: A History, p. 412. ISBN 0-19-820171-0.
- ^ Odessa pogroms at the Center of Jewish Self-Education "Moria"
- ^ Hilary L Rubinstein, Daniel C Cohn-Sherbok, Abraham J Edelheit, William D Rubinstein, The Jews in the Modern World, Oxford University Press, 2002.
- ^ "Jewish Massacre Denounced," in The New York Times, April 28, 1903, p.6
- ^ Nicholas II. Life and Death by Edward Radzinsky (Russian ed., 1997) p.89
- ^ Review of Albert Lindemann's Esau's Tears. Occidental Quarterly, 5(2), 2006.
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- According to Radzinsky, Sergei Witte appointed in 1905 Chairman of the Russian Council of Ministers, remarked in his Memoirs that he found that some proclamations inciting pogroms were printed and distributed by Police Departments.
See also
External links