Pogrom

Pogrom (from ; from "громить" IPA: - to wreak havoc, to demolish violently) is a form of riot, a massive violent attack on a particular group; ethnic, religious or other, primarily characterized by destruction of their environment (homes, businesses, religious centers). Usually pogroms are accompanied with physical violence against the targeted people and even murders, in some cases to the degree of massacre. The term has historically been used to denote massive acts of violence, either spontaneous or premeditated, against Jews, but has been applied to similar incidents against other, mostly minority, groups.

Pogroms against the Jews

In the Russian Empire

Massive violent attacks against Jews date back at least to the Crusades, the Ukrainian Uprising in 1649-1651 or earlier (see York Castle), but the term pogrom as a reference to large-scale, targeted, and repeated anti-Jewish rioting only saw use beginning in the 19th century. The first pogrom of this sort is often considered to be the 1821 anti-Jewish riots in Odessa (modern Ukraine) after the death of the Greek Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople, in which 14 Jews were killed.Odessa pogroms at the Center of Jewish Self-Education "Moria" Other sources, such as the Jewish Encyclopedia say the first pogrom was the 1859 riots in Odessa. The term became common after a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept southern Imperial Russia (modern Poland, Ukraine, Republic of Moldova) in 1881-1884, after Jews were wrongly blamed for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.

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 the actual number of dead was 47-48Hilary L Rubinstein, Daniel C Cohn-Sherbok, Abraham J Edelheit, William D Rubinstein, The Jews in the Modern World, Oxford University Press, 2002. and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes ^* 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." "Jewish Massacre Denounced," in The New York Times, April 28, 1903, p.6

Some historians believe that some of the pogroms had been organizedNicholas II. Life and Death by Edward Radzinsky (Russian ed., 1997) p.89 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.

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 the 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 1930s 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 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 [http://www.holocaustrevealed.org/_domain/holocaustrevealed.org/lithuania/lithuanian_history.htm and burning synagogues and Jewish shops. 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.

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 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

Other ethnic groups suffered this kind of targeted riots, at various times and in different countries. 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. 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. Similarly, religious riots in Gujarat, India in 2002 have led to accusations of an anti-Muslim pogrom sponsored by the ruling Hindu party.

Modern examples of pogroms against other nationals include anti-Caucasian (see Caucasophobia) actions of Russian racist skinheads:

April 21, 2001 in Yasenevo market in Moscow, against merchants from the Caucasus countries.
October 30, 2001 in Tsaritsyno market in Moscow.
September 9, 2004 pogrom in Yekaterinburg, Russia, left several people dead and most Caucasian-owned businesses in town destroyed.

Examples of other events that happened in modern history and are sometimes called pogroms:

Military coup in Indonesia, 1965: Pro-communist president Ahmed Sukarno is overthrown. Nationalist and Islamist groups commit mass-murder against members and supporters of the communist part and against the ethnic Chinese minority. Death tolls range in the hundreds of thousands.
Anti-Tamil government-sponsored pogrom in July 1977 in Sri Lanka, in the wake of the United National Party election victory in the general election .
Anti-Tamil government-sponsored pogrom in July 1983 in Sri Lanka, in the wake of the killing in ambush of 13 soldiers by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam - so-called 'Black July'.
Pogrom against Turks in Fergana (Uzbekistan) in June 1989, hundreds of Turks were killed.
Pogrom against Uzbeks in Osh (Kirghizstan) in June 1990, 300 Uzbeks were killed.
Anti-Serb pogrom in Kosovo on March 17–18, 2004 in the UN-administered Serbian province of Kosovo-Metohia continued anti-Serbian violence since 1994 carried out by Albanian Muslims.
May 1998: riots against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia.
Episodes of the Rwandan Genocide have been described as pogroms.
"Gujarat Pogrom", describing the violence of 2002 ^*^*.

Pogroms in 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^* 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).

Footnotes

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.

External links

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