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{{Short description|Antisemitic riots in Imperial Russia}}
'''Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire''', in particular, those of the late 19th century in what today is ] and ], gave rise to the international ] '']'' as a reference to large-scale, targeted, and repeated ] ]ing. The term saw its first use in the 19th century.
{{antisemitism}}
'''Pogroms in the Russian Empire''' ({{langx|ru|Еврейские погромы в Российской империи}}) were large-scale, targeted, and repeated ] rioting that began in the 19th century. ]s began to occur after ], which previously had very few ], acquired territories with large Jewish populations from the ] and the ] from 1772 to 1815. These territories were designated "the ]" by the Imperial Russian government, within which Jews were reluctantly permitted to live. The Pale of Settlement primarily included the territories of ], ], ], ] (modern ]), ] and ]. Jews were forbidden from moving to other parts of ] (including ]), unless they converted from ] or obtained a university diploma or first guild merchant status. Migration to the ], ], the ] or ] was not restricted.


==1821==
==Early 19th century==
The first pogrom is often considered to be the 1821 anti-Jewish riots in ] (modern ]) after the death of the ] patriarch in ], in which 14 Jews were killed.<ref> at the Center of Jewish Self-Education "Moria"</ref> Other sources, such as the ], indicate that the first pogrom was the 1859 riots in Odessa. The ] are sometimes considered the first pogroms. After the execution of the ] patriarch, ], in ], 14 Jews were killed in response.<ref> {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070121190823/http://www.moria.farlep.net/vjodessa/en/pogroms.html |date=January 21, 2007 }} at the Center of Jewish Self-Education "Moria".</ref> The initiators of the 1821 pogroms were the local Greeks, who used to have a substantial diaspora in the port cities of what was known as ].<ref> {{in lang|ru}}</ref>


===1881-1884=== ==1881–1882==
]
The use of the term "pogrom" became common in the English language after a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept through south-western Imperial Russia (present-day ] and ]) from 1881 to 1882; when more than 200 anti-Jewish events occurred in the ], the most notable of them were pogroms which occurred in ], ] and ].<ref>{{in lang|pl}} {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100206114536/http://www.diapozytyw.pl/pl/site/slownik_terminow/pogrom/ |date=February 6, 2010 }}, based on ], Hanna Węgrzynek, Gabriela Zalewska, ''Historia i kultura Żydów polskich. Słownik'', WSiP.</ref> They changed perceptions among Russian Jews and indirectly gave a significant boost to the early ] movement.<ref>] (1882) '']''</ref><ref>Yitzhak Maor, The "Sufot Banegev" as a Factor in the Rise of Nationalism among the Jewish Intelligentsia / "הסופות בנגב" כגורם להתעוררות התודעה הלאומית בקרב המשכילים היהודיים, 1981 {{jstor|23526296}}</ref>


{{anchor|Sufot BaNegev}}To circumvent censorship, these pogroms were referred to in the Jewish press as the "Storms in the South" or "Storms in the Negev" ({{langx|he|הסופות בנגב}}, ''Sufot BaNegev'').<ref> ({{doi|10.9783/9780812200812.143}}) from the book: ] (Translated by Chaya Naor), ''The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881'', 2005 </ref> The names are a reference to the prophecy in ]:1.<ref>''The Diary of Rabbi Rozenblum'', </ref> Variants of the translation of the prophecy: "...As storms in the South pass through, So it comes from the desert, from a terrible land." or: "Like whirlwinds sweeping through the Negev, an invader comes from the desert, from a land of terror", and so on,<ref> at ''Biblehub''</ref> with "]" meaning "South" in ] and the pogroms in question happening in the south (south-west) of the European part of the Russian Empire.
The term "pogrom" became commonly used in English after a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept through south-western ] in 1881&ndash;1884.


The trigger for these pogroms was the ], for which some blamed "the Jews."<ref>''Jewish Chronicle'', May 6, 1881, cited in Benjamin Blech, ''Eyewitness to Jewish History''</ref> The extent to which the Russian press was responsible for encouraging perceptions of the assassination as a Jewish act has been disputed.<ref>Stephen M Berk, ''Year of Crisis, Year of Hope: Russian Jewry and the Pogroms of 1881–1882'' (Greenwood, 1985), pp. 54–55.</ref> 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.<ref name=Aronson1980>I. Michael Aronson, "Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia," '']'', Vol. 39, No. 1. (Jan., 1980), pp. 18–31</ref> These rumours, however, were clearly of some importance, if only as a trigger, and they had a small kernel of truth: one of the close associates of the assassins, ], was indeed Jewish. The fact that the other assassins were all atheists had little impact on the spread of such antisemitic rumours. The event which triggered the pogroms was the ] on 13 March , 1881, for which some blamed "agents of foreign influence," implying that Jews committed it.<ref>'']'', May 6, 1881, cited in Benjamin Blech, ''Eyewitness to Jewish History''</ref><ref>] newspaper №65, March 8 (20), 1881</ref> One of the conspirators was of Jewish origins, and the importance of her role in the assassination was greatly exaggerated during the pogroms that followed. Another conspirator was baselessly rumored to be Jewish.<ref>Arthur Morius Francis, ''Nihilism: Philosophy of Nothingness'' (2015), p. 64.</ref> The extent to which the Russian press was responsible for encouraging perceptions of the assassination as a Jewish act has been disputed.<ref>Stephen M Berk, ''Year of Crisis, Year of Hope: Russian Jewry and the Pogroms of 1881–1882'' (Greenwood, 1985), pp. 54–55.</ref>


Local economic conditions, such as debt owed to Jewish ], 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 ] workers. Russia's industrialization caused Russians to be moving into and out of major cities.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia|last=Aronson|first=Michael|publisher=Wiley-Blackwell|location=New Jersey}}</ref> People trying to escape the big cities carried their antisemitic values with them, spread the ideas throughout Russia, and caused more pogroms in different regions of Russia.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia|last=Aronson|first=Michael|publisher=Wiley-Blackwell|location=New Jersey}}</ref> That has been argued to have been actually more important than rumors of Jewish responsibility for the death of the Tsar.<ref name=Aronson1980>I. Michael Aronson, "Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia", '']'', Vol. 39, No. 1. (Jan., 1980), pp. 18–31</ref> Those rumors, however, were clearly of some importance, if only as a trigger, and they drew upon a small kernel of truth: one of the close associates of the assassins, ], was born into a Jewish home. The fact that the other assassins were all atheists and that the wider Jewish community had nothing to do with the assassination had little impact on the spread of such antisemitic rumors, and the assassination inspired retaliatory attacks on Jewish communities. During these pogroms, thousands of Jewish homes were destroyed; many families were reduced to poverty and large numbers of men, women and children were injured in 166 towns in the south-western provinces of the Empire, such as ].{{cn|date=October 2023}}
During these pogroms, which started in Elizavetgrad (], Ukraine) in April 1881, thousands of Jewish homes were destroyed, and many families were reduced to poverty; and large numbers of men, women, and children were injured in 166 towns in the southwest provinces of the Empire such as the ]. The new ] ] initially blamed revolutionaries and the Jews themselves for the riots and issued a ] on Jews. The pogroms continued for more than three years, and were thought to have benefited from at least the tacit support of the authorities, though there were also attempts on the part of the Russian government to end the rioting.<ref name=Aronson1980/> Altogether the pogroms claimed the lives of relatively few Jews. Two Jews were killed by the mobs, while 19 attackers were killed by tsarist authorities<ref name=Kozhinov>{{Ru icon}} Vadim Kozhinov, </ref>, the damage, disruption and disturbance were dramatic. The pogroms and the official reaction to them led many Russian Jews to reassess their perceptions of their status within the Russian Empire, and so to significant Jewish ], mostly to the ]. These pogroms were referred to among Jews as the 'storms in the negev', negev being a Biblical word for the south. Changed perceptions among Russian Jews also indirectly gave a significant boost to the early ] movement.<ref>] (1882) '']''</ref>


There also was a large pogrom on the night of 15–16 April 1881 (the day of ] Easter) in the city of ] (now ]). On 17 April, the Army units were dispatched and were forced to use firearms to extinguish the riot. However, that only incited the whole situation in the region and a week later series of pogroms rolled through parts of the ].{{cn|date=October 2023}}
===1903-1906===
A much bloodier wave of pogroms broke out in 1903&ndash;1906, leaving an estimated 2,000 Jews dead, and many more wounded, as the Jews took to arms to defend their families and property from the attackers. The number of people of other nationalities killed or wounded in these pogroms exceeds Jewish casualties.<ref name=Kozhinov/> '']'' described the ] of ], 1903:


On 26 April 1881, an even bigger disorder engulfed the city of ]. The ] is considered the worst one that took place in 1881.<ref> {{in lang|ru}}</ref> The pogroms of 1881 did not stop then. They continued on through the summer, spreading across a big territory of modern-day Ukraine: (], ], ], ], and others). During these pogroms the first local Jewish self-defense organizations started to form—the most prominent one in Odessa, which was organized by the Jewish students of the ]. {{cn|date=October 2023}}
]).]]
] ]]


For decades after the 1881 pogroms, many government officials held the antisemitic belief that Jews in villages were more dangerous than Jews who lived in towns. The Minister of the Interior ] rejected the theory that pogroms were caused by revolutionary socialists, and instead he adopted the idea that they were a protest by the rural population against Jewish exploitation. With this idea in mind, he promulgated the notion that pogroms had spread from villages to towns. Historians today recognize that although rural peasantry did largely participate in the pogrom violence, pogroms began in the towns and spread to the villages.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia|last=Aronson|first=Michael|publisher=Wiley-Blackwell|location=New Jersey}}</ref>
<blockquote>"The anti-Jewish riots in ], ] (modern ]), 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 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babies 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."<ref>"Jewish Massacre Denounced," in ''The New York Times'', April 28, 1903, p. 6</ref></blockquote>


The new Tsar ] initially blamed revolutionaries and the Jews themselves for the riots and in May 1882 issued the ], a series of harsh restrictions on Jews.{{cn|date=October 2023}}
Some historians believe that some of the pogroms had been organized<ref>''Nicholas II. Life and Death'' by ] (Russian ed., 1997) p. 89. According to Radzinsky, ] appointed Chairman of the ] in 1905, remarked in his ''Memoirs'' that he found that some proclamations inciting pogroms were printed and distributed by Police.</ref> or supported by the ]ist Russian ], the ]. Such facts as the alleged indifference of the Russian ] and ] were duly noted, for instance, during the three-day ] of 1903, as well as the preceding publication of articles in ]s inciting anti-Jewish violence, suggesting to some that pogroms were in line with the internal policy of ]. The British historian ], however, suggests in his recent book ''War of the World'' that it was real or alleged Jewish involvement in contemporary left-wing politics that brought on the 'waves' of violence against the aforementioned southern areas of the ].


The pogroms continued for more than three years and were thought to have benefited from at least the tacit support of the authorities, although there were also attempts by the Russian government to end the rioting.<ref name=Aronson1980/>
There is also evidence which suggests that the police knew in advance about some pogroms, and chose not to act.{{fact|date=November 2009}}


The pogroms and the official reaction to them led many Russian Jews to reassess their perceptions of their status within the Russian Empire, and so led to significant Jewish ], mostly to the ].{{cn|date=October 2023}}
This series of pogroms affected 64 towns (including ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ]), and 626 small towns (Russian городок) and villages, mostly in the ] and ].


===Casualties===
===During the Revolution and the Civil Wars in Russia===
At least 40 Jews were killed during pogroms between April and December 1881.<ref>{{Cite news|date=January 28, 1882|title=Russian Jewish Horrors; A Nine-Months' Record of Rapine, Murder, and Outrage.|work=]|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1882/01/28/archives/russian-jewish-horrors-a-ninemonths-record-of-rapine-murder-and.html|access-date=November 6, 2021}}</ref>
Many pogroms accompanied the ] and the ensuing ], an estimated 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews were killed in the atrocities throughout the former ]; the number of Jewish orphans exceeded 300,000. In his book ''200 Years Together'', ] provides the following numbers from ]'s 1951 study of the pogroms in the 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 these incidents, about 40% were perpetrated by the Ukrainian forces led by ], 25% by the Ukrainian ] and various Ukrainian ] gangs, 17% by the ], especially the forces of ], and 8.5% by the ] (the Red Army pogroms were not sanctioned by the Red Army leadership). Gergel's figures, which are generally considered conservative, are based on the testimony of witnesses an 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"<ref>Henry Abramson, ''Jewish Representation in the Independent Ukrainian Governments of 1917-1920'', Slavic review, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 542-550</ref>


===British reaction===
== Russian pogroms in arts and literature ==
The leaders of the Jewish community in London were slow to speak out. It was only after ]'s support following leadership from an anonymous writer named "Juriscontalus" and the editor of '']'' that action was taken in 1881. Public meetings were held across the country and Jewish and Christian leaders in Britain spoke out against the atrocities.<ref name="Monaco2013">{{cite book|author=C. S. Monaco|title=The Rise of Modern Jewish Politics: Extraordinary Movement|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=i6OiFO2crdgC&pg=PA148|year=2013|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-0-415-65983-3|pages=148–}}</ref>
In 1903, Hebrew poet ] wrote the poem ''In the City of Slaughter''<ref></ref> in response to the ].


==1903–1906==
]'s '']'' depicts Jews fleeing a pogrom 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 ]. The experience of a Russian Jew is also depicted in ]'s '']''.
])]]
A much bloodier wave of pogroms broke out from 1903 to 1906, leaving an estimated 2,000 Jews dead and many more wounded, as the Jews took to arms to defend their families and property from the attackers. Particularly, the 1905 pogrom stands as one of the most severe incidents of anti-Jewish violence in Russia at the time, both in terms of property damage and human casualties. In comparison, the pogrom wave that occurred between 1881 and 1882 resulted in fewer fatalities. According to police records in Odessa, a minimum of 400 Jews and 100 non-Jews lost their lives, while around 300 individuals, predominantly Jewish, were injured. Additionally, an estimated 1,632 residential and commercial properties owned by Jews sustained damage. These numbers are considered by some to be conservative estimates, particularly regarding the number of injured individuals. The violence against the Jewish community was extreme, and involved acts such as physical assault and other forms of harm against men, women, and children who were not engaged in opposition to the government at the time. Reports also indicate instances of individuals being thrown from windows, sexual assault against women across age groups, and fatal violence against infants witnessed by their parents.<ref>Weinberg, Robert. ''The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps''. 1993, p. 164.</ref><ref>Avrutin, Eugene M., and Elissa Bemporad, eds. Pogroms: A Documentary History. Oxford University Press, 2021, p. 90.</ref>


'']'' described the ] of ], 1903:
A pogrom is one of the central events in the play '']''.


<blockquote>The anti-Jewish riots in ], ] ]], 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 ], Daniel C. Cohn-Sherbok, Abraham J. Edelheit, ], ''The Jews in the Modern World'', Oxford University Press, 2002.</ref>] and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babies 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.<ref>"Jewish Massacre Denounced", in ''The New York Times'', 1903 April 28</ref></blockquote>
In the film '']'', Fievel and his family's village is destroyed by a pogrom (with cats being their Cossack attackers). See also the movie ].


]. An invalid Jewish soldier who, having returned home from the ], finds the bodies of his family who had died at the hands of pogromists. A ] is saying ] for a member of the household who was killed.]]
The novel ''The Sacrifice'' by ] also deals with a family that is displaced after a pogrom in their homecountry and who immigrate to Canada after losing two sons to the riot and barely surviving themselves. The loss and murder of the sons haunts the entire story.
This series of pogroms affected 64 towns (including ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ]), and 626 small towns (Russian: городок) and villages, mostly in ] and ].

Historians such as ] suggest that many pogroms were incited by authorities and supported by the ]ist Russian ] (the ]), even if some happened spontaneously.<ref>''Nicholas II. Life and Death'' by ] (Russian ed., 1997) p. 89. According to Radzinsky, ] (appointed Prime Minister 1905) remarked in his ''Memoirs'' that he found that some proclamations inciting pogroms were printed and distributed by Police.</ref><ref name=":9">{{Cite book |last=Radzinsky |first=Edvard |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=L3VS4Kqa_nAC |title=The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II |date=2011-03-30 |publisher=Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |isbn=978-0-307-75462-2 |pages=69, 77, 79 |language=en |quote=To the tsar, the pogroms organized by the police seemed like a holy outburst of popular indignation against the revolutionaries}}</ref> The perpetrators who were prosecuted usually received clemency by Tsar's decree.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://starosti.ru/archive.php?m=12&y=1907|title=декабрь 1907 – Газетные "старости"(Архив)}}</ref>

Even outside of these main outbreaks, pogroms remained common; there was an anti-Jewish riot in Odessa in 1905 in which thousands of Jews were killed.<ref>Robert Weinberg, "The Pogrom of 1905 in Odessa: A Case Study" in ''Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History'', John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds. (Cambridge,1992): 248–89</ref>

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

A pogrom on July 20, 1905, in ] (present-day ], Ukraine), was stopped by the Jewish self-defense group. One man in the group was killed.

On July 31, 1905, there was the first pogrom outside the ], in the town of Makariev (near ]), where a patriotic procession led by the mayor turned violent.

At a pogrom in ] in ] on 31 July 1905,<ref></ref> the mayor ordered the police to fire at the self-defence group, and two fighters were killed (one of them, P. Kirilenko, was a Ukrainian who joined the Jewish defence group). The pogrom was conducted by the port workers apparently brought in for the purpose.

After the publication of the ], 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 in present-day Lithuania. There were also very few incidents in Belarus or Russia proper. There were 24 pogroms outside of the ], but those were directed at the revolutionaries rather than Jews.

]
Eyewitness account from local milkmen described the 1905 ] as follows:
<blockquote>The three previous days they had been in hiding. By Friday afternoon the pogrom was wrapping up. Friday night their neighbors, who were Russian, assured them that they could go home. They went and sat down for tea. And those same neighbors, it would seem, quietly let the killers in, since they never heard them knocking in the hallway. Suddenly, there was a knock on the door and strangers’ footsteps. The tea drinkers all hid: the servant by himself, the father by himself, the mother and daughter together. The killers found the mother and daughter first. They hit the mother in the head with an axe and cut the daughter’s arm. Their screams brought the father running, and he was taken down on the spot. The wounded mother was later taken to the hospital, while the daughter got off lightly.<ref>Odesskii pogrom i samooborona (Paris: Impremerie Ch. Noblet, 1906), 1718, 31–32. Translated from the Russian by Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya.</ref></blockquote>

The greatest number of pogroms were registered in the ] ] 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 ], over 150 in ], 67 in ], 54 in ], 30 in ]—over 40, in ]—over 30.

In 1906, the pogroms continued: January — in ], June — in ] (ca. 80 dead), and August — in ] (ca. 30 dead). The Russian secret police and the military personnel organized the massacres.

In many of these incidents the most prominent participants were railway workers, industrial workers, and small shopkeepers and craftsmen, and (if the town was a river port (e.g. ]) or a seaport (e.g. ])), ]; peasants joined in mainly to loot.<ref></ref>

=== Causes ===

Historian Bob Weinberg traces the roots of the pogrom to the complex social and political setting of Russia during that period. He contends that part of the explanation for the brutality lies in the realm of identity politics. For some individuals involved, their actions were not just acts of violence but also expressions of their ] beliefs and loyalty to the Russian monarch. The sense of eroding authority and changes in political structures seemed to amplify this sentiment, as exemplified by events like the vandalization of ]'s portraits, which stirred animosity and rallied those resistant to change.<ref>Avrutin, Eugene M., and Elissa Bemporad, eds. Pogroms: A Documentary History. Oxford University Press, 2021. pp 90-91.</ref>

Weinberg further argues that the pogroms functioned as a safety valve for defusing mounting societal discontent that could have otherwise led to revolutionary uprisings. He posits that the Jewish community was selected as a strategic scapegoat to redirect popular frustrations away from opposing the autocratic regime and focus them on an internal marginalized group instead.{{citation needed|date=September 2024}} This tactic was not an innovation of the 1905 ] but had historical precedents, such as the pogrom wave of 1881 that similarly victimized Jewish communities.

Other scholars have stressed economic factors in explaining the occurrence of pogroms. In 2020, three economists published an article in which they argued that the pogroms of 1881-1882, 1903-1906 and the ] were caused by Russia's economic situation. Their study of these pogroms led them to the conclusion that pogroms occurred out of non-Jews' economic discontent. This was because, they argued, Jews who traded non-Jewish peasants' grain at markets were blamed for poor returns, resulting from downturns in the Russian economy, by the Russian peasants who sold them such grain.<ref>Irena Grosfeld, Seyhun Orcan Sakalli, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, "Middlemen Minorities and Ethnic Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire", ''Review of Economic Studies'', Vol. 87 (2020), pp. 289-342.</ref>

=== Response of the United States===
]
The pogroms increasingly angered American opinion.<ref>Taylor Stults, "Roosevelt, Russian Persecution of Jews, and American Public Opinion" ''Jewish Social Studies'' (1971) 33#3 pp 13–22.</ref> The well-established German Jews in the United States, although they were not directly affected by the Russian pogroms, were well organized and convinced Washington to support the cause of Jews in Russia.<ref>Gerald Sorin, ''A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920'' (1995) pp 200–206, 302–303.</ref><ref>Alan J. Ward, "Immigrant minority 'diplomacy': American Jews and Russia, 1901–1912." ''Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies'' 9 (1964): 7–23.</ref> Led by ], ], ], and Rabbi ], they organized protest meetings, issued publicity, and met with ] and Secretary of State ]. Stuart E. Knee reports that in April, 1903, Roosevelt received 363 addresses, 107 letters and 24 petitions signed by thousands of Christians, public and church leaders alike—all calling on the Tsar to stop the persecution of Jews. Public rallies were held in scores of cities, topped off at ] in New York in May. The Tsar retreated a bit and fired one local official after the ], which Roosevelt had explicitly denounced. But Roosevelt was mediating the war between Russia and Japan at the time and could not publicly take sides. Therefore, Secretary Hay took the initiative in Washington. Finally, Roosevelt forwarded a petition to the Tsar, who rejected it claiming that the Jews themselves were at fault. Roosevelt won Jewish support in his ]. The pogroms continued, as hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Russia, most heading for London or New York. With American public opinion turning against Russia, Congress officially denounced its policies in 1906. Roosevelt kept a low profile, as did his new Secretary of State ]. However, in late 1906 Roosevelt did appoint the first Jew to the cabinet, naming ] as his Secretary of Commerce and Labor.<ref>Stuart E. Knee, "The Diplomacy of Neutrality: Theodore Roosevelt and the Russian Pogroms of 1903–1906," ''Presidential Studies Quarterly'' (1989), 19#1 pp. 71–78.</ref><ref>Ann E. Healy, "Tsarist Anti-Semitism and Russian-American Relations." ''Slavic Review'' 42.3 (1983): 408–425.</ref>

Other prominent Americans who condemned Russia's actions included Cardinal ].<ref>{{cite journal |last=Rosenau |first=William |date=1928 |title=Cardinal Gibbons and His Attitude Toward Jewish Problems |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/43059497 |journal=Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society |issue=31 |pages=219–224 |jstor=43059497}}</ref>

==Organization==
The pogroms are generally thought to have been organized or at least condoned by the authorities.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/ru/article.php?ModuleId=10005183|title=Погромы}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.antisemitism.org.il/rus/A%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%BC|title=CFCA – The Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism|access-date=2012-12-13|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101204072040/http://www.antisemitism.org.il/rus/A%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%BC|archive-date=2010-12-04|url-status=dead}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://jhist.org/lessons9/balt.htm |title=История евреев Российской империи. Погром в Балте |access-date=December 13, 2012 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120321041937/http://jhist.org/lessons9/balt.htm |archive-date=March 21, 2012 }}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://kishinev.moldline.net/pogrom.html|title=Virtual Kishivev – 1903 Pogrom}}</ref> However, that view was challenged by Hans Rogger, I. Michael Aronson and ], who were unable to find such sanction to be documented in the state archives.<ref>John Klier, Christians and Jews and the "dialogue of violence" in late Imperial Russia, 2002, p. 167, "Despite the most active search of the authorities, outside agitators and instigators were never found. The urban intelligentsia was rarely involved.... All contemporary descriptions of the pogroms depict them as anarchistic rebels, rather than ideological protests. For most of the participants, it seems the pogroms were a form of carnival, of role-reversal, of 'the world turned upside down'. Questions of status and respect seem to have played a role in the pogroms, where the participants (predominantly peasants, town proletariat, vagrants, migrant workers, demobilized soldiers and other unsettled elements) wanted to put the Jews 'in their place'."</ref><ref>Sonja Weinberg, , ], 2010, p. 210.</ref>

However, the ] made them possible. Official persecution and harassment of Jews influenced numerous antisemites to presume that their violence was legitimate. That sentiment was reinforced by the active participation of a few major and many minor officials in fomenting attacks and by the reluctance of the government to stop the pogroms and to punish those responsible for them.

==Influence==
The pogroms of the 1880s caused a worldwide outcry and, along with harsh laws, propelled mass ] emigration from Russia. Among the passed antisemitic laws were the 1882 ], which prohibited Jews from moving into villages, allegedly in an attempt to address the cause of the pogroms (when, in fact, the pogroms were caused by an entirely different reason). The majority of the Russian High Commission for the Review of Jewish Legislation (1883–1888) actually noted the fact that almost all of the pogroms had begun in the towns and attempted to abolish the laws. However, the minority of the High Commission ignored the facts and backed the laws.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia|last=Aronson|first=Michael|publisher=Wiley-Blackwell|location=New Jersey}}</ref> Two million Jews fled the ] between 1880 and 1920, with many going to the ] and ].<ref>{{cite journal|last=Lewin|first=Rhoda G.|url=http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/46/v46i07p258-273.pdf|title=Stereotype and reality in the Jewish immigrant experience in Minneapolis|journal=Minnesota History|publisher=Minnesota Historical Society|volume=46|issue=7|page=259|date=1979|access-date=August 12, 2018}}</ref> In response, the United Kingdom introduced the ], which introduced immigration controls for the first time, a main objective being to reduce the influx of Eastern European Jews.<ref name="C4">David Rosenberg, '' on the ] website</ref>

In reaction to the pogroms and other oppressions of the Tsarist period, Jews increasingly became politically active. Jewish participation in The ], colloquially known as the Bund, and in the ] movements, was directly influenced by the pogroms. Similarly, the organization of Jewish self-defense leagues, which stopped the pogromists in certain areas during the ], such as ], led to a strong embrace of ], especially by ].

==Cultural references==
In 1903, Hebrew poet ] wrote the poem '']''<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.history.umd.edu/Faculty/BCooperman/NewCity/Slaughter.html|title=In the City of Slaughter}}</ref> in response to the ].

]'s '']'' depicts Jews fleeing a pogrom 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 ]. The experience of a Russian Jew is also depicted in ]'s '']''.

A pogrom is one of the central events in the musical play '']'', which is adapted from Russian author ]'s ] stories. Aleichem writes about the pogroms in a story called "Lekh-Lekho".<ref>Sholem Aleichem. ''Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories''. Schocken Books, Inc: 1987. p. 116–131.</ref> The famous Broadway musical and film ''Fiddler on the Roof'' showed the cruelty of the Russian pogroms on the Jews in the fictional ] in the early 20th century.

In the adult animated musical drama film '']'', set during Imperial Russia during the late 1890s, a rabbi's wife and her young son Zalmie escape to America while the rabbi is killed by the Cossacks.

In the animated film '']'', set during and after the 1880s pogroms, Fievel and his family's village is destroyed by a pogrom. (Fievel and his family are mice, and their Cossack attackers are cats.)

The novel ''The Sacrifice'' by ] also deals with a family that is displaced after a pogrom in their home country and who emigrate to Canada after losing two sons to the riot and barely surviving themselves. The loss and murder of the sons haunts the entire story.

] gives graphic descriptions of the Russian pogroms in Reflections on Religion, Part 3, published in 1906.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://my.auburnjournal.com/detail/104213.html?content_source%3D%26category_id%3D32%26search_filter%3D%26user_id%3D%26event_mode%3D%26event_ts_from%3D%26event_ts_to%3D%26list_type%3Dmost_viewed%26order_by%3D%26order_sort%3D%26content_class%3D2%26sub_type%3Dblogs%26town_id%3D |title=Mark Twain, Reflections on Religion – Auburn Journal |access-date=November 26, 2011 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120405175300/http://my.auburnjournal.com/detail/104213.html?content_source=&category_id=32&search_filter=&user_id=&event_mode=&event_ts_from=&event_ts_to=&list_type=most_viewed&order_by=&order_sort=&content_class=2&sub_type=blogs&town_id= |archive-date=April 5, 2012 }} Reflections on Religion</ref>

] describes the early history of his mother, a Jew in the Russia of ], in the biographical 'Anna and her Orchestra'. He describes the raids by Cossacks on Jewish quarters and the eventual retribution inflicted by Anna's father and brothers on the Cossacks who murdered and burnt homes at the behest of the tsar.

In ]'s novel '']'', set in Tsarist Russia around 1911, a Russian-Jewish handyman, Yakov Bog, is wrongly imprisoned for a most unlikely crime. It was later made into a ] directed by ] with a screenplay by ].

] recounts a pogrom he experienced as a child in ], ca. 1905, in ''The Story of My Dovecote''. He describes another pogrom against travelers on a train in early 1918 in the short story "The Way".


==See also== ==See also==
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
** ]
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* ]
* ]
* ]
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* ]
* ] * ]
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==References== ==References==
{{Reflist}} {{Reflist|30em}}

==Further reading==
* Arnold, Richard. ''Russian Nationalism and Ethnic Violence: Symbolic violence, lynching, pogrom, and massacre'' (Routledge, 2016).
* Aronson, I. Michael. ''Troubled waters: Origins of the 1881 anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia'' (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990).
*Löwy, Bella. “The Russian Jews. Extermination or Emancipation?” The Jewish Quarterly Review 6, no. 3 (1894): 533–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/1450058.
* Gerasimov, Ilya V. "Anti-Jewish Violence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History." ''Ab Imperio'' 2012.3 (2012): 396–412.
* Goldstein, Yossi. "The impact of Russian terrorism in Kishinev on the Zionist movement and the Jewish intelligentsia." ''Terrorism and Political Violence'' 25.4 (2013): 587–596.
* Grosfeld, Irena, Seyhun Orcan Sakalli, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. "Middleman minorities and ethnic violence: anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian empire." ''Review of Economic Studies'' 87.1 (2020): 289–342.
* Humphrey, Caroline. "Odessa: Pogroms in a cosmopolitan city." in ''Post-Cosmopolitan Cities: Explorations of Urban Coexistence'' (2012): 17–64.
* Judge, Edward H. ''Easter in Kishinev: anatomy of a pogrom'' (NYU Press, 1995).
* Klier, John Doyle. ''Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882'' (2014).
* Penkower, Monty Noam. "The Kishinev pogrom of 1903: A turning point in Jewish history." ''Modern Judaism'' 24.3 (2004): 187–225.
* Schoenberg, Philip Ernest. "The American Reaction to the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903." ''American Jewish Historical Quarterly'' 63.3 (1974): 262–283.
* Staliūnas, Darius. "Anti-Jewish disturbances in the north-western provinces in the early 1880s." ''East European Jewish Affairs'' 34.2 (2004): 119–138.
* Weinberg, Robert. "Workers, pogroms, and the 1905 revolution in Odessa." ''Russian Review'' 46.1 (1987): 53–75.
* Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina, Irena Grosfeld, and Seyhun Orcan Sakalli. "Middleman Minorities and Ethnic Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire." (2018).

===Historiography===
* Budnitskii, Oleg. "Jews, Pogroms, and the White Movement: A Historiographical Critique." ''Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History'' 2.4 (2001): 1–23.
* Dekel-Chen, Jonathan, et al., eds. ''Anti-Jewish violence: rethinking the pogrom in East European history'' (Indiana UP, 2010).
* Karlip, Joshua M. "Between martyrology and historiography: Elias Tcherikower and the making of a pogrom historian." ''East European Jewish Affairs'' 38.3 (2008): 257–280.
* Klier, John Doyle, and Shlomo Lambroza, eds. ''Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History'' (2004).
* Weinberg, Robert. "Visualizing pogroms in Russian history." ''Jewish History'' (1998): 71–92.
* Zipperstein, Steven J. ''Pogrom: Kishinev and the tilt of history'' (Liveright, 2018).


==External links== ==External links==
* ]'s speech: About Anti-Jewish Pogroms (], {{Audio|Lenin - Anti-Jewish Pogroms.ogg|record}}) * ]'s speech: About Anti-Jewish Pogroms (, {{Audio|Lenin - Anti-Jewish Pogroms.ogg|record}})
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Latest revision as of 17:17, 20 October 2024

Antisemitic riots in Imperial Russia
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Pogroms in the Russian Empire (Russian: Еврейские погромы в Российской империи) were large-scale, targeted, and repeated anti-Jewish rioting that began in the 19th century. Pogroms began to occur after Imperial Russia, which previously had very few Jews, acquired territories with large Jewish populations from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire from 1772 to 1815. These territories were designated "the Pale of Settlement" by the Imperial Russian government, within which Jews were reluctantly permitted to live. The Pale of Settlement primarily included the territories of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Bessarabia (modern Moldova), Lithuania and Crimea. Jews were forbidden from moving to other parts of European Russia (including Finland), unless they converted from Judaism or obtained a university diploma or first guild merchant status. Migration to the Caucasus, Siberia, the Far East or Central Asia was not restricted.

1821

The 1821 Odessa pogroms are sometimes considered the first pogroms. After the execution of the Greek Orthodox patriarch, Gregory V, in Constantinople, 14 Jews were killed in response. The initiators of the 1821 pogroms were the local Greeks, who used to have a substantial diaspora in the port cities of what was known as Novorossiya.

1881–1882

1881 pogrom in Kiev

The use of the term "pogrom" became common in the English language after a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept through south-western Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine and Poland) from 1881 to 1882; when more than 200 anti-Jewish events occurred in the Russian Empire, the most notable of them were pogroms which occurred in Kiev, Warsaw and Odessa. They changed perceptions among Russian Jews and indirectly gave a significant boost to the early Zionist movement.

To circumvent censorship, these pogroms were referred to in the Jewish press as the "Storms in the South" or "Storms in the Negev" (Hebrew: הסופות בנגב, Sufot BaNegev). The names are a reference to the prophecy in Isaiah 21:1. Variants of the translation of the prophecy: "...As storms in the South pass through, So it comes from the desert, from a terrible land." or: "Like whirlwinds sweeping through the Negev, an invader comes from the desert, from a land of terror", and so on, with "Negev" meaning "South" in Biblical Hebrew and the pogroms in question happening in the south (south-west) of the European part of the Russian Empire.

The event which triggered the pogroms was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on 13 March , 1881, for which some blamed "agents of foreign influence," implying that Jews committed it. One of the conspirators was of Jewish origins, and the importance of her role in the assassination was greatly exaggerated during the pogroms that followed. Another conspirator was baselessly rumored to be Jewish. The extent to which the Russian press was responsible for encouraging perceptions of the assassination as a Jewish act has been disputed.

Local economic conditions, such as debt owed to Jewish moneylenders, 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. Russia's industrialization caused Russians to be moving into and out of major cities. People trying to escape the big cities carried their antisemitic values with them, spread the ideas throughout Russia, and caused more pogroms in different regions of Russia. That has been argued to have been actually more important than rumors of Jewish responsibility for the death of the Tsar. Those rumors, however, were clearly of some importance, if only as a trigger, and they drew upon a small kernel of truth: one of the close associates of the assassins, Hesya Helfman, was born into a Jewish home. The fact that the other assassins were all atheists and that the wider Jewish community had nothing to do with the assassination had little impact on the spread of such antisemitic rumors, and the assassination inspired retaliatory attacks on Jewish communities. During these pogroms, thousands of Jewish homes were destroyed; many families were reduced to poverty and large numbers of men, women and children were injured in 166 towns in the south-western provinces of the Empire, such as Ukraine.

There also was a large pogrom on the night of 15–16 April 1881 (the day of Eastern Orthodox Easter) in the city of Yelizavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi). On 17 April, the Army units were dispatched and were forced to use firearms to extinguish the riot. However, that only incited the whole situation in the region and a week later series of pogroms rolled through parts of the Kherson Governorate.

On 26 April 1881, an even bigger disorder engulfed the city of Kiev. The Kiev pogrom of 1881 is considered the worst one that took place in 1881. The pogroms of 1881 did not stop then. They continued on through the summer, spreading across a big territory of modern-day Ukraine: (Podolia Governorate, Volyn Governorate, Chernigov Governorate, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, and others). During these pogroms the first local Jewish self-defense organizations started to form—the most prominent one in Odessa, which was organized by the Jewish students of the Novorossiysk University.

For decades after the 1881 pogroms, many government officials held the antisemitic belief that Jews in villages were more dangerous than Jews who lived in towns. The Minister of the Interior Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev rejected the theory that pogroms were caused by revolutionary socialists, and instead he adopted the idea that they were a protest by the rural population against Jewish exploitation. With this idea in mind, he promulgated the notion that pogroms had spread from villages to towns. Historians today recognize that although rural peasantry did largely participate in the pogrom violence, pogroms began in the towns and spread to the villages.

The new Tsar Alexander III initially blamed revolutionaries and the Jews themselves for the riots and in May 1882 issued the May Laws, a series of harsh restrictions on Jews.

The pogroms continued for more than three years and were thought to have benefited from at least the tacit support of the authorities, although there were also attempts by the Russian government to end the rioting.

The pogroms and the official reaction to them led many Russian Jews to reassess their perceptions of their status within the Russian Empire, and so led to significant Jewish emigration, mostly to the United States.

Casualties

At least 40 Jews were killed during pogroms between April and December 1881.

British reaction

The leaders of the Jewish community in London were slow to speak out. It was only after Louisa Goldsmid's support following leadership from an anonymous writer named "Juriscontalus" and the editor of The Jewish Chronicle that action was taken in 1881. Public meetings were held across the country and Jewish and Christian leaders in Britain spoke out against the atrocities.

1903–1906

Photo believed to show the victims, mostly Jewish children, of a 1905 pogrom in Yekaterinoslav (today's Dnipro)

A much bloodier wave of pogroms broke out from 1903 to 1906, leaving an estimated 2,000 Jews dead and many more wounded, as the Jews took to arms to defend their families and property from the attackers. Particularly, the 1905 pogrom stands as one of the most severe incidents of anti-Jewish violence in Russia at the time, both in terms of property damage and human casualties. In comparison, the pogrom wave that occurred between 1881 and 1882 resulted in fewer fatalities. According to police records in Odessa, a minimum of 400 Jews and 100 non-Jews lost their lives, while around 300 individuals, predominantly Jewish, were injured. Additionally, an estimated 1,632 residential and commercial properties owned by Jews sustained damage. These numbers are considered by some to be conservative estimates, particularly regarding the number of injured individuals. The violence against the Jewish community was extreme, and involved acts such as physical assault and other forms of harm against men, women, and children who were not engaged in opposition to the government at the time. Reports also indicate instances of individuals being thrown from windows, sexual assault against women across age groups, and fatal violence against infants witnessed by their parents.

The New York Times described the First Kishinev pogrom of Easter, 1903:

The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia , 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 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babies 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.

Home at last by Moshe Maimon. An invalid Jewish soldier who, having returned home from the Russo-Japanese War, finds the bodies of his family who had died at the hands of pogromists. A rabbi is saying Kaddish for a member of the household who was killed.

This series of pogroms affected 64 towns (including Odessa, Yekaterinoslav, Kiev, Kishinev, Simferopol, Romny, Kremenchug, Nikolayev, Chernigov, Kamenets-Podolski, Yelizavetgrad), and 626 small towns (Russian: городок) and villages, mostly in Ukraine and Bessarabia.

Historians such as Edward Radzinsky suggest that many pogroms were incited by authorities and supported by the Tsarist Russian secret police (the Okhrana), even if some happened spontaneously. The perpetrators who were prosecuted usually received clemency by Tsar's decree.

Even outside of these main outbreaks, pogroms remained common; there was an anti-Jewish riot in Odessa in 1905 in which thousands of Jews were killed.

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 July 20, 1905, in Yekaterinoslav (present-day Dnipro, Ukraine), was stopped by the Jewish self-defense group. One man in the group was killed.

On July 31, 1905, 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.

At a pogrom in Kerch in Crimea on 31 July 1905, the mayor ordered the police to fire at the self-defence group, and two fighters were killed (one of them, P. Kirilenko, was a Ukrainian who joined the Jewish defence group). The pogrom was conducted by the port workers 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 in present-day 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.

Postcard depicting pogromists celebrating the murder and mutilation of Jews with shots of vodka. It was commonly believed that alcohol fueled the violence that characterized the killing of men, women, and children.

Eyewitness account from local milkmen described the 1905 Odessa pogrom as follows:

The three previous days they had been in hiding. By Friday afternoon the pogrom was wrapping up. Friday night their neighbors, who were Russian, assured them that they could go home. They went and sat down for tea. And those same neighbors, it would seem, quietly let the killers in, since they never heard them knocking in the hallway. Suddenly, there was a knock on the door and strangers’ footsteps. The tea drinkers all hid: the servant by himself, the father by himself, the mother and daughter together. The killers found the mother and daughter first. They hit the mother in the head with an axe and cut the daughter’s arm. Their screams brought the father running, and he was taken down on the spot. The wounded mother was later taken to the hospital, while the daughter got off lightly.

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 Bialystok (ca. 80 dead), and August — in Siedlce (ca. 30 dead). The Russian secret police and the military personnel organized the massacres.

In many of these incidents the most prominent participants were railway workers, industrial workers, and small shopkeepers and craftsmen, and (if the town was a river port (e.g. Dnipro) or a seaport (e.g. Kerch)), waterfront workmen; peasants joined in mainly to loot.

Causes

Historian Bob Weinberg traces the roots of the pogrom to the complex social and political setting of Russia during that period. He contends that part of the explanation for the brutality lies in the realm of identity politics. For some individuals involved, their actions were not just acts of violence but also expressions of their Orthodox Christian beliefs and loyalty to the Russian monarch. The sense of eroding authority and changes in political structures seemed to amplify this sentiment, as exemplified by events like the vandalization of Tsar Nicholas II's portraits, which stirred animosity and rallied those resistant to change.

Weinberg further argues that the pogroms functioned as a safety valve for defusing mounting societal discontent that could have otherwise led to revolutionary uprisings. He posits that the Jewish community was selected as a strategic scapegoat to redirect popular frustrations away from opposing the autocratic regime and focus them on an internal marginalized group instead. This tactic was not an innovation of the 1905 Odessa pogroms but had historical precedents, such as the pogrom wave of 1881 that similarly victimized Jewish communities.

Other scholars have stressed economic factors in explaining the occurrence of pogroms. In 2020, three economists published an article in which they argued that the pogroms of 1881-1882, 1903-1906 and the Pogroms during the Russian Civil War were caused by Russia's economic situation. Their study of these pogroms led them to the conclusion that pogroms occurred out of non-Jews' economic discontent. This was because, they argued, Jews who traded non-Jewish peasants' grain at markets were blamed for poor returns, resulting from downturns in the Russian economy, by the Russian peasants who sold them such grain.

Response of the United States

Herman S. Shapiro. "Kishinever shekhita, elegie" (Kishinev Massacre Elegy). Musical composition in New York attacking the Kishinev pogrom, 1904.

The pogroms increasingly angered American opinion. The well-established German Jews in the United States, although they were not directly affected by the Russian pogroms, were well organized and convinced Washington to support the cause of Jews in Russia. Led by Oscar Straus, Jacob Schiff, Mayer Sulzberger, and Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise, they organized protest meetings, issued publicity, and met with President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of State John Hay. Stuart E. Knee reports that in April, 1903, Roosevelt received 363 addresses, 107 letters and 24 petitions signed by thousands of Christians, public and church leaders alike—all calling on the Tsar to stop the persecution of Jews. Public rallies were held in scores of cities, topped off at Carnegie Hall in New York in May. The Tsar retreated a bit and fired one local official after the Kishinev pogrom, which Roosevelt had explicitly denounced. But Roosevelt was mediating the war between Russia and Japan at the time and could not publicly take sides. Therefore, Secretary Hay took the initiative in Washington. Finally, Roosevelt forwarded a petition to the Tsar, who rejected it claiming that the Jews themselves were at fault. Roosevelt won Jewish support in his 1904 landslide reelection. The pogroms continued, as hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Russia, most heading for London or New York. With American public opinion turning against Russia, Congress officially denounced its policies in 1906. Roosevelt kept a low profile, as did his new Secretary of State Elihu Root. However, in late 1906 Roosevelt did appoint the first Jew to the cabinet, naming Oscar Straus as his Secretary of Commerce and Labor.

Other prominent Americans who condemned Russia's actions included Cardinal James Gibbons.

Organization

The pogroms are generally thought to have been organized or at least condoned by the authorities. However, that view was challenged by Hans Rogger, I. Michael Aronson and John Klier, who were unable to find such sanction to be documented in the state archives.

However, the antisemitic policy that was carried out from 1881 to 1917 made them possible. Official persecution and harassment of Jews influenced numerous antisemites to presume that their violence was legitimate. That sentiment was reinforced by the active participation of a few major and many minor officials in fomenting attacks and by the reluctance of the government to stop the pogroms and to punish those responsible for them.

Influence

The pogroms of the 1880s caused a worldwide outcry and, along with harsh laws, propelled mass Jewish emigration from Russia. Among the passed antisemitic laws were the 1882 May Laws, which prohibited Jews from moving into villages, allegedly in an attempt to address the cause of the pogroms (when, in fact, the pogroms were caused by an entirely different reason). The majority of the Russian High Commission for the Review of Jewish Legislation (1883–1888) actually noted the fact that almost all of the pogroms had begun in the towns and attempted to abolish the laws. However, the minority of the High Commission ignored the facts and backed the laws. Two million Jews fled the Russian Empire between 1880 and 1920, with many going to the United Kingdom and United States. In response, the United Kingdom introduced the Aliens Act 1905, which introduced immigration controls for the first time, a main objective being to reduce the influx of Eastern European Jews.

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

Cultural references

In 1903, Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik wrote the poem In the City of Slaughter in response to the Kishinev pogrom.

Elie Wiesel's The Trial of God depicts Jews fleeing a pogrom 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. The experience of a Russian Jew is also depicted in Elie Wiesel's The Testament.

A pogrom is one of the central events in the musical play Fiddler on the Roof, which is adapted from Russian author Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman stories. Aleichem writes about the pogroms in a story called "Lekh-Lekho". The famous Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof showed the cruelty of the Russian pogroms on the Jews in the fictional Anatevka in the early 20th century.

In the adult animated musical drama film American Pop, set during Imperial Russia during the late 1890s, a rabbi's wife and her young son Zalmie escape to America while the rabbi is killed by the Cossacks.

In the animated film An American Tail, set during and after the 1880s pogroms, Fievel and his family's village is destroyed by a pogrom. (Fievel and his family are mice, and their Cossack attackers are cats.)

The novel The Sacrifice by Adele Wiseman also deals with a family that is displaced after a pogrom in their home country and who emigrate to Canada after losing two sons to the riot and barely surviving themselves. The loss and murder of the sons haunts the entire story.

Mark Twain gives graphic descriptions of the Russian pogroms in Reflections on Religion, Part 3, published in 1906.

Joseph Joffo describes the early history of his mother, a Jew in the Russia of Tsar Nicholas II, in the biographical 'Anna and her Orchestra'. He describes the raids by Cossacks on Jewish quarters and the eventual retribution inflicted by Anna's father and brothers on the Cossacks who murdered and burnt homes at the behest of the tsar.

In Bernard Malamud's novel The Fixer, set in Tsarist Russia around 1911, a Russian-Jewish handyman, Yakov Bog, is wrongly imprisoned for a most unlikely crime. It was later made into a film directed by John Frankenheimer with a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo.

Isaac Babel recounts a pogrom he experienced as a child in Mykolaiv, ca. 1905, in The Story of My Dovecote. He describes another pogrom against travelers on a train in early 1918 in the short story "The Way".

See also

References

  1. Odessa pogroms Archived January 21, 2007, at the Wayback Machine at the Center of Jewish Self-Education "Moria".
  2. Pogrom (Virtual Jewish Encyclopedia) (in Russian)
  3. (in Polish) Pogrom Archived February 6, 2010, at the Wayback Machine, based on Alina Cała, Hanna Węgrzynek, Gabriela Zalewska, Historia i kultura Żydów polskich. Słownik, WSiP.
  4. Leon Pinsker (1882) Autoemancipation
  5. Yitzhak Maor, The "Sufot Banegev" as a Factor in the Rise of Nationalism among the Jewish Intelligentsia / "הסופות בנגב" כגורם להתעוררות התודעה הלאומית בקרב המשכילים היהודיים, 1981 JSTOR 23526296
  6. Chapter 13 ‘‘Storms in the South,’’ 1881–1882 (doi:10.9783/9780812200812.143) from the book: Israel Bartal (Translated by Chaya Naor), The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881, 2005
  7. The Diary of Rabbi Rozenblum, Section "The Pogroms 1882 -- Sufot BaNegev"
  8. Isaiah 21:1 at Biblehub
  9. The Jewish Chronicle, May 6, 1881, cited in Benjamin Blech, Eyewitness to Jewish History
  10. Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti newspaper №65, March 8 (20), 1881
  11. Arthur Morius Francis, Nihilism: Philosophy of Nothingness (2015), p. 64.
  12. Stephen M Berk, Year of Crisis, Year of Hope: Russian Jewry and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (Greenwood, 1985), pp. 54–55.
  13. Aronson, Michael. Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
  14. Aronson, Michael. Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
  15. ^ I. Michael Aronson, "Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia", Russian Review, Vol. 39, No. 1. (Jan., 1980), pp. 18–31
  16. Pogrom Virtual Jewish Encyclopedia (in Russian)
  17. Aronson, Michael. Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
  18. "Russian Jewish Horrors; A Nine-Months' Record of Rapine, Murder, and Outrage". The New York Times. January 28, 1882. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  19. C. S. Monaco (2013). The Rise of Modern Jewish Politics: Extraordinary Movement. Routledge. pp. 148–. ISBN 978-0-415-65983-3.
  20. Weinberg, Robert. The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps. 1993, p. 164.
  21. Avrutin, Eugene M., and Elissa Bemporad, eds. Pogroms: A Documentary History. Oxford University Press, 2021, p. 90.
  22. Hilary L. Rubinstein, Daniel C. Cohn-Sherbok, Abraham J. Edelheit, William D. Rubinstein, The Jews in the Modern World, Oxford University Press, 2002.
  23. "Jewish Massacre Denounced", in The New York Times, 1903 April 28
  24. Nicholas II. Life and Death by Edward Radzinsky (Russian ed., 1997) p. 89. According to Radzinsky, Sergei Witte (appointed Prime Minister 1905) remarked in his Memoirs that he found that some proclamations inciting pogroms were printed and distributed by Police.
  25. Radzinsky, Edvard (2011-03-30). The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. pp. 69, 77, 79. ISBN 978-0-307-75462-2. To the tsar, the pogroms organized by the police seemed like a holy outburst of popular indignation against the revolutionaries
  26. "декабрь 1907 – Газетные "старости"(Архив)".
  27. Robert Weinberg, "The Pogrom of 1905 in Odessa: A Case Study" in Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds. (Cambridge,1992): 248–89
  28. Kerch
  29. Odesskii pogrom i samooborona (Paris: Impremerie Ch. Noblet, 1906), 1718, 31–32. Translated from the Russian by Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya.
  30. Pogroms
  31. Avrutin, Eugene M., and Elissa Bemporad, eds. Pogroms: A Documentary History. Oxford University Press, 2021. pp 90-91.
  32. Irena Grosfeld, Seyhun Orcan Sakalli, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, "Middlemen Minorities and Ethnic Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire", Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 87 (2020), pp. 289-342.
  33. Taylor Stults, "Roosevelt, Russian Persecution of Jews, and American Public Opinion" Jewish Social Studies (1971) 33#3 pp 13–22.
  34. Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920 (1995) pp 200–206, 302–303.
  35. Alan J. Ward, "Immigrant minority 'diplomacy': American Jews and Russia, 1901–1912." Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies 9 (1964): 7–23.
  36. Stuart E. Knee, "The Diplomacy of Neutrality: Theodore Roosevelt and the Russian Pogroms of 1903–1906," Presidential Studies Quarterly (1989), 19#1 pp. 71–78.
  37. Ann E. Healy, "Tsarist Anti-Semitism and Russian-American Relations." Slavic Review 42.3 (1983): 408–425.
  38. Rosenau, William (1928). "Cardinal Gibbons and His Attitude Toward Jewish Problems". Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (31): 219–224. JSTOR 43059497.
  39. "Погромы".
  40. "CFCA – The Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism". Archived from the original on 2010-12-04. Retrieved 2012-12-13.
  41. "История евреев Российской империи. Погром в Балте". Archived from the original on March 21, 2012. Retrieved December 13, 2012.
  42. "Virtual Kishivev – 1903 Pogrom".
  43. John Klier, Christians and Jews and the "dialogue of violence" in late Imperial Russia, 2002, p. 167, "Despite the most active search of the authorities, outside agitators and instigators were never found. The urban intelligentsia was rarely involved.... All contemporary descriptions of the pogroms depict them as anarchistic rebels, rather than ideological protests. For most of the participants, it seems the pogroms were a form of carnival, of role-reversal, of 'the world turned upside down'. Questions of status and respect seem to have played a role in the pogroms, where the participants (predominantly peasants, town proletariat, vagrants, migrant workers, demobilized soldiers and other unsettled elements) wanted to put the Jews 'in their place'."
  44. Sonja Weinberg, Pogroms and Riots: German Press Responses to Anti-Jewish Violence in Germany and Russia (1881–1882), Peter Lang, 2010, p. 210.
  45. Aronson, Michael. Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
  46. Lewin, Rhoda G. (1979). "Stereotype and reality in the Jewish immigrant experience in Minneapolis" (PDF). Minnesota History. 46 (7). Minnesota Historical Society: 259. Retrieved August 12, 2018.
  47. David Rosenberg, 'Immigration' on the Channel 4 website
  48. "In the City of Slaughter".
  49. Sholem Aleichem. Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories. Schocken Books, Inc: 1987. p. 116–131.
  50. "Mark Twain, Reflections on Religion – Auburn Journal". Archived from the original on April 5, 2012. Retrieved November 26, 2011. Reflections on Religion

Further reading

  • Arnold, Richard. Russian Nationalism and Ethnic Violence: Symbolic violence, lynching, pogrom, and massacre (Routledge, 2016).
  • Aronson, I. Michael. Troubled waters: Origins of the 1881 anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990).
  • Löwy, Bella. “The Russian Jews. Extermination or Emancipation?” The Jewish Quarterly Review 6, no. 3 (1894): 533–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/1450058.
  • Gerasimov, Ilya V. "Anti-Jewish Violence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History." Ab Imperio 2012.3 (2012): 396–412. online
  • Goldstein, Yossi. "The impact of Russian terrorism in Kishinev on the Zionist movement and the Jewish intelligentsia." Terrorism and Political Violence 25.4 (2013): 587–596.
  • Grosfeld, Irena, Seyhun Orcan Sakalli, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. "Middleman minorities and ethnic violence: anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian empire." Review of Economic Studies 87.1 (2020): 289–342. online
  • Humphrey, Caroline. "Odessa: Pogroms in a cosmopolitan city." in Post-Cosmopolitan Cities: Explorations of Urban Coexistence (2012): 17–64.
  • Judge, Edward H. Easter in Kishinev: anatomy of a pogrom (NYU Press, 1995).
  • Klier, John Doyle. Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (2014).
  • Penkower, Monty Noam. "The Kishinev pogrom of 1903: A turning point in Jewish history." Modern Judaism 24.3 (2004): 187–225. online
  • Schoenberg, Philip Ernest. "The American Reaction to the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903." American Jewish Historical Quarterly 63.3 (1974): 262–283. online
  • Staliūnas, Darius. "Anti-Jewish disturbances in the north-western provinces in the early 1880s." East European Jewish Affairs 34.2 (2004): 119–138.
  • Weinberg, Robert. "Workers, pogroms, and the 1905 revolution in Odessa." Russian Review 46.1 (1987): 53–75. online
  • Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina, Irena Grosfeld, and Seyhun Orcan Sakalli. "Middleman Minorities and Ethnic Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire." (2018). online

Historiography

  • Budnitskii, Oleg. "Jews, Pogroms, and the White Movement: A Historiographical Critique." Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2.4 (2001): 1–23.
  • Dekel-Chen, Jonathan, et al., eds. Anti-Jewish violence: rethinking the pogrom in East European history (Indiana UP, 2010).
  • Karlip, Joshua M. "Between martyrology and historiography: Elias Tcherikower and the making of a pogrom historian." East European Jewish Affairs 38.3 (2008): 257–280.
  • Klier, John Doyle, and Shlomo Lambroza, eds. Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (2004).
  • Weinberg, Robert. "Visualizing pogroms in Russian history." Jewish History (1998): 71–92. online
  • Zipperstein, Steven J. Pogrom: Kishinev and the tilt of history (Liveright, 2018). online

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