Pogrom

For the racehorse, see Pogrom (horse). For the volcano in the Aleutian Islands, see Pogromni Volcano.

Pogrom
Plundering the Judengasse, a Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, on 22 August 1614
Target	Predominantly Jews Additionally other ethnic groups

A pogrom (Russian: погро́м) is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement). Similar attacks against Jews which also occurred at other times and places retrospectively became known as pogroms. Sometimes the word is used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.

Significant pogroms in the Russian Empire included the Odessa pogroms, Warsaw pogrom (1881), Kishinev pogrom (1903), Kiev pogrom (1905), and Białystok pogrom (1906). After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, several pogroms occurred amidst the power struggles in Eastern Europe, including the Lwów pogrom (1918) and Kiev Pogroms (1919).

The most significant pogrom which occurred in Nazi Germany was the 1938 Kristallnacht. At least 91 Jews were killed, a further thirty thousand arrested and subsequently incarcerated in concentration camps, a thousand synagogues burned, and over seven thousand Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged. Notorious pogroms of World War II included the 1941 Farhud in Iraq, the July 1941 Iași pogrom in Romania – in which over 13,200 Jews were killed – as well as the Jedwabne pogrom in German-occupied Poland. Post-World War II pogroms included the 1945 Tripoli pogrom, the 1946 Kielce pogrom and the 1947 Aleppo pogrom.

Etymology

Main article: Definitions of pogrom

First recorded in English in 1882, the Russian word pogrom (погро́м, pronounced [pɐˈgrom]) is derived from the common prefix po- (по-) and the verb gromit' (громи́ть, Russian pronunciation: [grɐˈmʲitʲ]) meaning 'to destroy, wreak havoc, demolish violently'. The noun pogrom, which has a relatively short history, is used in English and many other languages as a loanword, possibly borrowed from Yiddish (where the word takes the form פאָגראָם). Its modern widespread circulation began with the antisemitic violence in the Russian Empire in 1881–1883.

The Hep-Hep riots in Würzburg, 1819. On the left, two peasant women are assaulting a Jewish man with pitchfork and broom. On the right, a man wearing spectacles, tails and a six-button waistcoat, "perhaps a pharmacist or a schoolteacher," holds a Jewish man by the throat and is about to club him with a truncheon. The houses are being looted. A contemporary engraving by Johann Michael Voltz.

Historical background

The first recorded anti-Jewish riots took place in Alexandria in the year 38 CE, followed by the more known riot of 66 CE. Other notable events took place in Europe during the Middle Ages. Jewish communities were targeted in the Black Death Jewish persecutions of 1348–1350, in Toulon in 1348, the Massacre of 1391 in Barcelona as well as in other Catalan cities, during the Erfurt massacre (1349), the Basel massacre, massacres in Aragon and in Flanders, as well as the "Valentine's Day" Strasbourg massacre of 1349. Some 510 Jewish communities were destroyed during this period, extending further to the Brussels massacre of 1370. On Holy Saturday of 1389, a pogrom began in Prague that led to the burning of the Jewish quarter, the killing of many Jews, and the suicide of many Jews trapped in the main synagogue; the number of dead was estimated at 400–500 men, women and children.

The brutal murders of Jews and Poles occurred during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648–1657 in present-day Ukraine. Modern historians give estimates of the scale of the murders by Khmelnytsky's Cossacks ranging between 40,000 and 100,000 men, women and children, or perhaps many more.

The outbreak of violence against Jews (Hep-Hep riots) occurred at the beginning of the 19th century in reaction to Jewish emancipation in the German Confederation.

Russian Empire

Further information: Pogroms in the Russian Empire

Victims of a pogrom in Kishinev, Bessarabia, 1903

The Russian Empire, which previously had very few Jews, acquired territories in the Russian Partition that contained large Jewish populations, during the military partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795. In conquered territories, a new political entity called the Pale of Settlement was formed in 1791 by Catherine the Great. Most Jews from the former Commonwealth were allowed to reside only within the Pale, including families expelled by royal decree from St. Petersburg, Moscow and other large Russian cities. The 1821 Odessa pogroms marked the beginning of the 19th century pogroms in Tsarist Russia; there were four more such pogroms in Odessa before the end of the century. Following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 by Narodnaya Volya, anti-Jewish events turned into a wave of over 200 pogroms by their modern definition, which lasted for several years. Jewish self-governing Kehillah were abolished by Tsar Nicholas I in 1844.

The first in 20th-century Russia was the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 in which 49 Jews were killed, hundreds wounded, 700 homes destroyed and 600 businesses pillaged. In the same year, pogroms took place in Gomel (Belarus), Smela, Feodosiya and Melitopol (Ukraine). Extreme savagery was typified by mutilations of the wounded. They were followed by the Zhitomir pogrom (with 29 killed), and the Kiev pogrom of October 1905 resulting in a massacre of approximately 100 Jews. In three years between 1903 and 1906, about 660 pogroms were recorded in Ukraine and Bessarabia; half a dozen more in Belorussia, carried out with the Russian government's complicity, but no anti-Jewish pogroms were recorded in Poland. At about that time, the Jewish Labor Bund began organizing armed self-defense units ready to shoot back, and the pogroms subsided for a number of years. According to professor Colin Tatz, between 1881 and 1920 there were 1,326 pogroms in Ukraine (see: Southwestern Krai parts of the Pale) which took the lives of 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews, leaving half a million homeless. This violence across Eastern Europe prompted a wave of Jewish migration westward that totaled about 2.5 million people.

Eastern Europe after World War I

Further information: Pogroms of the Russian Civil War

Map of pogroms in Ukraine between 1918 and 1920 per casualties

Large-scale pogroms, which began in the Russian Empire several decades earlier, intensified during the period of the Russian Civil War in the aftermath of World War I. Professor Zvi Gitelman (A Century of Ambivalence) estimated that only in 1918–1919 over 1,200 pogroms took place in Ukraine, thus amounting to the greatest slaughter of Jews in Eastern Europe since 1648.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his book Two Hundred Years Together provided additional statistics from research conducted by Nahum Gergel (1887–1931). Gergel counted 1,236 incidents of anti-Jewish violence and estimated that 887 mass pogroms occurred, the remainder being classified as "excesses" not assuming mass proportions. The Kiev pogroms of 1919, according to Gitelman, were the first of a subsequent wave of pogroms in which between 30,000 and 70,000 Jews were massacred across Ukraine; although more recent assessments put the Jewish death toll at more than 100,000. Of all the pogroms accounted for in Gergel's research:

• About 40 percent were perpetrated by the Ukrainian People's Republic forces led by Symon Petliura. The Republic issued orders condemning pogroms, but lacked authority to intervene. After May 1919 the Directory lost its role as a credible governing body; almost 75 percent of pogroms occurred between May and September of that year. Thousands of Jews were killed only for being Jewish, without any political affiliations.
• 25 percent by the Ukrainian Green Army and various Ukrainian nationalist gangs,
• 17 percent by the White Army, especially the forces of Anton Denikin,
• 8.5 percent of Gergel's total was attributed to pogroms carried out by men of the Red Army (more specifically Semyon Budenny's First Cavalry, most of whose soldiers had previously served under Denikin). These pogroms were not, however, sanctioned by the Bolshevik leadership; the high command "vigorously condemned these pogroms and disarmed the guilty regiments", and the pogroms would soon be condemned by Mikhail Kalinin in a speech made at a military parade in Ukraine.

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

On 8 August 1919, during the Polish–Soviet War, Polish troops took over Minsk in Operation Minsk. They killed 31 Jews suspected of supporting the Bolshevist movement, beat and attacked many more, looted 377 Jewish-owned shops (aided by the local civilians) and ransacked many private homes. The "Morgenthau's report of October 1919 stated that there is no question that some of the Jewish leaders exaggerated these evils." According to Elissa Bemporad, the "violence endured by the Jewish population under the Poles encouraged popular support for the Red Army, as Jewish public opinion welcomed the establishment of the Belorussian SSR."

After the First World War, during the localized armed conflicts of independence, 72 Jews were killed and 443 injured in the 1918 Lwów pogrom. The following year, pogroms were reported by the New York Tribune in several cities in the newly established Second Polish Republic.

Rest of the world

A massacre of Armenians and Assyrians in the city of Adana, Ottoman Empire, April 1909

In the early 20th century, pogroms broke out elsewhere in the world as well. In 1904 in Ireland, the Limerick boycott caused several Jewish families to leave the town. During the 1911 Tredegar riot in Wales, Jewish homes and businesses were looted and burned over a period of a week, before the British Army was called in by the then-Home Secretary Winston Churchill, who described the riot as a "pogrom".

In 1919 there was a pogrom in Argentina, during the Tragic Week. It had an added element, as it was called to attack Jews and Catalans indiscriminately. The reasons are not clear, especially considering that, in the case of Buenos Aires, the Catalan colony, established mainly in the neighborhood of Montserrat, came from the foundation of the city, but could have been the result of the influence of Spanish nationalism, which at the time described Catalans as a Semitic ethnicity.

In the north of Ireland during the early 1920s, violent riots which were aimed at the expulsion of a religious group took place. In 1920, Lisburn and Belfast saw violence related to the Irish War of Independence and partition of Ireland. On 21 July 1920 in Belfast, Protestant Loyalists marched on the Harland and Wolff shipyards and forced over 11,000 Catholic and left-wing Protestant workers from their jobs. The sectarian rioting that followed resulted in about 20 deaths in just three days. These sectarian actions are often referred to as the Belfast Pogrom. In Lisburn, County Antrim, on 23–25 August 1920 Protestant loyalist crowds looted and burned practically every Catholic business in the town and attacked Catholic homes. About 1,000 people, a third of the town's Catholics, fled Lisburn. By the end of the first six months of 1922, hundreds of people had been killed in sectarian violence in newly formed Northern Ireland. On a per capita basis, four Roman Catholics were killed for every Protestant.

In Mandatory Palestine under British administration, Jews were targeted by Arabs in the 1929 Hebron massacre and the 1929 Safed pogrom. In 1934 there were pogroms against Jews in Turkey and Algeria.

In the worst incident of anti-Jewish violence in Britain during the interwar period, the “Pogrom of Mile End”, that occurred in 1936, 200 Blackshirt youths ran amok in Stepney in the East End of London, smashing the windows of Jewish shops and homes and throwing an elderly man and young girl through a window. Though less serious, attacks on Jews were also reported in Manchester and Leeds in the north of England.

Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe

Main article: The Holocaust

Iași pogrom in Romania, June 1941

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

During World War II, Nazi German death squads encouraged local populations in German-occupied Europe to commit pogroms against Jews. Brand new battalions of Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz (trained by SD agents) were mobilized from among the German minorities.

A large number of pogroms occurred during the Holocaust at the hands of non-Germans. Perhaps the deadliest of these Holocaust-era pogroms was the Iași pogrom in Romania, perpetrated by Ion Antonescu, in which as many as 13,266 Jews were killed by Romanian citizens, police and military officials.

On 1–2 June 1941, in the two-day Farhud pogrom in Iraq, perpetrated by Rashid Ali, Yunis al-Sabawi, and the al-Futuwa youth, "rioters murdered between 150 and 180 Jews, injured 600 others, and raped an undetermined number of women. They also looted some 1,500 stores and homes". Also 300-400 non-Jewish rioters were killed in the attempt to quell the violence.

Jewish woman chased by men and youth armed with clubs during the Lviv pogroms, July 1941

In June–July 1941, encouraged by the Einsatzgruppen in the city of Lviv the Ukrainian People's Militia perpetrated two citywide pogroms in which around 6,000 Polish Jews were murdered, in retribution for alleged collaboration with the Soviet NKVD. In Lithuania, some local police led by Algirdas Klimaitis and Lithuanian partisans – consisting of LAF units reinforced by 3,600 deserters from the 29th Lithuanian Territorial Corps of the Red Army promulgated anti-Jewish pogroms in Kaunas along with occupying Nazis. On 25–26 June 1941, about 3,800 Jews were killed and synagogues and Jewish settlements burned.

During the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941, ethnic Poles burned at least 340 Jews in a barn (Institute of National Remembrance) in the presence of Nazi German Ordnungspolizei. The role of the German Einsatzgruppe B remains the subject of debate.

After World War II

After the end of World War II, a series of violent antisemitic incidents occurred against returning Jews throughout Europe, particularly in the Soviet-occupied East where Nazi propagandists had extensively promoted the notion of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy (see Anti-Jewish violence in Poland, 1944–1946 and Anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe, 1944–1946). Anti-Jewish riots also took place in Britain in 1947.

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

Usage

See also: Definitions of pogrom

According to Encyclopædia Britannica, "the term is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, [and] the first extensive pogroms followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881", and the Wiley-Blackwell Dictionary of Modern European History Since 1789 states that pogroms "were antisemitic disturbances that periodically occurred within the tsarist empire." However, the term is widely used to refer to many events which occurred prior to the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire. Historian of Russian Jewry John Klier writes in Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 that "By the twentieth century, the word 'pogrom' had become a generic term in English for all forms of collective violence directed against Jews." Abramson wrote that "in mainstream usage the word has come to imply an act of antisemitism", since while "Jews have not been the only group to suffer under this phenomenon ... historically Jews have been frequent victims of such violence."

The 1921 Tulsa race massacre, which destroyed the wealthiest black community in the United States, has been described as a pogrom.

The term is also used in reference to attacks on non-Jewish ethnic minorities, and accordingly some scholars do not include antisemitism as the defining characteristic of pogroms. Reviewing its uses in scholarly literature, historian Werner Bergmann proposes that a pogrom should be "defined as a unilateral, nongovernmental form of collective violence that is initiated by the majority population against a largely defenseless minority ethnic group, and he also states that pogroms occur when the majority expects the state to provide it with no assistance in overcoming a (perceived) threat from the minority," but he adds that in Western usage, the word's "anti-Semitic overtones" have been retained. Historian David Engel supports this view, writing that "there can be no logically or empirically compelling grounds for declaring that some particular episode does or does not merit the label [pogrom]," but he states that the majority of the incidents which are "habitually" described as pogroms took place in societies that were significantly divided by ethnicity and/or religion where the violence was committed by members of the higher-ranking group against members of a stereotyped lower-ranking group with which they expressed some complaint, and the members of the higher-ranking group justified their acts of violence by claiming that the law of the land would not be used to stop them.

There is no universally accepted set of characteristics which define the term pogrom. Klier writes that "when applied indiscriminately to events in Eastern Europe, the term can be misleading, the more so when it implies that 'pogroms' were regular events in the region and that they always shared common features." Use of the term pogrom to refer to events in 1918–19 in Polish cities including Kielce pogrom, Pinsk massacre and Lwów pogrom, was specifically avoided in the 1919 Morgenthau Report and the word "excesses" was used instead because the authors argued that the use of the term "pogrom" required a situation to be antisemitic rather than political in nature, which meant that it was inapplicable to the conditions which exist in a war zone, and media use of the term pogrom to refer to the 1991 Crown Heights riot caused public controversy. In 2008, two separate attacks in the West Bank by Israeli Jewish settlers on Palestinian Arabs were characterized as pogroms by then Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Olmert.

Werner Bergmann suggests that all such incidents have a particularly unifying characteristic: "[b]y the collective attribution of a threat, the pogrom differs from other forms of violence, such as lynchings, which are directed at individual members of a minority group, while the imbalance of power in favor of the rioters distinguishes pogroms from other forms of riots (food riots, race riots or "communal riots" between evenly matched groups); and again, the low level of organization separates them from vigilantism, terrorism, massacre and genocide".

Selected list

Template:Morefootnotesneeded This is a partial list of events for which one of the commonly accepted names includes the word "pogrom".

Inclusion in this list is based solely on evidence in multiple reliable sources that a name including the word "pogrom" is one of the accepted names for that event. A reliable source that merely describes the event as being a pogrom does not qualify the event for inclusion in this list. The word Pogrom must appear in the source as part of a name for the event.

Date	Pogrom name	Alternative name(s)	Deaths	Description
38	Alexandrian pogrom (name disputed)	Alexandrian riots		Aulus Avilius Flaccus, the Egyptian prefect of Alexandria appointed by Tiberius in 32 CE, may have encouraged the outbreak of violence; Philo wrote that Flaccus was later arrested and eventually executed for his part in this event. Scholarly research around the subject has been divided on certain points, including whether the Alexandrian Jews fought to keep their citizenship or to acquire it, whether they evaded the payment of the poll-tax or prevented any attempts to impose it on them, and whether they were safeguarding their identity against the Greeks or against the Egyptians.
1066	Granada pogrom	1066 Granada massacre	4,000 Jews	A mob stormed the royal palace in Granada, which was at that time in Muslim-ruled al-Andalus, assassinated the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred much of the Jewish population of the city.
1096	1096 pogroms	Rhineland massacres	2,000 Jews	Peasant crusaders from France and Germany during the People's Crusade, led by Peter the Hermit (and not sanctioned by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church), attacked Jewish communities in the three towns of Speyer, Worms and Mainz.
1113	Kiev pogrom (name disputed)	Kiev revolt		A rebellion which was sparked by the death of the Grand Prince of Kiev, in which Jews who participated in the prince's economic affairs were some of the victims
1349	Strasbourg pogrom	Strasbourg massacre, this massacre coincided with the persecution of Jews during the Black Death
1391	1391 pogroms	Massacre of 1391		A series of massacres and forced conversions beginning on 4 June 1391 in the city of Seville before they extend to the rest of Castile and the Crown of Aragon. It is considered one of the Middle Ages' largest attacks on the Jews, and were ultimately expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492.
1506	Lisbon pogrom	Lisbon massacre	1,000+ New Christians	After an episode of famine and bad harvests, a pogrom happened in Lisbon, Portugal, in which more than 1,000 "New Christian" (forcibly converted Jews) people were slaughtered and/or burnt by an angry Christian mob, in the first night of what became known as the "Lisbon Massacre". The killing occurred from 19 to 21 April, almost eliminating the entire Jewish or Jewish-descended community in that city. Even the Portuguese military and the king himself had difficulty stopping it. Today the event is remembered with a monument in S. Domingos' church.
1563	Polotsk pogrom (name disputed)	Polotsk drownings		Following the fall of Polotsk to the army of Ivan IV, all those who refused to convert to Orthodox Christianity were ordered drowned in the Western Dvina river.
1648–1657	Khmelnytsky pogrom (name disputed)	Khmelnytsky massacres	100,000	Eastern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth cossack riots, aka pogroms, aka uprisings included massive atrocities committed against Jews in what is today Ukraine, in numbers (conservatively estimated here by Veidlinger, Ataskevitch & Bemporad). They resulted in the creation of a new Hetmantate.
1821–1871	First Odessa pogroms			The Greeks of Odessa attacked the local Jewish community, in what began as economic disputes
1881–1884	First Russian Tsarist pogroms			A large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept through south-western Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine and Poland) from 1881 to 1884 (in that period over 200 anti-Jewish events occurred in the Russian Empire, notably the Kiev, Warsaw and Odessa pogroms)
1881	Warsaw pogrom		2 Jews killed, 24 injured	Three days of rioting against Jews, Jewish stores, businesses, and residences in the streets adjoining the Holy Cross Church.
1885	Rock Springs massacre		At least 28 immigrant Chinese miners (some sources indicate as many as 40 to 50 died)	The riot, and resulting massacre of immigrant Chinese miners by white immigrant miners, was the result of racial prejudice toward the Chinese miners, who were perceived to be taking jobs from the white miners. This occurred on 2 September 1885 in the present-day United States city of Rock Springs in Sweetwater County, Wyoming. Rioters burned 78 Chinese homes, resulting in approximately US$150,000 in property damage ($4.18 million in present-day terms).
1891	New Orleans lynchings		11 Italian Americans and Italian immigrants	They were lynched in New Orleans by a mob for their alleged role in the murder of police chief David Hennessy after some of them had been acquitted at trial. Dozens or hundreds of other Italians were arrested. It was the largest single mass lynching in American history.
1902	Częstochowa pogrom (name disputed)		14 Jews	A mob attacked the Jewish shops, killing fourteen Jews and one gendarme. The Russian military brought to restore order were stoned by mob.
1903–1906	Second Russian Tsarist pogroms		2,000+ Jews	A much bloodier wave of pogroms broke out from 1903 to 1906, leaving an estimated 2,000 Jews dead and many more wounded, as many Jewish residents took arms to defend their families and property from the attackers. The 1905 pogrom against the Jewish population in Odessa was the most serious pogrom of the period, with reports of up to 2,500 Jews killed.
1903	First Kishinev pogrom		47 Jews (Included above)	Three days of anti-Jewish rioting sparked by antisemitic articles in local newspapers
1904	Limerick pogrom (name disputed)	Limerick boycott	None	An economic boycott waged against the small Jewish community in Limerick, Ireland, for over two years
1905	Second Kishinev pogrom		19 Jews (Included above)	Two days of anti-Jewish rioting beginning as political protests against the Tsar
1905	Kiev pogrom (1905)		100 Jews (Included above)	Following a city hall meeting, a mob was drawn into the streets, proclaiming that "all Russia's troubles stemmed from the machinations of the Jews and socialists."
1906	Siedlce pogrom		26 Jews (Included above)	An attack organized by the Russian secret police (Okhrana). Antisemitic pamphlets had been distributed for over a week and before any unrest begun, a curfew was declared.
1909	Adana pogrom	Adana massacre	30,000 Armenians	A massacre of Armenians in the city of Adana amidst the government upheaval resulted in a series of anti-Armenian pogroms throughout the district.
1910	Slocum massacre	Slocum pogrom	6 Blacks confirmed; 100 Blacks estimated	A massacre of African Americans living in Slocum, Texas, organized by white mobs after rumors of a Black uprising began to spread. White people throughout Anderson County gathered guns, ammunition, and alcohol to prepare. District Judge Benjamin Howard Gardner attempted to stop the massacre by closing all saloons, gun stores, and hardware stores, but it was too late. The massacre lasted 16 hours, with white mobs killing any Black people they saw. As a result of the massacre, half of Slocum's Black population had left or been killed by the next census.
1911	Tredegar pogrom (name disputed) South Wales	Tredegar riots	None	Jewish shops were ransacked and the army was brought in.
1914	Anti-Serb riots in Sarajevo	Sarajevo frenzy of hate	2 Serbs	Occurred shortly after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
1918	Lwów pogrom	Lemberg massacre	52–150 Jews, 270 Ukrainians	During the Polish-Ukrainian War over three days of unrest in the city, an estimated 52–150 Jewish residents were killed and hundreds more were injured by Polish soldiers and civilians. Two hundred and seventy Ukrainians were also killed during this incident. The Poles did not stop the pogrom until two days after it began.
1919	Proskurov pogrom		1500–1700 Jews	The pogrom was initiated by Ivan Samosenko following a failed Bolshevik uprising against the Ukrainian People's Republic in the city. The massacre was carried out by Ukrainian People's Republic soldiers of Samosenko. According to historians Yonah Alexander and Kenneth Myers the soldiers marched into the centre of town accompanied by a military band and engaged in atrocities under the slogan: "Kill the Jews, and save the Ukraine." They were ordered to save the ammunition in the process and use only lances and bayonets.
1919	Kyiv pogroms (1919)		60+	A series of anti-Jewish pogroms in various places around Kiev carried out by White Army troops
1919	Pinsk pogrom (name disputed)	Pinsk massacre	36 Jews	Mass execution of 35 Jewish residents of Pinsk in April 1919 by the Polish Army, during the opening stages of the Polish–Soviet War
1919–20	Vilna pogrom	Vilna offensive	65+ Jews and non-Jews	As Polish troops entered the city, dozens of people connected with the Lit-Bel were arrested, and some were executed.
1921	Tulsa Massacre	Tulsa race massacre	26 whites and 39 Blacks confirmed; 100-300 Blacks estimate	Economic and social tension against Black community in Greenwood
1929	Hebron pogrom	Hebron massacre	67 Jews	During the 1929 Palestine riots, sixty-seven Jews were killed as the violence spread to Hebron, then part of Mandatory Palestine, by Arabs incited to violence by rumors that Jews were massacring Arabs in Jerusalem and seizing control of Muslim holy places.
1934	1934 Thrace pogroms		None	It was followed by the vandalizing of Jewish houses and shops. The tensions started in June 1934 and spread to a few other villages in Eastern Thrace region and to some small cities in Western Aegean region. At the height of the violent events, it was rumoured that a rabbi was stripped naked and was dragged through the streets shamefully while his daughter was raped. Over 15,000 Jews had to flee from the region.
1936	Przytyk pogrom	Przytyk riot	2 Jews and 1 Polish	Some of the Jewish residents gathered in the town square in anticipation of the attack by the peasants, but nothing happened on that day. Two days later, however, on a market day, as historians Martin Gilbert and David Vital state, peasants attacked their Jewish neighbors.
1938	November pogrom	Kristallnacht	91+ Jews	Coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria, carried out by SA paramilitary forces and non-Jewish civilians. Accounts from the foreign journalists working in Germany sent shock waves around the world.
1940	Dorohoi pogrom		53 Jews	Romanian military units carried out a pogrom against the local Jews, during which, according to an official Romanian report, 53 Jews were murdered, and dozens injured
1941	Iași pogrom		13,266 Jews	One of the most violent pogroms in Jewish history, launched by governmental forces in the Romanian city of Iași (Jassy) against its Jewish population.
1941	Antwerp Pogrom		0	One of the few pogroms of Belgian history. Flemish collaborators attacked and burned synagogues and attacked a rabbi in the city of Antwerp
1941	Bucharest pogrom	Legionnaires' rebellion	125 Jews and 30 soldiers	As the privileges of the paramilitary organisation Iron Guard were being cut off by Conducător Ion Antonescu, members of the Iron Guard, also known as the Legionnaires, revolted. During the rebellion and pogrom, the Iron Guard killed 125 Jews and 30 soldiers died in the confrontation with the rebels.
1941	Tykocin pogrom		1,400–1,700 Jews	Mass murder of Jewish residents of Tykocin in occupied Poland during World War II, soon after Nazi German attack on the Soviet Union.
1941	Jedwabne pogrom		380–1,600 Jews	The local rabbi was forced to lead a procession of about 40 people to a pre-emptied barn, killed and buried along with fragments of a destroyed monument of Lenin. A further 250–300 Jews were led to the same barn later that day, locked inside and burned alive using kerosene
1941	Farhud		180 Jewish Iraqis
1941	Lviv pogroms		Thousands of Jews	Massacres of Jews by the Ukrainian People's Militia and a German Einsatzgruppe.
1945	Kraków pogrom		1 Jew	Violence amid rumors of kidnappings of children by Jews
1946	Kunmadaras pogrom		4 Jews	A frenzy instigated by the crowd's libelous belief that some Jews had made sausage out of Christian children
1946	Miskolc pogrom		2 Jews	Riots started as demonstrations against economic hardships and later became antisemitic
1946	Kielce pogrom		38–42 Jews	Violence against the Jewish community centre, initiated by Polish Communist armed forces (LWP, KBW, GZI WP) and continued by a mob of local townsfolk.
1955	Istanbul pogrom	Istanbul riots	13–30 Greeks	Organized mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul's Greek minority. Accelerated the emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey (Jews were also targeted in this event).
1956	1956 anti-Tamil pogrom		150 Primarily Tamils	1956 anti-Tamil pogrom or Gal Oya massacre/riots were the first ethnic riots that targeted the minority Tamils in independent Sri Lanka.
1958	1958 anti-Tamil pogrom	58 riots	300 Primarily Tamils	1958 anti-Tamil pogrom also known as 58 riots, refer to the first island wide ethnic riots and pogrom in Sri Lanka.
1966	1966 anti-Igbo pogrom		30,000-50,000 Primarily Igbo People	A series of massacres directed at Igbo and other southern Nigerian residents throughout Nigeria before and after the overthrow (and assassination) of the Aguiyi-Ironsi junta by Murtala Mohammed.
14–15 August 1969	1969 Northern Ireland Anti-Catholic pogroms	1969 Northern Ireland riots	6 Catholics were killed, 4 by state force & 2 by anti-Catholic mob,	Along with the 6 murders, 500 Irish Catholics were injured by the state forces and anti-Catholic mob, 72 of those injured were injured from gun shot wounds, also 150+ Catholic homes and 275+ businesses had been destroyed – 83% of all buildings destroyed were owned by Catholics. Catholics generally fled across the border into the Republic of Ireland as refugees. After Belfast the other areas that saw violence were Newry, Armagh, Crossmaglen, Dungannon, Coalisland and Dungiven. The bloodiest clashes were in Belfast, where seven people were killed and hundreds wounded, in what some viewed as an attempted pogrom against the Catholic minority. Protesters clashed with both the police and with loyalists, who attacked Catholic districts. Scores of homes and businesses were burnt out, most of them owned by Catholics, and thousands of mostly Catholic families were driven from their homes. In some cases, RUC officers helped the loyalists and failed to protect Catholic areas.
1977	1977 anti-Tamil pogrom		300-1500 Primarily Tamils	The 1977 anti-Tamil pogrom followed the 1977 general elections in Sri Lanka where the Sri Lankan Tamil nationalistic Tamil United Liberation Front won a plurality of minority Sri Lankan Tamil votes in which it stood for secession.
1983	Black July	1983 anti-Tamil pogrom	400–3,000 Tamils	Over seven days mobs of mainly Sinhalese attacked Tamil targets, burning, looting and killing
1984	1984 anti-Sikh riots		8,000 Sikhs	In October 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi, and other parts of India, Sikhs in India were targeted
1988	Sumgait pogrom		26+ (or about 100–300) Armenians and 6+ Azeris (possibly rioters)	Mobs made up largely of ethnic Azeris formed into groups that went on to attack and kill Armenians both on the streets and in their apartments; widespread looting and a general lack of concern from police officers allowed the situation to worsen
1988	Kirovabad pogrom		3+ Soviet soldiers, 3+ Azeris and 1+ Armenian	Ethnic Azeris attacked Armenians throughout the city
1990	Baku pogrom		90 Armenians, 20 Russian soldiers	Seven-day attack during which Armenians were beaten, tortured, murdered and expelled from the city. There were also many raids on apartments, robberies and arsons
1991	Crown Heights pogrom (disputed)	Crown Heights riot	1 Jew and 1 non-Jew	A three-day riot that occurred in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. The riots incited by the death of the seven-year-old Gavin Cato, unleashed simmering tensions within Crown Heights' black community against the Orthodox Jewish community. In its wake, several Jews were seriously injured; one Orthodox Jewish man, Yankel Rosenbaum, was killed; and a non-Jewish man, allegedly mistaken by rioters for a Jew, was killed by a group of African-American men.
2004	March pogrom	2004 unrest in Kosovo	16 ethnic Serbs	Over 4,000 Serbs were forced to leave their homes, 935 Serb houses, 10 public facilities and 35 Serbian Orthodox church-buildings were desecrated, damaged or destroyed, and six towns and nine villages were ethnically cleansed

See also

Main article: Outline of Genocide studies

• Antisemitism
• Geography of antisemitism
• History of antisemitism
• Ethnic cleansing
• Expulsions and exoduses of Jews
• Genocidal massacre
• The Holocaust
• Jewish history
• Kristallnacht
• Persecution of Jews

Further reading

Main article: Bibliography of Genocide studies

• Astashkevich, Irina. Gendered Violence: Jewish Women in the Pogroms of 1917 to 1921 (Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy). Academic Studies Press. ISBN 978-1-61811-616-1.
• Avrutin, Eugene M.; Bemporad, Elissa (eds.). Pogroms: A Documentary History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-762929-1.
• Bemporad, Elissa. Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-046647-3.
• Bergmann, Werner (2003), "Pogroms", in Heitmeyer, Wilhelm; Hagan, John (eds.), International Handbook of Violence Research, vol. 1, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN 978-1-4020-1466-6
• Brass, Paul R. On the Study of Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide. Sawyer Seminar session on "Processes of Mass Killing". Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.
• Cohn, Norman. Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. New York: Harper & Row. OCLC 220903085.
• Engel, David (2010), "What's in a Pogrom? European Jews in the Age of Violence", in Dekel-Chen, Jonathan (ed.), Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, ISBN 978-0-253-35520-1
• Horvitz, Leslie A.; Catherwood, Christopher (eds.). Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide. New York, NY: Facts on File. ISBN 978-0-8160-6001-6.
• Klier, John D., ed. (2011), "What was a Pogrom?", Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-89548-4
• McDermott, Jim, (2001), Northern Divisions The Old IRA and the Belfast Pogroms 1920–22, BTP Publications, Belfast, pg 28, ISBN 1-900960-11-7
• Shelton, Dinah, ed. (2005). Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity. Detroit: Macmillan Reference. ISBN 978-0-02-865847-6.
• Thackrah, John R., ed. (1987). Encyclopedia of Terrorism and Political Violence. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-7102-0659-6.
• Veidlinger, Jeff, ed. (1987). In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust. Picador. ISBN 1-5098-6744-9.
• Velychenko, Stephen (2021). Ukraine’s Revolutions and anti-Jewish Pogroms (historians.in.ua)