Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire

The term pogrom as a reference to large-scale, targeted, and repeated antisemitic rioting saw its first use in the 19th century.

The first pogrom is often considered to be the 1821 anti-Jewish riots in Odessa (modern Ukraine) after the death of the Greek Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople, in which 14 Jews were killed^[1]. The virtual Jewish encyclopedia claims that initiators of 1821 pogroms were the local Greeks that used to have a substantial diaspora in the port cities of what was known as Novorossiya.^[2] The issue of pogroms arose sometime after the Pale of Settlement was created by the Russian government trying to eradicate Jews from the country unless they would convert to Christian Orthodox (compare to Religious segregation). To the Pale were driven not only the Jewish nationals, but also Russians who followed Judaism, such as Subbotniks (Sabbath-men).

Other sources, such as the Jewish Encyclopedia, indicate that the first pogrom was the 1859 riots in Odessa.

Contents 1 1881-1884 2 1903-1906 3 During the Civil War period in Russia 4 Russian pogroms in arts and literature 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

[edit] 1881-1884

The term "pogrom" became commonly used in English after a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept through south-western Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine and Poland) from 1881-1884 (in that period over 200 anti-Jewish events occurred in the Russian Empire, notably the Kiev, Warsaw and Odessa pogroms)^[3].

The trigger for these pogroms was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, for which some blamed "the Jews".^[4] The extent to which the Russian press was responsible for encouraging perceptions of the assassination as a Jewish act has been disputed.^[5] Local economic conditions (such as ancestral debts owed to 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, and it has been argued that this was actually more important than rumours of Jewish responsibility for the death of the Tsar.^[6] 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, Gesya Gelfman, was born into a Jewish home. The fact that the other assassins were all atheists had little impact on the spread of such antisemitic rumours. Nonetheless, the assassination inspired "retaliatory" attacks by Christians 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 southwest provinces of the Empire such as Ukraine.

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

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 Kirovograd). On April 17 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 April 26, 1881 even bigger disorder engulfed the city of Kiev. The Kiev pogrom of 1881 is considered the worst one that took place in 1881.^[7] The pogroms of 1881 did not stop then. They continued on through the summer, spreading across a big territory of modern-day Ukraine: (Podolie Governorate, Volyn Governorate, Chernigov Governorate, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, and others). During these pogroms the first local Jewish self-defense organizations started to form with the most prominent one in Odessa which was organized by the Jewish students of the Novorossiysk University.

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 on the part of the Russian government to end the rioting.^[6]

Altogether, these pogroms claimed the lives of relatively few Jews. Two Jews were killed by the mobs, and 19 attackers were killed by tsarist authorities, but 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 emigration, mostly to the United States.

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 Zionist movement.^[8]

[edit] 1903-1906

A much bloodier wave of pogroms broke out from 1903–1906, 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 1905 pogrom of Jews in Odessa was the most serious pogrom of the period, with reports of up to 2,500 Jews killed.^[9]

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

"The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia (modern Moldova), are worse than the censor will permit to publish. There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Orthodox Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, "Kill the Jews," was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 [Note: the actual number of dead was 47–48^[10]] 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."^[11]

There is also evidence which suggests that the police knew in advance about some pogroms, and chose not to act.^{[citation needed]}

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 inform that many pogroms were incited by authorities, even if some happened spontaneously^[12], supported by the Tsarist Russian secret police (the Okhrana). Those perpetrators who were prosecuted usually received clemency by Tsar's decree^[13].

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

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

A pogrom on July 20, 1905, in Yekaterinoslav (present-day Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine), was stopped by the Jewish self-defence group (one man in the group 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^[14], 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, actively aided by a group of Gypsies apparently brought in for the purpose.

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

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

In 1906, the pogroms continued: January — in Gomel, June — in Belostok (ca. 80 dead), in August — in Siedlce (ca. 30 dead). The police and the military personnel were among the perpetrators.

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, Dnepropetrovsk) or a seaport (e.g. Kerch)), waterfront workmen; peasants mainly joined in to loot^[15].

By 1907, the pogroms subsided, as the United States administration became overwhelmed by a large influx of immigrants, and pressured the central Russian government to take action.

[edit] During the Civil War period in Russia

Many pogroms accompanied the post-1917 period of the Russian Civil War: an estimated 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews were killed throughout the former Russian Empire; the number of Jewish orphans exceeded 300,000. In his book 200 Years Together, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn provides these numbers from Nahum Gergel's 1951 study of the pogroms in 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 Symon Petliura, 25% by the Ukrainian Green Army and various Ukrainian nationalist gangs, 17% by the White Army, especially the forces of Anton Denikin. A further 8.5% of Gergel's total figure is attributed to pogroms carried out by soldiers assigned to the Red Army - although the Red Army pogroms were not sanctioned by the Red Army leadership, and where Red Army troops had perpetrated pogroms, the Bolshevik high command subsequently disarmed entire regiments and individual pogromists were court-martialed and executed to deter further outbreaks.^[16][17] Gergel's 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 English in 1951 in the YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science titled "The Pogroms in the Ukraine in 1918-1921"^[18]

[edit] Russian pogroms in arts and literature

In 1903, Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik wrote the poem In the City of Slaughter^[19] 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 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." ^[20] The famous Broadway musical and film "Fiddler on the Roof" showed the cruelty of the Russian pogroms on the Jews in Anatevka in the early 20th century.

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

The novel The Sacrifice by Adele Wiseman also deals with a family that is displaced after a pogrom in their homecountry 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.

[edit] See also

• History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union
• Emancipation of the Jews in England#Pogroms in Russia
• British Responses to the anti-Jewish Pogroms in Tsarist Russia

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Lenin's speech: About Anti-Jewish Pogroms (Text of the speech, record (help·info))
• Jewish history of the Russian Federation (through the Second World War)
• Modern History Sourcebook: The Jewish Chronicle: Outrages Upon Jews in Russia, May 6, 1881
• Jewish Virtual Library page "Pogroms"
• History of pogroms in Odessa
• The Pogrom of 1905 in Odessa: A Case Study
• Kishinev pogrom history