Pogrom

 ( Persecution Of Jews ) 

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 the word's 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 occurring when the majority expect the state to provide them sic with no assistance in overcoming a (perceived) threat from the minority". However, Bergmann adds that in Western usage, the word's "anti-Semitic overtones" have been retained. Historian David Engel supports this view, writing that while "there can be no logically or empirically compelling grounds for declaring that some particular episode does or does not merit the label pogrom," the majority of the incidents which are "habitually" described as pogroms took place in societies that were significantly divided by Ethnic group 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 where 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 prevent the alleged complaint.

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 the Kielce pogrom, the Pinsk massacre and the Lwów pogrom) was specifically avoided in the 1919 Morgenthau Report; the word "excesses" was employed instead because the authors argued that the use of the term "pogrom" required a situation to be antisemitism rather than political in nature, which meant that it was inapplicable to the conditions which exist in a war zone. 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 Jews settlers on Palestinian were characterized as pogroms by then Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Olmert.

Werner Bergmann suggests that all such incidents have a particularly unifying characteristic: "By the collective attribution of a threat, the pogrom differs from other forms of violence, such as , 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 (, or '' between evenly matched groups); and again, the low level of organization separates them from vigilantism, terrorism, massacre and genocide".

The brutal murders of Jews and Poles occurred during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648–1657 in present-day Ukraine, then within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. 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. However, these figures are contested as being too high, with the lowest estimates suggesting that 18,000–20,000 Jews died out of a total population of 40,000, many due to disease and famine.

An 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.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his controversial 2002 book Two Hundred Years Together provided additional statistics from research conducted by Nahum Gergel (1887–1931), published in Yiddish in 1928 and English in 1951. Gergel counted 1,236 incidents of anti-Jewish violence between 1918 and 1921, and estimated that 887 mass pogroms occurred, the remainder being classified as "excesses" not assuming mass proportions. 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.
  Serhy Yekelchyk (2025). 9780195305463, Oxford University Press. . ISBN 9780195305463
  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.
  Paul Robert Magocsi (2025). 9781442640856, University of Toronto Press. . ISBN 9781442640856
  Thousands of Jews were killed only for being Jewish, without any political affiliations.
  Milton Kleg (1993). 9780791415368, SUNY Press. . ISBN 9780791415368
• 25 percent by the Ukrainian Green armies 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.
  Nora Levin (1991). 9780814750513, New York University Press. . ISBN 9780814750513

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.

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.