The Oct. 7 Pogrom Will Change Everything

The term pogrom as an act of organized violence, usually against Jews, bringing death and destruction to them where they live, was a Yiddish word first used about 1890. This was largely after the first surge of the anti-Jewish riots taking place in the Czarist Russian imperial state, but certainly not the last. The word pogrom was taken from the Russian word for destruction, related to the Russian word grom for thunder. For the Jews at that time, it was the antisemitic thunder of the mobs, manipulated often by Czarist government officials, to attack Jews in many towns and villages, and occasionally in cities.

By 1890, many such acts of butchery and plunder at the hands of Russian citizens would have already been experienced, especially following the assassination of Czar Alexander II almost a decade before. Alexander II had, at times, been a reform-minded monarch, but had developed many enemies on both the left and the right. When a radical group killed the czar in 1881, a wave of anti-Jewish violence came in the wake of the crime, as hundreds of Jewish communities were set upon.

The Jews were falsely blamed for the leftist violence generally, and specifically for the murder of Alexander. The Jewish Enlightenment – the Haskalah – which had called inter alia for Russian Jews to embrace the host country’s culture and language, was largely replaced overnight by other ideologies. Zionism became a much more attractive political philosophy for Jews living in the Pale of Settlement – the area at the western edge of the Russian Empire to which the Jews were confined.

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After the first wave of Russian riots against the Jews, mostly living in the Pale, Jews began to leave the Russian Empire in large numbers. Some went to the Land of Israel, others went to central and western Europe, many made their way to the Americas, and especially to the United States. The immigrants would keep coming in waves over the decades, to Eretz Yisroel, to America and to other places. The pogroms in imperial Russia themselves would surge and recede all the way to the Russian Revolution of 1917. The most infamous attack would be in Kishenev on Passover in 1903. Far more deadly was the 1905 massacre in Odessa, in which hundreds were murdered. But the most devastating attacks claiming tens of thousands of lives would take place in Ukraine during the civil war period of 1917-21. In this conflict, Jews were attacked by Ukrainian and Russian nationalist and royalist soldiers, and at times by the Bolshevik Red Army, with enormous savagery.

The Nazi Regime in Germany sometimes supported pogroms. The Night of the Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) took place in Germany, Austria, and parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Over 90 Jews were murdered, tens of thousands of Jewish men arrested and sent to prison and concentration camps. Hundreds of synagogues burned down, thousands of businesses decimated, enormous amount of assets stolen. The Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) would occasionally encourage riots against Jews in Ukraine in 1941. The Germans encouraged and took part in pogroms in Romania and Poland also in 1941 as part of their genocidal program. In 1946, over 40 Holocaust survivors who were trying to return home were murdered in Kielce, Poland. Largely, at this point, any surviving Polish Jews gave up on returning to their towns and left the country.

There has been a long history of Arab and Muslim violent mob actions against the Jewish communities of those countries. In Iran (Persia) there were murderous riots in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. In the British Mandate of Palestine, there were a series of anti-Jewish attacks in 1929. Algerian Arabs plundered their Jewish citizens in the next decade. In the 1940s alone, there were outbreaks of mass looting, killing, and burning of property in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Morocco. Many of the citizens of Israel are the refugees of these pogroms, or their descendants.

Of course, long before 1881 in Russia there have been many terrible pogrom-like massacres of Jews throughout history. The Jews of Alexandria, Egypt, were set upon in 66 CE by the Romans with enormous devastation. The Jews of York and other towns in England were exterminated by mob violence in 1190 CE. Jews were slaughtered by the thousands in the Rhineland during the First Crusade in the 1090s. Throughout Europe, and especially in Germany, rampaging hordes destroyed hundreds of Jewish communities during the Black Death moral panic of 1348-49. A national wave of anti-Jewish riots convulsed Spain in 1391. The Cossack carnage in Ukraine in 1648-49 claimed tens of thousands of Jewish lives. There are many more examples of this type of brutality in the long and tragic history of the Jewish people.

One of the reasons there is a State of Israel was so that its Jewish citizens might be safe from pogroms. The fear of this kind of devastation, where Jews are murdered, tortured, and plundered where they live, is many centuries old. Of all the different types of oppression suffered by the Jewish people, this type of collective violence – sometimes committed by peasants, townspeople, armies, criminals, or a combination of all groups – may be our most persistent ancestral fear.

That such an attack took place in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, at the hands of Hamas, will change Israeli politics and culture forever in ways we cannot now envision. Fortunately, the Israeli public, including Arab citizens, is largely united in the difficult effort to crush Hamas. What we can do is support the Jewish State politically, financially, and through our prayers.