Pogroms: History Repeating Itself

January 15, 2025

by: Kate Norman, BFP Writer

On the night of November 6, 2024, Maccabi Tel Aviv football club fans left the stadium in Amsterdam after a match between the Israeli team and the local team, Ajax.

They flooded into the streets to find what the city’s mayor described as “antisemitic hit-and-run squads” waiting. Multiple gangs of rioters screaming “Free Palestine,” many of whom victims described as Muslims or Arabs, proceeded to chase anyone identifiably Jewish.

Victims and witnesses described beatings and attempted car-rammings and stabbings. Taxi drivers took Jews into the violence rather than away to safety. People jumped into Amsterdam’s canals to avoid the mobs. Others sought shelter in hotels, casinos and restaurants until they could safely make their way to the airport and home to Israel.

“It was a pogrom,” a Maccabi fan told Haaretz, as quoted by the Times of Israel. “If there had been internet in ’38, that’s what Kristallnacht would have looked like,” he said, referencing the infamous German pogrom, when Nazis rampaged through the streets, smashed windows of Jewish shops, homes and synagogues and rounded up Jews to ship off to concentration camps.

Sixty-eight years later, in the city where Anne Frank and her family hid and were later discovered and sent to death camps, Jews were again targets of antisemitism. Israeli officials said 10 people were injured in the widespread, organized attacks. Police were present but did little, witnesses reported. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent rescue flights to bring Israelis home.

History of the Pogroms

Webster’s Dictionary defines the word “pogrom” as “an organized massacre of helpless people,” specifically Jewish people. It is a Russian word, meaning “to wreak havoc, destroy violently,” which entered popular vocabulary between the 1880s and the 1920s with three waves of violence against Jewish communities in Russia and Eastern Europe.

They began in 1881 after Czar Alexander II was assassinated and rumors spread that Jews were the culprits. The violence broke out in Yelisavetgrad, Ukraine, when a mob rampaged through the Jewish quarter of the city, destroying shops. The Jewish population had asked local soldiers for help, according to Jewish Encyclopedia, but instead the soldiers joined the rioting, which devolved into destruction of synagogues, raping and looting. At least three people died, and 500 houses and 100 shops were demolished. The rioting spread to some 30 other villages and towns across Ukraine, including Kyiv.

The second wave of pogroms flared up in 1902 in Częstochowa, Poland, when locals rampaged through the Jewish open market, looting warehouses and injuring several people. During Passover 1903, a riot broke out in Kishinev (Chisinau) after local newspaper Bessarabets had stoked the fire with antisemitic articles, including one written by the police chief. When a local Christian child was found dead, a false blood libel spread that Jews were responsible. Rioters assaulted the Jewish population, unhindered by some 5,000 soldiers stationed there, according to Jewish Virtual Library.org. Officials reported 49 Jewish people dead, 500 injured, 700 houses destroyed and looted and 600 shops looted.

More pogroms erupted throughout the next few years, including in Kyiv in 1905, when a contentious city hall meeting devolved into an angry mob blaming all of Russia’s problems on Jews and socialists. Some 100 Jewish people were killed in the aftermath.

Similar pogroms, violence and riots targeting Jewish communities raged throughout the aftermath of World War I, the interwar period and following World War II and the Holocaust—many with more deadly effects, as the mobs focused less on destroying Jewish property and more on people.

Between 1918 and 1921 alone, Ukrainian peasants and soldiers murdered more than 100,000 Jews, blaming them for the Russian Revolution, a professor of history wrote for Washington University.

But what caused these explosions of pogroms against Jewish communities?

Cause and Effect

Blaming Jewish people for the world’s problems dates back to the Black Death in 14th century Europe, when one of the earliest blood libels claimed that Jews poisoned wells and caused the deaths of some 40% of Europe’s population. This lie sparked outrage that resulted in massacres of thousands of Jews across Western Europe.

Fast-forwarding to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we can see how this ancient hatred continued. This time, the Jews were in the right positions at the wrong time. Dominating the moneylending and trade industries in the Russian Empire, the Center for Economic Policy Research postulates that Jews became the victims of violence when severe crop failures threatened social order. Once again, people needed a scapegoat on which to unleash their anger.

Starting with the bubonic plague, Jew-hatred ebbed and flowed across Europe and the world through the Crusades, Inquisition, pogroms, Holocaust, Hamas massacre on October 7 and its aftermath—including the violence in the streets of Amsterdam.

Finding Safety in the Homeland

The pogroms of 1881 sparked mass emigration from the Russian Empire to the US and other countries, but it particularly lit the flames of Zionism, as more Jews now desired to return to their ancient homeland. And after each subsequent wave of violence, that flame increased.

Following the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023 and the ensuing war, emigration from Israel surged. In the month after the massacre, some 12,300 Israelis left, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics—a 285% increase from the 3,200 in the same period the previous year. The numbers stabilized over the next few months, however.

However, Jewish people outside Israel have also felt the effects of the war.

“On October 7, a war erupted not against the State of Israel, but against the Jewish people,” World Zionist Organization chairman Yaakov Hagoel told a planeload of 150 Jewish immigrants from France in August. “Today, in many countries around the world, it is hard to be a Jew, whether at school, at work, or at prayer.”

Immediately following the war, aliyah (immigration to Israel) numbers dipped, but have since started growing again. Hagoel told the Times of Israel in August that nearly 30,000 people made aliyah since October 7, 2023.

In September 2023, just a month before the Hamas attack, US President Joe Biden stated: “I think without Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who’s secure. I think Israel is essential.”

The director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, DC, Rafael Medoff, explained to the Times of Israel that “President Biden was simply reiterating the obvious fact that it’s good there is an Israel to which persecuted Jews can flee. We all know what happened in the 1930s and 1940s when there was no Jewish state.”

Posted on January 15, 2025

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