The Russian pogroms were a series of attacks and acts of persecution which were carried out against the Jewish people within the Russian Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The most severe bouts of violence occurred in the early 1880s and the mid-1900s, with thousands of Jews killed, Jewish women raped and others badly assaulted or robbed. In response to these pogroms, which were part of the general drift towards severe anti-Semitism in Europe at this time, hundreds of thousands of people of Jewish heritage began leaving the Russian Empire. By the time it was done, approximately two million had left. Most headed for the United States, or what would become Israel in the 1940s, though there were some other significant centers of Jewish Russian migration.
Chronology of events
By the nineteenth century there were millions of Jews living in the lands of the Russian Empire, a vast territorial empire that included many parts of Eastern Europe, notably much of Poland and Ukraine. These latter two regions had arguably the highest concentration of Jewish people anywhere in the world during the early modern period. This was for the simple reason that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had ruled the region for centuries, was much more tolerant of the Jewish people than other parts of Europe. Conversely, states like England, France and Spain had engaged in mass expulsions of their Jewish communities between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Many had migrated to Eastern Europe and it was these Ashkenazic (Eastern) Jews that found themselves under Russian rule in the nineteenth century.[1]
The Russian pogroms were a mixed series of events. On the one hand, they were a set of specific riots and acts of violence against Jewish communities which were committed at various times. However, there was a more sustained form of discrimination going on as well across the Russian Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the shape of employment laws which negatively impacted on Jews and a whole host of other restrictions which damaged the Jewish community economically, politically and socially.[2]
The specific pogroms which occurred were multiple. The first such recorded ones occurred in the port city of Odessa on the Black Sea in what is now Ukraine. This was a multicultural city in the early nineteenth century, one with large Jewish and Greek communities. The first outbreak of violence occurred because of the simultaneous outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 as the Jewish community leaders in Odessa were suspected of broadly favoring the Ottoman Turks in their efforts to suppress the Greek revolt. Fourteen Jews were killed in Odessa as a response and many others were negatively impacted. Furthermore, this was not the only Jewish pogrom that occurred specifically in Odessa and further acts of violence were committed in 1859 and 1871.[3]
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The more expansive nationwide Jewish pogroms occurred across the Russian Empire at two times. The first of these came about in the 1880s in response to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881. Although there was no evidence to support this at all, many people came to believe that Alexander’s death had been owing to a Jewish conspiracy. Attacks on Jews across many parts of Poland, Ukraine and Russia occurred in the months that followed, with dozens killed and attacked, while Tsar Alexander III issued the May Laws against his Jewish subjects in 1882. Low-intensity violence against Russian Jews would continue for years to come, creating an atmosphere of danger and insecurity which caused a growing number of Russian Jews to leave the Russian Empire. The very word ‘pogrom’ dates to this time and is derived from a Russian word for ‘attack’.[4]
As bad as the pogroms of the 1880s were, they paled by comparison with the violence unleashed against the empire’s Jewish people in the mid-1900s. These began in 1903 in response to a deteriorating economic and political situation across Russia and continued through to 1906. They were at their worst in 1905 and 1906 as Russia’s defeat to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War was blamed on the country’s Jews. Thousands were killed, most notably at Kishinev in Moldova - an incident the New York Times reported it could not publish the full details of because they were too disturbing. All these events combined to see Russia’s Jews begin to flee their homeland.[5]
Extent of migration
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It is estimated that approximately two million Russian Jews left the Russian Empire between 1880 and 1920 in response to the growing persecution and pogroms which they faced. As many as three-quarters of these immigrated to the United States. There the Lower East Side in Manhattan in New York became the capital of Jewish America, though sizeable Jewish communities also emerged in places like Chicago’s West Side and in cities such as Boston and Philadelphia. Life was tough here for many of them in the beginning. The Lower East Side, for instance, was packed with more than 700 people per acre, making it the most populated urban area anywhere in the world at the dawn of the twentieth century. Those who did not head for communities like this in the United States drifted to other European countries where they might expect a slightly lesser virulent form of anti-Semitism to prevail, or else to the Levant, where many Jewish people were settling in the hopes of creating a new Jewish community in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people from before the Jewish diaspora of ancient times.[6]
Demographic impact
The demographic impact of the Russian pogroms has been most significant in the United States and what is now the state of Israel, but which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was only an unofficial center of Jewish settlement in response to the growing anti-Semitism of the period. There are approximately seven and a half million Americans of Jewish descent today, and given that as many as one and a half million arrived from the Russian Empire between 1880 and 1920, it is fair to assume that a huge proportion of these American Jews have links to these exiles from the Russian Empire a century or so ago. Indeed many Jewish Americans of Russian background have become prominent figures in American life, from Arnold Rothstein, the Jewish American organized crime boss who is famously believed to have fixed the 1919 World Series, to Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, the early twenty-first-century actors.[7]
See also
Explore more about Russian genealogy
- Russian historical records at MyHeritage.com
- Can the MyHeritage DNA test prove Jewish ancestry? on the MyHeritage Help Center
- How to Research Your Jewish Ancestors on MyHeritage on the MyHeritage Knowledge Base
- Russian State Historical Archive at Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) (in RU)
References
- ↑ https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2017.00087/full
- ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/27563679
- ↑ https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/odessa
- ↑ https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pogroms-2
- ↑ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/04/the-pogrom-that-transformed-20th-century-jewry/
- ↑ https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/polish-russian/the-lower-east-side/
- ↑ https://allthatsinteresting.com/arnold-rothstein