Definitions of pogrom

This article presents a list of scholarly, encyclopaedic and other notable definitions of the term pogrom, in chronological order.

Date	Author	Work	Definition
1806	Russian Academy	Dictionary of the Russian Academy	(Russian) destruction in the time of hostile invasion
1903	Vladimir Dal	Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language	(Russian) According to Klier, the 1903 version "still associated the word with general destruction by human or natural forces, even though the term was now widely used in the press for anti-Jewish riots
1920	Henry Morgenthau, Sr.	Morgenthau Report	...the word is applied to everything from petty outrages to premeditated and carefully organized massacres. No fixed definition is generally understood.
1920	Józef Piłsudski		Józef Piłsudski, Poland's Head of State following WWI, defined pogroms as "a massacre ordered by the government, or not prevented by it when prevention is possible" when arguing that no such events had been permitted by his government.
1931	Lietuvos aidas		A pogrom is an inhuman, disorderly use of brutal force against other people, citizens of the same state of a different nationality.
1932	Louis Fischer	The Nation	Experience in Czarist Russia, in post-war Poland and Rumania, and more recently in Palestine, has shown that a pogrom is, by definition violence perpetrated with the active assistance, or at least the connivance of, the authorities
1933	Oxford English Dictionary		an organized massacre in Russia for the destruction or annihilation of any body or class: in the English newspapers ... chiefly applied to those directed against the Jews
1964	Webster's Dictionary	Third New International	an organized massacre and looting of helpless people, usually with the connivance of officials, specifically, such a massacre of Jews
1995	Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz	The Jew in the Modern World	In the international lexicon pogrom is now a technical term designating the type of attack carried out by the non-Jewish population of Russia - and Eastern Europe in general - against the Jews between 1881 and 1921. Rarely did the police or the army intervene; indeed, they often lent their support to the rioters
1996	Brass	Riots and Pogroms	When it can be proved that the police and the state authorities more broadly are directly implicated in a "riot" in which one community provides the principal or sole victims
1999	Israel Charny	Encyclopedia of Genocide	has come to mean specifically the wanton destruction of Russian-Jewish life and property during the years 1881 and 1921, and more generally is available as a word for massacre of any minority group, although it is not often used
1999	Henry Abramson	Ukrainians and Jews in revolutionary times	A pogrom is generally thought of as a cross between a popular riot and a military atrocity, where an unarmed civilian, often urban, population is attacked by either an army unit or peasants from surrounding villages, or a combination of the two... Jews have not been the only group to suffer under this phenomenon, but historically Jews have been frequent victims of such violence. In mainstream usage, the word has come to imply an act of antisemitism.
2001	Donald L. Horowitz	The Deadly Ethnic Riot	The pogrom is not so much a complementary species of interethnic violence as it is a subcategory of the ethnic riot. If pogrom is taken to mean a massacre of helpless people, then it obviously connotes something about the situation of the targets and the outcome of violence.
2001	Encyclopedia of Nationalism		Mobilized crowd violence (usually officially encouraged) against members of a subordinate cultural group.
2003	Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity and Culture		Originally used to describe violent and often murderous anti-Jewish persecutions (the most important of which took place in Kishinev) in Russia following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, more recently the term 'pogrom', from the Russian pogrom (total destruction, devastation) has also been used to refer to attacks on other groups.
2003	Macmillan Encyclopedia		An attack on Jews and Jewish property, especially in the Russian Empire. Russian pogroms, which were condoned by the government, were particularly common in the years immediately after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 and again from 1903 to 1906, though mob persecution of Jews continued until the Russian Revolution (1917).
2004	Avraham Greenbaum	Bibliographical essay [on Russian pogroms]	...a serious anti-Jewish riot, usually lasting for more than a day and often abetted by the authorities actively or passively
2004	David Engel	What's in a Pogrom? European Jews in the Age of Violence	Engel states that although there are no "essential defining characteristics of a pogrom", the majority of the incidents "habitually" described as pogroms "took place in divided societies in which ethnicity or religion (or both) served as significant definers of both social boundaries and social rank, ... involved collective violent applications of force by members of what perpetrators believed to be a higher-ranking ethnic or religious group against members of what they considered a lower-ranking or subaltern group, ... appliers of the decisive force tended to interpret the behaviour of victims according to stereotypes commonly applied to the groups to which they belonged, ... perpetrators expressed some complaint about the victims' group, ...[and] a fundamental lack of confidence on the part of those who purveyed decisive violence in the adequacy of the impersonal rule of law to deliver true justice in the event of a heinous wrong."
2005	John K. Roth	A Dictionary Of Jewish-Christian Relations	In the history of anti-semitism and Jewish-Christian relations, however, pogrom refers to violent attacks on Jewish persons, communities and properties in any part of the world. Provoked by antisemitic charges that Jews, in one way or another, have acted treacherously against the majority population's national, economic or religious interests, pogroms often appear to be spontaneous, but closer scrutiny shows that they are usually condoned, if not organised, by political leaders and governments
2005	Werner Bergmann	Pogroms in International Handbook of Violence Research	a unilateral, nongovernmental form of collective violence initiated by the majority population against a largely defenseless ethnic group, and occurring when the majority expect the state to provide them with no assistance in overcoming a (perceived) threat from the minority...
2005	Dictionary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict		Russian word meaning 'attack' or 'devastation.' Historically, it designates mob attacks accompanied by pillage and murder that were perpetrated against the Jews of Russia—for example, in 1881–1882 and in 1903 at Kishinev. An important component of a pogrom is the usually silent complicity of the police and other authorities."
2007	Encyclopedia Judaica		a Russian word designating an attack, accompanied by destruction, looting of property, murder, and rape, perpetrated by one section of the population against another. In modern Russian history pogroms have been perpetrated against other nations (Armenians, Tatars) or groups of inhabitants (intelligentsia). However, as an international term, the word "pogrom" is employed in many languages to describe specifically the attacks accompanied by looting and bloodshed against the Jews in Russia. The word designates more particularly the attacks carried out by the Christian population against the Jews between 1881 and 1921 while the civil and military authorities remained neutral and occasionally provided their secret or open support.
2008	Dictionary of Genocide		A term usually associated with mob attacks against Jewish communities especially in Tsarist Russia before 1917, though embracing numerous additional anti-Jewish persecutions in other countries up to relatively recent times
2011	John Klier	Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882	By the twentieth century, the word "pogrom" had become a generic term in English for all forms of collective violence directed against Jews. The term was especially associated with Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, the scene of the most serious outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence before the Holocaust.
2011	Wiley-Blackwell	Dictionary of Modern European History Since 1789	Pogroms... were antisemitic disturbances that periodically occurred within the tsarist empire. ... The term pogrom has been applied additionally to the campaign of anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by Nazism...."
2011	David Gaunt, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Natan Meir, Israel Bartal	Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History	What were the Pogroms? Although pogroms could affect any targeted group, in normal usage the word has come to denote an anti-Jewish riot.... during [the late 19th and early 20th centuries] the pogrom was transformed from sporadic, spontaneous acts of mob violence with some government collusion into government-sponsored actions, if not policy, implemented by mechanisms of the state. The early pogroms (of which the 1881-1882 pogroms are the foremost example) targeted Jews as such, but did not aim to eradicate the Jewish people; thus, they fall outside the category of genocide. These riots caused greater loss of property (shops, warehouses, and homes) than deaths. The motivating factors here were socioeconomic, in particular the disruption caused by industrialization. Thus these pogroms were not "interpersonal", but rather targeted wealth and property as symbols of economic injustice. Later waves of pogroms, however, can be described as "genocidal behaviour" in that they involved mass murder of significant Jewish groups that were delimited by residence patterns, occupation, wealth or visibility.
2012	Yivo Encyclopedia		In general usage, a pogrom is an outbreak of mass violence directed against a minority religious, ethnic, or social group; it usually implies central instigation and control, or at minimum the passivity of local authorities.
2012	Encyclopedia Britannica		a mob attack, either approved or condoned by authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority. The term is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

See also

• Definitions of genocide
• Definitions of terrorism
• List of events named pogrom