The memory of persecutions and pogroms

The history of Jewish communities in Europe, the Mediterranean world, and the lands of Islam cannot be conceived without the long weave of violence that periodically struck them. From the Middle Ages to contemporary resurgences, in the prelude to the catastrophe that was the Shoah, anti-Jewish persecutions form a painful memory, made of flourishing communities annihilated, neighborhoods emptied, manuscripts burned, and names inscribed in the chronicles of martyrdom. To remember these events is not to draw up an indictment, but to understand the historical, religious, economic, and social forces that, across the centuries, made the Jew the figure of the designated scapegoat.

The present work stands at the intersection of Memory and History. It strives to document with rigor — places, dates, sources — the great waves of violence, while restoring the meaning that the victims themselves gave them: that of Kiddoush ha-Shem, the sanctification of the Name, and that of remembrance transmitted through the chronicles, the liturgical laments (selihot), and, later, the books of remembrance (Yizkor). So many vanished Jewish worlds were lost because of this violence; to restore their chronology is to give back to the departed a measure of presence.

The First Crusade, preached by Pope Urban II in 1095, was meant to lead the Christian armies toward Jerusalem; yet it first resulted, on the banks of the Rhine, in one of the earliest great waves of anti-Jewish massacres in the medieval West. In the spring and summer of 1096, crusader bands, including the one led by Count Emicho of Flonheim, fell upon the prosperous Jewish communities of the Rhineland cities. Chronicles and historical studies estimate the number of victims at several thousand: according to some estimates, the massacres claimed between 2,000 and 12,000 lives and destroyed the communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne [Historica Wiki; Medievalists.net].

In Worms, when Emicho's band arrived on May 18, the greater part of the Jewish community took refuge in the episcopal palace; eight days later, the crusaders broke through the walls and massacred between 800 and 1,000 Jews [Medievalists.net; Worms massacre (1096)]. These events were recorded around the middle of the twelfth century by the Jewish chronicler Salomon bar Simson, whose account, written some fifty years after the events, remains a major source [Medievalists.net].

These massacres, known in Hebrew as the gezerot Tatnou (the decrees of the year 4856), left a lasting mark on Ashkenazi Jewish consciousness. They gave rise to a liturgical literature of mourning and enshrined the ideal of Kiddoush ha-Shem, martyrdom for the divine Name, which shaped the collective memory of the Rhineland communities for centuries to come.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the crystallization of enduring defamatory accusations. The blood libel of ritual murder appeared in England, with the case of William of Norwich (around 1144), then spread to the continent. The accusation of host desecration and the slanders of well-poisoning fed a persecutory imagination. In England, the York massacre of March 1190—during which the Jewish community besieged in the castle tower, today Clifford's Tower, largely perished, sometimes by collective suicide to escape forced conversion—remains emblematic of these acts of violence; the kingdom of England expelled its Jews in 1290, followed by the kingdom of France in 1306.

The Black Death, which ravaged Europe from 1347–1348, triggered one of the deadliest waves of persecution. Falsely accused of having spread the epidemic by poisoning water sources, entire communities were annihilated in the Holy Roman Empire. The Strasbourg massacre, on 14 February 1349, during which hundreds of Jews were burned, illustrates the scale of these pogroms that destroyed hundreds of communities in the Rhineland, Swabia, and Franconia. These persecutions accelerated the shift of the center of gravity of Ashkenazi Judaism toward eastern Europe, into Poland and Lithuania, where charters of protection offered a relative refuge.

On March 31, 1492, the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile promulgated the Alhambra Decree, ordering the expulsion of all Jews from their kingdoms. In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering the expulsion of all Jews from their realms; within a few months, the Spanish Jews were forced to renounce their faith or abandon a land they had inhabited for a thousand years [Museum of Jewish Heritage]. This edict required that all Jews who did not convert to Christianity leave the country before the end of July of that same year, under penalty of death; the expulsion, formalized by the Alhambra Decree on March 31, 1492, marked a major and tragic event in Jewish history [EBSCO Research Starters].

This expulsion brought an end to the medieval Judeo-Spanish civilization, one of the most brilliant Judaism has ever known. It scattered the Sephardic exiles across the Mediterranean basin: into the Ottoman Empire, which welcomed them notably in Salonika, Istanbul, and Smyrna, into North Africa, Italy, and the Netherlands. Portugal proceeded with a forced conversion in 1497. From this dispersion arose the Sephardic world and the Judeo-Spanish language, Ladino, but also the long tradition of remembering exile. It should be noted that, while the lands of Islam often offered Jews a protected dhimmi status, this status came with legal subjections and was, on several occasions, broken by local violence.

In the mid-seventeenth century, the great Jewish community of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth suffered a catastrophe of a magnitude unprecedented since the Crusades. The Khmelnytsky pogroms were pogroms carried out against the Jews of present-day Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648, led by the Cossacks and serfs under the command of Bohdan Khmelnytsky [Khmelnytsky pogroms]. The Jews, often perceived as the economic agents of the Polish nobility in the Ukrainian lands — tax farmers, estate managers, innkeepers — found themselves caught in the gears of a revolt that was at once social, national, and religious.

The uprising, which combined Zaporozhian Cossacks and their Crimean Tatar allies, inflicted heavy defeats on the Polish-Lithuanian forces in present-day Ukraine [Khmelnytsky's campaign of 1648]. Estimates of the number of Jewish victims vary considerably according to the sources, ranging from several tens of thousands to far higher figures that contemporary scholarship has revised downward. After nearly a decade of bloodshed, the uprising succeeded in overthrowing Polish-Lithuanian rule, and it has taken on great symbolic importance in the history of Ukraine [Study.com]. In Jewish memory, the year 1648 — Tah ve-Tat — became synonymous with catastrophe and, according to several historians, fueled the messianic ferment that culminated in the movement of Sabbatai Tsevi.

The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 unleashed, in the southern provinces of the Russian Empire, a first great wave of pogroms. Confined within the Pale of Settlement and subjected to discriminatory laws, Jews were the designated targets of a popular violence often tolerated, even encouraged, by certain local authorities. This violence precipitated a massive emigration toward North America and Western Europe, and gave a decisive impetus to the movements of Jewish emancipation, from nascent Zionism to the socialism of the Bund.

The Kishinev pogrom of 1903 remained the most resounding event of this period. The Kishinev pogrom was an anti-Jewish massacre that unfolded over a day and a half, on 19 and 20 April 1903, in the city of Kishinev in Imperial Russia, today known as Chișinău, the capital of Moldova [Stanford Report]. Located in Kishinev, in the Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire, the pogrom took place from 19 to 21 April 1903 and targeted the Jews of Bessarabia; it left 48 dead, 92 people seriously injured and more than 500 lightly injured, and was motivated by antisemitism [Kishinev pogrom].

The international resonance of the massacre was considerable. It inspired the poem In the City of Slaughter by Hayim Nahman Bialik, which transformed the shame of passivity into a call for self-defense, and it mobilized Western opinion. A second wave of pogroms, more murderous still, accompanied the revolution of 1905, notably in Odessa. Contemporary research, such as that of the historian Steven Zipperstein, today seeks to distinguish the established facts from the myths that have grafted themselves onto the memory of Kishinev [Stanford Report].

If anti-Jewish persecution was of particular intensity in Europe, the Arab and Mediterranean world also experienced episodes of violence, whose intensity increased in the 20th century under the combined effect of nationalisms, tensions linked to Mandatory Palestine, and Axis propaganda. The most striking episode was the Farhoud, a pogrom perpetrated in Baghdad on 1 and 2 June 1941, amid the power vacuum that followed the collapse of the pro-German government of Rachid Ali al-Gaylani. The Jewish community of Baghdad, one of the oldest in the world, saw dozens of its members murdered and its property looted; this event is generally regarded as a historical rupture in the relationship between Jews and Iraqi society.

The Farhoud heralded, in the context of the Second World War and decolonization, the gradual erasure of the centuries-old Jewish communities of the Arab world — of Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and elsewhere — over the following decades. It thus belongs, like the European violence, to the long history of the fragility of diasporic Jewish minorities and to the memory of vanished worlds.

From the Rhineland of 1096 to the Baghdad of 1941, by way of Strasbourg, Sefarad, Khmelnytsky's Ukraine and the Kishinev of 1903, a recurring pattern emerges: the designation of the Jew as scapegoat in times of religious, social, or political crisis. The driving forces vary — medieval religious fanaticism, ritual slanders, economic resentment, modern nationalisms — but the structure of the persecutory mechanism reveals constants that history allows us to bring to light.

These acts of violence, prior to the Shoah, do not prefigure its industrial and genocidal character, which constitutes a singular rupture; they do, however, illuminate its ancient breeding ground. To remember these destroyed communities — without turning knowledge into a weapon — is a twofold duty: that of the historian toward the truth of the facts, and that of memory toward the departed. For behind each date and each place stand men, women, and children whose names, sometimes saved by a chronicle or a book of remembrance, attest that these worlds existed.