Pogrom triggered by a rumor at the market

A marketplace rumor — a theft attributed to a Jewish merchant — was enough to rouse the crowd in Częstochowa, an industrial city in what was then Russian Poland and the country's foremost Catholic pilgrimage site. The Jewish quarter was looted for several hours, shops gutted, homes emptied; troops, called in late, opened fire on the crowd itself, so that the dead were counted on both sides.

This pogrom belongs to the series of urban acts of violence that, in the years preceding the Russian revolution, accompanied the industrialization of the cities along the Vistula: a rootless working-class population, a national press that identified the Jewish merchant as the obstacle, and an imperial administration that preferred to see anger poured there rather than against itself.