Pogrom. That is the first word that came to mind when I heard about Huwwara. A rabid mob sowing violence, terror, fire and destruction, the terror magnified by the darkness, shops and houses and cars torched, with hundreds of injuries and – apparently by some miracle – just one death, of a man, Sameh Aqtash, who had just returned from volunteering help to victims of the earthquake in Turkey.
Horror and shame welled up close behind. This was a pogrom, but with the critical characters reversed. No longer were Jews the victims, in the classic, almost stereotypical role fixed by history and historiography for twenty-five centuries or more. Now Jews were “masters in their house”, as asserted by a minister in the new Israeli government, and determined to show it.[1]
Huwwara is not the first atrocity perpetrated by Jews or by Zionists or by Israelis. Purity of arms (tohar ha-neshek) may be the ideal preached and taught to generations of Israeli fighters, but it is far from a universal in practice.[2] Any of us can think of examples, some uniformed, some not. Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, in pre-state days, used to stand out. Baruch Goldstein, in the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994, still stands out – his picture hanging, for example, like that of a saint on the wall of the home of Itamar Ben Gvir, the minister just quoted.[3] The historian Benny Morris made us realize that the War of Independence in 1948 was far from as pure as we had been taught for forty years. The Six-Day War came with its load too. In the ’eighties Sabra and Shatila, even though without direct Israeli participation, also bore an Israeli imprint. Qana in 1996 left another stain. The list is not short. Huwwara will also certainly not be the last item on it. Yet it shocks, very deeply. It is also different. It was a pogrom.
Like many, Israelis and others, the moment I heard about the event, I thought of the word pogrom. And the word became rooted all the more deeply when I heard that a senior figure in the Israeli military establishment, Major-General Yehuda Fuchs, with responsibility for much of what the army does (and does not do) in the occupied West Bank, had himself used the word to describe it.[4] May we use the word pogrom in such a situation? How does the history of words help – or hinder – historical understanding?
Pogroms are different from other kinds of atrocity. They differ among themselves little in what they are and in their effects. But they and their contexts differ in what they mean. The Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which made the word pogrom famous, was not the first such event to wear the label pogrom, but unlike so many others, it still has the capacity to raise the hairs on the back of our necks. Part of the reason for this lies in Haim Nahman Bialik’s great poem, “In the City of Slaughter”.[5] That, too, makes us shiver, for its literary quality and its subject alike. Each enhances the significance of the other. Every reader of modern Hebrew literature knows this poem and recognizes it immediately.
In his fine study of the Kishinev pogrom, Steven Zipperstein points out that all pogroms, like all massacres, are not equal.[6] Not all have the ability to rouse our emotions and shock us in the same way. Not all have Bialik to write about them either. But pogroms differ in some cardinal features from what we can, shockingly, label ordinary massacres. And they also differ among themselves in curious ways. In the Kishinev pogrom, for example, nearly fifty Jews lost their lives. That number is dwarfed by the thousands killed in, for example, the 1648 persecutions perpetrated by the Cossacks in Ukraine or – closer in time and place – the Kiev pogrom of 1905 or the post-1917 anti-Jewish actions of the Bolsheviks and other Russians. Numbers are not the – or even necessarily a – defining characteristic of pogroms.
Dates matter too, but not as much as we might think. The earliest pogrom tends to be identified as one in nineteenth-century Russia, but earlier examples of anti-Jewish outbursts leading to massacres have often had the name applied to them too. Thus, in Granada in 1066, a massacre of the Jews that one Arabic-writing chronicler tells us took the lives of four thousand Jews, in addition to that of the Jewish vizier of the local ruler, has often been called a pogrom.[7] Similarly, when we read about the Jews in pre-Expulsion, thirteenth-century England, we often find the outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence there called pogroms too. A book about the rapid spread of devastating anti-Jewish rioting all over Christian Spain in the late fourteenth century actually calls it “The pogrom of 1391” in its title.[8] And when we do not see that label, it is that word, nevertheless, that springs to mind as we read the accounts of other such events. These include, for example, the anti-Jewish massacres that accompanied, were part of, were integral to, the earliest crusaders’ march down the valley of the Rhine in the last years of the eleventh century on their way to liberate Palestine from the Muslims, or the attack by a mob on the Jews of Alexandria as long ago as the year 38 C.E.[9]
Causes vary as well: those attacking Jews were often aroused by imaginary tales of Jews killing – or sacrificing – Christian babies or children. The Jews, as an entire group, in this scenario, were seen as bearing collective responsibility for such fictional butchery, comparable here to and pretty certainly influenced by the gospel story in which their ancestors allegedly took upon themselves and their (Jewish) descendants for ever responsibility for the crucifixion.[10]
The economic role of Jews as moneylenders also sufficed to rile their customers and rouse them to action as a way to cancel debts. In pre-Expulsion England, destruction of the “tallies” which were the records of debts owed to Jews was a frequent aim of anti-Jewish rioters (though as the king often tried to take over and recover the debts on his own account, the rioters were not always successful).[11] In more modern times, supposed profiteering in commerce had a similar effect: according to a report by the British government of an investigation into the post-1881 rioting that saw numerous Jews killed in Russia, Jews were responsible for their own fate then because they sought to take advantage of their customers.[12]
Pogroms are also anti-Jewish. Jews seem to be a necessary feature of a pogrom. If you don’t kill Jews, then you cannot be said to have engaged in a real pogrom; that is apparently the rule.[13] Yet the history of the use of the word actually points the other way: the earliest usage of pogrom in English recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary occurs in a report in the Century Magazine in 1889, by George Kennan, a distant cousin of George F. Kennan. There we find the word used to describe an “unprovoked attack of an armed force upon sleeping and defenseless prisoners”.[14]
However, the term pogrom itself is modern, and it has its own history. It is not English but, as Kennan’s example shows, Russian. It seems to have the word for thunder, or storm, grom, or gromit’, destroy, at its back.[15] Pogrom does not refer to a single event taking place at a specific time, but can be applied to hugely varied incidents occurring, as we have seen, at very different moments in history. In this it is unlike Holocaust, which is, in Zipperstein’s words, “tethered to time and place”. That capital initial letter H points to the Nazi Holocaust of Jewry (and we usually find the word “the” in front of it too), even though the word holocaust itself, as a common noun, with an ancient Greek background, simply means a sacrifice that is wholly consumed, and the term is borrowed thence today into such expressions as nuclear holocaust, referring to the destruction of all of humankind, not just one ethnic group. Pogrom by contrast provides a convenient umbrella term for what it describes. And even holocaust, with its twentieth-century acquisition or appropriation of a specific lien on the word’s meaning, actually has its own history, going back way beyond the Nazis – and continuing to this day, though with the twentieth century’s contribution always, necessarily and inescapably, in the back of users’ minds.
In our own time, pogrom has slipped that apparently exclusive Jewish link entirely too. It has lost any obligatory or automatic tie to Jews, so that when we see a book called Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India we know at once what is involved, and that it has nothing to do with Jews.[16] But Huwwara is not in India, and this pogrom had a Jewish link. It differs from other pogroms, ordinary pogroms, in two major ways: first, the victims were not Jews; and second, the perpetrators were not non-Jews.
In thus having a history that develops and moves on and adds new levels of meaning with time and circumstance, pogrom is not unlike other words with what are at their origins narrowly specific meanings. Ghetto, for example, began by referring to the tiny locale of the quarter in Venice in the sixteenth century where Jews happened to live. It does not have, at its origin, a specifically Jewish connotation. Acquiring that Jewish link in Venice, through the accident of geography, it then spread out to describe areas where Jews were forced to live in other Christian cities, all the way down to the horrors of Warsaw in 1943.[17] Since then, in the twentieth century and after, its use has expanded enormously to non-Jews, taking in especially areas where Blacks or other minorities or the poor are concentrated in U.S. cities. In 1969 it received the ultimate accolade, with the great hymn to Black poverty in the USA sung by Elvis Presley, In the Ghetto, offering a haunting stress on the final syllable -tto, which reached no. 3 in the Top 10, and, in the same year, Donny Hathaway’s The Ghetto. The word ghetto thus no longer has any normative or necessary connotation of a place where Jews live or are forced to live. Its central associations now relate to district, poverty, crowding, often some sort of minority status. But Jews have long since moved out of almost every area where they were forced to live in the past. Any geographical concentration of Jews in a particular area, such as Golders Green or Stamford Hill in London, or the Lower East Side in New York, is a voluntary expression of the need for proximity to such necessary communal services as kosher shops and synagogues. Poverty and over-crowding have largely disappeared as characteristics of modern Jewish life, and the term ghetto has virtually ceased to serve as a label of areas where Jews live.
So too, while pogroms have a normative association with Jews, that association is far from exclusive. The English historian H.A.L. Fisher, writing in 1935, tells us that the later Byzantine empire “had disgraced itself by a pogrom against the French and Italian colony in Constantinople”.[18] In using the word in this way Fisher was taking up a usage that had developed as early as the 1880s to include in its general field of reference small, defenseless, minority or poor groups.
This history is significant, for almost immediately following the Huwwara pogrom, a distinguished American historian wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal under the title “The Huwara Riot Was No ‘Pogrom’” in which he challenged the use of the word, telling his readers that what happened was brutal, but not a pogrom.[19] “Invoking this false analogy” he writes, “be it out of malice or mere ignorance, hijacks Jews’ historical traumas to inflame an incendiary situation.” He concludes his piece by saying that using the word pogrom to describe what happened in Huwwara “cruelly alleges that the once-innocent victims of bigotry have themselves become bullying bigots”. Many will agree with him.
A day later Ynet news, the English-language web presence of the popular Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, published a round-table discussion of the question whether the term pogrom was appropriate here. The participants were almost all Jewish scholars and while the results were varied, they tended to recommend avoidance of the term, mainly because of the “provocative” nature of the use of the word.[20]
The Israeli army, responsible under Israeli law for the administration of the occupied West Bank, and under international law for the lives and property of the inhabitants of the occupied territory, was, incredibly, wholly unprepared for the rioters and the mayhem they spread.[21] Instead of seeing soldiers protecting the inhabitants of the village, what we saw on video just a few days later on the festival of Purim was Israeli soldiers cavorting with the settlers as someone shouted in Hebrew, “Friends, Huwwara is conquered!”[22] (The contrast between the stunning victory by the armed forces of a small but plucky Israel over the combined armed forces of Syria, Jordan and Egypt, supported by other countries in the region, in 1967, and the “conquest” of Huwwara, a tiny village home to some six or seven thousand cowed and frightened civilians, “vandalized” in a “riot” — in the words of the writer in the Wall Street Journal — by a mob of hundreds of raging Jews in 2023, is not lost on most observers.) Such passivity in the face of majority violence against minority, to say nothing of active participation in it, serves only to confirm, both to victims and to outside observers, the tacit support of the forces of law and order for those perpetrating the violence.
..
Lexicography, the study and writing up of the histories of words in dictionaries, is not usually seen as an exciting task, except for the lexicographer. But words have histories, and history is not only interesting and exciting. It is also about us and what we think and what we do. Sometimes we don’t want to know. But we need to know. As a famous Jew said some two thousand years ago, You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
NOTES
[1] See, e.g., The Guardian, 21 May 2023 = https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/21/far-right-minister-itamar-ben-gvir-says-israel-in-charge-on-visit-to-jerusalem-holy-site.
[2] See Max Singer, ‘Moral Standards Under Pressure: the Israeli army and the intifada’, Ethics and International Affairs, 4, no. 1, March 1990, pp. 135-143; Barry L. Schwartz, ‘“Tohar Haneshek” (“Purity of Arms”): Reclaiming a Jewish Ethic in War’, Journal of Reform Judaism, 35, No. 3, Summer 1988, pp. 43-51; Noam Zion, ‘“Purity of arms”: Educating ethical warriors in the Israeli Army’, in Lester R. Kurtz (ed.), The Warrior and the Pacifist: competing motifs in Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, New York, Routledge, 2018.
[3] https://www.thedailybeast.com/itamar-ben-gvir-is-an-extremist-who-could-destroy-israel-as-we-know-it; https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/ben-gvir-responds-to-bennett-fine-ill-take-down-baruch-goldsteins-picture/; https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/11/03/who-is-itamar-ben-gvir-israels-kingmaker.
[4] See https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-28/ty-article/.premium/israeli-army-chief-of-staff-vows-to-probe-settler-rampage-in-west-bank-town/00000186-980e-d172-a587-9d5ef8910000; https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-arrests-suspects-settler-rampage-described-by-general-pogrom-2023-03-01/.
[5] Available in English at https://faculty.history.umd.edu/BCooperman/NewCity/Slaughter.html; for the original Hebrew see https://benyehuda.org/read/1784.
[6] Steven Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, New York and London, Liveright, 2018.
[7] Alejandro García-Sanjuán, ‘Violencia contra los judíos: el pogromo de Granada del año 459 h/1066’, in Maribel Fierro (ed.), De muerte violenta: política, religión y violencia en al-Andalus, Madrid, CSIC, 2004, pp. 167-206.
[8] Emilio Mitre Fernández, Los judíos de Castilla en tiempo de Enrique III: el pogrom de 1391, Valladolid, Servicio de publicaciones, Universidad de Valladolid, 1994.
[9] For the crusades see especially the works of Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987; In the Year 1096: The Jews and the First Crusade, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1996; God, Humanity, and History: The Hebrew First-Crusade Narratives, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000. For the Alexandria attack, see Philo, In Flaccum and Legatio ad Gaium, and, e.g., Per Bilde, ‘The Jews in Alexandria in 38-41 C.E.’, in id., Collected Studies on Philo and Josephus, ed. Eve-Marie Becker, Morton Hørning Jensen and Jacob Mortensen, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht (Studia Aarhusiana Neotestamentica, Vol. 7), 2016, pp. 189-206 (orig. pub. in Inge Nielsen (ed.), Zwischen Kult und Gesellschaft: Kosmopolitische Zentren des antiken Mittelmeerraumes als Aktionsraum von Kultvereinen und Religionsgemeinschaften. Akten eines Symposions des Archänologischen Instituts der Universität Hamburg (12.-14. Oktober 2005), Hephaistios 24, 2006).
[10] For Jews as killers of Christian children see the review article of Magda Teter, ‘Reckoning with a Troubled Past’, in the New York Review of Books, 23 March 2023, discussing the cases of Simon of Trent (in 1475) and the eradication of the Jewish community of Sandomierz (in 1698 and again in 1710), together with the letter of M. Barry Katz, ibid., 17 August 2023, adding to her list of such cases that of a Jew who was accused of stabbing a host in 1493 and was subsequently torn to pieces by a Christian mob. The gospel tale is at Matthew 27:25 (“His blood be on us and on our children”).
[11] See Robin R. Mundill, The King’s Jews: Money Massacre and Exodus in Medieval England, London, Continuum, 2010.
[12] Zipperstein, p. 5.
[13] For the notion of pogroms as having “well-established and characteristic rules,” see The Times (London), 7 December 1903, repr. in the Jewish Chronicle, 11 December 1903, quoted in Zipperstein, p. 9.
[14] George Kennan, ‘The history of the Kara political prison’, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, vol. XXXVIII, NS XVI, May 1889 to October 1889, pp. 734, 736, 738 and 739. None of these uses relates to Jews.
[15] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 3rd edition, 1996, offers a typical example of the general etymology offered: “Russian, outrage, havoc, from pogromit’, to wreak havoc: po-, adverbial pref. (from po, next to; see apo– in Appendix) + gromit’, to outrage, wreak havoc (from grom, thunder).”
[16] Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2012.
[17] In the Islamic world, Jewish quarters were different – though the modern Islamic world was not so different where pogroms were concerned.
[18] H.A.L. Fisher, A History of Europe, I, Ancient and Medieval, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1935, p. 238.
[19] Gil Troy, ‘The Huwara Riot was no “Pogrom”’, Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2023 (= https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-huwara-riot-was-not-a-pogrom-jews-palestinians-misappropriation-mainstream-margins-russia-95b5dabb).
[20] See https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hyqt0e0aj (March 4, 2023).
[21] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-06-15/ty-article/israel-wasnt-prepared-and-failed-to-protect-residents-during-hawara-riot-cnn-report-says/00000188-c047-d2e6-a9ab-e5df11140000, quoting an investigation by CNN; https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/one-palestinian-killed-three-arrested-over-killing-israeli-american-2023-03-01/; https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/top-west-bank-general-says-army-was-unprepared-for-settler-pogrom-in-huwara/#:~:text=February%2028%2C%202023-,Top%20West%20Bank%20general%20says%20army,for%20settler%20’pogrom’%20in%20Huwara&text=The%20Israeli%20general%20in%20charge,catching%20the%20military%20off%2Dguard. The source for the statement was Major-General Yehuda Fuchs, quoted above as describing the event as a pogrom.
[22] https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2023/03/07/Israeli-settlers-Palestinians-clash-in-West-Bank-s-Huwara-; https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-settlers-clash-with-palestinians-flashpoint-west-bank-town-2023-03-07/. It is a sad, if minor, irony here that Huwwara was thus “conquered” on the festival of Purim, when Jews read the biblical book of Esther. That book contains two of the very rare biblical occurrences of a word from the same root as the name Huwwara, hur, meaning white stuff, linen. According to Huwwara Town Profile, Jerusalem, Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem, 2014, p. 5, “Huwwara town was named for the nature of the white soil ‘Al Hur’”, https://web.archive.org/web/20170829034431/http://vprofile.arij.org/nablus/pdfs/vprofile/Huwwara_tp_en.pdf.
David J. Wasserstein is professor of history and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University. His poem “HUWWARA” appeared here in August.