Femke Halsema, the mayor of Amsterdam, may have touched off a diplomatic incident last week when she said on a Dutch television show that she regretted having used the word “pogrom” the day after attacks on Israelis in her city surrounding a soccer match.
Since the incidents, which began late on the night before the Nov. 7 game, Ms. Halsema, a member of the Green Party, said she had seen “the word politicized to the point of propaganda.” In response, Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, called Ms. Halsema’s statement “utterly unacceptable.” Referring to the attacks, he said, “There is no other word for this than a pogrom.”
The word “pogrom” described loosely organized, often deadly riots by local Russians or Eastern Europeans against Jews from the 1880s through the end of the Bolshevik Revolution some 40 years later. Though today it is applied to many ethnically or religiously based attacks, it has never shed its original association, and to describe an attack on Jews as a pogrom will always disinter century-old collective memories.
The eagerness of Mr. Saar to reaffirm the word — echoing statements made by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, and Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism — reflected the international Jewish community’s increased sensitivity to antisemitism in the year since Hamas led an attack into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 and kidnapped about 250 others.
At the same time, Ms. Halsema’s hesitance to use “pogrom” amplified the concern that such rhetoric is being deployed to forward an agenda against Muslims. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who also used the word, leads a far-right party that won a plurality of votes last year on a platform that called for ending immigration from Muslim countries, taxing head scarves and banning the Quran. Mr. Wilders has called Moroccan immigrants “scum.”
Using “pogrom,” said Hassnae Bouazza, a Dutch-Moroccan journalist and filmmaker, “legitimizes everything” against Muslim migrants and “establishes that there is fear, there is hatred, and the division in the country grows.”
Keren Hirsch, a Jewish councilwoman in Amsterdam, backed up Ms. Halsema’s newer statement, posting on social media that the “real problem” was “Jew-hatred,” adding, “And no, you don’t fight that with Muslim-hatred.”
“Pogrom” has a historical association with European antisemitism, inflicted in czarist Russia and elsewhere on largely defenseless Jews. The antisemitic attacks in Amsterdam had a different context: international outrage over Israel’s destructive war in Gaza that followed Hamas’s attack.
Even aside from the Dutch situation, there is a concern for many in the Jewish community and beyond that using “pogrom” is inaccurate or inappropriate at a time when most Jews live either in liberal democracies that are committed to protecting their rights as minorities or, of course, in a sovereign Jewish state with a famously well-armed military.
The “pogrom” reference, after all, is self-consciously a throwback. “As a friend said, an ancestral memory was activated — ‘This is a pogrom, I’m in danger,’” said Jelle Zijlstra, a Dutch theater director who works with the liberal Dutch Jewish group Oy Vey.
The hard-wired response the word provokes, Mr. Zijlstra added, is precisely why it should be used with caution. “This fearmongering and messaging that pushes these buttons with us, it works,” he said. “It works to make people afraid, to see reality in a grim way, in which other minorities are your enemy.”
Plainly more than semantics is at stake. In 2024, to call something a pogrom — the word does not change in Dutch, Hebrew or English from the original Russian — is to say that a period of history that was believed over is not.
A History of Destruction
Jewish history rhymes, according to Jews. Participants in Passover Seders imagine that they themselves were freed from the pharaoh’s yoke. Jewish tradition teaches that the two ancient temples in Jerusalem were destroyed on the same calendar day, more than six centuries apart. A few months ago, an Israeli sketch comedy show concretized Jewish memory with a decidedly not-funny skit, “Never Again All Over Again,” that depicted seven survivors of antisemitic massacres spanning 2,000 years describing their experiences, concluding with Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack — which itself has been compared to a pogrom.
So when Israelis were targeted on the streets of a city whose most famous attractions include Anne Frank’s secret annex, days before the anniversary of the 1938 Nazi-instigated riots known as Kristallnacht (in Germany often referred to as “Reichspogromnacht”), there was a natural instinct to connect the present to the past.
The resonant analogue was the pogrom. The Russian term, probably derived from the word for thunder, originally described attacks on Jewish settlements in modern-day Ukraine in the early 1880s in the wake of the assassination of Czar Alexander II. A second wave of pogroms occurred around 1905. The third, and deadliest, came during the Russian civil war roughly a decade later.
The most infamous pogrom took place in 1903 in Kishinev, a landlocked city in the Russian province of Bessarabia. (Today it is known as Chisinau and is the capital of Moldova, a small former Soviet republic.) Over two days that April, amid false rumors of Jews committing ritual murder, 49 Jews were killed, dozens were raped, hundreds were injured; synagogues, shops and property were desecrated, looted, razed.
“Prior to Buchenwald and Auschwitz, no place-name evoked Jewish suffering more starkly than Kishinev,” the Stanford University historian Steven J. Zipperstein wrote in his 2018 book, “Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History.”
A lesson many Jews took from Kishinev — where the authorities failed to prevent the massacre — was that they could not rely on others to protect them. As various nationalisms swept the decaying empires of Central and Eastern Europe, a Jewish nationalism seemed logical.
A representative from Kishinev’s Jewish community spoke months later at the Sixth Zionist Congress. The Russia-born poet Hayim Nahman Bialik’s landmark response to Kishinev, “In the City of Slaughter,” was composed the following year not in Russian or Yiddish but Hebrew, the language of a revitalized Jewish nationalism.
“The pogroms are the modern root of political Zionism — that without a state there are no guarantees, that you can’t rely on the good will of other countries,” said Jonathan Rynhold, a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv.
“When you read, ‘Here comes the state of Israel with airplanes to fly you home,’” he added, “it’s a vindication of the basic Zionist ideal.”
‘I Don’t See Why This Is Not a Pogrom’
When scholars debate polarizing terms like “apartheid” or “genocide,” they have recourse to international legal definitions. “Pogrom,” by contrast, is just a word. “The Oxford English Dictionary,” said Daniel B. Schwartz, a professor of history and Judaic studies at George Washington University, “doesn’t have an army.”
On the night of Wednesday, Nov. 6, some fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv, a prominent club that had traveled to Amsterdam to play the Dutch squad Ajax in a league soccer match, chanted incendiary and racist slogans, pulled down a Palestinian flag and attacked a cab. Palestinian solidarity has been amply displayed in Amsterdam during the past year of a war that has killed tens of thousands of Gazans, including many women and children.
The same night, Amsterdam cabdrivers — many of whom are of Moroccan or Turkish heritage — answered a call spread over apps such as Telegram to gather outside a casino holding hundreds of Israeli fans. A security guard at the casino promised to tip others off should the fans show up again. “Tomorrow after the game in the night,” a participant replied, “part two of Jew hunt.”
After the match the next night, Israeli fans were assaulted in hit-and-run attacks. Online videos indicate that victims were targeted for being Israeli or Jewish. Five Israelis were hospitalized and discharged, and there were a few dozen injuries, said the police, who detained more than 60 people (including some from Israel).
The Dutch justice and security minister distinguished the attacks from the type of hooliganism that too often barnacles onto European soccer, saying, “There was a kind of manhunt for individual supporters moving around the city.”
“I don’t see why this is not a pogrom,” said Elissa Bemporad, a professor at Queens College who specializes in East European Jewish history. A pogrom, Ms. Bemporad said, involves several perpetrators assaulting victims chosen because they belong to a subordinate group, often ethnic. It appears that in Amsterdam, not just the most aggressive Maccabi fans but also any Israelis were targeted. And not all pogroms have fatalities.
The inciting and violent behavior of the Maccabi fans does not mean that what happened next cannot be considered a pogrom, scholars said. Russian pogroms often flared during moments of political crisis amid rumors that Jews had committed provocations, Ms. Bemporad said. During the deadliest stretch of pogroms in the years of the Russian Civil War, pogromists affiliated with the White Army sometimes had good reason to believe that the Jewish communities they attacked had Red sympathies.
“It was not uncommon — even typical — for pogroms in Russia and elsewhere to be blamed on Jews,” Mr. Zipperstein said. “But nothing justified then — and nothing can be said to minimize today — the haunting significance of the attacks on the streets of Amsterdam on any passer-by who might be Israeli or Jewish.”
One paradox of contemporary uses of the word is that the target is often not Jews. In recent years, local officials and rights activists have described as pogroms attacks of ethnic minorities in Kosovo (against Serbs); in Myanmar (against Rohingya Muslims); in Chemnitz, Germany (against Muslim migrants); and in Ukraine (against Roma).
In fact, most scholars agree that a pogrom could be perpetrated by Jews. Observers sympathetic to Palestinians, including some Israelis, have called an attack last year by Israelis on the town of Huwara, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a pogrom. In 1983, an official Israeli commission said attacks committed by Christian militias the previous year at two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon were “massacres and pogroms” for which Israeli leaders deserved “indirect blame.”
‘Caught in the Middle’
Jonathan Dekel-Chen has a cruelly unique vantage on the wisdom of comparing older Jewish tragedies to modern ones. A professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he is an authority on East European Jewry. He is also a member of a kibbutz that Hamas attacked a year ago and the father of a hostage, Sagui, 36, taken that day and believed to be alive in Gaza.
Comparing Oct. 7 to the Holocaust and other antisemitic attacks that predated Israel’s founding in 1948, Mr. Dekel-Chen argued earlier this year in a Times opinion essay, obscured the existence of a sovereign state that ensures Jews are no longer undefended, deflecting responsibility from Israel’s government for failing to prevent the attacks and retrieve the hostages.
He feels similarly about the use of “pogrom” to describe the attacks in Amsterdam, he said in an interview.
“Using the term liberally allows Jews in general and Israelis in particular to turn off their brains in terms of understanding what has happened here,” he said.
“Not to excuse what happened — it seemed not just anti-Zionist but anti-Jewish, probably antisemitic, which should be condemned and dealt with,” he added. “Labeling it a ‘pogrom’ enables us not to think about root causes.”
A modern strain of conservative Jewish thought finds one all-consuming root cause for anti-Jewish incidents: ineradicable antisemitism. The most prominent exponent of this perspective is Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, who in his declaration of war on Oct. 7, 2023, quoted the famous Bialik poem about Kishinev.
In his worldview, there is no negotiating with modern-day antisemites, much as there was no negotiating with the Amalekites, the biblical antagonists to whom Mr. Netanyahu has more than once compared contemporary enemies of Israel and Jews.
But for Israeli critics of the current government like Mr. Dekel-Chen, deploying “pogrom” short-circuits the contemplation of other, more contingent developments that may have empowered Israel’s enemies.
And for liberal Jews in the diaspora, dependent on their societies’ commitments to pluralism, vigilance against antisemitism must be paired with a concern for minority groups even when the minority group is not the Jews.
“Dutch Jews feel caught in the middle,” said Jonathan Eaton, who runs an E.U.-funded group that seeks to fight European antisemitism by promoting Jewish-Muslim dialogue, and belongs to the Amsterdam synagogue that Otto Frank, Anne’s father, helped establish after World War II. “On the left, people victim-blame. On the right, they blame every Moroccan — saying, ‘There are some good ones.’”
He added: “When you have one section of society intentionally hunt out another section, that is a pogrom. When one section feels so emboldened that they’re going to get away with it, that’s a pogrom. That’s dangerous for Jews, for Muslims, for everybody.”
The post The Amsterdam Attacks and the Long Shadow of ‘Pogroms’ appeared first on New York Times.
