Page "Pogrom" Paragraph 5

According to Encyclopædia Britannica, " the term is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the first extensive pogroms followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 ," and the Wiley-Blackwell Dictionary of Modern European History Since 1789 states that pogroms " were antisemitic disturbances that periodically occurred within the tsarist empire.

" However, the term is widely used to refer to many events which occurred prior to the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire.

Historian of Russian Jewry John Klier writes in Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882 that " By the twentieth century, the word ' pogrom ' had become a generic term in English for all forms of collective violence directed against Jews.

" Abramson wrote that " in mainstream usage the word has come to imply an act of antisemitism ", since whilst " Jews have not been the only group to suffer under this phenomenon, ... historically Jews have been frequent victims of such violence.