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There were tensions between Hellenism and Judaism following the conquests of Alexander the Great, see for example the Maccabean Revolt of 167 BC. Particularly disputed were circumcision and antinomianism.

There were antisemitic riots in Alexandria under Roman rule in AD 38 during the reign of Caligula.^[3][4]

Evidence of communal violence against Jews and Early Christians, who were seen as a Jewish sect, exists dating from the second century AD in Rome. These riots were generally precipitated by the Romans because Jews refused to accept Roman rule over Judaea^{[citation needed]} and early Christians were seen as a Jewish sect that proselytized actively. It should be noted that Romans were generally quite tolerant of other religions, yet they conducted several wars against the Jews, see Jewish-Roman Wars, and, before the Edict of Milan, persecuted Christians.

Massive violent attacks against Jews date back at least to the Crusades such as the Pogrom of 1096 in France and Germany (the first to be officially recorded), as well as the massacres of Jews at London and York in 1189–1190.

During the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain, beginning in the ninth century, Islamic Spain was very welcoming towards Jews.^[5] The eleventh century, however, saw several Muslim pogroms against Jews; those that occurred in Cordoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066.^[6] In the 1066 Granada massacre, a Muslim mob crucified the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred about 4,000 Jews.^[7] In 1033 about 6,000 Jews were killed in Fez, Morocco by Muslim mobs.^[8][9] Mobs in Fez murdered thousands of Jews, leaving only 11 alive, in 1465.^{[10][citation needed]}

In 1348, because of the hysteria surrounding the Black Plague, Jews were massacred in Chillon, Basle, Stuttgart, Ulm, Speyer, Dresden, Strasbourg, and Mainz. By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed.^[11] A large number of the surviving Jews fled to Poland, which was very welcoming to Jews at the time.^[12]

In 1543, Martin Luther wrote On the Jews and Their Lies, a treatise in which he advocated harsh persecution of the Jewish people, up to what are now called pogroms. He advocated that their synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes razed, and property and money confiscated.^[13][14]

Jews and Poles were also massacred during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks in 1648–1654,^[15], and during the Koliyivshchyna in 1768-1769.

The victims, mostly Jewish children, of a 1905 pogrom in Yekaterinoslav (today's Dnipropetrovsk).

The term pogrom as a reference to large-scale, targeted, and repeated antisemitic rioting saw its first use in the nineteenth century.

The first pogrom is often considered to be the 1821 anti-Jewish riots in Odessa (modern Ukraine) after the death of the Greek Orthodox patriarch in Istanbul, in which 14 Jews were killed.^[16]

Other sources, such as the Jewish Encyclopedia, indicate that the first pogrom was the 1859 riots in Odessa.

The term "pogrom" became commonly used in English after a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept through south-western Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine and Poland) in 1881–1884 (in that period over 200 anti-Jewish events occurred in Russian Empire, notably the Kiev, Warsaw and Odessa pogroms).^[17]

The trigger for these pogroms was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, after which rumours were spread blaming "the Jews."^[18] The extent to which the Russian press was responsible for encouraging perceptions of the assassination as a Jewish act has been disputed.^[19] Local economic conditions are thought to have contributed significantly to the rioting, especially with regard to the participation of the business competitors of local Jews and the participation of railroad workers, and it has been argued that this was actually more important than rumours of Jewish responsibility for the death of the Tsar.^[20] These rumours, however, were clearly of some importance, if only as a trigger. Contrary to rumour, fourteen of the fifteen assassins were born into Christian homes, and one of their close associates, Gesya Gelfman, was born into a Jewish home. Nonetheless, the assassination inspired "retaliatory" attacks by Christians on Jewish communities.

A much bloodier wave of pogroms broke out in 1903–1906, leaving thousands of Jews dead and many more wounded, as the Jews took to arms to defend their families and property from the attackers. The 1905 pogrom of Jews in Odessa was the most serious pogrom of the period, with reports of up to 2,500 Jews killed.^[21]

Home at last by Moshe Maimon. The house's occupants return when it is safe, to find the house thoroughly looted. A rabbi is saying Kaddish for a member of the household who was killed.

A 1909 pogrom of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire claimed tens of thousands of lives, as Armenian and Christian property was burned en masse.^[22]

Historians such as Edward Radzinsky inform that many pogroms were incited by authorities, even if some happened spontaneously,^[23] supported by the Tsarist Russian secret police (the Okhrana). Those perpetrators who were prosecuted usually received clemency by Tsar's decree.^[24]

Even outside these main outbreaks, pogroms remained common; there were anti-Jewish riots in Odessa in 1859, 1871, 1881, 1886 and 1905 in which thousands were killed in total.

The 1903 Kishinev pogrom, (also known as the Kishinev Massacre), in present-day Moldova killed 47-49 persons. It provoked an international outcry after it was publicized by The Times and the New York Times. There was a second, smaller Kishinev pogrom in 1905.

A pogrom on the 20th of July 1905, in Yekaterinoslav (present-day Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine), was stopped by the Jewish self-defence group (one man in the group killed).

On July 31 1905 there was the first pogrom outside the Pale of Settlement, in the town of Makariev (near Nizhni Novgorod), where a patriotic procession led by the mayor turned violent.

At a pogrom in Kerch in Crimea on 31 July 1905^[25], the mayor ordered the police to fire at the self-defence group, and two fighters were killed (one of them, P.Kirilenko, was a Ukrainian who joined the Jewish defence group). The pogrom was conducted by the port workers, actively aided by a group of Gypsies apparently brought in for the purpose.

After the publication of the Tsar's Manifesto of October 17 1905, pogroms erupted in 660 towns mainly in the present-day Ukraine, in the Southern and Southeastern areas of the Pale of Settlement. In contrast, there were no pogroms either in present-day Poland or Lithuania. There were also very few incidents in Belarus or Russia proper. There were 24 pogroms outside of the Pale of Settlement, but those were directed at the revolutionaries rather than Jews.

The greatest number of pogroms were registered in the Chernigov gubernia in northern Ukraine. The pogroms there in October 1905 took 800 Jewish lives, the material damages estimated at 70,000,000 rubles. 400 were killed in Odessa, over 150 in Rostov-on-Don, 67 in Yekaterinoslav, 54 in Minsk, 30 in Simferopol - over 40, in Orsha — over 30.

In 1906 the pogroms continued: January — in Gomel, June — in Belostok (ca. 80 dead), in August — in Siedlce (ca. 30 dead). The police and the military personnel were among the perpetrators.

In many of these incidents the most prominent participants were railway workers, industrial workers, and small shopkeepers and craftsmen; peasants mainly joined in to loot.[2]

By 1907 the pogroms subsided, as the USA administration became overwhelmed by a large influx of immigrants, and pressured the central Russian government to take action.

Many pogroms accompanied the Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing Russian Civil War: an estimated 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews were killed throughout the former Russian Empire; the number of Jewish orphans exceeded 300,000.

Pogroms spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Anti-Jewish riots also broke out elsewhere in the world.

• In the Americas, there was a pogrom in Argentina in 1919, during the Tragic Week[3][4]
• In 1927, there were pogroms in Oradea (Romania).

In the Arab world, there were a number of pogroms which played a key role in the massive emigration from Arab countries to Israel. These occurred during rising tensions and violence in Palestine as Jews tried to secure a homeland there.

• On 1-2 June 1941 the Farhud pogrom in Iraq killed between 200 and 400 Jews.
• In 1945, anti-Jewish rioters in Tripoli, Libya killed 140 Jews.

There was a Limerick Pogrom, in Ireland in the late nineteenth century. This pogrom was less violent than the others. Although it involved campaigns of intimidation, it chiefly took the form of an economic boycott against Jewish residents of Limerick.

Pogroms were also encouraged by the Nazis, especially early in the war before the larger mass killings began. The first of these pogroms was Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, often called Pogromnacht, in which Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed, up to 200 Jews were killed and some 30,000 Jewish men and boys were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

A number of pogroms occurred during the Holocaust at the hands of non-Germans. Perhaps the deadliest of these Holocaust-era pogroms was the Iaşi pogrom in Romania, in which as many as 13,266 Jews were killed by Romanian citizens, police, and military officials.^[26]

In the city of Lwow, Ukrainian nationalists organized two large pogroms in June-July, 1941, in which around 6,000 Jews were murdered,^[27] in alleged retribution for the collaboration of some Jews with the previous Soviet regime (see Controversy regarding the Nachtigall Battalion).

In Lithuania, Lithuanian nationalists led by Algirdas Klimaitis and the Lithuanian partisans consisting of LAF units reinforced by 3,600 deserters from 29th Lithuanian Territorial Corps of the Red Army,^[28] engaged in anti-Jewish pogroms in Kaunas. Between 25 and 26 June 1941 about 3,800 Jews were killed and synagogues and Jewish settlements burned.^[29]

During the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941, Polish gentiles murdered between 400 to 1,600 Jews (estimates vary) in a burning barn-house. The degree to which Nazi Germans, who controlled the village, participated in the massacre remains the subject of debate among historians, whether the cause be internal versus their Polish neighbors, or cause of the Nazis'^[30]. The guidelines for such massacres were formulated by Reinhard Heydrich, who ordered to induce pogroms on territories occupied by Germany.^[31] The village was previously occupied by the Soviet Union, (see Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact) and some members of the Jewish community were subsequently accused of collaboration with the Soviet occupiers.

After the end of World War II, a series of violent anti-Semitic incidents occurred throughout Europe, particularly in the Soviet-occupied East (see anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe, 1944–1946).

The pogroms of the 1880s caused a worldwide outcry and, along with harsh laws, propelled mass Jewish emigration. Two million Jews fled the Russian Empire between 1880 and 1914, with many going to the United Kingdom and United States.

In reaction to the pogroms and other oppressions of the Tsarist period, Jews increasingly became politically active. Jewish participation in The General Jewish Labor Bund, colloquially known as The Bund, and in the Bolshevik movements, was directly influenced by the pogroms. Similarly, the organization of Jewish self-defense leagues (which stopped the pogromists in certain areas during the second Kishinev pogrom), such as Hovevei Zion, led naturally to a strong embrace of Zionism, especially by Russian Jews.