Pogrom

Pogrom (pronounced puh-gruhm, puh-grom, poh-gruhm or poh-grom)

An organized persecution or massacre of a defined (usually ethnic or religious) group, historically and originally applied especially to attacks on the Jews.

1882: From the Yiddish פּאָגראָם‎ (pogrom) (organized massacre in Russia against a particular class or people, especially the Jews), from the Russian погро́м (pogróm & pogromu (devastation, destruction) the construct being по (po) (by, through, behind, after) (cognate with the Latin post) +‎ громи́ть (gromu or gromít) (thunder, roar; to smash, to sack; to destroy, devastate) from the primitive Indo-European imitative root ghrem (which endures in Modern English as grim).  The Russian derivatives are погро́мщик (pogrómščik) and погро́мщица (pogrómščica).  The literal translation of the Russian pogróm is destruction, devastation (of a town, country, as might happen in a war) and it’s the noun derivative of pogromít; po is the perfective prefix and gromít (to destroy, devastate) is a derivative of grom (thunder).

For historic reasons, should perhaps be Jewish-specific

Although etymologists note the word pogrom has increasingly been used to refer to any persecution instigated by a government or dominant class against a minority group, its origin lies in organized attacks on the Jews and, for historic reasons, pogrom perhaps should be used only in this context.

Although mob attacks on Jews, organized and spontaneous, have been documented for thousands of years, pogrom is a Yiddish variation on a Russian word meaning "thunder" and entered the English language to describe nineteenth and twentieth century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire, similar attacks against Jews at other times and places retrospectively becoming known as pogroms.  An important technical distinction emerged in the discussions which produced the four articles of indictment ((1) planning aggressive war, (2) waging aggressive war (the two collective the core crime of aggression), (3) war crimes and (4) crimes against humanity) which became the basis of the Nuremberg trials in 1946-1947.  While it was clear an event such as 1938’s Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass), in which dozens of Jews were killed, was a pogrom in the historical sense, the holocaust which followed between 1941-1945 was so monstrous a crime and on such a scale that another word was required and thus was created genocide.

In the years since, the definitional aspects of these matters have become a macabre exercise for lawyers required to prosecute or defend those accused of mass-murder.  In the last quarter-century, deciding what to do about what was done in places like Rwanda, the Congo, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia and Burma (Myanmar) required courts to decide whether to treat the events as vigilantism, terrorism, massacres, genocide, war, pogroms or the more recent descriptor, ethnic cleansing.

Promotional poster by Josef Fenneker (1895-1956) for the German silent film Pogrom (1919), written and directed by Austrian Alfred Halm (1861-1951) and distributed by Berliner Film-Manufaktur GmbH.