Was The Violence in Amsterdam an Anti-Jewish Pogrom?
Dr Brendan McGeever from the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism says the careless use of the word 'pogrom' does a disservice to Jewish history.
The violence against supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam has been described in near singular terms. Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, Geert Wilders, and President Biden all speak as one: this was a pogrom against Jews.
As a scholar of anti-Jewish pogroms, I am accustomed to discussing the topic in academic conferences and seminars. Rarely is it debated outside of these settings. That all changed a year ago. In the immediate aftermath of 7 October, there was an 850% increase in Google search volume for ‘pogrom’. Since the events in Amsterdam, the increase stands at more than 1000%.
The word 'pogrom' evokes histories that are etched in Jewish collective memory. It is understandable that many are reaching for it as a way to make sense of recent events. The violence in Amsterdam was abhorrent, and the fact that it took place in the heart of Europe on the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht served only to confirm the sense of fear that many Jews live with today.
But was this a pogrom? Describing the violence in this way is not only misleading, but politically dangerous. All of us who want our streets to be safe, for Jews and non-Jews alike, have a responsibility to comprehend what happened in Amsterdam with accuracy and care.
Deriving from the Russian verb gromit – to plunder, destroy – the noun ‘pogrom’ travelled into the English language by the early twentieth century as news spread of atrocities carried out against Jews in Imperial Russia.
The pogroms were violent acts by sections of the majority population against a racialised minority lacking in rights or state protection. The intention was to keep that minority 'in its place'. When civil war broke out in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, more than 100,000 Jews were murdered in what was then the most ferocious wave of antisemitic violence in modern Jewish history.
There is a wealth of scholarship on pogroms. What are the prevailing definitions? For historian Hans Rogger, pogroms occur in a context in which the mechanisms of long-term structural oppression against a minority population begin to be relaxed or challenged. This is precisely what happened in Russia during the revolution.
For David Engel, pogroms involve "collective violent applications of force by members of what perpetrators believed to be a higher-ranking ethnic or religious group against members of what they considered a lower-ranking or subaltern group”.
In other words: pogroms occurred against Jews in regions of Europe where they were structurally discriminated against, where laws prohibited their full participation in civic and political life, and where Jews were deemed to be politically subversive and carriers of an alien culture. At times, the violence was carried out ‘from below’, by parts of the majority population; at others, such as Kristallnacht, the pogrom was organised and perpetrated by the state.
Describing the violence in Amsterdam on Thursday night as a pogrom is wrong for four reasons.
First, the term pogrom places the events in a very specific chapter of Jewish history to which they do not belong. Antisemitism was undoubtedly present on the streets of Amsterdam – a taxi driver was filmed declaring ‘we are here hunting the cancerous Jews’, while another referred to a ‘Jew hunt’. As chilling as these words are, not every incidence of antisemitic violence represents a pogrom. It is also not at all clear that, in general, antisemitism was the motivating factor in the violence. Supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv were targeted because they are Israeli. In Amsterdam, both anti-Zionism and antisemitism were on display: in some instances, they overlapped, while in others they were distinct. The application of the word pogrom to events in Amsterdam, however, serves to elide the complex nature of this relationship.
Second, earlier in the day, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were filmed shouting “death to the Arabs! Let the Israeli army win, fuck the Arabs!” A Palestinian flag was set on fire. A taxi driver was attacked. Later, they chanted “Why is school out in Gaza? Because they are no children left!”. This important context has been entirely ignored in some of the commentary by mainstream politicians. The term pogrom implies a clearcut distinction between victims and perpetrators; events in Amsterdam belie such a differentiation.
Third, describing the violence as a pogrom encourages us to ignore the difference between the status of Jews a century ago and their place in the world today. In Europe, antisemitism remains a danger, and it does not take the form of the pogrom as it once did. In Israel, Jews constitute the majority population of a state boasting one of the world’s most formidable armies. That state is presently engaged in a war described by some of the most respected scholars of the Holocaust as a genocide. Supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv were targeted because they were perceived to represent that state. The term pogrom does not enable us to capture these important historical differences.
Which is not to say that pogroms do not occur in the world today: based on the definitions that we find in the academic literature, we find a closer fit to a pogrom in the violence of armed Israeli settlers who have rampaged through towns in the West Bank in a wave of state-backed settler violence that has escalated dramatically since 7 October.
Fourth, 'pogrom' has been put in the service of racist dog-whistling by senior politicians in Britain and the Netherlands who have sought to link the violence to the ‘mass immigration’ of Muslims. Instead of combatting antisemitism, this only entrenches racism and enmity. Such claims are also empirically false: a study across five nations in Western Europe has shown that levels of antisemitism are in fact not impacted by immigration from Middle East and North African nations.
The word 'pogrom' is not just ill-suited to the task of explaining the violence in Amsterdam on Thursday. It leads us to imagine a world in which Jews are beleaguered and surrounded by powerful enemies: both the immediate and the geo-political context of the violence was significantly more complex than this.
The word ‘pogrom’, when used in this way, also does a disservice to Jewish history. We are accustomed to using care when it comes to the term ‘Holocaust’ and we rightly criticise those who deploy it inappropriately. ‘Pogrom’ deserves similar treatment. Misusing it prevents us from comprehending the multiple atrocities being carried out in the here and now, against Jews and non-Jews, and compounds an already dangerous situation.
We can and must do better.
Dr Brendan McGeever is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the author of Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (2019) and Britain in Fragments (2023). He is the 2024-2025 Cornell Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at Swarthmore College.