John Klier (2011). Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882. Cambridge University Press. p. 58."By the twentieth century, the word "pogrom" had become a generic term in English for all forms of collective violence directed against Jews. The term was especially associated with Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, the scene of the most serious outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence before the Holocaust. Yet when applied indiscriminately to events in Eastern Europe, the term can be misleading, the more so when it implies that "pogroms" were regular events in the region and that they always shared common features. In fact, outbreaks of mass violence against Jews were extraordinary events, not a regular feature of East European life."
For this definition and a review of scholarly definitions see Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan, International handbook of violence research, Volume 1 (Springer, 2005) pp 352–55 online
britannica.com
"Pogrom", Encyclopædia Britannica. "pogrom, (Russian: "devastation," or "riot"), a mob attack, either approved or condoned by authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority. The term is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries."
Anti-Jewish Violence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History. Edited by Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal "No doubt many will contend that history suggests the need for a serious attempt to clarify what a pogrom is or is not. In the event, however, no such clarification is possible, for "pogrom" is not a pre-existing natural category but an abstraction created by human beings in order to divide complex and infinitely varies social phenomena into manageable units of analysis. As a result, in the absence of universal agreement concerning the specific behaviours to which the word refers or of some supreme authority to whom the power of definition has been delegated, there can be no logically or empirically compelling grounds for declaring that some particular episode does or does not merit the label. "Engel states that although there are no "essential defining characteristics of a pogrom", the majority of the incidents "habitually" described as pogroms "took place in divided societies in which ethnicity or religion (or both) served as significant definers of both social boundaries and social rank, ... involved 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, ... appliers of the decisive force tended to interpret the behaviour of victims according to stereotypes commonly applied to the groups to which they belonged, ... perpetrators expressed some complaint about the victims' group, ... [and] a fundamental lack of confidence on the part of those who purveyed decisive violence in the adequacy of the impersonal rule of law to deliver true justice in the event of a heinous wrong."
