This timeline of antisemitism chronicles the facts of antisemitism, hostile actions or discrimination against Jews as a religious or ethnic group, in the 20th century. It includes events in the history of antisemitic thought, actions taken to combat or relieve the effects of antisemitism, and events that affected the prevalence of antisemitism in later years. The history of antisemitism can be traced from ancient times to the present day.
For events specifically pertaining to the expulsion of Jews, see Jewish refugees.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Roman Catholic Church adhered to a distinction between "good antisemitism" and "bad antisemitism". The "bad" kind promoted hatred of Jews because of their descent. This was considered un-Christian because the Christian message was intended for all of humanity regardless of ethnicity; anyone could become a Christian. The "good" kind criticized alleged Jewish conspiracies to control newspapers, banks, and other institutions, to care only about accumulation of wealth, etc. Many Catholic bishops wrote articles criticizing Jews on such grounds, and, when accused of promoting hatred of Jews, would remind people that they condemned the "bad" kind of antisemitism.David Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews.
1900s 1902 During the funeral of New York's Chief Rabbi Jacob Joseph, employees of R. Hoe & Company, who had been harassing local Jews for some time, threw water, paper, wood, and iron from the upper floors of the factory at 504 Grand Street onto the mourning procession. 1903 The Kishinev pogrom. 49 Jews murdered. 1903 The first publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax in St. Petersburg, Russia (by Pavel Krushevan). 1904 The Limerick boycott was an economic boycott waged against the small Jewish community in Limerick, Ireland. It was accompanied by a number of assaults, stone throwing and intimidation, which caused many Jews to leave the city. 1905 Pogrom in Yekaterinoslav. 66 Jews were killed and 125 wounded and Jewish homes and shops were looted. 1905 The 1905 Kiev pogrom was a massacre of 100 Jews. 1905 The second Kishinev pogrom. 19 Jews murdered and 56 wounded. 1906 Alfred Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army. 1907 Over 60 Jews in the Mellah of Casablanca are killed in a pogrom by Kabyle Muslims. Many more were wounded, and a large number of women and children were carried off. 1909 Salomon Reinach and Florence Simmonds refer to "this new antisemitism, masquerading as patriotism, which was first propagated at Berlin by the court chaplain Stöcker, with the connivance of Bismarck."Reinach, Salomon & Simmonds, Florence. Orpheus: A General History of Religions, G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1909, p. 210. Similarly, Peter N. Stearns comments that "the ideology behind the new anti-Semitism [in Germany] was more racist than religious."Stearns, Peter N. Impact of the Industrial Revolution: Protest and Alienation. Prentice Hall, 1972, p. 56.
1910s
1910 The 1910 Shiraz blood libel was a pogrom of the Jewish quarter in Shiraz, Iran. It was sparked by accusations that the Jews had ritually murdered a Muslim girl. By the end of the pogrom, 12 Jews were killed, 50 or so were wounded, and 6,000 were robbed of all their possessions. 1912The Tritl or the 1912 Fez massacre left 42 Moroccan Jews dead. 1913 The blood libel trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis in Kiev. 1915 In one 48-hour interval in May 1915, all 40,000 Jews living in Kaunas, Lithuania are forcibly removed from the city. 1915 The Leo Frank trial and lynching in Atlanta, Georgia turns the spotlight on antisemitism in the United States and leads to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League. 1917 The 1917 Jaffa deportation was a forceful expulsion and confiscation of property of 10,000 Jews from Jaffa and Tel Aviv by Ottoman authorities. 1917–1921 Attacked for being revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries, unpatriotic pacifists or warmongers, religious zealots or godless atheists, capitalist exploiters or bourgeois profiteers, masses of Jewish civilians were murdered in pogroms in the course of Russian Civil War (by various estimates 70,000 to 250,000, the number of orphans exceeded 300,000). 1918 3,000–10,000 Mountain Jews are killed during March Days. 1918 The Lwów pogrom of 1918 was an attack on the Jewish population of Lwów that took place on 21–23 November 1918 during the Polish–Ukrainian War. After the pogrom was over, an estimated 52–150 Jewish residents were killed and hundreds were injured. 1919 The Kiev pogroms of 1919 were a series of pogroms in various places around Kiev carried out by White Volunteer Army troops. There were a total of 1,326 pogroms across Ukraine around that time, in which between 30,000 and 70,000 Jews were massacred. According to some estimates, the pogroms left half a million Jews homeless. The series of events occurred in the following districts: 1919 The Pinsk massacre was the mass execution of thirty-five Jewish residents of Pinsk on 5 April 1919 by the Polish Army. 1919 In February 1919 a brigade of UNR troops killed 1500 Jews in Proskurov.D. Vital. Zionism: the crucial phase. Oxford University Press. 1987. p. 359 1919 In Tetiev on 25 March 1919, Cossack troops under the command of Colonels Cherkovsky, Kurovsky and Shliatoshenko murdered 4,000 Jews.M. I. Midlarsky. The killing trap: genocide in the seventeenth century. Cambridge University Press. 2005. p. 46. 1919–1920 During the Russian Civil War the Jews of Uman in eastern Podolia were subjected to two pogroms in 1919, as the town changed hands several times. The first pogrom, in spring, claimed 170 victims; the second one, in summer, more than 90. This time the Christian inhabitants helped to hide the Jews. The Council for Public Peace, with a Christian majority and a Jewish minority, saved the city from danger several times. In 1920, for example, it stopped the pogrom initiated by the troops of General Denikin.Encyclopaedia Judaica, second edition, vol. 20, p. 244 1919–1922 Soviet Yevsektsiya (the Jewish section of the Communist Party) attacks Bund and Zionist parties for "Jewish cultural particularism". In April 1920, the All-Russian Zionist Congress is broken up by Cheka led by Bolsheviks, whose leadership and ranks included many anti-Jewish Jews. Thousands are arrested and sent to Gulag for "counter-revolutionary... collusion in the interests of Anglo-French bourgeoisie... to restore the Palestine state." Hebrew language is banned, Judaism is suppressed, along with other religions.
1920s 1920 The Jerusalem pogrom of April 1920 of old Yishuv. 1920 The idea that the Bolshevik revolution was a Jewish conspiracy for the world domination sparks worldwide interest in a fabricated text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In a single year, five editions are sold out in England alone. In the US Henry Ford prints 500,000 copies. 1920 In the spring of 1920, Henry Ford made his personal newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, chronicle what he considered the "Jewish menace". Every week for 91 issues, the paper exposed some sort of Jewish-inspired evil major story in a headline. The most popular and aggressive stories were then chosen to be reprinted into four volumes called The International Jew.Albert Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York, Stein and Day, 1980), 14 1921 All Jews in Mongolia are massacred by Russian anti-Bolshevik forces commanded by Baron von Ungern-Sternberg with one known survival Baron Zanzer. 1921 Jaffa riots in Palestine. 1921–1925 Outbreak of antisemitism in United States, led by Ku Klux Klan. 1922 Soviet Yevsektsiya (the Jewish section of the Communist Party) attacks Bund and Zionist parties for "Jewish cultural particularism". In April 1920, the All-Russian Zionist Congress is broken up by Cheka led by Bolsheviks, whose leadership and ranks included many anti-Jewish Jews. Thousands are arrested and sent to Gulag for "counter-revolutionary... collusion in the interests of Anglo-French bourgeoisie... to restore the Palestine state." Hebrew language is banned, Judaism is suppressed, along with other religions.
1922 The government of Yemen, under Yahya Muhammad Hamid ed-Din, re-introduced an Islamic law entitled the "orphans decree". The law dictated that if Jewish boys or girls under the age of 12 were orphaned, they were to be forcibly converted to Islam, their connections to their families and communities were to be severed, and they had to be handed over to Muslim foster families.
1923 Der Stürmer (, lit. "the Attacker") was a weekly tabloid-format Nazi newspaper published by Julius Streicher (a prominent official in the Nazi Party) from 1923 to the end of World War II, with brief suspensions in publication due to legal difficulties. It was a significant part of Nazi propaganda and was vehemently antisemitic.Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, p 228 1924 The National Origins Quota of 1924 and Immigration Act of 1924 largely halted immigration to the U.S. from Eastern Europe and Russia; this was meant to restrict Eastern European Jews among others, as a great many of these immigrants coming from Russia and Eastern Europe were Jews (the "outbreak of antisemitism" mentioned in the above entry may have also played a part in the passage of these acts). 1925 Pogrom against jews in Oran where 2 jews are killed and 50 injured by a Muslim mob. 1925 The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy is a 144-page book written by Bishop Alma Bridwell White in 1925 and illustrated by Reverend Branford Clarke. This book primarily espouses White's deep fear and hatred of the Roman Catholic Church while also promoting antisemitism, racism against African Americans, white supremacy, and women's equality. 1925 Adolf Hitler publishes Mein Kampf. 1927 The Schwartzbard trial was a sensational 1927 French murder trial that resulted in a mistrial of international proportions. At the trial Sholom Schwartzbard was accused of murdering the Ukrainian immigrant and head of the Ukrainian government-in-exile Symon Petlura in Paris. While the defendant fully admitted to the crime the trial at the end turned in accusation of Petlura's responsibility for the massive 1919–1920 pogroms in Ukraine in which Schwartzbard had lost all 15 members of his family. Instead of Schwartzbard's murder case the trial was turned into a political case against the Ukrainian government. Schwartzbard was acquitted. 1928 The Massena blood libel was an instance of blood libel against Jews in which the Jews of Massena, New York, were falsely accused of the kidnapping and ritual murder of a Christian girl in September 1928. 1929 The ancient Jewish community of Hebron is massacred by local Muslims over rumors that the Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount. 1929 18–20 Jewish residents of Safed were brutally killed in the 1929 Palestine riots.
1930s
1930 Pogrom against the Jews of Bălți. 1933, 16 August Christie Pits riot takes place in Toronto, Ontario.Cyril H. Levitt and William Shaffir, The Riot at Christie Pits, Toronto: Lester & Orpen Denys, 1987 1933 In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933, published under the title After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934), T.S. Eliot wrote of societal tradition and coherence, "What is still more important [than cultural homogeneity] is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable."Kirk, Russell. "T. S. Eliot on Literary Morals: On T. S. Eliot's After Strange Gods", Touchstone Magazine, volume 10, issue 4, Fall 1997. Eliot never re-published this book/lecture.: 1933–1941 Persecution of Jews in Germany rises until they are stripped of their rights not only as citizens, but also as human beings. During this time antisemitism reached its all-time high. Law against Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities Law for the Reestablishment of the Professional Civil Service (ban on professions)