The 1905 Odessa Pogrom, the Deadliest of a Nationwide Wave

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The deadliest of the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that swept the Russian Empire in October 1905 struck Odessa in the days after Tsar Nicholas II's October Manifesto conceded a constitution and an elected legislature. Right-wing nationalist crowds, drawing support from groups later organized as the Union of the Russian People and known collectively as the Black Hundreds, mobilized in patriotic counter-demonstrations against the revolutionary unrest the Manifesto had touched off, and turned on the city's large Jewish population, looting and burning Jewish homes and businesses and killing residents over several days.

The Odessa pogrom was the single deadliest incident in the nationwide wave of over six hundred pogroms that followed the October Manifesto across the Russian Empire in 1905, and it accelerated the emigration of Jews from Odessa and the wider Pale of Settlement in the years that followed. Robert Weinberg's case study treats it as the sharpest single instance of the reactionary backlash the Manifesto's liberal concessions provoked.