GREEKS AND THE ANTI-SEMITIC POGROMS OF ODESSA

Odessa entered the nineteenth century as an imperial experiment. Founded in 1794 on the site of an ancient Greek colony, it developed rapidly into a major Black Sea port whose population was shaped by trade, mobility and imperial privilege. Greeks and Jews, fleeing persecution and seeking opportunity, arrived early and settled in large numbers. By the 1820s, both communities occupied prominent positions in the city’s commercial and social life. Greek merchants dominated shipping, brokerage and international trade networks, while Jewish traders, artisans and middlemen expanded steadily within retail, finance and grain export. Proximity and competition were inescapable.

The first major rupture between the two groups occurred in 1821, driven by events unfolding far beyond Odessa. The outbreak of the Greek War of Independence and the execution of Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory V in Constantinople reverberated across the Orthodox world. Odessa, home to a politically active Greek diaspora and members of the Filiki Eteria, became a centre of agitation. Greek refugees arrived from Ottoman territories bearing accounts of violence, executions and reprisals. Within this charged atmosphere, allegations circulated that Jews in Constantinople had assisted Ottoman authorities in the patriarch’s execution and had even agitated in favour of it. These claims were repeated with growing insistence in the Greek coffee houses and clubs of Odessa.

The burial of Gregory V in Odessa in June 1821, after his body was recovered from the sea, provided the immediate setting for violence. Contemporary observers describe unrest breaking out during the funeral procession itself. The German writer Heinrich Zschokke, present in the city shortly afterwards, recorded that Greek attacks on Jewish homes and shops erupted simultaneously in several districts. Windows were smashed, shops looted and individuals assaulted. The main synagogue was damaged. Later reconstructions based on municipal records indicate that seventeen Jews were killed and more than sixty injured.

Imperial forces were deployed, though their role proved ambiguous. Zschokke reported uneven intervention by soldiers and Cossacks and noted that looting continued in their presence. He further observed that advance warnings had circulated among Jews advising them to remain indoors, suggesting foreknowledge on the part of local officials.

The 1821 pogrom was treated by the authorities as a disturbance arising from exceptional circumstances. No structural measures were introduced to prevent recurrence, and the event was soon forgotten, its memory remaining largely confined to the Jewish community. Within Odessa’s Greek milieu, it was absorbed into narratives of martyrdom and national awakening.

Over the following decades, economic relations in the city shifted markedly. The abolition of Odessa’s free port status in 1859, together with the aftermath of the Crimean War, weakened Greek mercantile dominance. Jewish firms expanded into sectors vacated by Greek trading houses. By mid-century, Jewish traders were prominent in grain export, retail and finance, with statistical surveys from the 1860s showing steadily increasing Jewish ownership across commercial sectors. Greek commentators and merchants registered this transformation with growing resentment.

A second pogrom targeting Odessa’s Jewish population occurred in 1859 during the Orthodox Easter period. Its immediate catalysts lay in the circulation of rumours rather than in any identifiable political event. Jews were accused of ritual murder and of desecrating a Greek Orthodox church and cemetery, allegations drawing upon long-established European antisemitic tropes. In subsequent correspondence, Governor Alexander Stroganov attributed the outbreak to religious fanaticism intensified by false reports.

Violence broke out among groups of Greek sailors and dockworkers, joined by local residents. Jewish homes and shops were systematically attacked. Some contemporary accounts record that Jewish residents confronted their assailants holding Christian icons, hoping that the display of sacred images might restrain or deter the violence. Sources differ regarding fatalities, with some reporting one Jewish death and others two, while several individuals were seriously injured. Property damage was limited in scale compared with later events, though the symbolic impact was considerable. Local newspapers described the episode as a street fight, avoiding the language of communal violence, and once the unrest subsided, the administration treated the matter as resolved.

By the late 1860s, Odessa had become one of the Russian Empire’s largest Jewish urban centres, a transformation accompanied by the growing prominence of Jewish entrepreneurs and the further decline of Greek firms. Within the Greek community, these shifts were increasingly experienced as displacement and loss, with responsibility for economic decline frequently attributed to Jewish competitors. Tensions hardened as economic resentment was expressed in religious terms. Pamphlets circulated accusing Jews of exploiting Christian labour and mocking Orthodoxy, while the memory of Patriarch Gregory V was revived, detached from its historical context and redeployed as a symbolic instrument of grievance.

Against this background, the pogrom of 1871 unfolded over several days and marked a qualitative escalation. It erupted once more during Orthodox Holy Week, apparently triggered by a minor altercation whose precise circumstances remain unclear. What can be established with greater certainty is that organised groups quickly coalesced and directed their actions toward Jewish districts. Contemporary reports and later investigations identified Greek merchants and agitators as principal organisers, and the violence spread methodically, with Jewish taverns, shops and homes subjected to widespread destruction.

Municipal records and eyewitness accounts indicate that more than eight hundred homes and five hundred businesses were damaged or looted, displacing thousands of Jewish residents. Official casualty figures recorded six Jewish deaths and twenty-one injuries, although some contemporary Russian reports sought to minimise fatalities. The scale and pattern of destruction suggest restraint in the use of lethal force, possibly shaped by an assumption that authorities would tolerate extensive property damage while intervening decisively only in cases of murder.

The response of the imperial administration was marked by hesitation. Governor-General Pavel Kotzebue delayed decisive military intervention, while Jewish self-defence groups were dispersed by police and Cossack units rather than permitted to protect their neighbourhoods. In this atmosphere of uncertainty, a rumour circulated among rioters that imperial permission had been granted to destroy Jewish property. One Russian eyewitness later recalled a remark attributed to a Greek participant in the violence: “Do you think we could destroy and beat Jews for three whole days if that had not been the will of the authorities?” Order was restored only when unrest spread beyond Jewish districts and threatened the stability of the city as a whole.

Arrests followed, with approximately six hundred individuals detained, largely from the urban poor. No prominent organisers were subjected to serious punishment. Official reports attributed the pogrom to intoxication, religious passion and class resentment, while an internal memorandum explained hostility as arising from perceptions of Jewish economic dominance combined with religious difference. The language of these assessments avoided sustained engagement with structural or systemic factors.

Jewish intellectual responses were swift. Writing in Odessa in 1871, the jurist Ilya Orshansky framed the violence in legal terms: “Until such time as the divergence between the Jews’ actual and juridical position in Russia is permanently removed by eliminating all existing limitations on their rights, hostility to the Jews will not only persist, but in all likelihood will increase.” His assessment circulated widely within Jewish legal and journalistic circles. The journalist Mikhail Kulisher approached the events from a psychological perspective, observing that “beneath the apparently accidental and singular Odessa pogrom we discovered something of enduring importance, namely, that Judeophobia was not a theoretical error of some kind, but a psychic attitude in which centuries upon centuries of hatred was reflected.”

Taken together, the three Odessa pogroms form a coherent pattern rather than isolated disturbances. In each case, rumours framed in religious language circulated during periods of economic transition, often coinciding with heightened liturgical moments, while administrative hesitation operated as a permissive condition. During this phase of Odessa’s history, the Greek community emerged as the principal initiator of anti-Jewish violence, a role that diminished after 1871 as leadership of pogrom activity shifted toward Slavic populations and organised far-right movements. In this respect, Odessa invites comparison with imperial cities such as Roman Alexandria, where Greek and Jewish communities similarly competed for proximity to power, civic privilege and economic advantage, and where violence erupted when imperial authority proved ambivalent.

In Odessa, as in Alexandria, communal conflict unfolded within an imperial framework that rewarded intermediaries. Greeks in southern Russia functioned for decades as favoured Orthodox agents of empire, occupying a position shaped by commercial utility, religious affinity and political expediency. This alignment conferred privilege while also exposing the community to instrumentalisation. Although direct state orchestration of the pogroms cannot be demonstrated, patterns of hesitation, selective enforcement and narrative minimisation suggest that Greek hostility toward Jews operated within tolerable limits of imperial policy, at times deflecting social tension without destabilising the broader order.

The consequences of this history extended beyond its Jewish victims and profoundly shaped the Greek community itself. As mercantile dominance declined and imperial favour weakened, Greeks in Odessa came to occupy an increasingly ambiguous position within the Russian state. Following the Russian Revolution and civil war, the Greek population of southern Russia abandoned the region in large numbers, dispersing to Greece, the Balkans and the wider diaspora. In exile, memories of Odessa were selectively reordered. Narratives of prosperity, philanthropy and national awakening were preserved, while episodes of communal violence were marginalised or omitted, excluded from the usable past through which displaced Greek communities articulated their twentieth-century identity.

Greek-language sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflect this selectivity. Memoirs, communal histories and publications produced by Greek Odessans emphasise educational institutions, churches, benefactions and revolutionary activity, often portraying the city as a site of harmonious coexistence later disrupted by Russian or Bolshevik violence. Where conflict is acknowledged, responsibility is diffused or reframed as disorder and popular excess. The Greek role in earlier pogroms against Jews is rarely examined directly and, when mentioned, appears obliquely, stripped of agency and specificity. Silence thus functioned as a mechanism of communal self-preservation.

The Odessa pogroms therefore illuminate more than a sequence of anti-Jewish attacks. They reveal how imperial structures fostered competition among minority intermediaries, how privilege could be extended without protection, and how violence could be absorbed into administrative routine and later effaced from communal memory. As in Alexandria under Rome, coexistence rested on contingent favour rather than secure equality. The surviving record remains incomplete, shaped as much by omission as by preservation, reminding us that communal histories are determined as decisively by what is set aside as by what is remembered.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 14 February 2026