effect upon the crowd.  The pogrom was stopped, after five hundred Jewish families had been ruined and a Jewish sanctuary had been defiled.  In one devastated synagogue the human fiends got hold of eleven Torah scrolls, tearing to pieces some of them and hideously desecrating other copies of the Holy Writ, inscribed with the commandments, “Thou shalt not murder,” “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery”—­which evidently ran counter to the beliefs of the rioters.

The example set by Yekaterinoslav, the capital of the government of the same name, proved to be contagious, for during August and September pogroms took place in several neighboring towns and townlets.  Among these the pogrom at Novo-Moskovsk on September 4 was particularly violent, nearly all Jewish houses in that town having been destroyed by the mob.

The year 1884 was marked by a novel feature in the annals of pogroms:  an anti-Jewish riot outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement, in the ancient Russian city of Nizhni-Novgorod, which sheltered a small Jewish colony of some twenty families.  While comparatively circumscribed as far as the material loss is concerned, the Nizhni-Novgorod pogrom stands out in ghastly relief by the number of its human victims.  A report, based upon official data, which endeavors to tone down the colors, gives the following description of the terrible events: 

The “disorders” [a euphemism for excesses accompanied by murder] began on June 7 about nine o’clock in the evening, due to the instigation of several half-drunk laborers who happened to overhear a Christian mother telling her child, who was playing with a Jewish girl, to stop playing with her, as the Jews might slaughter her.  The work of destruction began with the Jewish house of prayer which was crowded with worshippers.  It was followed by the demolition of five more houses owned by Jews.  In these houses the mob destroyed everything that fell into its hands.  The doors and windows were broken and everything inside was thrown into the streets.  On this occasion six adults and one boy was killed; five Jews were wounded, two of whom died soon afterwards.

The governor of Nizhni-Novgorod reported that the disorders could not possibly have been foreseen.  Yet there can be no doubt that the people were to a certain extent prepared for them.  The investigations of the police and the judicial inquiry both converged to prove that the Nizhni-Novgorod excesses were prompted primarily, if not exclusively, by the desire for plunder.  In all demolished houses not a single article of value that could be removed was destroyed, and not only money but anything at all that was fit for use was looted.  That the disorders broke out on the seventh of June was, in the opinion of the governor, entirely accidental, but that they were directed against the Jews was due to the fact that the people had been led to believe that even the the gravest crimes were practically unpunishable, so long as they were were committed against the Jews, and not against other nationalities.