A massacre is an event of killing people who are not engaged in hostilities or are defenseless. It is generally used to describe a targeted killing of civilians en masse by an armed group or person.
Le Massacre de Scio ("The Chios massacre") a painting (1824) by Eugène Delacroix depicting the massacre of Greeks on the island of Chios by Ottoman troops during the Greek War of Independence in 1822.
A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire. Similar attacks against Jews which also occurred at other times and places became known retrospectively as pogroms. Sometimes the word is used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.
The Hep-Hep riots in Würzburg, 1819. On the left, two peasant women are assaulting a Jewish man with pitchfork and broom. On the right, a man wearing spectacles, tails and a six-button waistcoat, "perhaps a pharmacist or a schoolteacher," holds a Jewish man by the throat and is about to club him with a truncheon. The houses are being looted. A contemporary engraving by Johann Michael Voltz.
Victims of a pogrom in Kishinev, Bessarabia, 1903
A massacre of Armenians and Assyrians in the city of Adana, Ottoman Empire, April 1909
Iași pogrom in Romania, June 1941
