Timeline of antisemitism in the 19th century

This timeline of antisemitism chronicles the acts of antisemitism, hostile actions or discrimination against Jews as a religious or ethnic group, in the 19th 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.

Some authors prefer to use the terms anti-Judaism or religious antisemitism for religious sentiment against Judaism before the rise of racial antisemitism in the 19th century. For events specifically pertaining to the expulsion of Jews, see Jewish refugees.

1800s

 * 1805, June 29: Two to five hundred Algerian Jews are massacred.

1810s



 * 1811: Head of the Jewish community of Algiers David ben Joseph Coen Bakri is decapitated by the Dey Hadj Ali.
 * 1815: Eight Jews are burned at the stake in Algiers.
 * 1815: Pope Pius VII reestablishes the ghetto in Rome after the defeat of Napoleon.
 * 1818:Turks from Algiers attack Constantine, massacre and pillage Jewish homes, and abduct 17 young Jewish girls whom they bring to their commander.
 * 1819: A series of anti-Jewish riots in Germany that spread to several neighboring countries: Denmark, Latvia and Bohemia known as Hep-Hep riots, from the derogatory rallying cry against the Jews in Germany.

1820s

 * 1827: Compulsory military service for the Jews of Russia: Jewish boys under 18 years of age, known as the Cantonists, were placed in preparatory military training establishments for 25 years. In practice, Jewish children were often forcibly conscripted as young as eight or nine years old. Cantonists were encouraged and sometimes forced to baptize.
 * 1829: The law in Canada requiring the oath "on my faith as a Christian" was amended in 1829 to provide for Jews to not take the oath.

1830s

 * 1830: The Persian Jewish population of Tabriz, Iran is attacked by a mob, resulting in most of the Jewish community either being killed or fleeing.
 * 1830: The Jews of Shiraz are forced to convert to Islam.
 * 1831: The prominent French-Canadian politician Louis-Joseph Papineau sponsored a law which granted full equivalent political rights to Jews in Lower Canada, twenty-seven years before anywhere else in the British Empire.
 * 1832: Partly because of the work of Ezekiel Hart, a law was passed that guaranteed Jews the same political rights and freedoms as Christians in Canada.
 * 1833: Clemens Brentano published The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to the Meditations of Anne Catherine Emmerich. The "Dolorous Passion" is claimed to reveal a "clear antisemitic strain throughout", with Brentano writing that Emmerich believed that "Jews ... strangled Christian children and used their blood for all sorts of suspicious and diabolical practices."
 * 1834: The 1834 looting of Safed was a month-long attack on the Jewish population of Safed by local Arab and Druze villagers. It was full of large scale looting, as well as the killing and raping of Jews and the destruction of many homes and synagogues. Before the attacks Jews made up over 50% of the population, but many of them fled to nearby cities which reduced their presence drastically.
 * 1834: Jewish heroine and martyr Sol Hachuel is publicly decapitated at 17 years old in Fez, Morocco. She is executed for refusing to convert to Islam.
 * 1835: Oppressive constitution for the Jews issued by Czar Nicholas I of Russia.
 * 1838: The 1838 Druze attack on Safed was a plunder of the Jewish community of Safed by the local Druze during the Druze revolt.
 * 1839: Forty-plus Persian Jews are killed and the entire Jewish community of Mashhad is forced to convert to Islam in the Allahdad. Many of them practised Judaism in secret, which led to the Mashhadi Jews, whom today number in the thousands.

1840s

 * 1840: The Damascus affair: false blood libel accusations cause arrests and atrocities, culminating in the seizure of 63 Jewish children and attacks on Jewish communities throughout the Middle East.
 * 1844: Karl Marx publishes his work On the Jewish Question: "What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money... Money is the jealous God of Israel, besides which no other god may exist... The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of this world", "In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism."
 * 1844: Muslims accuse jews of murdering a Christian for his blood in Cairo

1850s

 * 1850: Das Judenthum in der Musik (German for "Jewishness in Music", but normally translated Judaism in Music; spelled after its first publications, according to modern German spelling practice, as 'Judentum'), is an essay by Richard Wagner which attacks Jews in general and the composers Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn in particular. It was published under a pseudonym in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (NZM) of Leipzig in September 1850 and was reissued in a greatly expanded version under Wagner's name in 1869. It is regarded by some as an important landmark in the history of German antisemitism.
 * 1853: Blood libels in Saratov and throughout Russia.
 * 1858: Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old Jewish boy whom a maid had baptized during an illness, is taken from his parents in Bologna, an episode which aroused universal indignation in liberal circles.

1860s

 * 1860: The Jews of Hamadan are accused of mocking the Ta'zieh ceremonies for Imam Husain, several of them are fined and some have their ears and noses cut off as punishment.
 * 1862: During the American Civil War General Grant issues General Order No. 11, ordering all Jews out of his military district, suspecting them of pro-Confederate sympathy. President Lincoln directs him to rescind the order. Polish Jews are given equal rights. Old privileges forbidding Jews to settle in some Polish cities are abolished.
 * 1863: A Jew in Hamadan is lynched by a Muslim mob, and many others are severely injured after being accused of insulting Muhammad.
 * 1864: At least 500 Moroccan Jews are massacred in Marrakech and Fez.
 * 1866: The Jews of Barforush are forcibly converted to Islam. When they are allowed to revert to Judaism thanks to French and British ambassadors, a Muslim mob kills 18 Jews, burning two of them alive.
 * 1868: Samuel Bierfield (d. 15 August 1868) is believed to be the first Jew lynched in the United States. Bierfield and his African-American clerk, Lawrence Bowman, were apprehended in Bierfield's store in Franklin, Tennessee and fatally shot by a group of masked men believed to belong to the Ku Klux Klan, on 15 August 1868. No one was ever convicted of the crime, however.
 * 1869: 18 Tunisian Jews are killed in a pogrom and an Arab mob loots Jewish homes and stores, burns synagogues, on Jerba Island.

1870s

 * 1870: The 35,000 Jews living in Algeria are granted French citizenship as a result of the Crémieux Decree. This leads to a rise of antisemitism in Algeria and across the Middle East.
 * 1871: Speech of Pope Pius IX in regard to Jews: "of these dogs, there are too many of them at present in Rome, and we hear them howling in the streets, and they are disturbing us in all places."
 * 1873: The Southern Baptist Convention passed a "Resolution On Anti-Semitism" stating, "RESOLVED, That we do gratefully remember this day our unspeakable indebtedness to the seed of Abraham, and devoutly recognize their peculiar claims upon the sympathies and prayers of all Gentile Christians, and we hereby record our earnest desire to partake in the glorious work of hastening the day when the superscription of the Cross shall be the confession of all Israel 'Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews'."
 * 1875: Twenty Jews are killed by a Muslim mob in Demnat, Morocco.
 * 1878: Adolf Stoecker, German antisemitic preacher and politician, founds the Christian Social Party, which marks the beginning of the political antisemitic movement in Germany.
 * 1879: Nine Jews in Kutaisi are accused of ritual murder, and eventually are tried and found not guilty.
 * 1879: Heinrich von Treitschke, German historian and politician, justifies the antisemitic campaigns in Germany, bringing antisemitism into learned circles.
 * 1879: Wilhelm Marr coins the term Anti-Semitism to distinguish himself from religious Anti-Judaism.

1880s

 * 1881: Pogrom against the Jews in Tlemcen, Algeria.
 * 1881:The German Reichstag receives and rejects a petition with more than 250,000 signatures, and supported by the Kaiser's personal chaplain, Adolf Stoecker, calling for the removal of Jews from public life.
 * 1881: Georg Ritter von Schönerer, a pan-German Austrian leader and antisemite styles himself as "Führer" and he and his followers use the greeting "Heil!"
 * 1881–1884: Pogroms sweep southern Russia, propelling mass Jewish emigration from the Pale of Settlement: about 2 million Russian Jews emigrated in period 1880–1924, many of them to the United States (until the National Origins Quota of 1924 and Immigration Act of 1924 largely halted immigration to the U.S. from Eastern Europe and Russia). The Russian word "pogrom" becomes international.
 * 1882: Jewish population of Algiers is attacked by a Muslim mob.
 * 1882: The Tiszaeszlár blood libel in Hungary arouses public opinion throughout Europe.
 * 1882: The International Anti-Jewish Congress, led by Adolf Stoecker, convenes at Dresden, Germany; it appeals to "the Government and Peoples of Christian Nations Threatened by Judaism" to expel "the Semitic race of Jews" from Europe.
 * 1882: A series of "temporary laws" by Tsar Alexander III of Russia (the May Laws), which adopted a systematic policy of discrimination, with the object of removing the Jews from their economic and public positions, in order to "cause one-third of the Jews to emigrate, one-third to accept baptism and one-third to starve" (according to a remark attributed to Konstantin Pobedonostsev)
 * 1886: Jews are attacked by Arabs in Petah Tikva
 * 1887: Russia introduces measures to limit Jews access to education, known as the quota.
 * 1891: Blood libel in Xanten, Germany.

1890s



 * 1891: Expulsion of 20,000 Jews from Moscow, Russia. The Congress of the United States eases immigration restrictions for Jews from the Russian Empire. (Webster-Campster report)
 * 1891: Leading Muslims in Jerusalem asked the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople to prohibit the entry of Jews arriving from Russia.
 * 1891: Blood libels in Corfu and Zakynthos last several weeks; several Jews murdered.
 * 1892: Mulla Abdullah issues a fatwa to kill all the Jews of Hamadan if they refuse to abide by Jewish restrictions. The local Persian Jews were later ordered to become Muslims or face death.
 * 1892: Two Persian Jews go out to sell merchandise and end up killed with all of their property stolen. Their relatives went out to search for the bodies and when they found them, they were killed by the same villagers. Even after many attempts to plea for their, the governor of Savojbolagh County paid them no mind.
 * 1892: Justinas Bonaventure Pranaitis writes The Talmud Unmasked an antisemitic and misleading inaccurate anti-Talmudic work.
 * 1893: Karl Lueger establishes antisemitic Christian Social Party and becomes the Mayor of Vienna in 1897.
 * 1894: The Dreyfus affair in France. In 1898 Émile Zola publishes open letter J'accuse!
 * 1895: A. C. Cuza organizes the Alliance Anti-semitique Universelle in Bucharest, Romania.
 * 1895: Captain Alfred Dreyfus being dishonorably discharged in France.
 * 1897: Synagogues and Jewish homes are pillaged in Oran.
 * 1897: Synagogues are ransacked and Jews are murdered in Tripolitania.
 * 1898: Violent anti-Jewish riots erupt in Algiers.
 * 1899: Houston Stewart Chamberlain, racist and antisemitic author, publishes his Die Grundlagen des 19 Jahrhunderts which later became a basis of National-Socialist ideology.
 * 1899: Blood libel in Bohemia (the Hilsner case).