Hebron massacre (1929)

1929 Hebron massacre
From top-left, clockwise: A boy crying from wounds; The Holy Ark of the Sephardi Abraham Avinu Synagogue is ransacked; A survivor reflecting in the aftermath of the massacre; Kolstein family recovering from injuries.
Bottom: Memorials to murdered rabbinical students in the Old Jewish cemetery, Hebron.
LocationHebron, British Mandate for Palestine
DateSaturday, August 24, 1929
Deaths67
Injured
58
PerpetratorsArabs
MotiveFalse claims that Jews planned to take over the Temple Mount

The Hebron massacre[a] refers to the mass murder of at least 67 Jews on August 24, 1929 in Hebron, British Mandate for Palestine.[b][2] The massacre was committed by Arabs who believed that there was a Jewish conspiracy to take over the Temple Mount.[2] The massacre was considered one of the worst mass murders of Jews in Mandatory Palestine.[3]

All Hebron's Jews were evacuated by the British colonial government following the massacre. The massacre formed part of the 1929 Palestine riots, where at least 133 Jews were killed.[4] The massacre resulted in the rise of Jewish self-defence groups,[5] including the Haganah,[5] due to the lack of protection of Jews by the antisemitic[6] colonial police force.[6]

Background

Hebron is a religiously important city for both Jews and Muslims.[3] Hebron's population numbered about 20,000.[7] 700 (3.5%) of them were Jews.[7] The Jewish immigration to Ottoman Palestine – caused by millennia of persecutions in Europe[8] – through the late 19th and early 20th centuries[8] was associated with a rise in tension between Jews and Arabs.[9]

Arabs in Mandatory Palestine disliked the increasing ethnic diversity as they considered Jewish immigrants a threat to the Muslim majority.[9] Most Jews in Mandatory Palestine supported Zionism.[10]

Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,[11][12] led the Arab opposition to further Jewish immigration.[11][12] Al-Husseini ordered works to the Western Wall,[13] during which bricks fell on those who prayed in front of the Western Wall while feces from mules stank the area.[13] The Jews unsuccessfully requested the British colonial government to stop it.[13]

Massacre

The massacre began with minor attacks by Arabs on Jews on August 23,[3] which escalated to full-scale attacks on Jews across Hebron.[3] The Arabs shouted "Kill the Jews", broke into Jewish houses, and raped, castrated and murdered the Jews.[3] Some Jews survived by hiding in the houses of Arab neighbors,[3] though the level of help is unclear due to the widespread antisemitism in the region.[11][13]

Testimonies

Sir John Chancellor

British High Commissioner Sir John Chancellor wrote:[3]

“ The horror of it is beyond words. In one house I visited not less than twenty-five Jewish men and women were murdered in cold blood. ”

Raymond Cafferata

Raymond Cafferata[c], the Assistant District Superintendent of the Palestine Police Force,[14] wrote:[7][13]

“ On hearing screams in a room, I went up a sort of tunnel passage and saw an Arab in the act of cutting off a child's head with a sword. He had already hit him and was having another cut, but on seeing me he tried to aim the stroke at me, but missed; he was practically on the muzzle of my rifle. I shot him low in the groin. Behind him was a Jewish woman smothered in blood with a man I recognized as a police constable named Issa Sheriff from Jaffa. He was standing over the woman with a dagger in his hand. He saw me and bolted into a room close by and tried to shut me out-shouting in Arabic, "Your Honor, I am a policeman." [...] I got into the room and shot him. ”

Jacob Joseph Slonim

Rabbi Jacob Joseph Slonim, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Hebron, said that Cafferata made the antisemitic reply that "the Jews deserve it, you are the cause of all troubles" when he asked him to protect the Jews.[6]

Legacy

Historical assessments of the Hebron massacre changed over time due to the dynamics of geopolitics in relation to the Israel–Palestine conflict.[15][16] Scholars hold different views on the matter.[15][16] Some of them considered the Hebron massacre a pogrom,[d][15] comparing it to the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel[15][16] – seen by some scholars as the worst massacre of Jews since the end of the Holocaust.[19]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Hebrew: טבח חברון. The Hebron massacre is sometimes known as the Hebron pogrom.[1]
  2. ↑ Commonly known as Mandatory Palestine.
  3. ↑ Full name: Raymond Oswald Cafferata
  4. ↑ A pogrom is a form of riot that targets an ethnic or a religious group. It is derived from the Russian word погром ("pogrom"); from "громить" IPA: [grʌˈmitʲ] ‒ to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.[17][18]

References

  1. ↑ "The Hebron Massacre of 1929". Zionism & Israel Information Center. Retrieved May 18, 2025. In August of 1929, Arabs instigated violence in the Jerusalem area that spread to most of Palestine. The violence began in Jerusalem and soon spread to Hebron, Motza, and Safed, all old Jewish communities in Palestine that supposedly lived in harmony with their Arab neighbors [...] principle instigators were Haj Amin El Husseini and Aref el Aref [. ...] Arabs killed 64 to 67 Jews in Hebron and wounded many others. Babies were beheaded. Old rabbis were castrated. There were incidents of rape, torture and mutilation. Hands and fingers were torn off bodies, apparently for jewelry.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "The Hebron Massacre of 1929: A Recently Revealed Letter of a Survivor". hebron1929.info. Archived from the original on 2020-12-12. Retrieved 2013-01-07.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 "This week in Jewish history | Massacre in Hebron kills 67". World Jewish Congress. August 23, 2023. Retrieved May 18, 2025.
  4. ↑ Shaw Commission: Shaw, Walter; Bettington, Henry; Hopkin Morris, R.; Snell, H. (1930). Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929. HMSO. Command paper Cmd. 3530.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Itamar Rabinovich, Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), Israel in the Middle East: Documents and Readings on Society, Politics, and Foreign Relations, Pre-1948 to the Present Archived 2017-02-28 at the Wayback Machine, UPNE 2008 p. 85
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 'Eye Witnesses Describe Horrors of the Moslem Arabs’ Attacks at Hebron on Saturday, August 24,' Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 1, 1929.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Segev, Tom (2000). One Palestine, Complete. Metropolitan Books. pp. 314–327. ISBN 0-8050-4848-0.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 "The Lost Cause: Anti-Zionism, Oct. 7, and How Revisionist Movements Can Distort History". The Algemeiner. February 28, 2025. Retrieved March 24, 2025. Similar to the Lost Cause phenomenon, anti-Zionism is a popular revisionist movement that reframes the founding of Israel as a colonial enterprise [. ...] reality is most Jews were forcibly expelled from what is modern day Israel into the diaspora by the Babylonians and the Romans [. ...] Arab anti-immigrant activists [...] pressured the British to restrict Jewish refugees [...] enabling millions of Jewish deaths in the Holocaust including 80 members of my family [. ...] Jewish Agency supported the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan [. ...] Arab countries refused to compromise [...] attacked Israel in 1948 [. ...] still determined to eliminate Israel [... .]
  10. ↑
    • Douglas V. Duff, The Rough With the Smooth (London: J.M. Dent & Sons LTD., 1940), 124.
    • Letter 514, To Arthur J. Balfour, London, 3 October 1917 English: T.W.:P.R.O. – F.O. 371/3083, F. 143082, No. 171885. See The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann: Volume VII, Series A, August 1914-November 1917, Meyer W. Weisgal, Gen. Ed. (Jerusalem: Israel University Press, 1975), Page 521-522
    • Krahe, Tyler (2016). "A History of Violence: British Colonial Policing in Ireland and the Palestine Mandate". WVU Research Repository. Retrieved May 18, 2025. Douglas Duff also offers is own assessment of Zionism and Jews by writing, "The Jews, too, are not united. The great majority are Zionists, people who believe in the restoration of their race to its homeland. They devote their lives to the realization of this ideal, one that becomes all the dearer with the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe. The difference between them and the Mizrachi, or orthodox Jews, is that the Zionists believe in the nationhood of Israel, and use Hebrew as their everyday speech; whilst the orthodox think of Jewry as a religion, are extremely conservative in their religious opinion, and hold that Hebrew is a sacred tongue which must be used only for devotional purposes.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 Benny Morris (2001). Righteous victims. Internet Archive. Vintage Books. p. 112. ISBN 978-0-679-74475-7.
  14. ↑ "Raymond O Cafferata". The Auxiliaries. Retrieved May 18, 2025.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 Schwartz, Yardena (November 8, 2023). "October 7 Happened Before, in Hebron". Tablet. Retrieved May 18, 2025. A brutal massacre nearly a century ago in Judaism's second-holiest city makes clear that murderous Palestinian rage against Jews has little to do with Israel or Zionism [...] Before the State of Israel was born, long before its military occupation began, Palestine was the scene of what was until now the most gruesome pogrom outside of Europe [. ... on] Aug. 24, 1929, some 3,000 Muslim men armed with swords, clubs, axes, and daggers went from Jewish house to Jewish house in the holy city of Hebron, stabbing, raping, and in some cases castrating and burning their victims alive. Jewish children watched as their parents were butchered by their Arab neighbors. Infants were killed in their mothers' arms. Houses and synagogues were looted and torched. Sixty-seven unarmed Jewish men, women, and children were murdered that day.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2
    • Silow-Carroll, Andrew (September 29, 2024). "Ghosts of a Holy War: How the 1929 Hebron massacre shaped a century of conflict". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved May 18, 2025. Yardena Schwartz's new book explores the 1929 Hebron massacre and its lasting impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, drawing parallels to today's ongoing strife. Before October 7, 2023, there was August 24, 1929. Having revised her [Yardena Schwartz's] original manuscript after the Hamas attack on October 7, she argues that there is a direct line between the two attacks in how they shaped a century of bloodshed [...] "These were Jews escaping persecution in Eastern Europe. And when you think about the rhetoric that was used against Jewish immigration, it sounds a lot like the rhetoric used against immigrants today. It wasn't, "the Jews are going to take over the land." It was "Palestine is our land. The Jews are our dogs."
    • "This Often Forgotten 1929 Massacre is Key to Understanding the Current Israel-Palestinian Conflict". American Jewish Committee. April 3, 2025. Retrieved May 18, 2025. On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust [...] a chilling echo of the 1929 Hebron Massacre—the brutal slaughter of nearly 70 Jews, incited by propaganda that Jews sought to seize the Al Aqsa Mosque.
    • Coren, Michael (April 12, 2025). "This 1929 massacre is key to understanding Israel". The Telegraph. Retrieved May 18, 2025. The attacks in Hebron nearly a century ago has important parallels with the October 7 attacks
  17. ↑
  18. ↑
  19. ↑
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