Jacob Joseph Funeral Riot (1902)

Wed Jul 30, 1902

Image

Image: A photograph from 1902, depicting the massive crowd at Joseph’s funeral [Wikipedia]

On this day in 1902, a massive funeral procession for Rabbi Jacob Joseph in New York City, attended by more than 50,000 Jews, was attacked by a group of factory workers and police.

The procession descended into chaos as funeral-goers passed by a factory, whose workers began to chuck debris at the procession from above. Jews threw the missiles back and, when some entered the factory to try and get the abuse to stop, the police were called and they were hosed down in an attempt to get them to leave.

As the melee escalated into a full-scale riot, hundreds of New York City policemen arrived and proceeded to pummel and arrest the mourners rather than the instigators. Factory workers poured out into the streets and joined the police in beating Jewish mourners.

Although historians have cited this anti-Semitic riot as a vivid example of Catholic Irish anti-Semitism, noting that both the workers and policemen were “predominantly Irish”, recent historical research shows that the factory workers were mostly German, not Irish.