The Wales of 1911 was a place where pressure had been building for months. Historians call this period the Great Unrest, and it ran through Britain like a fever. The Cambrian Combine miners had been on strike since 1910 in nearby Tonypandy, and Churchill had already sent troops there. Wages were stagnant, rents were rising, and food prices climbed faster than pay packets. Tredegar in August 1911 was a town of colliers in tight terraced streets, where everyone knew everyone, and where a small Jewish community of perhaps thirty families ran shops, lent money, and kept houses much like anyone else. They were not wealthy. Some had arrived only a generation earlier, fleeing the actual pogroms of the Russian Empire. They had come to Wales for safety. On the night of 19 August, that safety broke.

The accusation that lit the match was the oldest one in the antisemitic playbook: that the Jewish shopkeepers were overcharging miners. There is no evidence they were. The mob did not stop at one shop. Windows went in. Stock was carried off into the streets. Families inside their homes barricaded doors and hid upstairs as crowds smashed everything they had built. One Jewish woman recalled decades later that her family was lucky not to be targeted that first night; others were not. Fifteen people were injured in Tredegar, though none seriously. The violence then moved up and down the valleys, hitting Jewish properties in Ebbw Vale, Rhymney, Bargoed and beyond. Local police were overwhelmed. The Monmouthshire chief constable wrote of "a determination expressed by the inhabitants to get rid of" the Jewish community. After a week of attacks, on 29 August, Churchill ordered the Worcestershire Regiment up from Cardiff. The soldiers, not the constables, ended it.

Forty-six people were charged. The prosecuting lawyer described them as "generally considered respectable, the majority being colliers in regular employment and the wives of colliers." Thirty-eight were convicted, receiving sentences ranging from twenty-eight days to three months. Public opinion in the valleys turned, remarkably, against the courts. Letters to local newspapers complained that decent working people had been sent to prison too harshly, that their backgrounds had not been taken into account. The influential South Wales Baptist Association, which might have spoken for conscience, declined to condemn the riots at all. The Jewish residents who had been attacked received no such consideration. Many of those families never returned to the valleys, and the small Jewish community of Tredegar that existed before that August was effectively destroyed within a generation.

More than a century on, scholars still debate what to call this. Some historians have argued the riots were less about antisemitism than about poverty and the broader Great Unrest, pointing out that non-Jewish premises were attacked from the second night onwards. Others, including Geoffrey Alderman, have argued the evidence of explicit antisemitic motivation is undeniable. In a 2024 article in The Welsh History Review, historian Robin Douglas noted a sharp comparison: in other Welsh race riots that decade, against Chinese residents in July 1911 and Black residents in 1919, only members of the targeted group were attacked. The Tredegar riots began the same way, against one specific community, before generalising into broader looting. The chief magistrate at the trials offered perhaps the plainest verdict: "the first disturbances were no doubt anti-Jewish." The people who lost their shops and their sense of home that summer would have agreed.

Tredegar today sits at the head of the Sirhowy Valley, a town shaped by the iron and coal that drew workers and shopkeepers alike. The Jewish community is gone. There are no synagogues left in any of the valleys. A few descendants of the rioters and a few descendants of the attacked still live in the same streets, mostly unaware of what their grandparents did or had done to them. In recent years the BBC, The Jewish Chronicle, and local historians have worked to bring the story back into public memory, with documentaries and articles arguing that the comfortable Welsh self-image as a tolerant nation has to be honest about August 1911. The valleys produced extraordinary solidarity, world-changing industry, and the founder of the NHS. They also produced this. Both are true, and remembering both is the only way to honour the people who were here.