Qualla: 1911 South Wales Anti-Jewish Riots

1911 South Wales Anti-Jewish Riots: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the evening of 19 August 1911, a group of miners walked out of a Tredegar pub and went to attack their neighbours. The first target was a shop owned by a Jewish family. Within hours the attack had become a riot of more than two hundred people, and twenty Jewish-owned businesses had been ransacked. Over the following days, the violence spread to Caerphilly, Ebbw Vale, Bargoed, and beyond. The Home Secretary at the time was Winston Churchill, and he had a word for what was happening in the valleys he had once represented. He called it a pogrom.

1911 South Wales Anti-Jewish Riots: A Summer of Strikes

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 t...

1911 South Wales Anti-Jewish Riots: The Nights That Followed

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

1911 South Wales Anti-Jewish Riots: A Verdict the Town Resented

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

1911 South Wales Anti-Jewish Riots: What Historians Argue About

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, includin...

1911 South Wales Anti-Jewish Riots: Memory in the Valleys

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 attac...