Pogroms were organized with state sponsorship, never spontaneous popular eruptions.

Evidence

Pogroms as spontaneous outbreaks of popular fury seem to be a myth, and there is in fact no established case where the inhabitants of a town or village have simply fallen upon their Jewish neighbours and slaughtered them. This was true even in the Middle Ages … In modern times popular initiative has been still less in evidence, for the organizing groups themselves have been effective only when they were carrying out the policy and enjoying the sponsorship of some kind of government. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 117

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that anti-minority violence requires state organizational sponsorship directly feeds the reader’s later biopolitics/necropolitics module on how bureaucratic rationality enables mass exclusion.