The Mass Migration of Jews

Unprecedented Jewish Mass Migration

One obvious way in which uneven global economic development transformed Jewish life relative to the situation as it stood in 1880 was by inciting an unprecedented Jewish mass migration between 1880 and 1918, while also producing the ravenous U.S. business demand for cheap labor that allowed this migration to occur. The vast waves of Jewish immigration during the four decades preceding the outbreak of World War I were part of a massive wave of migration across the globe in those years. 

As the Industrial Revolution upended the old economic order, it also created the infrastructure that enabled these migrations to occur in practice. The construction of a network of railroads across continents, the improvement of maritime transport, and innovations in communication (such as the telegraph) shortened times and distances. A voyage to a destination across the ocean which at the middle of the century would have taken months now lasted a couple weeks, and was affordable even to those of quite modest means.

Profound Demographic Change

Several million Jews whose old economic environment had changed within a few years were among the multitudes who undertook the journey to new places between 1880 and 1914. Their journey was in many respects uniquely transformative. The demographer and statistician Liebmann Hersch (1882–1955), a pioneering researcher into international Jewish immigration in those years, determined that no other people changed as profoundly as Jews under the influence of world migration in the modern age.¹ 

Most Jewish immigrants, unlike immigrants of other ethnic groups, left their places of residence with no intention of returning; they included among the highest percentage of women and children among immigrants; the majority of Jewish immigrants were attracted to places with large and dense populations, in relatively wealthy and more economically developed countries. This was especially the case with regard to the big cities of the United States, but it was likewise true of Canada, Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil. This fact also helps account for the tiny number of immigrants to Palestine in those years. 

While Jewish immigration during this period rose and fell in response to riots, policy changes, and fluctuations in agricultural yields, it was nevertheless the occupational structure of Jewish society—that is, their economic situation in their countries of origin—that established and directed the massive flows of immigration. 

Within a few years, Jews were transformed from inhabitants of villages and towns into a people that lived mostly in large cities, earning a living under the conditions of a capitalist economy in an industrialized environment. 

A Mass Exodus from Eastern Europe

The largest source of immigrants was Eastern Europe. Contrary to what has become established in the collective memory of the Jews, mass migration from this part of the world did not originate with the infamous 1881 pogroms known as the “storms in the South,” which caused a large number of refugees to flee across the border between the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires. Rather, already in the early 1870s, famine in the northwestern (Lithuanian) provinces of Russia’s Pale of Settlement drove several thousand Jews to emigrate. 

If a second wave of Jewish emigration from Russia occurred after the pogroms in the southern provinces of the Russian Empire during the years 1881–1882, another wave ensued in 1890–1891 without any pogroms to act as drivers. And the numbers kept rising. Between 1904 and 1907 alone, more than half a million Jewish immigrants left tsarist Russia for the United States. In 1904, mass Jewish immigration for the first time crossed the 100,000-person mark each year, and in 1906—a record year for Jewish immigration—more than 150,000 emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States. All told, some 1,700,000 Jews arrived in the United States between 1881 and 1914. From 1899 to 1914 alone, 1,486,641 Jews entered that country, of whom 928,000 settled in New York City. And this vast outflux to the United States represented only part of the total East European Jewish emigration. 

In the same years, 300,000 East European Jews came to England; 100,000 sailed to Argentina; 80,000 to France; 60,000 to Canada; and 50,000 to South Africa. The same process transformed Palestine’s Jewish community. The emigration waves of 1881–1882 and 1890–1891 included founders of the new Jewish agricultural colonies in Israel, who became known as the members of the “First Aliyah.” The fourth wave, which began in 1904 and contained a small minority of immigrants to Israel—the “Second Aliyah”—included the largest group of immigrants from Eastern Europe. It is estimated that approximately 60,000 Jews arrived in Palestine over the years 1881–1914. 

Other Noteworthy Migrations: Baghdad, Instanbul, and Warsaw

If the westward exodus of some two million East European Jews is the main Jewish migration story of our era, similar processes in other geographical areas, albeit on smaller scales, occurred in most of the Jewish diasporas around the world. The large Jewish community of Baghdad, long a commercial-economic metropolis, swelled by tens of thousands over the course of our period, in part through an influx of arrivals from Middle Eastern communities that had lost their economic status. A similar situation played out in Istanbul. 

Warsaw, which attracted immigrants from towns and cities throughout Eastern Europe, had some 320,000 Jews at the end of World War I, and about 140,000 lived in Odessa, a flourishing port city in the late tsarist period.

Seeking New and Better Prospects

The vast majority of immigrants around the turn of the twentieth century abandoned the places where they had been born and raised in an effort to extricate themselves from economic hardship and improve their living conditions. Motives for migration were not usually ideological or political. 

Throughout the period, a gap existed between the internal Jewish discourse and the policies of public activists, philanthropic organizations, and political parties, which tried to interfere in the spontaneous process of mass migration. Nevertheless, the ideological debates surrounding mass migration, and the experience of displacement from the old world and adaptation to a new and sometimes alienating one, catalyzed political and cultural responses to the impermanence and changeability of the old and the given.