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Overview // Pogroms // Famine Relief

When studying immigration, historians consider incentives for leaving the native country (the “push”) as well as reasons for settling in a particular adopted land (the “pull”).  For immigrants to the United States from Czarist Russia, many of whom were Jewish, the “push” included religious persecution, economic deprivation, and political hostility, while the “pull” was religious, economic, and political liberty.  The first significant wave of Jews to the United States consisted primarily of middle-class Germans arriving in the 1830s-1850s.  German states had enacted discriminatory laws against their Jewish residents, severely restricting their ability to travel, marry, and transact business. 

A larger second wave came in 1880-1910, during which nearly 1.5 million Jews fled discrimination and violence in Russia and other Eastern European nations for haven in the United States.  They tended to be less educated and less prosperous than those from the first wave.  In 1881, under one percent of the immigrants to the United States were Jewish, but by 1887 that figure had risen to six-and-a-half percent.  The increased number of Eastern European immigrants prompted the founding of the American Protective Association, a nativist organization that spoke out harshly against Jews and Catholics and promoted restrictive immigration laws.


Sources Consulted

Bodnar, John.  The Transplanted:  A History of Immigrants in Urban America.  Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University Press, 1985.

Howe, Irving.  World of Our Fathers:  The Journey of the East European Jews to American and the Life They Found and Made.  New York:  Simon & Schuster, A Touchstone Book, 1976.

 
 
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