Jewish Communities on the Ohio River by Amy Hill Shevitz

Author:Amy Hill Shevitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2007-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

The East European Immigration and the Reconfiguration of Community

Between 1880 and 1924, some 2.25 million Jewish immigrants arrived in the United States, overwhelming the existing American Jewish population of 250,000. The wave started slowly. Between 1871 and 1880, there were about 1,500 Jewish immigrants per year, making up only about one-half of 1 percent of all immigrants to the United States. In the following four years, 1881 through 1884, Jewish immigration was almost 75,000 persons, an average of more than 18,000 per year, constituting 3 percent of all immigration. The wave continued to surge, cresting at 154,000—14 percent of all immigration—in 1906.1

The flood was precipitated by deteriorating conditions in those areas of eastern Europe—Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Galicia—that were then home to fully 75 percent of the world’s Jews. In the Russian Empire, where most lived, there was a sudden and violent increase in antisemitism in the late nineteenth century, reflecting wrenching economic dislocations and the conflicts accompanying the rise of revolutionary politics. With an autocratic government and a society only a step away from feudalism, Russia was not modernizing gracefully, and Jews often bore the brunt of conflicting policies. Throughout the nineteenth century, they suffered under repressive measures designed to undermine traditional communal authority, damage Jewish economic life, and coerce assimilation and conversion to Orthodox Christianity.

Although Jews in central Europe had experienced discrimination and repression, it was almost mild compared to the harshness and violence of the Russian situation. The so-called May Laws of 1882, instituted in the wake of the assassination of the liberal Czar Alexander II in 1881, revoked most of the few gains Jews had achieved in the mid-nineteenth century, severely restricting rights of residence and access to schools and professions. The czarist government now sanctioned—perhaps even encouraged—physical violence against Jewish persons and property; pogroms (the Russian word means “devastation”) were widespread, frequent, and vicious. Some Russian Jews responded by committing themselves to revolutionary politics. Others, inspired by Zionism, moved to Palestine to begin to rebuild the Jewish national homeland. Many chose a route of greater economic promise: immigration to America.

The memory of the east European experience tends to dominate contemporary American Jewish life—not surprisingly, since the present-day Jewish community is dominated by their descendants, and the vibrant and diverse American Jewish culture of today is unimaginable without this immigration. This is true even for the Ohio River Valley, where German American Jewish life had developed in its classic form, for the cultural and demographic reinforcements provided by the east Europeans secured the survival of many small Jewish communities well into the twentieth century. But in each of these towns, the experience of the east European influx was influenced by specific local conditions.

A critical factor in the east European experience—and an important difference from the central European experience in the earlier nineteenth century—was the destination, as much as the size, of the migration. By the late nineteenth century, America’s industrial cities were the sites for economic mobility; country peddling and small-town merchandising no longer offered as much promise.

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