People & Histories
1881–1924

Pogroms and the great migration

Waves of anti-Jewish violence and discrimination in the Russian Empire push some two million Jews to America and others to Western Europe, South America and Palestine.

  • Pogroms (YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe) — John D. Klier, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (2010)
  • A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present — Zvi Gitelman, Indiana University Press (2001)
  • The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 — Hasia R. Diner, University of California Press (2004)
  • Jewish People, Jewish Thought: The Jewish Experience in History — Robert M. Seltzer, Macmillan (1980)

Well established persecutionmigrationpolitics

By the late nineteenth century about half the world’s Jews lived in the Russian Empire, most of them confined to the Pale of Settlement in today’s Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and Poland, poor, Yiddish-speaking and barred from many jobs. After revolutionaries assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, a wave of anti-Jewish riots, called pogroms, swept the south, followed by restrictive “May Laws” in 1882.

The Kishinev pogrom of 1903 killed 49 Jews and shocked the world, and far worse violence came in 1905–06 and above all in 1918–21, when tens of thousands of Jews were murdered in Ukraine during the civil war; estimates run from about 30,000 to more than 100,000, depending on who is counted and how.

Jews responded by moving and organising. Between 1881 and 1924 roughly two million Jews emigrated to the United States, crowding into New York’s Lower East Side, sweatshops and Yiddish theatres; others went to Britain, Argentina, Canada and South Africa, and a small idealistic minority to Ottoman Palestine.

  • The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 — Hasia R. Diner, University of California Press (2004)
  • Jewish People, Jewish Thought: The Jewish Experience in History — Robert M. Seltzer, Macmillan (1980)
Those who stayed founded the socialist Bund (1897), Zionist groups and a flowering Yiddish press. In 1924 the US sharply restricted immigration from Eastern Europe, closing the door just as Jews would most need it.
  • The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 — Hasia R. Diner, University of California Press (2004)
  • A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present — Zvi Gitelman, Indiana University Press (2001)

Why it matters today

Jewish people

Most American, British, Canadian, Argentine and South African Jews descend from this migration, and family stories of a grandparent fleeing the Tsar's army or a pogrom are common. It also gave birth to the political ideas, from Jewish socialism to Zionism, that shaped the twentieth century.