Why did many Eastern European Jews immigrate to the United States near the end of the nineteenth century?

As the major Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur approach, Save Ellis Island is reflecting on Jewish immigration to America. When New York was still New Amsterdam there was a small population of Jews living on the island of Manhattan. During the first half of the 19th century they were joined by a wave of German Jews who came to America. By 1877 the American Jewish Yearbook records the presence of over 200,000 Jews in the United States.

Table of Contents Show

Immigration in the Colonial Era
Immigration in the Mid-19th Century
Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation
European Immigration: 1880-1920
The Bracero Program
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965
PHOTO GALLERIES

In 1881, the decade prior to the opening of Ellis Island, the mass migration of Jews to America began. The assassination of Russian Tsar Alexendar II in 1881 was widely blamed on the Jews. A series of pogroms (a Russian word meaning to wreak havoc) started in Elizavetgrad, now located in modern Ukraine. The pogroms spread across southern Russia and Ukraine – Jewish owned stores and businesses were attacked and their property was destroyed.

Tsar Alexander III enacted a series of anti-Semitic laws in 1882, known as the “May Laws.” These laws restricted where Jews could settle, forbade non-Jews from issuing mortgages to Jews, and prohibited Jews from conducting business on Sundays. With little alternative, tens of thousands of Russian Jews joined by Jews from Eastern European countries controlled by Russia, made their way to America. Between 1881 and 1910 the American Jewish Yearbook estimates that over 1.5 million Jews had come to America, of those more than 70% came from Russia.

Just prior to the official 1892 opening of Ellis Island, President Benjamin Harrison sent a five-man commission to travel to Europe to explore the reasons for the mass migration of Europeans to the United States. Among the members of the commission was future Commissioner of Immigration Colonel John B. Weber who traveled to Russia to get a first-hand understanding of Jewish immigration from Russia. According to Vincent Cannato’s American Passage: The History of Ellis Island, “Weber was haunted by nightmares of the tragic Jewish figures he encountered…”. Weber argued that Russian Jews were immigrating to the United States because of ethnic and religious persecution. In 1892 Ellis Island opened its doors to millions of immigrants and the issue of Jewish immigration would be debated for the next three decades.

As millions of desperate and impoverished Jews fled Europe, numerous aid societies were established in America to assist the newcomers starting with their arrival at Ellis Island. In 1891 the Baron de Hirsch Fund was established to provide aid to Jewish immigrants. Through the Fund, agents of the United Hebrew Charities of New York and the Council of Jewish women helped ease the passage of Jewish immigrants through Ellis Island. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, founded in 1881 to assist Jews leaving Russia and Eastern Europe, started a bureau on Ellis Island in 1904. They provided translation assistance, guided immigrants through medical screenings, argued before the Boards of Special Inquiry to prevent deportations, obtained bonds to guarantee employment status, lent the $25 landing fee, and provided reduced rate railroad tickets. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society even worked to have a Kosher kitchen installed on Ellis Island.

Outbreaks of ferocious anti-Semitism coincided with increased numbers of Jewish immigrants processed at Ellis Island. Violence in Russia between the years 1903 and 1908 is reflected in the peak year of Ellis Island immigration – 1907. The American Jewish Yearbook reported that between September 1, 1906 and June 30, 1908, 131,910 Jews came to America. The majority came through Ellis Island.

While other religious and ethnic groups spread throughout the United States, the majority of Jewish immigrants stayed in New York City initially settling in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The New York Daily Tribune reported in 1893, “Whatever one may think of the Hebrew question in general, it is impossible for the student of current history to deny that it is a vital one in New York today.” A percentage of other immigrant groups returned to their country of origin yet virtually no Jews returned to Europe. By 1924, the year that the National Origins Act was passed effectively curtailing the end of mass immigration, the Jewish population of New York was over 1.7 million. With a total population of 3.6 million nationwide, almost one-half of Jews had settled in New York.

The impact of Jewish culture on New York is undeniable. Thousands worked in the garment district, leading New York to become a world capital of fashion. Jewish food, particularly through widely popular delicatessens, became synonymous with New York – pastrami on rye is a staple. Irving Berlin, a Russian Jewish immigrant to New York is just one example of the many Jews who contributed to American culture. He wrote such American classics as “White Christmas,” and “God Bless America.”

Save Ellis Island continues to preserve the story of the great migration of Jews to America. Our Hard Hat Tours allow visitors to walk the corridors of the Ellis Island Hospital Complex, where thousands of Jews were treated before settling in the United States.

Joining Save Ellis Island in telling the story of Jewish immigration is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and the Museum at Eldridge Street. As the holidays bring about a time of remembrance and reflection, we encourage you to explore the history of Jewish people in America at Save Ellis Island’s Hard Hat Tours, available daily, and at these wonderful organizations.

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The Jewish migration at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was one of the dramatic events that changed the Jewish people in modern times. Millions of Jews sought to escape the distressful conditions of their lives in Eastern Europe and find a better future for themselves and their families overseas. The vast majority of the Jewish migrants went to the United States, and others, in smaller numbers, reached Argentina, Canada, Australia, and South Africa.

From the beginning of the twentieth century until the First World War, about 35,000 Jews reached Palestine. Because of this difference in scale and because of the place the land of Israel possesses in Jewish thought, historians and social scientists have tended to apply different criteria to immigration, stressing the uniqueness of Jewish immigration to Palestine and the importance of the Zionist ideology as a central factor in that immigration. This book questions this assumption, and presents a more complex picture both of the causes of immigration to Palestine and of the mass of immigrants who reached the port of Jaffa in the years 1904–1914.

About the author

Gur Alroey is Professor of Jewish History in Modern Times and Chair of the School of History at the University of Haifa. He is also author of Bread to Eat and Clothes to Wear: Letters from Jewish Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century (2011).

"Through an overview of diaries, letters, and media, [Alroey] uncovers the background of mundane people who struggled over a new culture and language and suffered boredom, loneliness, and exploitation . . . This book provides a fine [...] insight into Jewish migration to Palestine. Essential for Israel-Middle East collections."

—Hallie Cantor, Association of Jewish Libraries

"Gur Alroey has refocused the great Jewish migration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, putting the migration to Palestine into its proper perspective. By doing so he expands our understanding of not only that small stream but its larger global scope. By making the immigrants to Palestine just like, but still different than, those to the United States he both demystifies the former and sheds light on the latter. By eliminating ideology from the one migration, he helps us understand who went where, why, and how."

—Hasia Diner, New York University

The United States experienced major waves of immigration during the colonial era, the first part of the 19th century and from the 1880s to 1920. Many immigrants came to America seeking greater economic opportunity, while some, such as the Pilgrims in the early 1600s, arrived in search of religious freedom. From the 17th to 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans came to America against their will. The first significant federal legislation restricting immigration was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Individual states regulated immigration prior to the 1892 opening of Ellis Island, the country’s first federal immigration station. New laws in 1965 ended the quota system that favored European immigrants, and today, the majority of the country’s immigrants hail from Asia and Latin America.

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Immigration in the Colonial Era

From its earliest days, America has been a nation of immigrants, starting with its original inhabitants, who crossed the land bridge connecting Asia and North America tens of thousands of years ago. By the 1500s, the first Europeans, led by the Spanish and French, had begun establishing settlements in what would become the United States. In 1607, the English founded their first permanent settlement in present-day America at Jamestown in the Virginia Colony.

Did you know? On January 1, 1892, Annie Moore, a teenager from County Cork, Ireland, was the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island. She had made the nearly two-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean in steerage with her two younger brothers. Annie later raised a family on New York City’s Lower East Side.

Some of America’s first settlers came in search of freedom to practice their faith. In 1620, a group of roughly 100 people later known as the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in Europe and arrived at present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they established a colony. They were soon followed by a larger group seeking religious freedom, the Puritans, who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By some estimates, 20,000 Puritans migrated to the region between 1630 and 1640.

A larger share of immigrants came to America seeking economic opportunities. However, because the price of passage was steep, an estimated one-half or more of the white Europeans who made the voyage did so by becoming indentured servants. Although some people voluntarily indentured themselves, others were kidnapped in European cities and forced into servitude in America. Additionally, thousands of English convicts were shipped across the Atlantic as indentured servants.

Another group of immigrants who arrived against their will during the colonial period were enslaved people from West Africa. The earliest records of slavery in America include a group of approximately 20 Africans who were forced into indentured servitude in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. By 1680, there were some 7,000 Africans in the American colonies, a number that ballooned to 700,000 by 1790, according to some estimates. Congress outlawed the importation of enslaved people to the United States as of 1808, but the practice continued. The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) resulted in the emancipation of approximately 4 million enslaved people. Although the exact numbers will never be known, it is believed that 500,000 to 650,000 Africans were brought to America and sold into slavery between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Immigration in the Mid-19th Century

Another major wave of immigration occurred from around 1815 to 1865. The majority of these newcomers hailed from Northern and Western Europe. Approximately one-third came from Ireland, which experienced a massive famine in the mid-19th century. In the 1840s, almost half of America’s immigrants were from Ireland alone. Typically impoverished, these Irish immigrants settled near their point of arrival in cities along the East Coast. Between 1820 and 1930, some 4.5 million Irish migrated to the United States.

Also in the 19th century, the United States received some 5 million German immigrants. Many of them journeyed to the present-day Midwest to buy farms or congregated in such cities as Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati. In the national census of 2000, more Americans claimed German ancestry than any other group.

During the mid-1800s, a significant number of Asian immigrants settled in the United States. Lured by news of the California gold rush, some 25,000 Chinese had migrated there by the early 1850s.

The influx of newcomers resulted in anti-immigrant sentiment among certain factions of America’s native-born, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant population. The new arrivals were often seen as unwanted competition for jobs, while many Catholics–especially the Irish–experienced discrimination for their religious beliefs. In the 1850s, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American Party (also called the Know-Nothings) tried to severely curb immigration, and even ran a candidate, former U.S. president Millard Fillmore (1800-1874), in the presidential election of 1856.

Following the Civil War, the United States experienced a depression in the 1870s that contributed to a slowdown in immigration.

Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation

One of the first significant pieces of federal legislation aimed at restricting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from coming to America. Californians had agitated for the new law, blaming the Chinese, who were willing to work for less, for a decline in wages.

For much of the 1800s, the federal government had left immigration policy to individual states. However, by the final decade of the century, the government decided it needed to step in to handle the ever-increasing influx of newcomers. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) designated Ellis Island, located in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty, as a federal immigration station. More than 12 million immigrants entered the United States through Ellis Island during its years of operation from 1892 to 1954.

European Immigration: 1880-1920

Between 1880 and 1920, a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization, America received more than 20 million immigrants. Beginning in the 1890s, the majority of arrivals were from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. In that decade alone, some 600,000 Italians migrated to America, and by 1920 more than 4 million had entered the United States. Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing religious persecution also arrived in large numbers; over 2 million entered the United States between 1880 and 1920.

The peak year for admission of new immigrants was 1907, when approximately 1.3 million people entered the country legally. Within a decade, the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) caused a decline in immigration. In 1917, Congress enacted legislation requiring immigrants over 16 to pass a literacy test, and in the early 1920s immigration quotas were established. The Immigration Act of 1924 created a quota system that restricted entry to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in America as of the 1890 national census–a system that favored immigrants from Western Europe–and prohibited immigrants from Asia.

The Bracero Program

The Bracero Program was a series of diplomatic accords between Mexico and the United States signed in 1942 that brought millions of Mexican immigrants to the United States to work on short-term agricultural labor contracts. From 1942 to 1964, 4.6 million contracts were signed — making it the largest U.S. contract labor program to date.

The program also addressed Depression-era deportations and brought many Mexican Americans, who were largely targeted for deportation at the time, back to the states.

The program was criticized because workers often faced discrimination, harsh working conditions, and had virtually no job security. Once their contracts expired, some Braceros returned home with little money because of debts incurred to the stores located in employer-operated housing camps, while others stayed in the United States illegally and sought additional work.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

Immigration plummeted during the global depression of the 1930s and World War II (1939-1945). Between 1930 and 1950, America’s foreign-born population decreased from 14.2 to 10.3 million, or from 11.6 to 6.9 percent of the total population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. After the war, Congress passed special legislation enabling refugees from Europe and the Soviet Union to enter the United States. Following the communist revolution in Cuba in 1959, hundreds of thousands of refugees from that island nation also gained admittance to the United States.

In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which did away with quotas based on nationality and allowed Americans to sponsor relatives from their countries of origin. As a result of this act and subsequent legislation, the nation experienced a shift in immigration patterns. Today, the majority of U.S. immigrants come from Asia and Latin America rather than Europe.

PHOTO GALLERIES

Ellis Island seen from New York Harbor, 1903.

Geo. P. Hall & Son/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images

Immigrants to the United States on the deck of the S.S. Patricia on December 10, 1906.

Popperfoto/Getty Images

Interior view of the Great Hall at the Ellis Island Immigration Station in New York.

Interim Archives/Getty Images

New arrivals line up to have their papers examined.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

A large group of immigrants with baggage lined up at tellers' windows for money exchange in 1907.

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

A woman and her three children undergoing examinations by Edwin Levick at Ellis Island in 1907.

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Immigrant children being examined by a city health officer upon arrival in 1911.

Members of the Health Department carefully examine an immigrant mother and child.

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Pens at the Ellis Island Registry Room, or Great Hall, all filled with immigrants, 1907.

The dinning room for detained immigrants at Ellis Island.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Children display their Christmas gifts at Ellis Island.

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An immigrant family on the dock at Ellis Island after having just passed the rigid examination for entry into the country, looking hopefully at New York's skyline while awaiting the government ferry on August 13, 1925.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

During the late 19th and early 20th century, large groups of people from northern and western Europe immigrated to the United States, like this Slavic woman. An Ellis Island Chief Registry Clerk, Augustus Sherman, captured his unique viewpoint of the influx by bringing his camera to work and taking photos of the wide array of immigrants entering from 1905 to 1914.