The Quiet Revolution: Jewish Emigration from the Russian Empire, 1875–1924. [Hamahapeikha ha-shkeitah: ha-hagirah ha-yehudit me-ha-imperiah ha-russit 1875–1924.] (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Quiet Revolution: Jewish Emigration from the Russian Empire, 1875–1924. [Hamahapeikha ha-shkeitah: ha-hagirah ha-yehudit me-ha-imperiah ha-russit 1875–1924.] Philip Hollander (bio) The Quiet Revolution: Jewish Emigration from the Russian Empire, 1875–1924. [Hamahapeikha ha-shkeitah: ha-hagirah ha-yehudit me-ha-imperiah ha-russit 1875–1924.] By Gur Alroey. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2008. 281 pp. Rather than adding to scholarship on Jewish immigrant acculturation and immigrant transformation of extant American Jewish institutions, customs, and folkways, this book offers important insights concerning Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States through the study of the larger phenomenon of Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire between 1875 and 1924. Moving beyond the view of persecution as the primary push factor and economic opportunity as the main pull factor for the nearly three million Jews who left Russia during this period, Alroey, in a constitutive act of empathy, places himself in these emigrants' situations and investigates what led them, unlike most Russian Jews, to uproot themselves and head elsewhere. Three basic questions guide his efforts: How did Russian Jewish politics influence emigration and destination selection? How did individuals decide to emigrate and select their destinations? How did individuals realize their decisions? Through analysis of turn-of-the-century Russian Jewish political writings on emigration, Alroey shows that Jewish political parties devoted little time and energy to the issue. With noticeable exceptions, individuals worked alone, or as part of a nuclear or extended family, to bring about one of modern Jewish history's principal developments. While the Jewish Colonization Association successfully directed immigration to Argentina prior to its patron's death in 1896, by and large Jewish organizations and ideologies had little success in directing or controlling Jewish emigration. Alroey's analysis of statistical information pertaining to the short-lived Galveston Project reinforces this claim. Russian Jews made their decisions to emigrate and selected their destinations once they concluded that this place offered them a better life than the one they currently had. In addition to increasing Russian antisemitism, Alroey points to three parallel revolutions that propelled individuals to emigrate. First and foremost decreased infant mortality led to a Jewish demographic explosion. As the industrial revolution undermined the shtetl's economic foundations and pushed Jews to urban centers in search of employment, increasingly large families burdened parents who found it difficult to nurture them [End Page 117] as labor competition increased. Suddenly, with rail and sea travel made cheaper, quicker, and more available, emigration became more conceivable. As a result, even before the 1881–1882 pogroms, Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire had increased. Emigrants in the 1870s let chance play an important role in the decision to emigrate and in selecting a destination. After that, new sources of information about emigration made the process more comprehensible, enabling the emigrants to make increasingly rationalized decisions about embarkation and destination, and this quickly expanded the emigrant pool. Letters from earlier emigrants to friends and family members back home constituted the first form of information influencing potential emigrants' decision-making process. This fact illuminates seemingly idiosyncratic regional variation in choosing destinations characteristic of chain migration, explaining the predominance of Kovno Jews among immigrants to South Africa. Immigrants searched for additional information to guide their decisions, such as the suitability of different professions in various locations and the comparative affordability of different embarkation ports and destinations. Newspapers provided the first expansion of information. By the turn-of-the-century, various Jewish organizations opened information bureaus responsive to emigrant queries and began producing pamphlets and newspapers to demystify the migration process, as well as the virtues and shortcomings of various destinations. Alroey points to the Jewish Colonization Association's information bureaus and its newspaper Der Yiddisher Emigrant as unsung heroes of the emigration revolution through their provision of accurate and up-to-date information for potential emigrants that made it easier for them to pursue emigration and to realize this decision. Successful arrival at one's intended destination required more than just desire and the requisite information. Numerous factors set successful emigrants off from the general Russian Jewish population. Since collecting and analyzing information proved vital...