THE WANDERING JEW
The Wandering Jew is not the Jew of legend, but the Jewish people of history. The dislocation of large Jewish bodies, which was characteristic of the Middle Ages, has been kept up during the nineteenth century; and this dislocation has, as in former times, profoundly modified Judaism in the various countries. From the fifteenth century on to the nineteenth, hostile legislation on the part of Western Europe had been continually driving the Jews to the East. The expulsion from Spain and Portugal, at the end of the fifteenth century, forced several hundred thousand into Turkey; while the hardships which they had to suffer in the smaller German states and in Austria caused large numbers to seek a refuge in Poland and Russia. The tide commenced to turn westward about the middle of the eighteenth century, though bands of Jews from Poland had been driven into Germany, Italy, and Holland in the terrible years of the Chmelnicki persecutions (1648–1651). The readmission of Jews into England, the relative kindness of Frederick William of Prussia and of Frederick the Great, aided a certain slow but continuous infiltration from Poland, so that at the end of the eighteenth or the first half of the nineteenth century these Polish Jews were to be found in all parts of Germany, Holland, and England. This slow migration back again to Western Europe took on, however, much larger proportions in the latter part of the nineteenth century; but before this could happen a strong movement still farther westward had already taken place. Jews were among the earliest settlers on the American continent. They were in nearly every case of Spanish or Portuguese descent, having come from Holland and England to the possessions which these powers held on the new continent. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when the tide of immigration from Germany was at its height, a large number of Jews from the southern states and the Rhine region found their way to these shores. The Russian atrocities of 1882 and the following years caused a greater shifting of the Jewish population westward than can be paralleled at any previous time. It has been estimated that between the years 1882 and 1900 fully one million Russian Jews left their homes in the pale of settlement, finding new dwelling-places in England, Germany, and France. The largest number (probably half a million) came to the United States and Canada. Untoward economic conditions existing in Galicia, and the frequent outbreaks of anti-Semitism there, forced out during the 90’s a large number of Galician Jews; and in 1899 and 1900 the hostility of the Roumanian government has made it impossible for thousands of Jews to remain in a country in which most of them had been born; and, under circumstances the like of which has hardly ever before been seen, bands of the Roumanian Jews have been wandering over Europe, seeking the means by which to come to the American continent in order there to establish themselves anew. There are between ten and eleven million Jews to-day in the world: of these, about nine million live in Europe; one million in the United States and Canada; three hundred and fifty thousand in Africa; three hundred and fifty thousand in Asia; and sixteen thousand in Australasia.