The marked diminution or practical cessation of Jewish immigration from Germany by no means meant a stoppage of Jewish immigration. There was a steady flow of immigration from Russia, which, beginning with the exodus from Russian-Poland of 1845 (see above, [page 189]), has actually never ceased until this day, although it did not assume the immense proportions of the last thirty years. The “Aufruf” on behalf of the Russian-Jewish refugees, which Rabbi S. M. Schiller (Schiller-Szinessy, b. in Alt-Ofen, Hungary, 1820; d. in Cambridge, England, 1890) published in the Orient for 1846 (pp. 67–68), is a sufficient indication of the comparative antiquity of a problem which many suppose never arose until after the anti-Jewish riots in 1881. What is even less known in Western countries is that the economic condition of the Jews in Russia was much worse in the so-called “golden period” under Czar Alexander II. (1818–81) than under his more despotic predecessor. There was a popular saying among the Russian-Jews at that time—when it could not have occurred to anybody that these years of starvation would later be considered a golden age—that Czar Nicholas I. (1796–1855) wanted the persons of the Jews but left them their goods, while his son was less concerned about the persons, but despoiled them of their goods. This allusion to the passage in the Pentateuch (Gen. 14.21), in which the king of Sodom says to Abraham “Give me the persons and take the goods to thyself,” meant that Nicholas, who first began to enroll Jews in the Russian army and attempted to convert as many Jews to Christianity as possible, afforded the Jews in general better opportunities to earn a living than the more liberal Alexander. The fact that no proper provision was made for the Jews in the re-adjustment which followed the emancipation of the serfs, and that even the slight concessions, like the permission to skilled artizans to live outside of the “Pale of Settlement,” were never carried out honestly, is at the bottom of much of the Jews’ trouble there.
In less than five years after the emancipation of the Russian serfs there came a crisis, occasioned by the hard times which followed the crop failure of 1867, which caused “a state of distress in East Prussia and a famine on the other side of the border.”[43] The Jews of Germany did much to alleviate the distress of the large number of Russian Jews who lived at that time in East Prussia, and also to send relief to the needy co-religionists of Western Russia. But then, as now, the suffering was too widespread and the general condition too hopeless to be relieved by almsgiving, and the result was an exodus of considerable magnitude. This new exodus was treated in a series of articles in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums of 1869 entitled “Auswanderung der Juden aus den Westrussischen Prowinzen” (Emigration of Jews from the provinces of Western Russia). M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu (in his Les Immigrants juifs et le Judaisme aux Etats-Unis, Paris, 1905, p. 5) tells of 500 Jewish emigrants from Russian-Poland which the Alliance Israelite Universelle sent to the United States in 1869 from the famine stricken districts. The great anti-Jewish riot in Odessa on Passover, 1871, which shattered the hope of the Jews for emancipation in the then near future, and marked the beginning of the reaction which culminated in the reign of the following Czar, was also followed by considerable emigration of Jews. Many remained in Prussia, which was yet open for Russian subjects; but a large number proceeded to the United States, or went there after remaining for some time in England.
The Jewish population of the United States, and especially of the City of New York, was therefore constantly increasing, though neither the number of Jews nor the relative proportion as to country of origin is possible to ascertain for that time. Judge Daly ([p. 56]) quotes Joseph A. Scovil, author of “Old Merchants of New York” as saying (in 1868), “There are now 80,000 Israelites in this city, and it is the high standard of excellence of the old Israelite merchant of 1800 that has made the race occupy the proud position it now holds in this city and in the nation.” Daly himself thought the number to be somewhat smaller. He says ([p. 58]), “The Jews have now (1872) in New York twenty-nine synagogues, and as a proportional part of the population they are now estimated at about 70,000.”
Whether the lower estimate or the higher is nearer the truth, it is clear that there were already in New York a large number of Jews, and that a considerable portion of them were from Russia. A rare little volume in rabbinical Hebrew, entitled Emek Rephaim, against the heresy of the Reform Jews, which was published by the author, Elijah Holzman, a shochet from Courland, in New York, in 1868, is a good indication that there were already here at that time a sufficient number of readers of that language to warrant the publication of a work of that nature. As only the intellectual aristocracy among the Jews of the Slavic countries reads Hebrew and a large majority of the Russian-Jewish immigrants of that period belonged to the poorest and most ignorant classes, the belief in the existence of a Hebrew reading public, even if it proved to be a mistaken one, implies the presence of a large number of Russians.
The first attempts to establish periodicals for this public soon followed. Hirsch Bernstein (b. in Wladislavov or Neustadt-Schirwint, government of Suwalki, 1846; d. in Tannersville, New York, 1907) arrived in New York in 1870, and in the same year established the first Judaeo-German or Yiddish paper, and also the first periodical publication in the Neo-Hebraic language in the United States. The Yiddish publication, called “The Post,” had a brief existence; but the second, ha-Zofeh be’ Erez ha-Hadashah, of which Mordecai ben David Jalomstein (b. in Suwalki, 1835; a. 1871; d. in New York, 1897) was editor for most of the time, appeared weekly for more than five years. His brother-in-law, Kasriel H. Sarasohn (b. in Paiser, Russian-Poland, 1835; d. in New York, 1905), who arrived in the United States in 1866, and settled in New York, founded there, in 1874, the weekly “Jewish Gazette,” which, with its daily edition, the Jewish Daily News (established 1886), later became the most prosperous Jewish periodical publications in any country. Jalomstein was the principal contributor to these publications for about twenty years. Another Yiddish weekly, the Israelitische Presse, was founded in Chicago in 1879, by Nachman Baer Ettelson and S. L. Marcus. It had a Hebrew supplement, and existed for several years. The Jewish press in general will be treated in a later chapter; but it deserves to be mentioned here that some of the best representative Jewish papers of the country, like the American Hebrew of New York and the Jewish Exponent of Philadelphia (both founded in 1879) and the Jewish Advance of Chicago (founded 1878; existed about four years) contributed to place the Jews of the country in the proper condition for the reception of the large number of persecuted Jews which were soon to arrive.
Kasriel H. Sarasohn.