Jewish History – Yannay Spitzer

A Jewish-Russian Frontier Man

This is the story of Aharon Ya’akov Dukhan, a Jewish-Russian frontier man whose life spanned the second half of the nineteenth century. In Pale in Comparison, a paper that I am currently developing, I argue that even in as late a period as the one in which Aharon Ya’akov was active, Jews were, in a…

Pogroms, Networks, and Migration: The Jewish Migration from the Russian Empire to the United States 1881–1914

The migration of one and a half million Jews from the Russian Empire to the United States during the years 1881–1914 is commonly linked to the occurrence of pogroms, eruptions of anti-Jewish mob violence, that took place mainly in two waves in 1881–1882 and in 1903–1906. Although the common perception that pogroms were a major…

Pogrom-Driven Migration: The Case of Kalarash

Were Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement to the United States really driven by pogroms? This is a question with which I deal empirically, using data on migration and on events of anti-Jewish violence. But before zooming out to the large statistical picture, it is important to verify anecdotally that one can find particular…

“Stop Your Cruel Oppression of the Jews”: Reading a Cartoon

When I present my work on the Jewish migration, I like using this cartoon in order to illustrate the traditional thesis that the Jewish migration from the Pale of Settlement was caused by the pogroms. It shows a Jewish town, on that right, that was hit by a pogrom, and a stream of Jewish refugees…

A Letter from a Jewish Surgeon During the Russo-Japanese War

A Russian Correspondent of The Times says that the mother of one of the Jewish surgeons who were sent from Warsaw to the war recently received from her son a letter written in the usual official Russian style and bearing the stamp of the censor. The letter stated that the writer was in good health,…

The King is Dead, Long Live the… Wait, is it Good for the Jews?

“Is it Good for the Jews?” is a generations-old criterion for making sense of world events. Wars, revolutions, natural disasters, something colossal has happened, at the bottom line we want to know the only thing that matters – is it, or is it not? For the occasion of the abdication of Dutch Queen Beatrix and…