Tag: Jewish History

  • Ostjuden: a review

    Ostjuden: a review

    Shalom Boguslavsky’s book, Ostjuden: The Forgotten Story (published in Hebrew as הסיפור הבלתי סביר והלא מספיק זכור על עלייתה ונפילתה של מזרח אירופה היהודית) is not only a wonderful, captivating, and enjoyable work of popular history. It is also a serious and important book that can contribute to our collective historical memory and to the…

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

    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

    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…

  • A Hebrew Book Travelling from Berlin To Baghdad

    A Hebrew Book Travelling from Berlin To Baghdad

    A Hebrew book printed in Warsaw, kept in a library in Berlin, probably immigrated to Mandate Palestine, shipped to Baghdad, and returned back to Israel.

  • A Mother’s Obituary for Her Fallen Son: The Pogrom of Orsha 1905

    A Mother’s Obituary for Her Fallen Son: The Pogrom of Orsha 1905

    For fourteen years I had been a childless Jewess, I prayed God for a son, and he gave him to me in the fifteenth year of my marriage. It was my long-awaited yearned son. God has blessed me, for I had a pure and noble son, full with love for his family and passion for…

  • Occupations of Jews in the Pale of Settlement

    Occupations of Jews in the Pale of Settlement

    What were the occupations and trades the Jews were holding in the old country? The 1897 census of the Russian Empire tells us a lot about that, and in great detail. The summary data have been studied in the past, and the major facts are well known by historians. Based on my work on this…

  • Edward A. Steiner: A Writer on Immigration

    Edward A. Steiner: A Writer on Immigration

    Steiner (1866–1956) was a professor of Applied Christianity, for what it means, in Grinnell College in Iowa. He was born to a well-to-do Jewish-Slovak-Hungarian family in a Carpathian village, and was educated in Vienna and Heidelberg, from where he made a pilgrimage to his venerated Tolstoy in Russia. This pilgrimage was followed later by five…

  • Most Common Jewish Names

    Most Common Jewish Names

    I present here an analysis of the distribution of Jewish and non-Jewish names among immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is a by-product of my work on the Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement. The first sections explain a few technical details about the data. It…

  • A New Map of Jewish Communities in the Russian Empire

    A New Map of Jewish Communities in the Russian Empire

    This map shows the precise place of residence of over 4.3 million Jews at the time of the Russian census of 1897. The census enumerated over 5 million Jews living in the Pale of Settlement, the 25 western provinces of the Russian Empire in which Jews were generally free to reside. Together with the Jewish…