RECENT JEWISH IMMIGRATION. 335 



national elements included within the same territorial limits, but 

 there is also brought out in stronger relief a racial migration of 

 essentially modern character, due to exceptional influences and one 

 that will go down in history as among the most important in the 

 annals of the Hebrew race. 



Jews have been represented among the arrivals to this country 

 since early colonial times. They appeared in considerable numbers 

 as an accompaniment and sequel of our German immigration and 

 were then derived largely from the German Polish provinces, but 

 now the Jewish as well as the Polish immigration from these prov- 

 inces has practically ceased. The Hungarian Jewish immigrant has 

 likewise disappeared. 



The immigration of the Yiddish-speaking Hebrew in the shape 

 of an extensive exodus dates back scarcely twenty years, during which 

 time probably not far from a million have come to this country from 

 the Eussian Empire, Galicia and Koumania, not as returning travelers 

 or temporary sojourners, but for the most part as a new and perma- 

 nent increment to our population. 



An important factor in the causation of this movement is to be 

 found in the acute phase which anti-Jewish feeling had assumed in 

 eastern Europe twenty years ago. About 1880 widespread outbreaks 

 of popular fury against the Jews were occurring in Kussia. These 

 disorders were followed by attempts on the part of the Russian gov- 

 ernment to enforce existing though neglected laws relative to the 

 privileges of these people within the empire and to devise new measures 

 for allaying popular clamor and complaint. 



The unexaggerated accounts of the violence, robbery and brutality 

 to which the Jews were being subjected by the Russian populace, the 

 tenor of the Russian laws and the harshness with which they were 

 enforced attracted foreign attention to the unfortunate condition of 

 these people and opened to them a refuge in more western countries 

 where the Jew had not been unfavorably known or where, by a similar 

 violent process, he had been eliminated as an important economic 

 factor centuries before. 



Exceptional obstacles stood in the way of their emigration. Ad- 

 vance toward the east was forbidden by Russia and the police laws of 

 the continental countries toward the west made a permanent refuge 

 in this direction out of the question. The class to whom emigration 

 would appeal lacked the resources for joining in distant colonial move- 

 ments as the Germans and Scandinavians had done, and, unlike the 

 Italians, Slovaks and Poles, these Jews were unprepared to supply the 

 sort of labor for which a demand existed in other lands. 



Foreign sympathy and organized charitable aid furnished the chief 

 means of overcoming their inertia and starting the stream of migra- 



