336 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tion to England and America. Prominently associated with the 

 earlier aspect of this movement was a Jewish Colonization Associa- 

 tion, which had at its disposal a fund of $50,000,000, a donation of 

 the late Baron de Hirsch, but so far as the United States is con- 

 cerned the new arrivals found in various vocations a sufficient degree 

 of success to establish the immigration on a prepaid ticket basis on 

 which it still continues. 



The disabilities imposed upon the Jews in eastern Europe and 

 the events associated with the Eussian emigration are wont to be 

 referred to as religious persecution. Tales of the use of the blood 

 of christian children in religious rites and of stolen holy wafers 

 punctured with a knife give a decidedly religious aspect to certain local 

 outbreaks of violence. But the Eussian church and the Eussian 

 people lack the proselyting spirit so characteristic of western people 

 of whatever faith. "While intolerant of dissenting sects from his 

 own church 'because they invent their religions out of their own 

 heads,' the Eussian is inclined to respect the diverse religions of 

 alien races as 'received from God.' Neither the Lutheran German 

 nor the Mohammedan Tartar complains of religious persecution. In 

 the case of the Jews, however, the matter of religious faith serves 

 in Eussia, Austria and Eoumania as it has served in other lands to 

 intensify a deep-seated feeling of popular resentment toward a race 

 alien in speech and customs and closely identified with economic con- 

 ditions that are commonly regarded as prejudicial to the common 

 good; and it is not in the mere chronicle of clerical invective, political 

 discrimination, violence and murder that the cause of this immigra- 

 tion and the explanation of its character are to be found, but in the 

 economic history of a land where for centuries society was divisible 

 into three classes, nobles, Jews and peasants. 



Jews are known to have existed in Hungary and Eoumania since 

 Eoman times, and within the present limits of Eussia at a date almost 

 as remote. But those emigrating to-day owe their presence there to 

 much later migrations, both voluntary and involuntary, from more 

 western Europe to Polish territory. Whenever the political condition 

 of the western states of Medieval Europe became somewhat stable the 

 expulsion of the Jews 'was almost sure to follow, and the refugees 

 always tended eastward, finding more favorable conditions in those 

 states whose political turmoil and continual squabbles gave little time 

 for the consideration of internal affairs. 



Poland offered such favorable conditions long after more western 

 Europe had quieted down. Here the ancient Jewish element was 

 obscured by continual Jewish immigration from the west, of which 

 the wholesale migration from Bohemia near the close of the eleventh 



