Czarist persecution and failed rebellion drove Eastern European Jews to mass emigration to America
Evidence
In 1897, the year the Moses family moved from New Haven, hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews, who had been working eighteen hours a day for a wage of two or three rubles a week, formed Algemeiner Yidisher Arbeter Bund, the General League of Jewish Workers, in Russia, Poland and Lithuania, in a last, despairing, foredoomed attempt to improve their lot, which was even harder than that which German Jews like the Cohens and Silvermans had fled a half century earlier. In Czarist Russia, the vast ghetto known as the Pale of Settlement had become a morass of the most bitter poverty. The virtual legalization of discrimination in the May Laws of the 1880’s had touched off a series of savage pogroms. When the strikes called by the cobblers, tailors and weavers who had formed the General League were broken—by bloodshed, imprisonment and torture—the Jews of Eastern Europe felt that their only hope was escape to America. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 131
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to earlier German-Jewish migration background and the established-German-versus-new-immigrant class dynamic that will shape Bella’s and later Robert Moses’s upward trajectory. — connects to: German anti-Semitic statutes drove the Cohens to emigrate to America — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 112; Zionism externalized the Arab from the Jew and the Jew from Europe — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 975; Zionist emigration to Palestine was minuscule next to mass Jewish migration westward — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 955 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Zionist emigration to Palestine was minuscule next to mass Jewish migration westward
#corroborates(0.85) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 955 - Zionism externalized the Arab from the Jew and the Jew from Europe
#complicates(0.75) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 975 - The Ottoman Empire offered Jews refuge from European Christian persecution.
#qualifies(0.72)