On 23 December 1791 the Empress Catherine the Great signed a decree that fixed the residence of the Jews of the Russian Empire inside a line drawn across the western territories of her realm. The decree did not name a Pale of Settlement, because the phrase did not yet exist; the English term was a translation that only appeared in the 1890s, and the Russian word was cherta osedlosti, the boundary of settlement. What the decree established was a legal architecture of extraordinary precision and extraordinary cruelty, and it is one of the strangest instruments of governance ever devised. It did not expel the Jews. It permitted them, and in exchange it made them poor, confined them to a territory they had not chosen, closed to them the professions and the trades on which a family could feed itself, and then, over the following century, closed the exit. More than two million people left through that exit between 1881 and 1914. The system was not designed for their benefit, and it was never generous. But it was designed in a particular way, and that design determined almost everything that followed, including the shape of the communities that arrived in New York, Baltimore, Chicago and Philadelphia with a Torah scroll in a trunk and a synagogue in their heads.<\/p>\n
It is worth saying at the outset what this essay is and is not about. It is not a history of the migration as a statistic. The figures are important and they will be given, but a number that moves is not an argument. It is also not a story about famous people, several of whom have already had their own account on this site. It is an argument about a particular kind of institution: the institutions of a small Jewish town, and why they could be carried across an ocean in a way that other things could not. The synagogue with its Torah scrolls, the school that taught children to read the Torah in Hebrew, the burial society that provided for the dead, the mutual aid society that provided for the living, the library that lent books, the society that raised money to buy passage. These were portable in a way that a village was not, and they were portable because they were text-based. A community that keeps its law, its teaching, its calendar, its dead and its prayer in a book can be reconstructed on a foreign shore by the people who carry the book and remember who read it. The great Jewish migration out of the Russian Empire was, in this sense, the largest relocation of a text-based civilisation in the nineteenth century, and the consequences of that fact are still visible in American Jewish life.<\/p>\n
The connection to the Hebrew Bible is not a decorative frame. The Torah scroll was the constitution of the community, the object around which a congregation literally assembled, the item without which a minyan could not be constituted and a service could not be held. To arrive in a new city without a scroll was to arrive without a congregation; to arrive with one was to arrive as a community. The economic decisions of the Pale, the ticket societies of Hamburg and Bremen, the inspections at Ellis Island, the building of a synagogue on Hester Street within weeks of landing, the competitions between American congregations to outbid one another for a rabbi, the relief societies that sent money for the upkeep of a Torah scroll in a small town in Podolia: all of these are, from the point of view of this journal, the transmission history of a text and the institutions that carry it. The manuscript does not stay in the manuscript room. It travels in the hold of a steamer, and it is read on Lower East Side by men whose fathers had read the same text in a town that no longer exists.<\/p>\n
The empire that drew this line did not begin with a Jewish population problem. When Catherine took the throne in 1762 there were perhaps a few hundred thousand Jews in Russia, most of them in the new southern territories and the Crimea, and they were a rounding error in an empire that was overwhelmingly Orthodox. The situation changed violently and for reasons that had nothing to do with the Jews. In 1772 the First Partition of Poland placed a large and well-organised Jewish population under Russian rule for the first time, and in 1793 and 1795 the second and third partitions brought in far more, along with the great commercial and intellectual centres of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry. The empire had annexed a population it had not expected and had to decide what to do with it. The decision, in 1791, was that the Jews would be concentrated in the annexations as a buffer and a labour pool while Russian settlement was pushed into the empty lands of the Black Sea steppe, and that the price of tolerating them at all would be paid by them.<\/p>\n
The mechanism was simple to state. The decree of 23 December 1791 set the limits within which permanent Jewish residence was permitted, and it did so in the western and southwestern governorates rather than in the new Black Sea territories, which was the point. Jews were allowed to expand the territory available to them, but in exchange Jewish merchants could no longer do business in the Russian interior. The logic was that a population whose legal rights were bounded by a line would be kept economically dependent, and would serve as a useful buffer population on a frontier that the state did not yet have the administrative capacity to govern directly. When the second partition brought in the former Polish Commonwealth’s Jewish towns in 1794 and the third added Vilna and Grodno in 1795, the cherta was extended to cover them. At its height it included roughly a fifth of the territory of European Russia and broadly corresponded to the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Cossack Hetmanate, parts of the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Khanate and eastern Moldavia. In modern terms it covered most of Belarus and Moldova, much of Ukraine and Lithuania, east-central Poland and small parts of Latvia and western Russia.<\/p>\n
The population it contained was enormous in proportion to its size. At the height of the Pale there were more than five million Jews inside it, which was around forty per cent of the world’s Jewish population. That concentration, sustained for well over a century, produced the dense cultural life that later writers romanticised and that later historians complicated. It produced a shtetl culture of extraordinary intensity, a Yiddish literature read in the original, a network of schools that gave the world the Volozhin yeshiva model, and a social welfare system more developed than anything the surrounding state provided for its own citizens. It also produced the first great wave of Jewish emigration to the United States, and it produced the pogroms. The two are not separable, and the essay will return to that.<\/p>\n
The exceptions to the rule were few, and they were of a kind that reveals what the state was actually doing. Jews with university education could live outside the Pale. Merchants of the First Guild, the wealthiest occupational estate in the empire, could live outside it. Certain artisans, soldiers drafted under the Recruit Charter of 1810, and ennobled Jews could live outside it, as could their families and sometimes their servants. In effect, the state was granting residence according to usefulness: the educated, the rich, the skilled and the conscript were allowed to leave the Pale because they were assets, and everyone else was kept where they were because they were not. The dispensations were also unstable. Several thousand Jews were expelled from Moscow as late as 1891, and the law on Jewish residence was repeatedly tightened and loosened according to the politics of the moment. Under Nicholas I, from 1825 to 1855, the Pale shrank and grew more restrictive: Jews in Kiev were severely restricted by decree in 1827, the North Caucasus and Astrakhan were removed from the Pale in 1835, and in 1843 the government attempted to clear all Jews from within eighty kilometres of the Austrian border, which proved impractical and was relaxed in 1858.<\/p>\n
Under Alexander II, who ruled from 1855 to 1881, the position of the educated and the wealthy improved, and there was a real possibility that the cherta would be abolished. Many Jews believed it. Then Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, and rumours spread that the assassins had been Jewish. The result was a decade of pogroms from 1881 to 1884, a reactionary law forbidding any new Jewish settlement outside the Pale, and a provision that granted peasants the right to demand the expulsion of Jews from their towns. The law was described as temporary. It remained in force, in amended form, until at least 1903. In 1910 Jewish members of the State Duma proposed abolishing the Pale; the arithmetic of the Duma made the bill impossible to pass, and the far right responded by proposing the expulsion of the Jews from the empire altogether.<\/p>\n
The most systematic instrument of restriction, however, was the code of 1882 known as the May Laws, which is named for the month in which Alexander III sanctioned them. They were drafted by the minister of the interior, Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev, and promulgated on 15 May, 3 May in the old style. Four provisions are worth quoting in substance because they show what the state was actually regulating. Jews were forbidden to settle anew outside towns and boroughs, with exceptions only for existing Jewish agricultural colonies. The issuing of mortgages and other deeds to Jews was temporarily forbidden, as was their registration as lessees of real property outside towns and boroughs, and as holders of powers of attorney to manage and dispose of such property. Jews were forbidden to transact business on Sundays and on the principal Christian holy days, the existing Christian closing-day regulations being applied to them as well. And the first three of these provisions were to apply only within the governments of the Pale, which meant that they were aimed at the population that had already been confined.<\/p>\n
These were modest on paper, and they were not modest at all. The prohibition on settlement outside towns was a prohibition on rural settlement, and it removed from the Jewish population the one escape route that had been open to it, since Jews had generally been barred from owning land and farming anyway. The restriction on mortgages and landholding was the restriction that made them artisans and shopkeepers, because there was no security to borrow against and no land to pledge, so that credit, which is what turns a trade into a business, was closed to them. The Sunday and holy-day prohibition meant that a Jewish trader could not work on the days when Christian competitors were closed, which placed a permanent handicap on every shopkeeper in every town. The laws were framed as temporary and survived for more than thirty years. Their successors tightened further: in 1887 the quota on Jewish admission to high schools and universities was fixed at ten per cent within the Pale, five per cent outside it, and three per cent in Moscow and St Petersburg, caps so far above the local Jewish proportion that they appear generous until one notices that they froze admission for many students permanently. Jewish doctors in the army were capped at five per cent. A Jewish lawyer who wished to be called to the bar needed the express consent of the Minister of Justice. In 1892 the town regulations of that year stripped Jews of the right to sit on town dumas or to elect to them, in a system of inverted representation which handed effective control of the towns to the minority of payers who were not Jewish. In 1893 the law concerning names made it a criminal offence for a Jew to adopt a Christian name and required that birth names as recorded in the metric books be used in all business, writing, advertising and labels, a piece of legislation whose purpose was to make concealment impossible and visibility permanent.<\/p>\n
What all of this produced, economically, was a population that could not feed itself in the place where it was permitted to live. Because land ownership and agriculture were closed to Jews, the overwhelming majority worked as artisans, shopkeepers, small traders and wage labourers in the towns. Because credit was closed, the shops stayed small. Because the towns were small and the families numerous, the shops could not absorb the young. The result was a demographic pressure that emigration could relieve but never solve: the emigration of the 1880s and 1890s was enormous, and the population of the Pale continued to grow, because births exceeded departures and because the periodic expulsions from outside the Pale added to the population inside it.<\/p>\n
There were moments when the machinery of the state produced something absurd. In the spring of 1891 most Jews were deported from Moscow, with the exception of a handful deemed useful to the city, and a synagogue that had only just been built was closed by order of the governor-general, the Tsar’s brother. Some twenty thousand people were put on the road to the Pale, and the episode drew condemnations across Europe and a direct intervention from the government of the United States. On 9 December 1891 President Benjamin Harrison told the Congress of the United States that his government had found occasion to express, in a friendly spirit but with much earnestness, its serious concern because of harsh measures being enforced against the Hebrews. It is one of the few occasions on which the government of the United States has intervened in the domestic policy of the Russian Empire, and it was made in the same decade in which the largest movement of Jewish people to American shores was under way. Whatever the American government intended, the timing was not accidental. The migration found a government in the United States that was disposed to regard the mistreatment of Jews in Russia as a matter of international concern, and a large body of American opinion that agreed.<\/p>\n
The end of the Pale came not by reform but by catastrophe. Its rigid hold on the Jewish population loosened during the First World War, as large numbers of Jews fled into the Russian interior from the advancing German army. In formal terms the cherta ceased to exist on 19 August 1915, when the Ministry of Internal Affairs permitted residence in urban settlements outside the Pale, with the exception of the capitals and of the localities under the jurisdiction of the ministers of the imperial court and the military. It was abolished formally on 20 March, 2 April in the new style, in 1917, by the decree of the Russian Provisional Government on the abolition of religious and national restrictions. Much of the former territory was reconstituted as the Second Polish Republic, and within a generation most of the Jewish population of that territory was murdered. The Pale lasted a hundred and twenty-six years, and the communities it held together lasted considerably longer than the state that had made them.<\/p>\n
Before leaving the legal architecture it is worth noting that the Pale is one of the better-documented instances of a historical argument that never settles, and that the argument has changed shape over time. The older literature, represented by Richard Pipes’s account of the origins of the cherta, tends to treat the measure as a piece of Russian administrative expediency: a state that had annexed a population it did not want and needed a formula for managing it, and that settled on the cheapest possible formula, which was to confine and then to neglect. The later literature, including the work of Robert Geraci on the pragmatism of the Pale’s origin and of Benjamin Nathans’s study of the Jewish encounter with late Imperial Russia, reads the same instruments differently, as an anti-Jewish policy pursued by a state whose anti-Semitism was systematic rather than a by-product of administrative convenience. Both readings are supported by the evidence, and the choice between them changes the moral shape of the story without changing what happened to the people who lived inside the line. What the two readings agree on is that the Pale was not a temporary measure that outlasted its purpose, and not an accident of partition. It was maintained for a hundred and twenty-six years, revised as the empire expanded and contracted, and dismantled only when the empire itself was dismantled.<\/p>\n
A shtetl, in Yiddish, is a little town. The word is diminutive and slightly affectionate, and it names a settlement of perhaps a few hundred to a few thousand people in which the great majority were Jewish, arranged around a market square, with a synagogue as its architectural centre and a market day as its rhythm. There were thousands of them inside the Pale, and they were never a single thing. Some were old market towns with a Polish or Lithuanian past; some were newer settlements on the Black Sea steppe founded in the last decades of the eighteenth century to hold the population the empire had decided to confine; some were railway junctions; a few were large enough to be called cities and to sustain a considerable literary and scholarly life. What they had in common was a legal environment that excluded the principal route to wealth and a religious culture that was institutionally dense. The shtetl was, in effect, the form that Jewish life took when it was given a territory and denied a career.<\/p>\n
Because Jews were generally barred from owning land and from farming, and because the May Laws closed the villages to new Jewish settlement and the countryside to Jewish property, the shtetl economy was built on trade and manufacture rather than on the land. The population produced the artisans that the surrounding agricultural economy required – tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, blacksmiths, butchers, tinsmiths, coopers – and it ran the small-scale commerce that moved goods between the market town and the villages. The division of labour was extraordinarily narrow and the capital requirement extraordinarily low, which meant that a family could put a son into a trade with a small sum and that the trade could then fail and be re-entered. It also meant that there was no way for a successful family to move from commerce into anything larger. In an economy where land was the store of value and the ladder of ascent, the Jews of the Pale were held at the bottom rung by construction, and the May Laws of 1882 did not merely restrict what could be done in the towns; they removed what had been the last route out of them.<\/p>\n
Into this economic void the shtetl built a system of mutual support that was, by the standards of the time and the society around it, remarkable. The building block was the chevra, a voluntary fellowship of neighbours, and the most consequential of them was the chevra kadisha, the burial society, which provided for the dead and for the rituals that attended them. Alongside it ran a dense provision of mutual aid: clothing for students too poor to be maintained by their families, medical care for the indigent, dowries and household goods for brides whose families could not furnish them, technical training for orphans, and kosher food for Jewish soldiers conscripted into the imperial army, who were required to eat according to the law while serving in units where no kosher kitchen existed. The scale of this is difficult to overstate. By the end of the nineteenth century close to one Jew in three inside the Pale was in receipt of support from a Jewish welfare organisation, and no province of the Pale had fewer than fourteen per cent of its Jews on relief; in Lithuania and in Ukraine the proportion of the poor supported by their own community was as high as twenty-two per cent. The state provided almost nothing for the people it had confined. The community provided for itself, and it did so at a level that would not have been remarkable in a modern welfare state.<\/p>\n
Two institutions of this world are of particular interest to a journal concerned with the transmission of scripture. The first is the heder, the elementary school, ordinarily kept in a room in a private house and taught by a melamed, a teacher who was often simultaneously a shoemaker, a watchmaker or a day labourer. Its curriculum was narrow by modern standards and exacting by any: a child learned to read Hebrew, which was not the vernacular of the street but a language requiring instruction, and learned to read the Torah, which meant learning to chant, to follow the text without a printed guide, and to acquire the habits of study that would make the synagogue intelligible. The heder was the bottleneck through which every child passed, and it was therefore the one institution that could not be allowed to fail, even when the town was poor and the teacher was improvising. The second is the synagogue itself, and specifically the Torah scroll that stood in its ark. A Sefer Torah is one of the most demanding objects in the craft of the book: it is written by a scribe on prepared animal parchment, the columns ruled, the text copied without error or correction, the lines and letters checked repeatedly against the copy being followed, and the finished scroll crowned with ornamental finials. Months of work go into one. It cannot be improvised, and it cannot be bought in a market. A congregation is, in this sense, the community plus a scroll, and a community without a scroll is a congregation in the process of being formed.<\/p>\n
Around the synagogue and the school there developed a supporting apparatus of learning. The great example is the Strashun Library in Vilna, a lending library founded by Mattityahu Strashun that opened its doors in 1874 and which was, by any measure, a remarkable public institution: it held tens of thousands of volumes in Hebrew and Yiddish, it lent them, and it did so in a town where the state had just closed the doors of the higher schools to Jewish pupils. Libraries of this kind, founded in shtetls across the Pale in the later decades of the nineteenth century, were among the first libraries in the Russian Empire to be genuinely public in the sense of lending to readers who could not pay. Another example was the yeshiva at Volozhin, founded in 1803 by Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, which became the prototype of the modern advanced school for the study of the Torah. The imperial authorities closed it in 1879, reopened it in 1881 on condition that its teachers held Russian diplomas and taught Russian language and culture, and closed it for good in 1892 when those conditions proved impossible to meet. Its students went out and founded new schools of the same kind across the Pale, and the model they carried with them is the direct ancestor of the yeshiva system that would dominate advanced Torah study in the twentieth century.<\/p>\n
The shtetl was also a place of argument, and the arguments travelled as well. From the 1880s onwards a secular socialist movement organised Jewish workers in the Pale, most famously the General Jewish Labour Bund, founded in Vilna in 1891, which organised strikes, ran cooperative workshops, campaigned for the right to vote in municipal elections and became a substantial force in the revolutionary politics of 1905. Alongside it worked a smaller and more radical current, including the anarchist groups formed around the Hebrew poet Chaim Zhitlowsky, who argued that the national struggle and the class struggle were one struggle. The Palestine movement that would eventually become Zionism took shape in the same towns in the same decades, and one of its early figures, the physician Leon Pinsker, published his argument for a Jewish national home in a book printed in Heidelberg in 1882. What these movements shared was a conviction that the communal institutions of the shtetl, impressive as they were, were a ceiling as well as a floor. They provided for the poor; they did not explain why the poor were poor. A generation of young men left for New York and worked in the trades, and the trades were where the movement continued in America, in the garment unions, in the socialist and communist parties of the Lower East Side, and in the labour Zionist organisation that carried the Bund’s politics across the ocean.<\/p>\n
This is the point at which the question of what could travel becomes answerable. A shtetl could not travel: it was a place, with a market square and a set of buildings and a relation to the surrounding villages and their non-Jewish majority that could not be reproduced elsewhere. Its economic base could not travel either, because the base had been a restriction rather than an occupation. What could travel was a set of institutions that were, in the end, quite small and quite abstract. A Torah scroll and the books to go with it. A teacher, or the memory of what a teacher had taught. A calendar and the texts that mark it. A congregation, which needed ten men and a scroll and a room. A burial society, which needed people and a plot of ground. A mutual aid society, which needed a membership and a chest. A library, which needed a building and a collection. None of these was large, and all of them were composed of texts, forms and habits. A community of this kind could be reconstituted on a foreign shore by the people who carried the components, and it was reconstituted with remarkable speed. The immigrants who arrived in New York in the weeks after a pogrom did not arrive as a village. They arrived as a set of institutions in transit, and they reassembled them on the Lower East Side with a speed that astonished contemporaries and irritates anyone who prefers the story to have taken longer.<\/p>\n
The decision to leave was made by families, and it was made under pressure from several directions at once. The economic pressure was constant and structural: no land, no credit, no route from the small trade into the larger one, and a population growing faster than the town’s capacity to absorb it. The legal pressure came in waves, and the largest of them were the pogroms. The first wave ran from 1881 to 1883, beginning in the wake of the assassination of Alexander II and the rumours that followed it, and it attacked hundreds of towns across the Pale, killing and maiming and destroying property. The second and larger wave ran from 1903 to 1906 and followed the pogrom at Kishinev in the spring of 1905, where a single event produced an outcry in the British Parliament, in the United States Congress and across the European press that the Russian government found harder to dismiss than any earlier incident. These attacks were not the sole cause of emigration and they were not spontaneous expressions of popular anger in any simple sense; they were often instigated, tolerated or enabled by officials, and the reaction they provoked was at least as much about the international consequences as about the victims. But they did what no amount of legal restriction could do: they made the decision to leave urgent, and they made it impossible for a family to regard the decision as a temporary inconvenience.<\/p>\n
The Russian historians of the period divided the violence of the 1880s into two phases, and the distinction matters for understanding the migration it produced. The first, the pogroms of 1881, were called the belye pogromy, the white pogroms, and were largely outbreaks of popular violence in the weeks after the assassination, concentrated in the southern and western Pale and accompanied by destruction of property. The second, the pogroms of 1882 to 1883, were called the chernye pogromy, the black pogroms, and they were a different thing: more systematically organised, more militarily supported in several provinces, and directed by officials who had decided that the disorder was useful. A further wave in 1903 to 1906 followed the pogrom at Kishinev in the spring of 1905, where a single event produced an outcry in the British Parliament, in the United States Congress and across the European press that the Russian government found harder to dismiss than any earlier incident. These attacks were not the sole cause of emigration and they were not spontaneous expressions of popular anger in any simple sense; they were often instigated, tolerated or enabled by officials, and the reaction they provoked was at least as much about the international consequences as about the victims. But they did what no amount of legal restriction could do: they made the decision to leave urgent, and they made it impossible for a family to regard the decision as a temporary inconvenience.<\/p>\n
The third pressure was military. Jewish males in the Russian Empire were liable to conscription into the imperial army for a term of twenty-five years, a period stretching from the reforms of the 1850s to the end of the empire, against a term of five years for other soldiers and, from 1874, a system of service in the reserves that effectively removed young men from the labour market for most of their adult lives. The conscription of a generation of Jewish men into the army, and the deaths of many of them in campaigns and in the conditions of barracks disease, is a factor in the demographic arithmetic of the Pale that is constantly omitted from the popular accounts and is inseparable from the rest.<\/p>\n
Against these pressures there was a pull, and it was an American pull of a particular kind. The United States had excluded Jewish immigration from the Pacific coast at the beginning of the 1860s on racial grounds, then reversed the restriction and had admitted, from the 1880s, a Jewish immigration far larger than any it had known. The economic openings were specific: the railways reaching west, the Homestead Act of 1862, the discovery of gold in California, the cattle drives, the settlement of the Great Plains, and above all the needle trades of the eastern cities, where garment manufacture was expanding explosively and where a skilled or semi-skilled worker could find work that a shtetl tailor, in a shtetl tailor’s shop, could not. The irony was exact and it was widely noticed at the time. A young man who could not own land in Lithuania and could not practise many trades in Russia could cross the Atlantic and obtain in a few years a small business of his own, or a stake in a larger one. The conditions in the garment trades were appalling, the hours were long, and the industry generated a cycle of sweatshops, union organisation and reform that occupied American Jewish politics for two generations. But the arithmetic worked, and it worked for women as well as men, which is why the migration was a family migration and why the new communities in America were not composed of young men waiting to return.<\/p>\n
Getting there was itself an organised process, and the organisation is one of the best-documented aspects of the migration. The migrants did not simply walk into the ticket office of a Hamburg agent. Credit was needed, and credit was precisely what the Russian state had closed to them, so the ticket money was organised from outside, by societies in Germany and in the United States. The largest and most generous of these was founded by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the Austro-Hungarian financier whose earlier work in the Russian Caucasus had brought him into contact with the condition of the Jewish agricultural colonies and of the Pale itself. In 1891 his Society for the Promotion of Emigration among Jewish Workers began lending money for the passage of emigrants from the Russian Empire to the United States, at a scale and on terms that no commercial agent could have matched. In the United States the corresponding work had begun earlier, with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Fund of 1882, which became the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in 1909 and which eventually absorbed or partnered with a range of local and international bodies, including the Hirsch organisation. These societies advanced the fare, insured against the failure that was otherwise certain, supplied a letter of introduction, and in the case of the society organised by Hirsch placed the migrant in the hands of a network of correspondents on the American side who would find the family a job, a bed and a synagogue before the ship had docked.<\/p>\n
The ships sailed from three principal ports. Libau, now Liepaja in Latvia, was the Russian Baltic port and the point of departure for the cheapest and most direct sailings; Hamburg was the great European centre of the emigration trade and the port from which the largest lines ran; Bremen was the third. The companies were the Hamburg-America Line, the Norddeutscher Lloyd and a number of smaller operators, and the emigrant traffic was carried in third class, in steerage accommodation that was sometimes little more than a dormitory deck, where families slept on canvas pallets stacked in rows, cooked their own food, and could be at sea for ten days or more in weather that made the voyage dangerous. Deaths from fever and typhus on the emigrant ships were common enough in the early years that the major lines and the aid societies developed inspection and quarantine arrangements at the ports of departure, a development that was among the earliest formal international health controls on the migration of labour. The crossing was, in other words, the point at which the institutions of the old world first organised themselves to reproduce the community in the new one: the ticket society, the shipping line, the emigration agent and the American receiving society together constituted a chain, each link of it staffed by people from the same communities, and each of them arranging for the next thing needed – a job, a room, a school place, a synagogue – before the migrant had any claim upon them.<\/p>\n
New York was the destination for the majority, but it was not the only one, and the geography of arrival shaped the character of the communities that were built. Baltimore had been an entry point for German and Irish immigration since the 1820s and became the principal port for the southern and central European arrivals, including many of the Jews from the Pale who went first to Baltimore and then moved on. Philadelphia, the third great port, had a smaller but a distinguished Jewish community going back to the eighteenth century, and it was chosen by a number of the better-off immigrants precisely because it was cheaper and less forbidding. The American Jewish Publication Society was founded in Philadelphia in 1888, and the capital and the institutional centre of American Jewry stayed in New York, where the sheer number of arrivals made it necessary. The result was a country in which a single metropolitan area contained a larger share of the Jewish population than any country in the world, and in which the traditions of the Pale were reproduced at a scale that no one in the Pale could have imagined. The shtetl had been designed for a few thousand people and for a slow-growing population. It was reproduced in New York for hundreds of thousands and for a population that stopped growing.<\/p>\n
The arrival in New York came to a single building. The first federal immigration station at Castle Garden was a former fort, and it operated as an immigrant depot from 1855 until 1890, when the federal government opened the station on Bedloe’s Island that is now Ellis Island. The new station processed something like ten million arrivals over the following six decades, and between roughly 1881 and 1924 it received the great majority of the Jews who came out of the Russian Empire. The examination at Ellis Island was severe and perfunctory at the same time: a line of doctors checked for trachoma and other conditions, with the consequence that people were turned back from the shipping deck with disease they had not known they had, and a second line of inspectors questioned travellers for their names, their occupations and their intentions, and could mark a name for further examination. The records that survive from those years are the passenger manifests and the case books, and they are the primary documentary base for the whole story of American Jewish immigration. It must be said that the station also suffered a catastrophe of its own: a fire in the winter of 1903 destroyed the original records of arrivals for the preceding decade, so that for the most intense years of the migration the paper trail is incomplete, and for many thousands of people the most direct official trace of their arrival no longer exists. The historian of American Jewish life is therefore, in a real sense, working from partial evidence, and the absence of a record for a given arrival is not evidence that the person did not come.<\/p>\n
The United States closed the door in stages, and the timing of each closure is part of the story. A literacy test, introduced in 1917 and enforced after the Supreme Court upheld it in 1923, allowed the government to turn away anyone who could not demonstrate a simple reading of a passage of English text, a provision that passed in a form which lent itself to arbitrary enforcement against people the examining officers judged to be likely to fail. Then the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 replaced the open door with a numerical one, limiting immigration to a fixed proportion of the number admitted from the country in a specified earlier year, and the base year chosen was one that had been chosen precisely to minimise the number of southern and eastern European admissions. The result was that the great migration was largely over by the middle of the 1920s. Some two and a half million Jews had arrived in the United States between 1881 and 1924, the great majority of them from the Russian Empire and the Pale, and the cohorts of the 1880s and 1890s and the first years of the 1900s were the largest. What they brought with them, and what they built in the four decades before the doors closed, is the subject of the remaining sections.<\/p>\n
It is a mistake to imagine that the great Jewish migration to America began at Ellis Island in 1892. Jewish communities had been established in the American colonies since the middle of the seventeenth century, when a group of Sephardi Jews fleeing the expulsions from Spain settled in New Amsterdam, and they had been reinforced through the eighteenth century by Ashkenazic families arriving from the Rhineland and from the Netherlands. The first synagogue in New York was founded in 1690 by a travelling merchant from Alsace; the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, was dedicated in 1772 and is the oldest surviving synagogue building in the United States; and the Shearith Israel congregation of New York, which claims descent from the arrivals of 1654, has maintained a scroll in continuous use ever since. What these communities shared, crucially, was the habit of writing the Torah themselves rather than importing it. The oldest Torah scroll known to have been written in America was completed in 1765 by Aaron Levy for the Shearith Israel congregation of Newport, and it is still in the possession of that congregation. The point is worth making because it establishes that the transmission of the text across the Atlantic had begun a century before the Pale began to push people towards the ocean, and that the institution that carried it was the congregation rather than the ship.<\/p>\n
The migration of the 1880s onward changed the scale and the composition of American Jewry beyond anything the earlier communities had imagined, and it did so within a single generation. New York’s Lower East Side became the most densely Jewish urban neighbourhood the world had ever seen, and the American Jewish community became the largest in the world by a wide margin. The synagogues went up in quick succession, and they are the best single index of how the institutions travelled, because a synagogue is not a building but a congregation with a Torah scroll in it. The Roumanian-American Congregation was founded in the 1860s by immigrants from the Romanian principalities who had themselves come through the Pale, and by the end of the century its synagogue on Rivington Street was the largest in the world, with a congregation numbering in the thousands. The Eldridge Street Synagogue, completed in 1891, was the largest synagogue building in the United States. Its closure in 1907 and the demolition of the building that followed cost American Jewry one of the great interiors of the Jewish world, and the loss is a standing reminder that the physical plant of a community is as fragile as the people in it. The catalogues assembled by the Center for Jewish History, which has worked systematically for years to record the synagogues of the Lower East Side, number in the hundreds: they occupied buildings on nearly every street of the neighbourhood, and their names preserve the geography the migrants had come from, so that a synagogue on Rivington Street named for a town in Podolia or Volhynia is a map of the Pale rendered in architecture.<\/p>\n
At the level of public and learned institution the transfer was as striking as the transfer of the synagogue. The Jewish Theological Seminary was founded in New York in 1886, the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1875, the Jewish Publication Society in Philadelphia in 1888, and the American Jewish Year Book began to appear in the 1890s. None of these had existed before, and all of them were founded by people who had been shaped by the institutions of the Pale even where they had been born in the United States. When the Kishinev pogrom of 1905 produced an outcry that the government of the United States could not ignore, the response was the creation in 1906 of the American Jewish Committee, the first national organisation of American Jewry and the ancestor of the American Jewish Congress. In the two decades after the First World War the Orthodox communities of the United States built their own apparatus at speed: a network of yeshivas that taught in Hebrew to a standard that had not existed outside the Pale since the Volozhin school was closed; a kashrut and certification authority that had to be invented, because the kosher meat and the kosher wine that had been guaranteed locally by a town’s slaughterer and its rabbi could no longer simply be assumed in a city of half a million Jews; a rabbinic court system; and a set of communal bodies that policed the observance of the law in the way that the towns of the Pale had done without any need to write it down. The shtetl had done all of this in conversation. America had to do it in committee, and the minutes of those committees are among the most revealing documents the migration produced.<\/p>\n
The other institutions arrived at the same speed and with the same logic. The Educational Alliance, founded in New York in 1880 to serve the immigrant poor, had by the turn of the century become the largest Jewish educational institution in the world, running evening schools for adults, classes in English and civics, and a network of evening courses in the trades. The Hebrew schools of the Lower East Side reproduced the heder at a larger scale, and the Young Israel movement and the religious schools that grew out of it gave the immigrant community its own educational system, separate from the public schools and in some respects better than them. Mutual aid societies multiplied: a society would collect dues, pay for medicine, provide dowries, fund the burial, and send money home to the family in the shtetl. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which had been founded in 1882 to help newly arrived immigrants find work and housing, became the coordinating body of the whole enterprise, and it was the body that received most of the money that the American Jewish community raised for the relief of the Pale and for the settlement of new arrivals in the Ottoman and Mandate territories.<\/p>\n
What is striking, looking at the American side of this migration from a distance, is how much of it was a transfer of texts. The Yizkor books are the most direct case. From the 1920s onwards, and particularly in the 1940s to 1970s, the survivors of the destroyed communities wrote memorial books in Yiddish, each one devoted to a single town, recording its history, its institutions, its trades, its notabilities, its rabbinic figures and its dead, often printed in New York and distributed through the remaining families in the old country and then in Israel. Several thousand Yizkor books were produced, and the New York Public Library and the Yizkor Book Project at JewishGen have since digitised a large part of the corpus. Their function is that of a written archive of communities that no longer exist, and their composition is a striking illustration of the argument of this essay: the book that records a shtetl is written in the language the shtetl spoke, printed on a press in the new country, and circulated back to the old one. The text travels, the text preserves, and the text is the only survivor.<\/p>\n
The same is true of the manuscript record, and here the story is more directly this journal’s own. In 1912, with the war approaching and the communities of the eastern Pale visibly disintegrating, the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition organised by S. An-sky spent two years travelling through roughly seventy shtetls in Volhynia, Podolia and Galicia, gathering folk tales, songs and artefacts, recording oral tradition on cylinders, photographing people and buildings, and collecting manuscripts, printed books and community records of every kind. The expedition was an act of rescue carried out by people who had already understood that the material culture of the Pale was being dispersed by modernisation, by pogrom and by emigration, and that most of it would be destroyed. Its collections passed through the Vilna Archives of the Scientific Institute of Jewish History and Folklore, founded in the city in 1924, and came to New York after the war. They are the basis of the Vilna Collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, whose early years are now fully accessible online, digitised with the kind of technical care this journal has followed in other manuscript projects. The point of telling it here is not that a library was saved. It is that the materials of a civilisation do not stay where its people stayed. The books that the Jews of Vilna, Pinsk and the towns of Podolia had read were carried out of the towns in which they had been read and are now read in New York, and a fragment of a scroll or a notebook from a shtetl synagogue can be studied in a New York library while the synagogue it came from is a field.<\/p>\n
Print travelled with them too, and it travelled in a form that has its own history. The Hebrew press of the Pale was among the great publishing industries of the Russian Empire, and the century that produced the Vilna Talmud of 1886 to 1888, with its famous page, putting the commentaries and the annotations in the outer columns around the central text so that a reader could work through all of them at once, was also the century of the Warsaw prayer books and the Vilna and Lublin title pages. The presses were concentrated in a handful of towns, and the same small number of families controlled the trade for generations, among them the Romm family of Vilna. The books that came out of those presses went everywhere the Jews of the Pale went, which included the Pale itself, the Ottoman Empire, Palestine and the United States, and they were the books that the American immigrants found waiting for them. The press did not stop when its market emptied; it moved. The Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers of the Lower East Side, which were for many years the most widely read papers in New York City, were produced by the same trade in a new country, and the machinery, the compositor and the advertising base all came across on the same ships as the families.<\/p>\n
And the argument is not only that texts travelled but that the habit of making them travelled. The printing presses of the Pale had to live with the Russian censorship, which approved or prohibited particular works by name, and a printer who wanted to publish a history or a lexicon had to petition for permission and then accept a censor’s deletions. The same books, reprinted in Philadelphia and in New York by the same families and their successors, were free of that constraint, and the shift is visible in the catalogues. A publisher who had been printing a commentary because it was permitted began printing what his readers wanted. A reader who had been taught to read by a melamed in a rented room in a shtetl now had access to a library, to a newspaper and to a lecture system. The instrument of transmission changed from the handwritten scroll and the printed book to the library and the press, and the community carried it as it had carried everything else.<\/p>\n
The textual culture of the migrants also came with them in a third and very visible form. The American Jewish Publication Society, founded in Philadelphia in 1888, was an institution of the new community in the old community’s idiom, and its most consequential undertaking was a new English translation of the Torah, published in 1917, the product of a committee of scholars working in the United States on the Hebrew text that the community had carried with it. That volume is a document of the migration in the most literal sense: a text that had been transmitted for centuries through the hands of scribes, communities and academies, the last of which had been closed by the Russian authorities a generation earlier, was re-set in type in a new country, in a new language, for a readership that had itself been assembled in that country out of the descendants of the communities that had transmitted it. A translation is the moment when a text changes its readers, and this one changed them in the middle of the migration that had brought the readers.<\/p>\n
It is time to draw the argument together, and to be honest about what the argument does and does not establish. The claim is a narrow one. It is that the Jewish communities of the Pale of Settlement were able to be reconstructed in the United States because what they consisted of was, at bottom, textual and institutional rather than territorial: a Torah scroll, a set of books, a teacher, a congregation, a burial society, a mutual aid fund, a calendar. A village could not have emigrated. A street could not have emigrated. A religion organised around a book could, and did, and did it at a speed that would have seemed impossible to anyone who had watched the slow unmaking of the community it came from. That is a fact about the transmission of scripture and the institutions that carry scripture, and it is the reason the subject belongs in a journal about the transmission of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament rather than in a history of immigration and nothing else.<\/p>\n
What was carried was the text and the apparatus. The Torah in the original, the scroll that had to be written by hand because a congregation could not function without one, the prayer books and the printed Bibles, the commentaries and the lexicons, the language in which the teaching was done, the calendar that organised the year, and the sequence of institutions that made the teaching possible. What was carried was also, and this is not a trivial thing, the expectation that the community would sustain the teaching. In the Pale the heder had been financed, in effect, by the whole town; the teacher had been supported by the family or by communal charity; the synagogue had been maintained by a communal levy on households whose income might be a few rubles a week. In the United States the same institutions were maintained by a different economy, one in which a-wage labour in the needle trades could be combined with the freedom to make a contribution, and in which a synagogue of three hundred households was a plausible thing for families whose earnings, though small, were at least rising.<\/p>\n
The demographic arithmetic of the period is startling and is usually softened in the telling. At the height of the Pale there were more than five million Jews inside its borders, around forty per cent of the world’s Jewish population. Some two million of them left for the United States in the three decades from 1881, the largest single movement of people in the history of the territory. The population of the Pale nevertheless continued to grow, because the birth rate was high and because emigration could not keep pace with it, and because the expulsions from outside the Pale – from Moscow in 1891, from the interior cities, from the villages where the laws had closed the rural economy – continued to push people in. A migration that removed a fifth of a population in a generation was, for that generation, a catastrophe, and it was also a demographic fact of modest effect. This is the reason it is misleading to tell the story of the Pale’s Jews as a people leaving, and more misleading still to tell it as a rescue. Most of them did not leave, and the communities that they left behind continued to grow, and continued to be the great majority Jewish population of the towns in which they lived.<\/p>\n
What was lost was the shtetl, and it was lost in the crossing rather than after it. The loss was not primarily of people. The great Jewish communities of the Pale were, in demographic terms, remarkably successful: they sustained high birth rates in circumstances of extreme poverty, and the population of the Pale continued to grow throughout the period of the migration because emigration could not keep pace with births and with the expulsions that pushed people in from outside the Pale. The loss was of a particular social form, and of a particular relation to the land. A shtetl was a self-contained economy in which a Jewish family did its trade, educated its children, buried its dead, provided for its poor and governed itself, within a town in which it was a majority. That combination was not reproducible anywhere. In America the Jewish community was a minority from the first day, and an immigrant minority at that, and the institutions that had been the instruments of a majority community became the instruments of a minority one. The trades that the shtetl had excluded by law were the trades the American Jew entered by choice, and the first generation of American Jewish workers in the garment trade discovered, as the labour movement and the garment industry would have predicted, that a minority community which wished to be integrated would have to organise as a working class. The shtetl’s economy had excluded them from the land; the American economy excluded them from much else, and the difference between those two exclusions produced a very different politics.<\/p>\n
There is also the shadow that falls across the second half of the story, and it must not be glossed. The emigration of the 1880s to the 1910s was a solution that worked for those it reached, and it worked at scale. It did not work for everyone. The quotas of 1921 and 1924, enacted at the moment when the survivors of the Pale were being identified, were followed in the 1930s by a European catastrophe in which the Jews of the Pale who had not emigrated, and many whose emigration had been prevented by those quotas or by the poverty that made it impossible, were murdered. The communities of the Pale that had not been emptied by the great migration were among the communities destroyed. The text travelled; the readers did not all travel with it. To say that the Torah went west is to describe a movement of a civilisation’s intellectual furniture, and it is not to say that the civilisation itself was rescued. Most of the shtetls were not. The towns are still there, in Belarus, in Ukraine, in Poland and in Lithuania, and they are memorials, and the memorial books written in New York are the record of a loss as much as of a transplantation.<\/p>\n
What, then, was carried to the United States? On the level of institutions, a complete working apparatus: the scroll, the ark, the reader and the congregation; the school and the teacher; the burial society and the mutual aid society; the library; the newspaper and the printing press, which produced not only the Yizkor books but a press of great importance in its own right, from the Vilna daily to the Jewish newspapers of the Lower East Side, which were the most-read papers in the city for much of the early twentieth century. On the level of ideas, a conviction that a community was constituted by its texts and that the texts must be taught, which is why the American Jewish community invested an enormous proportion of its early wealth in schools, in charities and in publication, and why, when it had money, it sent it back. The societies that raised money for the Pale, for the colonies in Palestine, for the refugees of the 1920s and 1930s, and for the campaigns of the 1940s, were operating on the understanding that a community is a thing you are responsible for, and that responsibility does not stop at the water’s edge.<\/p>\n
There is a temptation, in a story like this, to end with the America that was built. The Lower East Side did produce an extraordinary culture, a literature, a music, a theatre and a political tradition, and the American Jewish community went on to change the politics of the United States. But that is the subject of other essays, and it is the subject of the second half of this one’s story rather than its end. The end of this essay is the Pale, and the end of the Pale is a line drawn on a map in 1791 and lifted in 1917, and a population that moved from one side of that line to the other side of an ocean carrying with them the most portable thing they owned. What they owned was a book, and what they built on the far side was a house in which the book could be read, and then another, and then ten thousand more. It is an extraordinary fact, and it is a small one. The Torah scroll went west, and the shtetl did not, and no amount of luggage could have made it.<\/p>\n
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