ABSTRACT

From 1881 (the year of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II) to the outbreak of the First World War, some 2.5 million Jews left the Russian Empire, part of the massive shift of population from eastern and southern Europe. The Jews had lived in Russia for many centuries, developing their own distinctive religious and cultural life, but by the last quarter of the nineteenth century they were largely confined to the Tale of Settlement' (15 provinces in the north-west and south-west of Russia - Belorussia, Lithuania, the Ukraine and New Russia), totalling nearly three million people. An additional one million Jews lived in the Kingdom of Poland. Of the Jews of the Pale, it has been estimated that just over 80 per cent lived in towns or shtetlekh. The uneven pattern of modernisation in the Russian and Russian Jewish economy and culture, alongside restrictions on freedom and substantial population growth, led to an increasin3ly impoverished and dislocated Jewish community ripe for emigration. The United States was the biggest recipient of this global movement, with a minimum of 200,000 and a maximum of one million immigrants of all types and from all countries per annum in this period. But if the United States was the dominant place of settlement, other countries, particularly Britain, also experienced an inflow. Statistics in this area are notoriously unreliable, but Lloyd Gartner has estimated that some half a million Jews from the Russian Empire spent at least two years in Britain during the era of mass immigration.1