ABSTRACT
After many years of economic restrictions and bouts of savage persecution against Jews in Russia and Russian Poland, the ‘May Laws’, which attacked the basis of Jewish economic life, were enacted in 1882. They were the straw that broke the camel’s back, sparking off an exodus of probably one million people until the end of the 19th century. Other waves of refugees were generated by Bismarck’s expulsion of alien Poles from Prussia in 1886 and the continuing repression of Jews in Romania. These groups formed part of a larger westward movement of people from Eastern and Southern Europe. Larger numbers of refugees left for the US, although many chose to stay in England. Up to 1890, most immigrants were initially from Germany, but they were soon overtaken by those from Russian Poland. A smaller group of Lithuanians, fleeing from Tsarist policies of Russification of religion and language, and the introduction, in 1874, of forced conscription, also settled in Britain, mainly in Scotland (Holmes, 1988, pp 27-30).
