ABSTRACT
This article analyses the reactions of German Jewry to the stream of migrants from Russia that flooded into the West in 1891. That was the year that marked a turning-point in everything to do with Russian-Jewish immigration into Germany, both from the German historical point of view and that of German-Jewish self-awareness. The immigrants’ Jewish brethren in Germany described them as an ‘influx of proletarians,’ and even if this was not an accurate designation, it is instructive as to the link it signified between this immigration and revolutionary socialism. German and Western Jews could not be expected to show total indifference in the face of the persecutions and certainly not in the face of their bothersome practical outcome – the mass migration. When the stream of migration swelled into a flood, German Jewry living near the border with Russia in the region of westward transit had to take measures, all the more so given the apprehensions already referred to.
