Wandering Jews or Jewish Migrants? Reassessing the Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe before (and after) 1914

• In Event: Jewish Journeys from Russia and the Soviet Union

Abstract

The migration of close to two million Jews from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires between the late 1860s and 1914 completely transformed Jewish life in different parts of the world. How to make sense of this migration? This paper retraces the scholarship about Jewish migration in the modern period by portraying three scholars who themselves left Russia in the wake of the “Great War” and the Russian Civil War but assessed Jewish migration from the Russian Empire (and Jewish history) in strikingly different terms: historian and aid worker Mark Wischnitzer, sociologist and journalist Jacob Lestschinsky and legal scholar and demographer Eugene Kulischer. They grew up in the Russian Empire but pursued different professional careers. Their paths intersected during the 1920s in Berlin and again in New York after dramatic escape journeys from Europe. During the 1940s they published longer texts about Jewish migration history. In a still widely referenced 1948 study Wischnitzer traced Jewish migrations after 1800 almost exclusively to persecution and treated Jewish migration as a distinct phenomenon. In contrast, in a little-known 1943 essay Kulischer described Jewish migration as “part of the general movement” and rejected the view of the Jews as a “wandering people” as misguided and stereotypical. Lestschinsky emphasized the impact of economic factors on Jewish migration before 1914 and identified the First World War as a decisive turning point because Jews were displaced into a legal no man’s land. Today the view that most Jews leaving the Russian Empire before 1914 “fled the pogroms” still lingers in collective memory and in the general scholarship about migration history. In the paper I argue that the distinction between refugees and migrants, as proposed most recently by Robert Chazan, is suggestive but misleading. The history of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe before and after 1914 serves as a reminder that individuals on the move often straddle the artificial and shifting divide between refugees fleeing persecution and migrants seeking a better life for themselves and their children.

Author

• Tobias Brinkmann, Penn State University