The Jewish Diaspora

Flight from persecution

From the Pale to the New World

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1881–1924 CEThe Pale of Settlement (Ukraine, Belarus) → the Americas

Why it happened

The assassination of Tsar Alexander II on 13 March 1881 triggered the 1881–1884 .1 The 1882 May Laws then heaped residency and business restrictions on the Jews2 and, with the pogroms, 'provided the impetus for mass emigration.'2

The migration

The Pale held 'a Jewish population of over five million'—40% of world Jewry3—where 'Jewish life in the shtetls... was hard and poverty-stricken.'4 After 1881 'the extremely restrictive decrees and recurrent led to much emigration from the Pale,'2 and 'some two million Jews emigrated from there between 1881 and 1914, mainly to the United States.'3 The vast majority crossed the Atlantic: 'Between 1880 and the start of World War I in 1914, about 2,000,000 -speaking Jews immigrated from diaspora communities in Eastern Europe.'5 They 'clustered in New York City, created the garment industry there... and were heavily engaged in the trade unions.'6 Smaller streams reached Britain, Argentina, and Ottoman Palestine, where the First Aliyah (1881–1903) drew an estimated 25,000–60,000.7 Washington's 1924 Immigration Act, which 'heavily restricted immigration from the countries where most Jews... had come from, including Russia,' closed the door.8

Genetic corroboration

  • autosomalWhole-genome sequencing of Jews 'confirms a recent bottleneck of merely ≈350 individuals' followed by rapid expansion.9 This population-level result does not establish that all migrants from the Pale formed a genetically uniform group or date the bottleneck to this migration.

Sources

  1. BEncyclopaedia Judaica. 2007. Pogroms. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference / Gale) link
  2. BSlutsky Y. 2007. Pale of Settlement. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 15 (Detroit: Macmillan Reference / Gale) 577–580. link
  3. CWikipedia contributors. 2026. Pale of Settlement. Wikipedia link
  4. BEncyclopaedia Judaica. 2007. Shtetl. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference / Gale) link
  5. CWikipedia contributors. 2026. History of the Jews in the United States. Wikipedia link
  6. BRischin M. 1962. The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870–1914. Harvard University Press link
  7. BShapira A. 2012. Israel: A History. Brandeis University Press (Schusterman Series in Israel Studies) link
  8. BDaniels R. 2004. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882. Hill and Wang (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) link
  9. ACarmi S, Hui KY, Kochav E, et al.. 2014. Sequencing an Ashkenazi reference panel supports population-targeted personal genomics and illuminates Jewish and European origins. Nature Communications 5 4835. doi:10.1038/ncomms5835