The Jewish Diaspora

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The Second and Third Aliyah

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1904–1923 CEThe Pale of Settlement (Ukraine, Belarus) → Land of Israel

Why it happened

The Second followed and rising antisemitism in tsarist Russia.1 The Third Aliyah was triggered by the October Revolution, subsequent pogroms in Russia, Poland, and Hungary, the British conquest of Palestine, and the Balfour Declaration.2

The migration

About 40,000 Jews reached Ottoman Palestine during the Second , though absorption difficulties and an unstable economic base caused nearly half to leave.1 Most were young people inspired by socialist ideals.1 They established Degania, the first kibbutz, and Ha-Shomer, the first Jewish self-defense organization in Palestine,1 helped revive spoken Hebrew,1 and founded Ahuzat Bayit, which developed into Tel Aviv.1 The Third Aliyah (1919–1923) brought approximately 40,000 more.2 Its mostly young Eastern European halutzim built roads and towns and undertook drainage projects in the Jezreel Valley and Hefer Plain.2 The Histadrut and Haganah were established during this period.2

Genetic corroboration

  • autosomalIn Atzmon and colleagues' sampled Jewish populations, each group showed Middle Eastern ancestry and varying European .3 This population-level finding does not describe the ancestry of individual Second- or Third- migrants or validate the political meaning assigned to those movements.

Sources

  1. CJewish Virtual Library. 2026. The Second Aliyah (1904–1914). Jewish Virtual Library link
  2. CJewish Virtual Library. 2026. The Third Aliyah (1919–1923). Jewish Virtual Library link
  3. AAtzmon G, Hao L, Pe'er I, et al.. 2010. Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry. The American Journal of Human Genetics 86 850–859. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2010.04.015
  4. BSachar, Howard M.. 2007. A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. Alfred A. Knopf
  5. BZipperstein, Steven J.. 2018. Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. Liveright Publishing (W. W. Norton & Company)
  6. BBalfour, Arthur James. 1917. The Balfour Declaration (letter from Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, 2 November 1917). The Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School link
  7. BAlroey, Gur. 2002. The Demographic Make-Up of the Second Aliya. Israel: Journal for the Study of Zionism and the State of Israel 2 33–55.
  8. BTeveth, Shabtai. 1987. Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground, 1886–1948. Houghton Mifflin
  9. CWikipedia contributors. 2026. Third Aliyah. Wikipedia link