Jewish Immigrants in Early 1900s America: A Visitor's Account

By Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu

WITH MORE THAN 50 VINTAGE PHOTOS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

From the 1880s to 1920s, more than 2 million Jews immigrated to the United States. Most were fleeing poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. As the U.S. Jewish population swelled from 250,000 to 4 million, they built new identities and strong communities.

French political writer Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu toured the eastern U.S. in 1904 to see how the refugees were doing. "I had already visited most of the Jewish quarters in Europe, Asia and Africa," he explained. Now he wanted to explore the crowded, bustling Jewish neighborhoods of America. What he saw amazed and impressed him.

That autumn, he gave an enthusiastic, insightful talk to the Jewish Studies Association in Paris, praising a "land of wonders and liberty" where long-oppressed Jews were thriving. Librairie Nouvelle published his lecture as a booklet in 1905. This new English translation contains more than fifty vintage photographs and illustrations.

This is the second book in the Between Wanderings collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven Capsuto
• Release date: Sep 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780997825435

Book preview

Translator’s preface

At the start of the great Russian exodus… there were about a hundred thousand Jews in New York City. Imagine someone telling them, Within less than twenty-five years, you will have to take in more than half a million of your fellow Jews from the Old World, and you will need to find housing and the means of survival for all those exiles.

— Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, 1904

From the 1880s to 1920s, more than two million Jews immigrated to the United States. Most were Ashkenazic Jews fleeing poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, where anti-Jewish laws and mob violence had intensified since the early 1880s. These refugees, largely speakers of Yiddish (or of Jargon, as some called it), flooded into an English-speaking country that previously had little knowledge of Jews. When the great influx began, there had been 250,000 Jews in the United States. By 1924, when an anti-immigration law slammed shut America’s Golden Door, the number had risen to four million through a mixture of immigration and reproduction. Most of the immigrants settled initially in big cities, in crowded Jewish neighborhoods. There they found English courses and professional training programs aimed at Jewish newcomers, as well as synagogues and kosher butchers, Yiddish newspapers and theaters, and, perhaps most importantly, employers who could communicate with them.

In 1904, halfway through that wave of migration, the noted French political writer Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu visited America for two months and toured Jewish communities to see how the refugees were faring. I had already visited most of the Jewish quarters in Europe, Asia and Africa, he explained. It remained for me to acquaint myself with what Americans improperly refer to as the ‘ghettos’ of the New World. What he saw impressed him tremendously. When he returned to France, this scholar—the author of Empire of the Tsars and Israel among the Nations: A Study of the Jews and Anti-Semitism—gave an enthusiastic lecture to his country’s Jewish Studies Association. He spoke of a land of wonders and liberty where throngs of long-oppressed Jews were thriving. In 1905, Librairie Nouvelle published his talk as a short book, which this new English translation augments with photographs (from the 1890s to 1910s) and modern captions.

Leroy-Beaulieu’s comments about American Jewry were unabashedly celebratory. After all, he had seen the living conditions in European shtetls. He had visited communities that had survived pogroms. Whatever flaws and contradictions the United States might have had—and they were and are numerous—they paled next to the problems Jews faced in Europe, where they had been persecuted for centuries.

The Lure of America

Jews of many backgrounds came to America in those years: there were Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East, Romaniote and Sephardic Jews from the Mediterranean and the Balkans, and—the overwhelming majority—Ashkenazim from Central and Eastern Europe, especially Russia.

By the 1880s, Russia was a sprawling empire spanning two continents. The czar had more than a hundred million subjects, several million of whom were Jewish. The empire’s entrenched anti-Semitism became much worse after the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II, whose reforms had reduced the official persecution of Jews. Those reforms died with him. Russia’s new leaders painted the Hebrews as a corrupting foreign influence, and revived laws to minimize contact between Jews and real Russians. Such laws restricted where Jews could live, where they could travel, what they could own and what professions they could practice. They also limited Jews’ access to education. Once again, Russia uprooted hundreds of thousands of people and crammed them into communities in the Pale of Settlement. Denied the means to prosper, most Russian Jews lived in poverty. Many also lived in fear of violence: from 1881 to 1884 alone, there were hundreds of pogroms in Central and Eastern Europe. By the early 1890s, when Russia expelled twenty thousand Jews from Moscow and banned most Jews from that city, large numbers had already fled or were fleeing to other countries.

Russia’s Jewish communities commonly perceived the United States as a goldene medine—a golden land of near-universal wealth—and so it became the refugees’ preferred destination. As Mary Antin describes it in her 1899 memoir, From Plotzk to Boston:

In the year 1891, a mighty wave of the emigration movement swept over