Thoughts from the weekend

At the weekend I helped out at the JGSGB stand at the "Who do you think you are live" show at Olympia in London: Britain's biggest ever genealogical event. It was exhausting, but interesting and fun. One of the features at the show was celebrities being interviewed about their families (the BBC has a series that researches celeb's families).

I caught the end of one interview with a Jewish television personality - who said that his family had left Latvia because of "the pogroms". No, they didn't. (By the way, we know that his father's side immigrated to the UK from Latvia in 1893 and his mother's family arrived in the 1930s from, I guess, Germany).

Why is there this common misconception? and why did about 2 million Jews leave Russia between 1880 and 1914?

I think this idea gained currency for a number of reasons.

1. Coincidence of timing: The emigration accelerated after 1881. The most famous wave of pogroms in south Russia (Ukraine primarily) started in 1881.
2. 1930s emigrants: German/Austrian Jewish emigration in the 1930s definitely was motivated by antisemitic activity (eg Kristallnacht also called Pogromnacht).
3. Emotional simplicity: "Zadie, why did you come to America?" "Because of the Cossacks and the Pogroms."

But if the Cossacks and the Pogroms were so awful how come there were still about 4 million Jews in the Pale in 1914. Why didn't everyone leave? The only reasonable answer is that things were sometimes very, very bad, but only for very, very few (as made clear by Bartal in The Jews of Eastern Europe 1772-1881 at page 146). So why did our families leave?

I'm sure that someone somewhere has researched this thoroughly, and please, someone let me know what I should be reading on this.

I identify three types of cause for the emigration: push, pull and technical.

Push causes

1. Population growth was remarkable. The Jewish population in the Russian empire through the 19th century rose from 1.6 million in 1820, to 2.4 million in 1850 and reached 4 million by 1880. The marginal nature of the economy in the northern guberniya meant that there must have been problems supporting the population.
2. Periodic famines every 10-12 years would have become more problematic with urbanisation. 1868-1869 saw crop failures across the Baltic region from Finland down through Kovno and Vilna Guberniyas.
3. Economic stress was enhanced at the bottom end of the economy by the freedom of the serfs in 1861 which created new competition in many areas of Jewish activity and by continuing restrictions on education limiting Jewish access to the professions.
4. Government policy to Jews including economic restrictions introduced as "temporary rules" in 1882 (including as one element tacit support for pogroms).

Pull causes

1. Economic opportunity in the capitalist, industrialising nations (US, Canada, UK, South America) and in South Africa (diamond rush from 1871 and a gold rush from 1886).
2. Religious toleration in the West.

Technical causes

1. The so-called "second Industrial revolution" started in about 1850. New railways allowed easy movement around Europe - the first train arrived at Vilna in 1860. Screw propeller steam ships were developed - from about 1870 this allowed reliable, cheap transocean sea travel.
2. Development of the money economy in Russia and savings and credit institutions which allowed potential emigrant families to find the cash to send one pioneer to the West.

In summary: there were reasons to go, places to go to and the means to get there. The pogroms may have helped create a mood where the movement happened sooner rather than later, but they were not what it was all about.

What does your family history tell us about this?