New Worlds
From the mid-19th century until World War I, approximately 3.5 million Jews left Eastern Europe for new homes around the globe. Reasons for mass emigration included economic displacement and deepening poverty caused by industrialization and a Jewish population boom, and an increase in discriminatory policies and anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire, particularly in the form of pogroms, organized massacres aimed at intimidating and killing Jews.
Of the Jews who left Eastern Europe during the Great Migration, three-quarters were bound for the United States, but other destinations included Western and Central Europe, Latin America (especially Argentina), parts of the British Empire (esp. Canada, Australia, South Africa and Palestine), and the Asian regions of the Russian Empire. Internal migration from small agricultural- and market towns to urban centers constituted a significant portion of population movement as well. In fact, following World War I, numbers of internal migrants came to equal those of international emigres.
Shown here is a collection of works documenting Jewish communities which unsettled and resettled during the Great Migration. These “notes from the New World” include almanacs from Jewish communal organizations in Melbourne, Shanghai, and Havana; a trilingual dictionary from the Irkutsk Central Zionist Office in Siberia; a Yiddish sex-education manual from Riga, Latvia; and a 1920 Hebrew translation of Goethe published in British Mandate Era Palestine. Also shown is a facsimile of the Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book printed in what is now the United States. Though not connected to Jewish migration, its use of Hebrew type makes it significant in the history of Hebrew printing.
Notes from the New World
The 18th-century European Enlightenment transformed Jewish life. Even before the French Revolution inaugurated the age of Jewish Emancipation by extending civil rights to Jews in 1791, figures like philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) [#4] argued for Jews’ integration into the nation state. He also called for the practice of Judaism as a religion rather than a totalizing identity, and believed that religion and reason were compatible [#9].
The 19th century saw the emergence of Reform Judaism [#7] and other denominations grappling with continuity and change, and challenges to the relationships between religion and society, theology and rationalism, individual choice, and the authority of Jewish law.
In the mid-19th century, the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah or Haskole) arrived in the “primitive” Eastern European shtetl with a civilizing mission and a contempt for the “jargon” Yiddish, the regional Jewish dialect, derived from medieval German. Efforts to promote a modern literature in the higher-status language of Hebrew [#2] met with mixed results, and Haskole writers like Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (1835-1917) [#8] who began their careers in Hebrew found a warm reception and mass audience in Yiddish.
The late-19th and early-20th century global phenomenon of modern Jewish literature (in Yiddish [#5 & 6], Hebrew, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic [#1]) and politics [#3] owe a debt both to the Jewish Enlightenment and its failures. The Haskalah had no answer to the upsurge of anti-Jewish violence in the 1880s, and in its place emerged the Jewish national and radical movements that would shape Jewish life for decades to come.
Displayed Above (With Coressponding Citations):
[#1] Hai Sitruk, Hikayat al-bankir Alfons di Logik (Susah/Sousse, ca. 1930s)
[#2] Partial shelf of titles from Hebrew literature series Ha-Bibliyoteka ha-'Ivrit ["The Hebrew Library"] (Warsaw, ca. 1898-1902)
[#3] D. Bernstein, Karl Marx postcard: "Le Moise Moderne" (France, Late-19th century)
[#4] Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem oder überreligiöse Macht und Judenthum, (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1791)
[#5] Abraham Reisen, Dos naye land = New land (New York, 1911-12)
[#6] Sholom Asch, The God of Vengeance (Girard, Kansas, 1918)
[#7] Samuel Naumbourg, Zemirot Yisra'el = Chants religieux des Israelites (Paris, 1863)
[#8] Mokher-Sforim, Mendele (pseud. Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh), Dos kleyne menshele, oder, A lebensbeshraybung fun Yitshak Avraham Takif (Vilna, 1879)
[#9] Isaac Baer Levinsohn, Efes Damim, (Warsaw, 1890)