Three factors played an especially significant role:
- Forced Urbanization
In reality, by the 1880s the internal communal order and the traditional economic life of the shtetl were breaking down and causing social and economic uprooting. The May Laws of 1882 prohibited Jews from settling outside cities and towns, even in the Pale. The Jews were becoming forcibly urbanized and, being unable to settle in rural areas, they were overcrowding the cities of the Pale.
Prague was one such city. Below is a square in the Jewish quarter of the provincial city of Prague, c. 1900:
Industrialization led to the creation of a new large proletariat, and by 1897 about 90 percent of the Jewish population came close to being a proletariat. The poor were becoming more and more indigent; by the late 1890s, about 20 percent of the Jewish population had reached pauperization.
According to the census of 1897, 5.2 million Jews lived in the Russian Empire, about 4 % of the population as a whole. Of those, 4.9 million – 11.5 percent of the population of whole there – lived in the Pale of Settlement. Only 13.5 percent of the population lived in the countryside, while the remaining 86.5 percent lived in towns and cities.
For comparison, the distribution previously looked very different in the Pale:
Yet pictures from the turn of the century demonstrate the rapid urbanization, such as this one in the Jewish quarter of Bucharest (present-day Romania):
- Transformation of the Occupational Structure
It was, however, not only the limitation of their residential area which oppressed the Jews. By force of historical circumstances they were also restricted in their occupations. They were concentrated in commerce (38.6% of the Jews gainfully occupied) and crafts (35.4%); 72.8% of the total of persons engaged in commerce within the Pale of Settlement were Jews, as well as 31.4% of those engaged in crafts. Jewish artisans concentrated in certain branches of crafts (tailoring; shoemaking). Very few had the possibility of engaging in agriculture.
Below is one such craftsman, an 85-year-old lensmaker:
- Pauperization
A process of differentiation took place in the second major area of activity: craft, industry, and transport. As the significance of craftsmen in the national economy dwindled, the competition among the merchants, shopkeepers, and craftsmen was intense and gave rise to pauperization and the development of a Jewish proletariat which could not be integrated.
At this time, many Jews were active in two major areas of employment – trade, banking, and credit on the one hand, and craft, industry and transport on the other- more than 40 percent at any given time. In this way, trade gradually became the most important source of income for the Jews, while at the beginning of the century crafts had been far more significant.
The growing number of independent professions was of virtually no consequence, nor the steadily diminishing opportunities to work in agriculture or in other sectors of the economy. Trade was increasingly dominated by a number of big merchants and thus the mass of Jewish merchants became poorer. Shuffling for the daily bread might have resembled this scene in Novigorod, Lithuania:
The impoverishment of the mass of Jews proceeded rapidly. In many towns the proportion of Jews without fixed employment reached 50 % or more by the end of the century. At the end of the century, the Jewish population has become so impoverished that approximately one-third depend to some degree on Jewish welfare organizations and those who were no longer able to find any employment joined the growing number of families of Luftmenshen – up to 40% of the whole Jewish population at that point – people without education, capital, without a particular trade who now lied on air or engaged in “air business.”
This situation, together with the incessant anti-Jewish decrees and the waves of pogroms, especially during the years 1881–84 and 1903–06, resulted in a constant stream of Jewish emigration from the Pale of Settlement to Western Europe and the United States.
So there were reasons enough. But could just anyone make the journey?
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