The lifting of polemical pressures and methodological constraints related to the Holocaust and Cold War in the 1980s allowed scholars more freedom to critically and empirically examine east European Jewish civilization. The mythologized shtetl and pogrom came under special scrutiny. The pioneering work of John D. Klier and others helped to deconstruct the timeless image of the suffering yet faithful Jew, everywhere and always in flight from tsars and Cossacks. The shtetl re-emerged as a dynamic site of multi-ethnic co-existence and rivalry between Jewish and Slavic populations; the pogrom, more accurately explained as an eruption of unsanctioned ethnic mob violence, and part of a broader pattern of economic and social volatility that affected all of eastern Europe.
Another related symptom and feature of this volatility was the departure of nearly one in every three Jews from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, about two million people, between the 1870s and 1914. In Between Borders, Tobias Brinkmann challenges a romanticized narrative still present in popular memory and scholarship, positing “the 1881–1882 pogroms as the single overarching cause driving Jewish ‘flight’ from Russia” (41). Scholars such as Klier, Gur Alroey, and Yannai Spitzer had found earlier that most Jewish migrants who left eastern Europe starting in the 1880s hailed not from pogrom-stricken places in Ukrainian lands, but from the northern parts of the Pale of Settlement, where interethnic violence was notably rare. This book builds on this important finding. However, the analytical clarity and expanded chronology that Brinkmann brings to the study of Jewish mass migration from eastern Europe makes this book a valuable addition to the historiography. And for scholars rooted to the geography and languages of eastern Europe, it brings a much-needed transnational perspective—this is not a study of tsarist or national policies but of the migrants who left the region, typically transited across Germany and Britain, and ended their journeys in North or South America.
Brinkmann restores complexity to an oversimplified and misleading story, explaining how the phrase “fled the pogroms” became one of its stock features starting in the 1940s. He reckons with the pernicious and influential view that dislocation and uprootedness are somehow essential conditions of being Jewish, from the pejorative Christian trope of the eternally “wandering Jew” to the Zionist teleology of the exilic condition being redeemed through mass resettlement to the Land of Israel. We have here a decidedly less sentimental and more nuanced view of the Jew on the move, tracked across shifting contexts from the late 1860s to the 1940s. Economic and social factors played a large part in migrants’ decisions; while transnational kinship networks, social workers, businesses, and regimes shaped the migration process and the “seemingly mundane transit journey” (8) within and between borders.
Histories of the Great Migration almost invariably begin in 1881, on the assumption that anti-Jewish riots that swept across southern Russia after the assassination of Alexander II drove Jews to flee the Russian empire. Brinkmann moves the starting point back by more than a decade to 1868–69, to a different crisis, when Lithuanian Jews responded to famine-related starvation and disease by moving north, across the then porous Russian-Prussian border to Memel (now Klaipeda), a port city along the Baltic. The startled Jews of Memel promptly proposed that the Alliance israélite universelle, founded in Paris in 1860 by French Jews wishing to promote the education, health, and rights of Jews in the “benighted” east, expand its mandate to manage the migration of the benighted east European Jews to destinations where they were not unwanted. The events of 1869 opened an era when non-governmental Jewish groups began to organize the emigration of Jewish migrants in distant countries.
Displacing 1881–82 as the supposedly decisive start to an era of Jewish mass migration allows the author to distinguish causation from correlation in regard to the pogroms. It was easy for contemporary observers and the press to link violence to migration, especially for those wishing to improve migrants’ chances for asylum and counter anti-immigrant views of exploitative and radical “Russians.” In 1904 alone, following the infamous pogrom in Kishinev, some 100,000 Jews from eastern Europe entered the United States—roughly the same number that entered the country from 1820–80. Brinkmann does not discount the contributing effect of the pogroms to this influx, acknowledging that violence, along with restrictive and impoverishing conditions of life under tsarist autocracy, bred fear and despair among many Jews, especially poorer families. He insists, however, on recognizing the mixed array of motives that compelled migrants and the surge in migration.
Individual stories are brilliantly chosen as cases in point. Abe Cahan, a giant of American Yiddish letters who founded the mass circulation New York daily Forverts in 1897, came to the US in 1882 from the Russian empire. He left Vilnius in 1882, not fleeing any pogroms but in search of economic and social opportunities. After hiding from police, bribing train conductors, drivers, and smugglers, and crossing the Russian-Austrian border on foot, he arrived in Brody, a Galician city and major transit point for emigration to the west. There Cahan encountered a group of Jewish socialists from Balta, a city in southern Ukraine where a major pogrom had occurred on April 29, 1882. The migrants had left several weeks prior to the pogrom, however, and had not witnessed or fled from it. Having left as economic migrants, had they now also become refugees?
A chapter on the “mobility entrepreneur” reveals the high degree of involvement of Jews as financiers, managers, and advocates in shaping policies and structuring migration pathways for the millions of Polish, Ukrainian, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, and Jewish migrants who moved west before the First World War. Maurice de Hirsch, born in Munich, died as one of Europe’s richest men after financing the first line to connect Vienna with Constantinople. Alfred Ballin, the 13th child of a Hamburg ticket agent, oversaw the growth of the Hamburg America Line (HAPAG) into the world’s largest passenger and cargo line. These two upwardly mobile German Jews financed and administered the horizontal mobility of millions of Jews across the continent and the Atlantic.
The business of migration was facilitated by a tightly interlocking network of ticket agencies, steamship companies, border control stations, and aid organizations that helped to screen migrants for illnesses and provide immunizations as mandated by American immigration policy. German and American Jewish aid organizations expanded rapidly in the 1880s and 90s, providing migrants with a “protective umbrella” by covering the costs of housing or return journeys for deported migrants, and treating conditions that would have failed to pass US immigration inspections. Here, too, individual stories illustrate the complexity of Jewish migrant experiences that were later flattened in misleading ways. The story of Mary Antin, author of The Promised Land, who came to the US as an adolescent from Polotsk, Belarus in 1894, is told to great effect. The journey by train brought her family to a checkpoint at the Polish village of Oswiecim, where the German authorities divided men and women to shower and undergo delousing measures. Two recent scholars of the Holocaust conflated those German delousing checkpoints at Oswiecim with the brutal herding of Jews by the German SS into the gas chambers at Auschwitz in the 1940s. Brinkmann undoes the conflation, restoring circumstance, cause, and contingency to the two events. He carefully points out that the delousing measures of the 1890s were not specific to Jews but indiscriminately applied to all migrants; they were also driven by US immigration policy and not some timeless variant of virulent German Jew-hatred.
World War I is the figurative and literal center of the book. It divides an era of largely voluntary mobility from an era of largely desperate and sometimes futile searches of stateless or persecuted people for refuge. Flight from expulsion, pogrom, disease, and many other forms of violence is an apt characterization for Jewish mobility in this era. If the contours of the refugee experience in the 1930s are well-known, they are principally focused on of the 60% of German and Austrian Jews who managed to escape the Third Reich. East European Jews who reached the US in the 1930s and 40s were exceptional in having done so; most did not. During the Shoah, Jews born outside of France, predominantly from eastern Europe, made up nearly three of every four Jews deported from Vichy to ghettos and camps in the east.
Brinkmann makes a valiant effort to not lose sight of the migrant experience or reduce the displaced to prototypical “wandering Jews.” He follows the networks of east European Jewish intellectuals that formed in Berlin and Paris, their notable literary and scholarly activity, institution-building efforts, and aspirations to reach desirable destinations despite overwhelmingly onerous odds and regulations. As with earlier generations of Jewish migrants, “the quest for better opportunities elsewhere and flight from violent persecution” overlapped to different degrees (204).
But among east European Jews, the figures we follow from fascist Europe to the US and Palestine were exceptional in multiple respects. They possessed intellectual and material capital that enabled choices not available to most Jews. The individuals who interest Brinkmann are also a small sample: they were migrants who became scholars of migration. Examining the explanations of Jewish migration they offered brings us back full circle to the book’s starting point. Eugene Kulischer, Russian-born author of multiple groundbreaking studies of migration, arrived to the US in 1941 after nearly two itinerant decades in exile from the Bolsheviks. In various commissioned studies, he argued for the primacy of economic factors in determining patterns of Jewish migration. His views on the salutary benefits of migration (“productivizing” the weak, religious, ghetto Jews by compelling the adoption of “useful” trades) influenced “The M [Migration] Project,” a set of schemes envisioned by the Roosevelt administration to resettle “excess” numbers of European Jews across the Global South, Alaska, and Middle East. Brinkmann points out an unsettling parallel: like the Nazis’ General Plan Ost but without genocidal intentions, the M Project romanticized subsistence agriculture in “open” territories, and the dispersal and “resettlement” of Jews from eastern Europe for economic purposes (211).
Whereas Kulischer steadfastly refused to explain the historical movement of Jews as anything other than a byproduct of economic and demographic factors, studies published later during and after the war returned increasingly to the “wandering Jew” trope, often in the service of political agendas. The Jewish Refugee published in 1944 by immigrant scholars Kurt Grossman and Arieh Tartakower for a Jewish think tank identified Jewish refugees as a persistent, unsolved problem of perennial displacement, one that required a permanent and international solution, ideally in the form of a nation-state. Mark Wischnitzer, a writer of east European origin who had aided German Jewish refugees seeking entry to the US, published To Dwell in Safety in 1949, where he described the Displaced Persons languishing then in occupied Germany as “only the latest chapter in a long history of Jewish persecution” (222). Those scholars who saw east European Jews as wanderers invariably did so for usable reasons, but they also projected their own experiences of flight from persecution onto the earlier generation of migrants they studied, crafting what Brinkmann calls a “darker view of Jewish history … that would shape popular accounts of the Jewish migration from Eastern Europe for decades” (220). The author has done a great service by illuminating the sources of that darker view.
