East European Jewish migration: inside and outside

Abstract

This introductory article provides an overview of modern Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. It engages the foundational historiography of the field and explores intersections of Jewish migration with general migration theory. In addition to framing the six articles in this special collection, this essay presents longue durée factors linking today's post-Soviet diaspora communities on three continents with social and political trends beginning in the late nineteenth century and during the interwar period and postwar periods.

Keywords:

• Migration
• historiography
• Eastern Europe
• diaspora
• post-Soviet
• Russia
• Jewish

Notes on contributor

Jonathan Dekel-Chen is senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History & Contemporary Jewry and in the Department of General History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also serves as the Academic Chairman of the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry.

Notes

1. Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, 2.

2. Braziel and Mannur, 4–6.

3. Clavin, “Defining Transnationalism,” 422.

4. For examples of regional or chronological foci, see: Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews to the US; Journal of Jewish Identities 4, no. 1 (2011); Brinkmann, “From Immigrants to Supranational Transmigrants and Refugees;” Glass, From New Zion to Old Zion; Cohen et al., “Who Went Where?”

5. Gans, “Filling in Some Holes.”

6. For example, see Siegel, “Australia Adopts Tough Measures to Curb Asylum Seekers.”

7. For recent scholarship, see Russian Emigration at the Crossroads of the XX–XXI Centuries, 74–220.

8. Clavin, “Defining Transnationalism,” 431.

9. For a comprehensive study of transborder connections between diaspora and “home” communities during an earlier wave of migration, see Rebecca Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora.

10. In the years leading up to 1991, Western researchers gained access to most archival and library collections in the USSR. More recently, financial crises in post-Soviet institutions and the rising suspicions of regimes in parts of the FSU have made some collections inaccessible.

11. For more on the term “law of rising recollections,” see Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 35.

12. For a study anchored in oral history, see Shternshis, “Between the Red and Yellow Stars.”

13. Safran, “The Jewish Diaspora in a Comparative and Theoretical Perspective,” 36, n. 1, p. 56.

14. For example, see Østergaard-Nielsen, “Diasporas in World Politics.”

15. For example, see Brinkerhoff, Diasporas and Development; Foner and Rumbaut, Immigration Research for a New Century; Van Hear, New Diasporas. In Theorizing Diaspora, edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, there is no mention of the Jewish diaspora beyond a chapter by Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity” (85–118). More awareness emerges in Knott and McLoughlin, Diasporas, where two articles among 14 national test cases in this collection deal directly with Jewish migration, while others include it in more general discussions.

16. For example, see Tolts, “Post-Soviet Jewish Demography;” DellaPergola, “The Demography of Post-Soviet Jewry.”

17. For overviews, see Elazar, “The Jewish People as the Classic Diaspora;” Safran, “The Jewish Diaspora,” 36–60; Jaffe, “Sociological and Religious Origins of the Non-profit Sector in Israel,” 159, 169–71.

18. Many scholars concur on the causal effect of these revolutions on migration. For example, see Sheffer, Diaspora Politics, 63.

19. See Garland, After They Closed the Gates.

20. For a comparative approach, see Münz and Ohliger, Diasporas and Ethnic Migrants.

21. Here I adopt the definitions of “transnationalism” and “diaspora” offered by Braziel and Mannur in Theorizing Diaspora (8).

22. This topic is explored in Conner, “The Impact of Homelands upon Diasporas.” Rebecca Kobrin recently engaged these questions; see her Jewish Bialystok.

23. For theoretical background, see Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, 14–15.

24. Tolts, “Demography of the Contemporary Russian-Speaking Jewish Diaspora,” 10–17. For journalistic discussion of remigration in recent years see Luri, “Be-hazarah l'ima Rusya;” Matan, “Ha-aliyah ha-rusit nimshekhet, le-Moskva.”

25. For a key scholarly analysis, see Jonathan D. Sarna, “The Myth of No Return.”

26. Alroey, Imigrantim, 208–20. Similar, if not higher, rates of return to countries of origin have been a nearly constant feature of immigration to the United States for at least the past century.

27. Sebastian Hoepfner, Jewish Organizations in Transatlantic Perspective, 3, 255; Gitelman, Jewish Identity in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine, 247.

28. For an early revision, see Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews,” 42–52, 67, 88, 92, 94, 122. For recent reassessments, see Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–82, 265–87; Alroey, Ha-mapecha ha-sheketah, 22–56. Alroey also challenged the Zionist narrative of solely ideological motivations among Jewish emigrants to Palestine.

29. For example, see Cohen et al., “Who Went Where?” 234–64.

30. Mark Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety, 37–157; Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews;” Kahan, Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History, 102.

31. For example, Choldin, “Kinship Networks in the Migration Process;” Fawcett, “Networks, Linkages and Migration Systems.”

32. See Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok.

33. Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon, 66.

34. Sahadeo, “Soviet ‘Blacks' and Place Making in Leningrad and Moscow.”

35. Some of these issues are explored in Hegner, “‘Historical Responsibility’ vs. ‘Freedom’.”

36. For developments in Israel, see Lerner, “‘Russians' in Israel as a Post-Soviet Subject;” Bernstein, “Symbolic Meaning of Pork Crossing National Borders in the Migration Process.” For a wider view, see Remennick, Russian Jews on Three Continents.

37. For example, see Heschel and Baker, “Transnational Migrations of Identity,” 4.

38. For descriptions of early efforts, see Kelner, Reshitoh shel tikhnun hevrati klal-yehudi, 6–40; Bar-Chen, “Two Communities with a Sense of Mission.” On Romania, see Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 158–9, 184–91.

39. Sarna, “America's Russian-Speaking Jews Come of Age,” 3–4.

40. The purpose of the 1970 amendment was to ensure the unity of intermarried families. It does not apply to persons who had been Jews and voluntarily converted to another religion. Downloaded from the website of the Foreign Ministry of Israel on 8 January 2012: “Acquisition of Israeli Citizenship,” www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Facts+About+Israel/State/Acquisition+of+Israeli+Nationality.htm

41. For example, see Clayman, “Cooperation and Tensions between American Jewry and Israel over Selected Problems Confronting European Jewry.”

42. Sarna, “America's Russian-Speaking Jews Come of Age,” 3. I have gone somewhat beyond Sarna's data to account for higher assessments currently circulating.

43. Tolts, “Demography of the Contemporary Russian-Speaking Jewish Diaspora,” 4–5; Shneer, “The Third Way.”

44. Fred A. Lazin, “‘We Are Not One’;” Gal Beckerman, When They Come for Us, 530–2.

45. For example, see Kellner, “Mered,” 70–1; Fox, “Weimar Germany and the Ostjuden;” Maurer, “Between Expulsion and Integration.”

46. For material connected to these efforts from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century, see Wolf, Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question; Goldstein, The Politics of Ethnic Pressure.

47. For example, see Lazin, “‘We Are Not One’,” 17–18, 31; interview with Seymour Reich, 2 February 1990, William E. Wiener Oral History Library of the American Jewish Committee, “Soviet Jewry Movement in America,” 20–1.

48. Interview with Rabbi Herschel Schacter, 30 May 1974, William E. Wiener Oral History Library of the American Jewish Committee, “Soviet Jewry Movement in America,” 38; interview with David A. Harris, 7 October 1991, idem, 12, 14; interview with Phil Baum, 24 May 1989, idem, 24–5; interview with Theodore Comet, 4 April 1989, idem, 16–21. A number of activists of the time that I have spoken with share this view. I am not at liberty at this time to cite them.

49. For 1881–1924, see Berman, The Attitude of American Jewry towards East European Jewish Immigration, 516–23; Kutzik, “The Social Basis of American Jewish Philanthropy,” 984–9.

50. Mandel, “Transition to Where?” 227.

51. Ibid., 232. For an early example in the Jewish world, see Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, 47–120.

52. Slezkine, The Jewish Century.

53. World Bank, “World Bank Launches Initiative on Migration;” Arana, “The Migrant Cash Lifeline.”

54. For discussion of these multiple centres, see Aviv and Shneer, New Jews.

55. For example, the question is raised in Shneer and Aviv, “Jews as Rooted Cosmopolitans; and again in Knott and McLoughlin, Diasporas, 270.

56. For more, see Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence, 266–70; Gitelman, “Thinking about Being Jewish in Russia and Ukraine.”

57. For example, Shternshis, “Between the Red and Yellow Stars;” Rutland, “Jews from the FSU in Australia;” Leventhal, “Community, Memory and Shifting Jewish Identities in Germany since 1989.”