national elements included within the same territorial limits, but there is also brought out in stronger relief a racial migration of essentially modern character, due to exceptional influences and one that will go down in history as among the most important in the annals of the Hebrew race.
Jews have been represented among the arrivals to this country since early colonial times. They appeared in considerable numbers as an accompaniment and sequel of our German immigration and were then derived largely from the German Polish provinces, but now the Jewish as well as the Polish immigration from these provinces has practically ceased. The Hungarian Jewish immigrant has likewise disappeared.
The immigration of the Yiddish-speaking Hebrew in the shape of an extensive exodus dates back scarcely twenty years, during which time probably not far from a million have come to this country from the Russian Empire, Galicia and Roumania, not as returning travelers or temporary sojourners, but for the most part as a new and permanent increment to our population.
An important factor in the causation of this movement is to be found in the acute phase which anti-Jewish feeling had assumed in eastern Europe twenty years ago. About 1880 widespread outbreaks of popular fury against the Jews were occurring in Russia. These disorders were followed by attempts on the part of the Russian government to enforce existing though neglected laws relative to the privileges of these people within the empire and to devise new measures for allaying popular clamor and complaint.
The unexaggerated accounts of the violence, robbery and brutality to which the Jews were being subjected by the Russian populace, the tenor of the Russian laws and the harshness with which they were enforced attracted foreign attention to the unfortunate condition of these people and opened to them a refuge in more western countries where the Jew had not been unfavorably known or where, by a similar violent process, he had been eliminated as an important economic factor centuries before.
Exceptional obstacles stood in the way of their emigration. Advance toward the east was forbidden by Russia and the police laws of the continental countries toward the west made a permanent refuge in this direction out of the question. The class to whom emigration would appeal lacked the resources for joining in distant colonial movements as the Germans and Scandinavians had done, and, unlike the Italians, Slovaks and Poles, these Jews were unprepared to supply the sort of labor for which a demand existed in other lands.
Foreign sympathy and organized charitable aid furnished the chief means of overcoming their inertia and starting the stream of migra-
