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An Unpromising Land
Jewish Migration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century
By Gur Alroey STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9087-1
CHAPTER 1
Three Revolutions and the Pogroms
In March 1913, at the height of the great Jewish mass migration, David, the oldest son of the Kohelet family, sent a letter to the directors of the Palestine Office in Jaffa. In the letter, he described without embellishment the miserable situation of his family in a shtetl in the region of Mogilev. He listed one by one the tribulations of this Jewish family's attempts to sustain itself in the economic and social conditions of the Russian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his letter, David Kohelet described the family's hesitations, difficulties, economic situation, and relations with the non-Jewish population of the shtetl. His presentation of the situation enables us to see the intentions of such a family in calculating a decision to emigrate even before it had made a decision to do so.
Kohelet's letter is an extraordinary document from the period of the great migration, and it embodies all the factors that gave rise to the Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. These factors, which will be discussed in detail in this chapter, combined relentlessly to upset the fragile economic situation of the Kohelet family and of many similar Jewish families in the Pale of Settlement, which drove the Kohelets and many like them to consider emigration.
The Kohelet family lived in Zakharino, a small village in the region of Mogilev. There were ten people in the family: a father and mother, both 53 years old, and their eight children—six sons and two daughters. The letter described the situations of these eight children. The eldest son David, 27, ran a Talmud Torah (a religious school); two sons were shoemakers, who could not make a living from their trade and found work with a timber merchant close to their home, earning a wage of a rouble a day; two sons aged 15 and 17 lived at home with their sistersaged 6 and 12; and an 8-year-old child was at school. The father of the family, whose name the eldest son did not give, was a shoemaker who, because of the many people practicing that trade and the great competition between them, earned very little and even that was obtained with great difficulty. The poverty and wretchedness of the family in Mstislawl, the town where they lived previously, had caused them to move to Zakharino. There the family rented a plot of land and grew a few vegetables, which it sold in the market on "one of the days of the week." In addition to their economic woes and the difficulties of providing for a family of ten people, the Kohelet family suffered from the behavior of its non-Jewish neighbors. "The family does not feel it has any ground to stand on, and life is against it," wrote David Kohelet. "You have to put up with the insults of the peasants in the village and flatter them when your blood is boiling at their cruelty."
This reality totally undermined the family's economic foundations and sense of security. The economic distress, paltry wages and constant search for work, being uprooted from place to place, and the father and sons' abandonment of the trade of shoemaking to go and work with a timber merchant—all this, plus difficult relations with the local people, made the family feel that its future was unclear and the basis of its existence was disappearing under its feet. They thus wrote the following letter to Arthur Ruppin, director of the Palestine Office in Jaffa:
In light of all this, the family is thinking about leaving this country and heading for another country that will treat them in a more welcoming fashion.... We are not aiming for a life of luxury or asking for easy work; we just long for a quiet, satisfying life. We are not idealists, but we are willing to make sacrifices—provided that we are assured that our future will eventually be secure and stable, and that the ground under our feet will not collapse. If we see that there is no way for the entire family to leave the country all at once, then we have decided that the older sons—that is, the second and third sons—will emigrate first, and after a while the rest of the family will go. Sir! If possible, express your opinion on this matter. Please help us by sending us your instructions and your advice: Would we be able to move to Palestine and settle on the land or even in some city? Will we find what we are looking for in the Land of Israel? Or would we be better off heading for other countries, because the living conditions in Palestine are not suitable for us? We are afraid that we will fail and ruin our already-precarious position. Please do not delay in replying. Respectfully, in the name of the entire family, David Kohelet.
David's letter reveals the family's hesitations concerning the destination country, its fears of the future, its economic distress, and its longing for "a quiet satisfying life"—a place where it would feel secure and unthreatened. The troubles described in the letter show how the changes that took place in Eastern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century undermined the basis of the Jewish family's existence in every sphere. Here we have an individual case that enables us to see how "macro" factors brought a single, but representative, Jewish family to consider immigration to Palestine or to other countries overseas.
Three revolutions took place in the Russian Empire from the mid-nineteenth century onward: a demographic revolution; an industrial revolution, followed by urbanization; and a revolution in public transport. In addition to these three revolutions, there were persecutions by the authorities and pogroms that hindered the activities of the Jews and worsened their socioeconomic situation; but, as we shall see in the following pages, these were only a catalyst and not a cause of emigration. The aim of this chapter is twofold: On the one hand, I will examine the macro factors that brought about the emigration of more than two and a half million Jews from Eastern Europe; and on the other hand, I offer an exploration of how the causes of emigration were reflected in letters to the Zionist information bureaus set up at the beginning of the twentieth century. The many letters sent to these Zionist information bureaus not only enable us to examine in a direct fashion "from below" how the demographic and economic changes affected ordinary Jews in Eastern Europe but also to see immigration to Palestine in a much broader perspective—as an inseparable part of the general Jewish migration. The letter of the Kohelet family and similar letters of Jewish families who considered immigration to Palestine show, first of all, similarities in the causes of immigration to America and to Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century. These migrations were not two parallel movements without any point of contact, but rather they comprised a single movement of immigration in which the points in common—even if the immigrants went to different countries—were greater than the points of difference.
The Demographic Revolution
One of the major changes that took place in czarist Russia between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War I was its rapid demographic growth. The rate of natural increase in the Russian Empire as compared to other European countries was extraordinary and impressive in its scope. In the space of about only fifty years (1860–1913) the population of Russia doubled from 74 million in 1860 to 164 million in 1913. Between 1883 and 1887 and between 1909 and 1913 the population increased at a rate of 1.6 percent a year. This rate of increase was only matched in the United States, Canada, and Australia during the same time periods. But, whereas in these countries the growth was due to a continuous immigration up to World War I, in czarist Russia it was a natural increase of the population.
The main reason for the growth in population in Russia was the sharp decrease in mortality as a result of the development of medicine and improvements in sanitation, even though the rate of births remained unchanged. An increasing number of children survived the first years of their lives, and as a result the difference in the total number of births compared to the total number of deaths increased significantly.
The rate of natural increase among the Jews of czarist Russia was far greater than that of the non-Jewish population. The economist Simon Kuznets has examined the growth of the Jewish population in relation to that of the non-Jewish population. His findings show that, averaged over the years, the Jewish population grew by 223 percent in the years 1825–1900, and the non-Jewish population by 150 percent. In Minsk, for example, between the years 1847 and 1897 the Jewish population increased by roughly 300 percent, in Vitebsk the rate of growth was 248 percent, in Kiev 220 percent, in Vilna 199 percent, and in Grodno 185 percent. In the south of the Pale of Settlement, in the regions of Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, and Taurida, the rate of increase was even more rapid. In 1844 the Jewish population there numbered about 95,000 souls, but by 1913 it reached 900,000. The Jewish population had grown by 844 percent. On the other hand, the non-Jewish population had only grown by 280 percent. At the same time in these areas, as we shall see in the following pages, part of the growth was not due to natural increase but to a large-scale internal migration from the northwestern parts of the Pale to the south. In Congress Poland and Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire the demographic tendencies were not very different: In 1860 the Jewish population in Poland numbered about 600,000 souls and the non-Jewish population about 2,700,000. Fifty years later, the number of Jews reached two million—a growth of about 227 percent. As against this, the general population grew by about 170 percent, and in 1913 it stood at thirteen million souls. In Galicia, the rate of growth was more moderate, but it was still high. Between the years 1869 and 1910, the Jewish population grew from 575,000 souls to 880,000.
The difference in the rates of growth of the Jewish and non-Jewish populations appears to have been due to the special character of Jewish society: its concern for orphans and the poor, the existence of charitable institutions caring for the sick and needy, the stability of the family cell, a low rate of infant mortality, and preservation of the traditional way of life. All these factors constituted a kind of "life insurance" that reduced Jewish mortality in general and infant mortality in particular, bringing about a more than fivefold increase in the number of Jews in Russia over a period of a little over a hundred years. There were a million Jews in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the eighteenth century; by the end of that century, their number had reached five million.
A by-product of this population growth was the large proportion of young people. From the findings of the Russian census of the year 1897, it appears that 29 percent of the Jewish population consisted of children up to the age of 9, 23 percent were from 10 to 19 years old, 28 percent were from 20 to 39, 14 percent were from 40 to 59, and only 6 percent were age 60 and above. This situation was clearly reflected in letters sent to the Zionist information offices. Most of the senders were fathers, and they provided information on the size of their families. The Kohelet family, for example, whose story opened this chapter, is a good example of this demographic. Zalman Lifchitz of Kiev said in his letter to Ruppin that he was the father of five children: three sons aged 5, 13, and 20 and two daughters who were twins aged 22. The Alterman family declared that it numbered "nine people, five of whom are familiar with work in the fields and are able to contribute, and another one or two who help in blacksmithing."
This division of ages had far-reaching socioeconomic consequences. A third of the Jewish population consisted of small children who were unable to be self-supporting. This stratum of the population, together with those over 60, was supported and unproductive. The necessity of feeding so many mouths led to a very difficult economic situation and hard living conditions. The economic situation was only eased when children joined the workforce. In David Kohelet's letter to Ruppin, he said that "five years ago the family lived a life of poverty, barely earning enough for their dry bread because the children were still small," and "only recently, when the boys grew up and started helping out, one here and one there, did things improve a bit." Alterman, in his letter to Ruppin, also spoke of the contribution of five of the nine family members to supporting the family. This demographic reality naturally worsened the economic distress and made many Jews consider immigration to a country overseas. Palestine was one of their options.
The Industrial Revolution and Urbanization
From the 1870s, the Russian Empire, a hundred years late, began a process of rapid industrialization. Alexander II's ascent to the throne in 1855 brought a period of far-reaching changes in most areas of Russian life. The liberation of the serfs in 1861 removed a major stumbling block to industrial development in czarist Russia. At the same time, most scholars agree today that serfdom was not the main obstacle to the awakening of the Russian economy. There were many liberated serfs even before the official abolition of serfdom, and the majority of them were unable to contribute to the improvement of the czarist economy, even if they so desired. Vast distances between villages and cities, the scarcity of railways, and Russian peasants' attachment to their lands held back the entry of hundreds of thousands of people into the developing labor market.
Russia's defeat in the Crimean War (1854–1856) placed the Russian authorities in the position to make far-reaching changes in the country. The defeat by Britain and France, industrialized countries equipped with up-to-date warships, brought the Russian government to the conclusion that the Russian economy had to be developed without delay. This realization led to rapid industrial development throughout the Russian Empire. In the space of about sixty years, there was an industrialization process in Russia similar in character and consequence to what had taken place in Germany, France, and Britain fifty years before. Farming communities in Russia became urban settlements, new social classes emerged, and the family ceased to be the dominant unit of productivity. On the eve of World War I, Russia was an industrialized land with a powerful economy, able to compete successfully with Western and Central European countries.
The outstanding characteristic of this industrialization process was the exploitation of raw materials. New centers of industry arose in areas rich in coal and iron, especially the Ukraine, the Ural Mountains, and the Caucasus region. The iron industry developed a need for coal, as the iron had to be smelted and cast in unprecedented quantities. In the years 1860–1864 Russia produced about 400,000 tons of coal a year in all. Ten years later (in the period 1870–1874) coal production increased to more than a million tons a year, and shortly before World War I coal production reached a total of more than 33 billion tons a year—an increase of more than 300 percent.
The most significant progress in the industrialization of Russia took place in the 1890s. The reason for this was the increasing involvement of the state in speeding up the process. This economic achievement may be ascribed to Sergei Witte, the Russian Minister of Industry from 1893 to 1903. In those eleven years, Russia became an industrial empire able to compete on an equal basis with the industrial countries of Western Europe. The Russian government invested a great deal of money in the railways, which began to connect small towns and remote villages to the developing industrial centers. This railway system crossed the length and breadth of Russia and made possible a labor force of hundreds of thousands of peasants who had previously found it difficult to integrate into the new economic order.
Investment in the railway infrastructure was the heart of the industrial revolution that took place on the European continent in general and in Russia in particular. In 1890 Russia took fifth place among industrial nations with regard to railways; but during the years 1890–1900, through an investment of 350 million roubles, Russia built the second-most-developed railway infrastructure in the world (after the United States). The laying of the Trans-Siberian Railway was one of the most ambitious projects undertaken by the Russian government—equal in importance to the building of the Suez Canal in the mid-nineteenth century and the Panama Canal in 1900. From the beginning of the 1890s until the end of the nineteenth century, the size of the railway system grew from 30,000 kilometers to 53,000 kilometers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from An Unpromising Land by Gur Alroey. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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