Jewish Persecution

The Russian state’s aggressive legal repression of its Jewish minority contributed hugely to the wave of emigration that occurred during the late 1800s. Russian Jews, already confined for much of imperial history to the “Pale of Settlement” in the Empire’s western borderlands, faced increasing violence and persecution as the century wore on. This hostility came to a head after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, an event which sparked a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms throughout the Pale.[1] The imperial administration, seeing the Jews as a useful scapegoat, failed to meaningfully suppress the violence. Instead, in 1882 the government issued the “May Laws,” which restricted Jewish settlement in urban areas and severely limited land ownership rights.[2]

It is difficult to overstate the impact of this anti-Jewish policy on patterns of emigration from the Russian Empire. Russian Jews represented a huge share of total emigrants—32 percent, to be precise—from 1871 to 1910.[3] Moreover, there is a clear spike in Jewish emigration as a associated with the outbreak of pogroms and the imposition of new legal restrictions. From 1882, the year of the May Laws, to 1898, Jews accounted for at least 70 percent of total emigration each year. The share of Jewish emigration reached a peak of more than 85 percent in 1891, coinciding with a second wave of anti-Jewish action by the state that included the expulsion of 20,000 Jews from Moscow and the enactment of new property restrictions.[4] Legal repression and state-sponsored terror essentially drove Russian Jews out of the empire[5]—statistical analysis shows significantly higher rates of emigration from districts where pogroms occurred.[6] Thus, by limiting the rights of its Jewish minority and neglecting to punish anti-Jewish violence, state policy actively contributed to the mass exodus from its borders during this period.