436 A History of Judaism
comprising primarily Sephardic Jews from London and the Netherlands
involved in trade and agriculture, who had settled since the establish-
ment of a Jewish community in Charleston, South Carolina, in the late
seventeenth century. By 1880, the total number of Jews had grown to
over seven and a half million. Of these, some four million were under
Russian rule. By comparison, the Jewish population of western Europe
and the United States had grown much less, with the exception of New
York, where 80,000 Jews had settled: an influx of German and Polish
Jews into the thriving city doubled the size of the Jewish population
between 1860 and 1880. Mass migration from the east over the follow-
ing thirty years led to complete upheaval. Between 1881 and 1914
about a third of the Jews of eastern Europe moved to central and west-
ern Europe and the United States, partly in fear of persecution and
partly for economic betterment. By 1914 immigrant Jews outnumbered
the settled Jewish community in Britain by five to one, and 1.3 million
Jews (of whom a million were in New York) had settled in the United
States. Smaller numbers had moved to Argentina, Brazil, Canada and
Palestine, often with the help of charitable organizations funded by
wealthy Jews in western Europe to settle their impoverished brethren in
agricultural colonies.
Despite massive losses in the Great War of 1914– 18, with around
140,000 Jews killed as servicemen (mostly on the Russian side) and
many civilians forced to flee by the fighting in eastern Europe and by
persecution in the aftermath of the war in Hungary, Poland and Ukraine,
the total Jewish population in the world had grown by 1930 to over
fifteen million. Of these, half were still in eastern and central Europe,
with three million in Poland alone, but the largest concentration of Jews
was now in the United States, where some four million had settled,
mostly on the eastern seaboard. Successive waves of immigration to
Palestine, ruled by the British under a mandate from the League of
Nations, had brought the Jewish population to around 160,000.
The rise of Nazism in the 1930s changed dramatically this pattern of
migration. Of the half- million Jews who left Europe between 1932 and
1939, including 300,000 German Jews seeking to escape the tightening
grip of anti- Jewish laws, nearly half went to Palestine, placing great
strains on the Mandate government; in these years immigration to the
United States was subject to strict quotas imposed in xenophobic re -
action primarily to the economic crisis following the stockmarket crash
of 1929. But the suffering of these migrants was insignificant compared
to what followed in Europe. Between 1941 and 1945 some six million