shores in the 1880s, 300,000 in the 1890s, and another 1.5 million between
1900 and World War I. American Jews were neither prepared for nor over-
joyed by the seemingly incessant flood. Communal leaders reacted at the
beginning with marked ambivalence. On the one hand, worries about new
economic burdens and fears of the newcomers’ impact on the status of the
established Jews bred resentment and hostility. The Union of American
Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) candidly warned in 1891: “If there
should grow up in our midst a class of people not imbued with American
ideas... , prejudice and ill judgment will hold us responsible for evils of
which we none may be guilty.” To mitigate the fallout, some spokesmen
called for selected immigration, or the weeding out of those who failed to
measure up to physical and characterological standards. On the other
hand, humanitarianism and an overriding sense of responsibility dictated a
positive if grudging reception of the immigrants. One active contributor to
immigrant relief explained: “We did not invite them, but they came, they
came for the reason that America is the only country that is willing and
able to receive these hounded people.... We look upon the reception of
these people as the first and highest duty, a duty that one human being
owes to another, and by that law that one Jew owes to another.” So long as
Russian policy remained unchanged, Western Jews—which meant primar-
ily American, since England, France, and Germany were too limited in re-
sources or fettered by restrictive immigration laws—had little choice but to
cope with the consequences. Schiff and his friends aptly described the situ-
ation after 1890: America had become the “center of gravity” of the Rus-
sian Jewish question.^1
Between 1880 and 1900 voluntary relief committees in western Europe
sprang into action, assisting in the transport and physical care of the emi-
grants. International conferences were hastily convened in efforts to regu-
late and direct the transcontinental exodus and to divide the burdens equi-
tably among Western Jews. Nevertheless, the work of those ad hoc bodies,
which betrayed a woeful lack of planning and coordination, was too little
and too late. The enormity of the task failed to impress American Jews, but
the Europeans, for their part, often ignored American desires. An efficient
central agency might have better heeded conflicting demands, justifiable or
not, regarding the numbers that could be absorbed, the preferred type of
immigrant, and the need to distribute refugees throughout the United
States. But persistent persecution doomed any ongoing plans for orderly
emigration. Propelled by its own momentum, the human tide swelled out
of control. Most emigrants in search of a haven fixed upon the United
States and on New York City in particular. In 1892 a cartoon in the popular
magazine Judgecalled the city the new Jerusalem.^2
Tens of thousands of immigrants poured into one square mile of New
York’s Lower East Side. To be sure, the Lower East Side was not the first
The New Immigrants 83